From a historical perspective, the first data related to the placebo effect on “mental health” date to the 1950s decade, when evidence was first shown of the important percentage of people with a psychiatric pathology that benefited from the consumption of placebos. It is believed that the responses to placebos and nocebos are influenced by the content and the way of informing the patient, which influences in the quality of life and therapy adherence. Among the factors that influence the magnitude of the placebo effect, we find variables related to the patient, with the placebo itself and the therapist.

To determine the relationship between the clinical response of a placebo and the behavior and information on the placebo contributed by the health worker.

Systemic review of the articles published in Medline-PubMed from 2005 to the present.

Being kind, friendly, interested, nice, emphatic, and considerate as well as having a positive attitude toward the patient and the treatment as well as the expectations of the therapist are variables that are associated to a beneficial effect in a placebo situation as well as in active treatment.

The patient's expectations, a product of selective processing of the information that she/he receives about the effect of a placebo or active treatment, and the behavior of the health worker in clinical practice, produces variability in the symptomatic response through its influence on the magnitude of the placebo effect. In the bibliography reviewed, there is a marked lack of attention dedicated to clinical studies in the addressing of this phenomenon.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Mindfulness is defined as the ability of paying attention to the present moment with intentionality, moment to moment without making judgments of value.

To describe the effectiveness of group therapy performed in our mental health center according to the results in the SOFI scale of patients. This scale is designed to assess different qualities, which evolve through training in meditation practice based on mindfulness.

Group therapy consisted of 12 weekly sessions of an hour and a half. A total of 11 patients, 7 of which having completed therapy. The questionnaires were answered in the first and final session of therapy.

The questionnaire items were divided before and after treatment, into four categories with the following results: positive (friendly, happy, acceptance, compassion) to himself: 1.86 (0.54)/2.75 (0.78) and to others 3.57 (0.86)/3.89 (0.54); negative (hate, angry, cruel, bad) to himself: 2.92 (0.54)/2 (0.23); and to others: 2.28 (0.41)/1.96 (0.36)

In keeping with similar studies, the scale shows effectiveness of therapy in all sets of items, highlighting the variation of the aspects related to himself.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Traditionally, “understanding” is related to the comprehension of the particular and of individualities as historical unique; “explanation” is conversely related to the sciences of general laws, preferential expressed mathematically. Within the “Methodenstreit”, first method is related to an idiographic second to a nomothetic approach. This dichotomy was transferred by Jaspers into psychiatry.

How the understanding-explanation dichotomy could be dialectically kept, but also surmounted in contemporary psychiatry and psychosomatics in the light of a broader concept of “comprehensibility” as dialectically opposed to “incomprehensibility”.

Possible steps in development of the understanding-explanation dichotomy are rebuilt historically from Neo-Kantian and hermeneutic approaches onwards. Starting from reflections on analytic action theory as well as from a critique of Descartian dualism of substance and from the assumption of incomprehensibility, we try to state an integrative conceptual network.

Ways of comprehensibility and incomprehensibility as well as understanding and not understanding are explored by crossing epistemological and ontological perspectives. Four implicit categories of understanding and a dialectically built conceptual network of dimensional dualities are stated.

The methods of “understanding” and “explanation” maintain in contemporary psychiatry a heuristic importance, but not in a segregative manner. This epistemological dichotomy might be integrated in a network of superordinate dualities.

The author has not supplied his/her declaration of competing interest.

Determine the incidence of suicide attempts in women exposed to sexual violence in Ecuador.

We applied a transversal descriptive study accomplished by the National Institute of Statistics and Census (INEC). The INEC recruited Ecuadorian women from 15-years-old and ahead, the surveys were focused on this population. Eighteen thousand and eight hundred (18,800) rural and urban housings were selected all over the country, 24 provinces. Date of the survey: November 16–December 15 of 2011. The sample included 737 women of several marital status (single, married and separated woman) who reported had been victims of sexual violence.

The average age of the sample was 28-years-old. The standard deviation was 21 years, ages: 15–25 years old: 14.265 (21.6%), 25–35-years-old: 9.324 (14.1%), 35–45-years-old: 8.132 (12.3%), 45–55-years-old: 6.283 (9.5%), 55–65-years-old: 4.302 (6.5%) and > 65 years old: 23.745 (35.9%). The incidence of women who had attempted suicide due to sexual violence was 73.95% (545 of 737 women surveyed). According to the marital status, the incidence was 79.3% on single, 65.5% on married and 79.0% on separated women.

The rate of suicide attempts in Ecuadorian women undergoing situations of sexual violence is very elevated. The traumatic incident in descending order according to the classification by marital status is: single, separated and married. It was identified the population of unmarried women in our society to be the most vulnerable to develop suicidal behaviors (8 out of 10 women). However, we must keep in mind that these statistics could be even higher due to the fear and rejection to expose personal traumatic experiences in conservative societies such as the Ecuadorian. These results represent a powerful call to the Mental Health Systems. They must increase protection and follow-up programs on sexually abused women in Ecuador and other Latin-American countries.

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.