In this issue (June 2015)

We are pleased to announce that the Shanghai Archives of Psychiatry has now been accepted for registration in PsycINFO, a database with 2.7 million records that provides systematic coverage of the psychological literature from the 1800s to the present. This issue starts with a Commentary about the Special Article by Paul Bebbington in the last issue [1] which discussed a new model for conceptualizing psychosis based on findings in psychosocial epidemiology. Murray and colleagues [2] acknowledges the important contribution that Bebbington's integration of cognitive theory and community-based epidemiology of the social risk factors and non-psychotic symptoms associated with psychotic-like conditions makes to our understanding of schizophrenia and related disorders, but they believe that a more complex model that includes the exciting new findings in genetics and molecular biology [3] is needed to move the field forward. They use the findings of the sociodevelopmental-cognitive model to suggest an updated dopamine hypothesis, one in which dopamine dysfunction is a dynamic process that can be altered by social stressors like child abuse or by biological challenges like cannabis use. The second Commentary by Button and Munafo [4] discusses the network meta-analysis of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) for generalized anxiety disorder by Zhu and colleagues [5] which reported the surprising finding that current meta-analyses of CBT in generalized anxiety disorder do not meet the rigorous requirements specified by the Cochran Collaboration GRADE criteria of study quality and, thus, cannot be considered robust findings. Button and Munafo suggest that inadequate placebo control and failure to blind participants, therapists, and evaluators in psychotherapy trials make it difficult to remove potential bias and, thus, seriously reduces the robustness of the casual inferences that can be drawn from such trials. They suggest some options for reducing these biases in psychotherapy studies – including learning about the basic science of the underlying mechanism of action of CBT, using measures of bias to adjust outcomes, and having multi-arm studies that assess each component of the intervention. But it will never be possible for randomized controlled trials of psychotherapeutic interventions to fully meet the robust GRADE criteria. The systematic review and meta-analysis in this issue by Jiang and colleagues [6] considers randomized controlled trials about the effectiveness of metacognitive training (MCT) for schizophrenia, an exciting new adjunctive treatment for schizophrenia aimed at reducing positive symptoms, particularly delusions, by training patients to identify and alter the cognitive biases that underlie delusions and …