The book brings together into a single text the interrelated but different research efforts to translate the current evidence on risk and outcome of severe mental disorders into a preventive perspective. The book also introduces a holistic approach to prevention in mental health, by combining biological, psychological and environmental evidence that attempts to blunt the risk and reduce the number of individuals with mental health vulnerabilities who eventually progress to the manifestation of a severe mental disorder. Finally, the book wants also to highlight the possibility to overcome the single disorder-oriented preventive approach in an attempt to intercept a wider at-risk youth population and explore clinical research areas underperformed where future efforts will have to concentrate.

Mental health problems have their peak of incidence during the transition from childhood to young adulthood, interesting up to 20% adolescents. Half of those eventually developing such difficulties experience clinically relevant mental distress by the age of 14. Even more importantly, the symptomatic onset is generally anticipated by non-specific warning signs of psychosocial impairment potentially evolving in any severe mental disorder. This is of crucial importance, as almost one in two health problems contributing to the global disease burden across the 0-25 age span is a mental disorder.

The search for preventive strategies among youth has developed over the past 2-3 decades, invigorated by a rethinking of mental disorders' ineluctable prodromal phase into a period where the trajectory of illness can be slowed down, blunted, or even halted. The paradigms for implementing preventing approaches in mental health have often developed independent of each other. This book aims at summarizing the available evidence and make a step towards a more mature vision of the potentialities of promotion and prevention in mental health.

 

Part 1. General aspects and paradigms

1. Gender and mental health prevention: when differences matter
2. Clinical staging of psychiatric disorders: its utility in mental health prevention
3. The Role of Psychopharmacology in Mental Health Prevention
Part 2. Areas for intervention and improvement
4. Postpartum (Puerperal) Psychosis: Risk factors, Diagnosis, Management and Treatment
5. Childhood trauma and mental health: never too early to intervene
6. Promoting positive parenting to prevent mental health problems
7. Neurodevelopmental Disorders and Psychosocial Issues Later in Life
8. Migration and mental health: from vulnerability to resilience
9. Tackling Urbanicity and Pollution in Mental Health Prevention Strategies
10. Is there room for anti-stigma interventions in mental health preventive programs?
11. Combined prevention for substance use and mental health problems in youth: A glance at two conditions at high-risk for addiction
12. Enhancing cognition inpeople with mental health vulnerabilities
13. Targeting metabolic abnormalities in mental health prevention strategies
14. Imaging in Psychiatry: a reappraisal of preventative potential
15. Functional neurological symptoms: a potential sentinel of neurological and mental health disorders
Part 3. Future perspectives
16. Unmet therapeutic needs in psychotic illness: the gut-microbiome-endocannabinoid axis as a target for the development of new preventative strategies
17. Prodromal dementias with Lewy bodies: a paradigm for identifying people at ultra-high risk
18. Neglected vulnerabilities in mental health: where do we need to do more