Latest Posts

UNC Farm at Penny Lane is one of three organizations to receive affordable housing funding from Chatham County’s Board of Commissioners. Read more at Chapelboro.Com      

The Brushes with Life gallery located in the N.C. Neuroscienes Hospital is a space for hundreds of local artists living with mental illness to display their work. The Brushes with Life Art Program strives to lessen the stigma of mental illnesses through this program.

Lorna Moser, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Center’s Institute for Best Practices, is principal investigator for a three-year, nearly $500,000 grant from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation for a national study to look at Assertive Community Treatment (ACT) for individuals with serious mental illness.

“What Schizophrenia Does to Families“ A mother, a son, an unraveling mind — and a mental health system that can’t keep up This is an overwhelmingly familiar, sad, discouraging read. It evoked many reactions, including — a continued fragmented, underfunded, antiquated system of care (day treatment; unregulated group homes). I’m...

Impairments in social functioning are central to Schizophrenia (SCZ). Patients with SCZ have challenges in the ability to evaluate their functioning. A correlate of self-assessments in SCZ is depression, wherein negligible depression predicts overestimation. Healthy individuals misestimate their functioning, but mild dysthymia predicts accuracy. We examined depression, gender, and schizophrenia...

Black Americans are disproportionately diagnosed with schizophrenia and experience worse objective functional outcomes than their White counterparts. This study assessed race and domains of functioning known to be associated with objective outcomes in a sample of individuals with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders from the Social Cognition Psychometric Evaluation (SCOPE) study…read more. Nagendra...

Persons diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSDs) often experience pervasive feelings of loneliness, which are considered a significant barrier to treatment and recovery. As impaired social cognition may contribute to increased loneliness and less skillful social interactions, this study examines the relationships between loneliness and measures of social cognition and...

Psychosocial treatments have demonstrated reliable improvements in social cognition (SC) abilities, highlighting the need for accurate identification of SC deficits for efficient and individualized treatment planning. To this end, the Observable Social Cognition Rating Scale (OSCARS) is a scale with both self and informant versions. This study investigated psychometric properties...

Suicide risk among individuals with schizophrenia (SZ) is intractably high, with over 40% of individuals attempting to take their own lives during their lifetime and an estimated 5-10% completing suicide. Aerobic exercise (AE) has been shown to improve a number of predictors of suicide risk (e.g., depressed mood, sleeping difficulties)…read...

Face perception is a highly developed function of the human visual system. Previous studies of event-related potentials (ERPs) have identified a face-selective ERP component in healthy participants. In contrast, patients with schizophrenia exhibit reduced amplitude of the N170 component, which may represent a pathological deficit in the neurophysiology of face...

This 2 1/2-day in-person training accompanied with pre-recorded webinars covers ACT topics, including: ACT History, Research, and Fidelity; ACT Staffing; ACT Leadership: ACT Medical Team; ACT specialists and related specialty services (co-occurring substance use, employment, peer support, housing, psychiatric rehabilitation); assertive outreach; assessment and person-centered planning; and daily team meeting....

It is an exciting time at the Center as we look forward to the holiday season. We are pleased to welcome our new chair of psychiatry, Samantha Meltzer-Brody, MD, MPH, who officially took the role October 1. Many of you know Samantha from her leadership in our Department of Psychiatry,...