Dear Editor, we appreciated Borgo and colleagues’ correspondence proposing Gilbert’s syndrome as a potential biological vulnerability state in which non-specific somatic symptoms, including fatigue, autonomic arousal and lowered pain threshold, may be experienced as clinically meaningful and, in some patients, potentially patterned over time. This perspective is valuable because it invites a shift from static […]
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Historical Archive – 2026 – Year XXI – No. 1
The Value of Time in Patients with Parkinson’s Disease. An Instrumental Approach.
Historical Archive – 2025 – Year XX – No. 1-2-3
Depression and oral contraceptives: a neuropsychophysiological hypothesis.
Depressive behavior in women taking oral contraceptives: a human model of depression.
Historical Archive storico – 2023/2024 – Year 18/19 – N° 1-2-3
Cognitive Psychoterapies – Recent Developments in Theory, Research and Pratice
Promote well-being to promote mental health
The consideration that health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity (WHO) makes it appropriate to consider mental health and mental illness as two related but distinct factors. Therefore the absence of mental illness does not imply the presence of mental health understood as a condition of completely mentally healthy functioning (flourishing), just as the absence of mental health does not imply the presence of mental illness but could lead to the condition of languishing (Keyes).
In diagnostic terms, the usefulness of operationalizing and adopting the diagnosis of mental health can be underlined. If you want to promote well-being, you must be able to document the degree of well-being before and after the intervention.
In clinical and applicative settings, two relevant examples in line with the repercussions of the WHO definition of mental health are represented by Well-being Therapy and Subjective Well-Being Training. The first proposal, elaborated by Fava, is based on the idea of inserting a phase of well-being promotion in place of relapse prevention to complete the therapeutic process. The second proposal, elaborated by Goldwurm starting from the Fordyce model, is based on the idea that it is important to promote complete well-being in the general population.
Positive psychology can help to understand the role of a person’s strengths and well-being in counteracting the development of mental illness, improving both the understanding of aetiological mechanisms and the treatment of treatment-resistant disorders. Scientific and applied research need an integrated perspective that overcomes the positive/negative opposition.
Historical archive – 2022 – Year 17 – N° 1-2-3
In memory of Stan Maes Health Psychology in Cardiovascular Health and Disease
Historical Archive
Vic Meyer, of Polish origin, was a British psychologist at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School of the University of London (now UCL Medical School) and is considered the “spiritual father” of clinical case formulation, an approach to understanding complex psychiatric problems using learning principles derived from experimental psychological research and idiographically adapted to the individual case to develop an effective intervention regimen.
POSTERS
These two posters have been selected from those presented at the 16th International Congress of Behavioral Medicine Medicine: “Interdisciplinary behavioral medicine: systems, network and interventions”, held in Glasgow in June 2021.