Dear Colleagues, 

Mood disorders are the most common types of mental disorders and one of the leading causes of disability worldwide. They lead to cognitive and social functioning impairments, negative impact on quality of life, and higher suicidality and mortality rates. All this entails high costs for patients, families, and society. Currently, pharmacotherapy represents the most widely used treatment option, but growing evidence suggests that although it is effective in the treatment of acute episodes, medication alone does not help many patients to achieve functional recovery. Psychotherapies, especially in combination with pharmacotherapy, are effective in producing behavioral and lifestyle changes essential to relapse prevention, long-term maintenance, and promoting positive function (vs. symptom reduction) in people with mood disorders, yet there is still much to improve in our understanding, management, and treatment of mood disorders from a psychological perspective. Waiting for progress in personalized psychiatric treatment approaches that could lead to precise biological interventions, implementing evidence-based psychological assessment and treatment for mood disorder is essential to reduce their burden at an individual, societal and public health levels. An efficient assessment process is essential because it leads to more accurate diagnosis, better treatment matching, increased patient engagement, and enhanced outcomes. However, to be fully effective the evidence-based assessment should be ‘humanized’ because both diagnostic and psychotherapeutic processes take place inside the patient–clinician relationship. The latter’s technical and relational parts are constantly and reciprocally interacting; and the relationship accounts for process and outcome variance in and of itself.

This special issue of International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) focuses on the current state of knowledge on the role of the relationship elements in the care of (child, adolescent, and adult) patients with mood disorders and their families. New theoretical and papers, qualitative and quantitative research papers, reviews, meta-analyses, and evidence-based case reports are welcome to this issue. Papers dealing with methodological aspects of an evidence-based approach to assessment and either pharmacological, psychotherapeutic, or combined treatment are also welcome.

IJERPH is an open access journal with a four-year impact factor of 3.42. Our goal with this special issue is to bring the perspectives and methods of psychology, including your work, to a new audience, with the open access amplifying the ability for the information to get shared rapidly through new connections in the web of collaboration and science. 

Dr. Alberto Stefana
Dr. Anna Van Meter
Prof. Dr. Eric A. Youngstrom
Prof. Dr. Eduard Vieta
Guest Editors

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• mood disorder
• depression
• bipolar disorder
• diagnostic and therapeutic relationship
• relationship elements
• evidence-based assessment
• evidence-based relationships
• therapeutic alliance
• countertransference
• real relationship