Many people with schizophrenia continue to experience symptoms despite conventional treatments being used. Alternative therapies such as hypnosis, in conjunction with conventional treatments, may be helpful. OBJECTIVES: To investigate the use of hypnosis for people with schizophrenia or schizophrenia-like illnesses compared with standard care and other interventions. SEARCH STRATEGY: We searched the Cochrane Schizophrenia Group's Register (October 2006), contacted the Cochrane Complementary Medicine Field for additional searching (January 2003), hand searched references of included or excluded studies and made personal contact with authors of relevant trials. SELECTION CRITERIA: We included all randomised or double blind controlled trials that compared hypnosis with other treatments or standard care for people with schizophrenia. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS: We reliably selected studies, quality assessed them and extracted data. We excluded data where more than 50% of participants in any group were lost to follow up. For binary outcomes we calculated a fixed effects risk ratio (RR) and its 95% confidence interval (CI). MAIN RESULTS: We included three studies (total n=149). When hypnosis was compared with standard treatment no one left the studies between 1-8 weeks (n=70, 2 RCTs, Risk Difference 0.00 CI -0.09 to 0.09). Mental state scores were unaffected (n=60, 1 RCT, MD BPRS by one week -3.6 CI -12.05 to 4.8) as were measures of movement disorders and neurocognitive function. Compared with relaxation, hypnosis was also acceptable (n=106, 3 RCTs, RR leaving the study early 2.00 CI 0.2 to 2.15) and had no discernable effect on mental state (n=60, 1 RCT, MD BPRS by one week -3.4 CI -11.4 to 4.6), movement disorders or neurocognitive function. Hypnosis was as acceptable as music (Sibelius) by four weeks (n=36, RR leaving the study early 5.0, CI 0.3 to 97.4). AUTHORS' CONCLUSIONS: The studies in this field are few, small, poorly reported and outdated. Hypnosis could be helpful for people with schizophrenia. If we are to find this out, better designed, conducted and reported randomised studies are required. This current update has not revealed any new studies in this area since 2003.

Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2007 Oct 17;(4):CD004160. Izquierdo de Santiago A, Khan M.

The entropy metric derived from information theory provides a means to quantify the amount of information transmitted in acoustic streams like speech or music. By systematically varying the entropy of pitch sequences, we sought brain areas where neural activity and energetic demands increase as a function of entropy. Such a relationship is predicted to occur in an efficient encoding mechanism that uses less computational resource when less information is present in the signal: we specifically tested the hypothesis that such a relationship is present in the planum temporale (PT). In two convergent functional MRI studies, we demonstrated this relationship in PT for encoding, while furthermore showing that a distributed fronto-parietal network for retrieval of acoustic information is independent of entropy. The results establish PT as an efficient neural engine that demands less computational resource to encode redundant signals than those with high information content.

PLoS Biol. 2007 Oct 23;5(11):e288 Overath T, Cusack R, Kumar S, von Kriegstein K, Warren JD, Grube M, Carlyon RP, Griffiths TD.

The majority of the Thai population is Buddhists and Buddhism has a great deal of influence on their mind, character, way of life, and health, particularly mental health. According to the Four Noble Truths (Cattari ariyasaccani), suicide is a form of suffering that is originated from craving (Tanha). Therefore, human beings cannot avoid suffering by taking their own lives, nor do they escape from "the wheel of suffering" by doing so. Moreover, the consequence of suicide is a rebirth in the woeful planes of existence, and hence further suffering endlessly. From the present study, the Buddhist approach to suicide prevention can be considered in the following areas: 1) Buddhist attitude toward suicide, 2) faith and confidence in life after death, 3) providing monks with general knowledge and understanding about suicide and life after death, 4) early identification of mental disorders, persons at risk of suicide and prompt referral to appropriate mental health professionals, 5) control of access to instruments of suicide, 6) control of alcohol and drug abuse, 7) prevention of HIV infection, 8) responsible media reporting and 9) practice of meditation.

J Med Assoc Thai. 2007 Aug;90(8):1680-8. Disayavanish C, Disayavanish P. Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand.