Psychiatrikē = Psychiatriki
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Suicidal behavior is considered as the result of complex cognitive and emotional processes and it is a timeless, global and multifactorial phenomenon. Periods of financial crises in the past, such as the Great Depression in the USA in 1929 and the economic crises of Asia, Russia and Argentina in the late 1990s, have been associated with impairment of mental health of the economically affected. Unemployment, job insecurity, debts, poverty and social exclusion seems to lead to higher incidence of anxiety and depressive symptoms and increased suicidality. ⋯ The financial crisis is probably associated with upward trend in attempted suicide of the Athens population. Most affected are those who are unemployed, married, widowed, divorced. Suicide prevention programs are essential for the accurate and timely identification and the immediate and effective management of this special high risk group of attempters during the financial crisis.
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In the last decade there is extensive evidence to suggest that cognitive functions depending on coordination of distributed neuronal responses are associated with synchronized oscillatory activity in various frequency ranges suggesting a functional mechanism of neural oscillations in cortical networks. In addition to their role in normal brain functioning, there is increasing evidence that altered oscillatory activity may be associated with certain neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia. Consequently, disturbances in neural synchronization may represent the functional relationship of disordered connectivity of cortical networks underlying the characteristic fragmentation of mind and behavior in schizophrenia. ⋯ One of the coordinating mechanisms appears to be the synchronization of neuronal activity by phase locking of self-generated network oscillations. This led to the hypothesis that the cerebral cortex might exploit the option to synchronize the discharges of neurons with millisecond ` theoretical formulations of the binding-by-synchrony hypothesis were proposed earlier by Milner (1974), but the Singer lab in the 1990s was the first to obtain experimental evidence supporting the potential role of synchrony as a relational code. The results concerning the functional connectivity of the brain during TBs further support the hypothesis of phase synchronization as a key mechanism for neuronal assemblies underlying mental representations in the human brain.