Drozdstoj Stoyanov

Medical University of Plovdiv · Department of Psychiatry and Medical Psychology

Schizophrenia patients show increased disabilities and lower quality of life (DisQoL). Nevertheless, there are no data on whether the activation of the interleukin (IL)-6, IL-23, T helper (Th)-17 axis, and lower magnesium and calcium levels impact DisQoL scores. This study recruited 90 patients with schizophrenia (including 40 with deficit schizoph...

Aim: This study aims to develop new approaches to characterize brain networks to potentially contribute to a better understanding of mechanisms involved in depression. Method and subjects: We recruited 90 subjects: 49 healthy controls (HC) and 41 patients with a major depressive episode (MDE). All subjects underwent clinical evaluation and funct...

Background: The affective profiles model allows the comparison between diametrically different individuals, but also the comparison within individuals who differ in one affectivity dimension but that are similar in the other. This line of research indicates that individuals with different affective profiles regulate their emotions in distinct ways...

Translational validity (or trans-disciplinary validity) is defined as one possible approach to achieving incremental validity by combining simultaneous clinical state-dependent measures and functional MRI data acquisition. It is designed under the assumption that the simultaneous administration of the two methods may produce a dataset with enhanced...

BACKGROUND: Personality is the major predictor of people’s subjective well-being (i.e., positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction). Recent research in countries with high-income and strong self-transcendent values shows that well-being depends on multidimensional configurations of temperament and character traits (i.e., Joint Personal...

Aim. In the current study, we aimed at identifying resting-state brain networks, which are different in patients with depression compared to healthy individuals. Moreover, we analyzed the potential for clinical use of different network measures that could discriminate the two groups and thus help the diagnostic process. Method and subjects. We recr...

At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied ma...

Introduction: In the current study, we used the Stroop Color and Word Test (SCWT) combined with an n-back component in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in order to activate the working memory and cognitive interference in patients with Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) as compared to healthy controls. Our hypothesis was that there would...

Background and hypotheses: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs) is not only a common symptom in schizophrenia but also observed in individuals in the general population. Despite extensive research, AVHs are poorly understood, especially their underlying neuronal architecture. Neuroimaging methods have been used to identify brain areas and network...

The current understanding of major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) is plagued by a cacophony of controversies as evidenced by competing schools to understand MDD/BD. The DSM/ICD taxonomies have cemented their status as the gold standard for diagnosing MDD/BD. The aim of this review is to discuss the false dogmas that reign in cu...

The current understanding of major depressive (MDD) and bipolar (BD) disorder is plagued by a cacophony of controversies, as evidenced by competing schools to understand MDD/BD. The DSM/ICD taxonomies have cemented their status as the gold standard for diagnosing MDD/BD. The aim of this review is to discuss the false dogmas that reign in current MD...

We used the Mass Multivariate Method on structural, resting-state, and task-related fMRI data from two groups of patients with schizophrenia and depression in order to define several regions of significant relevance to the differential diagnosis of those conditions. The regions included the left planum polare (PP), the left opercular part of the in...

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and str...

We have used Mass Multivariate Method on structural, resting state and task related fMRI data from two groups of patients with schizophrenia and depression, respectively, in order to define several regions of significant relevance to the differential diagnosis between those conditions. The regions included the left Planum polare, Left opercular par...

BACKGROUND Over the past decade, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rsfMRI) has concentrated on brain networks such as the default mode network (DMN), the salience network (SN), and the central executive network (CEN), allowing for a better understanding of cognitive deficits observed in mental disorders, as well as other characte...

This study was conducted to examine whether there are quantitative or qualitative differences in the connectome between psychiatric patients and healthy controls and to delineate the connectome features of major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SCZ) and bipolar disorder (BD), as well as the severity of these disorders. Toward this end, we...

The current understanding of major depressive (MDD) and bipolar (BD) disorder is plagued by a cacophony of controversies, as evidenced by competing schools to understand MDD/BD. The DSM/ICD taxonomies have cemented their status as the gold standard for diagnosing MDD/BD. The aim of this review is to discuss the false dogmas that reign in current MD...

Background & Objective We have previously identified aberrant connectivity of the left precuneus, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, anterior cingulate cortex, and anterior insula in patients with either a paranoid (schizophrenia), or a depressive syndrome (both unipolar and bipolar). In the current study, we attempted to replicate and expand these f...

Тhe neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental hypotheses represent the basic etiological framework for the origin of schizophrenia. Additionally, the dopamine hypothesis, adopted more than two decades ago, has repeatedly asserted the position of dopamine as a pathobiochemical substrate through the action of psychostimulants and neuroleptics on the m...

This study was conducted to examine whether there are quantitative or qualitative differences in the connectome between psychiatric patients and healthy controls and to delineate the connectome features of major depressive disorder (MDD), schizophrenia (SCZ), bipolar disorder (BD) and the severity of these disorders. Toward this end, we have perfor...

Emotional exhaustion in the context of vulnerability to burnout is a part of the universal narrative of high stress and systematically reported in healthcare professionals. The sense of coherence (SOC) is a salutogenic construct, operationalized by A. Antonovsky as a generalized resistance resource (GRR) to stress in three dimensions: meaningfulnes...

XIV Romanian Conference of Psychiatry – v-CNP 2021 Romanian Association of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy Bucharest, Romania 14-17 July 2021 Plenary Symposium on Psychiatry and Philosophy Symposium Title: “‘The Return of the Repressed’: Why Psychiatry Needs – and Cannot Avoid – Philosophy” If anyone thinks he can exclude philosophy and leave it...

The current understanding of major depressive (MDD) and bipolar (BD) disorder is plagued by a cacophony of controversies, as evidenced by competing schools to understand MDD/BD. The DSM/ICD taxonomies have positioned themselves as the gold standard taxonomies to diagnose MDD/BD. The aim of this review is to discuss the many false dogmas that reign...

Psychotic disorders occur as a result of pathobiochemical processes in the brain, which disrupt the central neurotransmission of molecules such as dopamine and glutamate. The dopamine hypothesis, adopted more than 2 decades ago, has repeatedly asserted its position as an etiopathogenetic substrate through the action of psychostimulants and neurolep...

Background The 20th century has seen great developments in the concept of disease. Marked by the biopsychosocial paradigm, several strategies for disease definition were added to previous descriptive organic views, but a final concept is still out of reach. Method A critical review was carried out on thorough analysis of articles and textbooks to...

Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) and Bipolar Disorder (BD) have a high prevalence and detrimental socio-economic consequences for the patients and the community. Furthermore, the depressive symptomatology of both disorders is essentially identical, thus rendering the clinical differential diagnosis between the two significantly more difficult consid...

Traditional therapeutic methods in psychiatry, such as psychopharmacology and psychotherapy help many people suffering from mental disorders, but in the long-term prove to be effective in a relatively small proportion of those affected. Therapeutically, resistant forms of mental disorders such as schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and bipola...

Psychoses and affective disorders are severe mental illnesses with a considerable negative effect on an individual and global scale. They are among the most damaging and socially significant diseases, which contribute to permanent disabilities for the patients. The aim of this review is to analyse the capacity of neuroscientific methods as tools to...

Background: Online education became mandatory for many students during the Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and blurred the distinction between settings where processes of stress and restoration used to take place. The lockdown also likely changed perceptions of the indoor acoustic environment (i.e., soundscape) and raised its importan...

This is an advance review of "Psychiatry in Crisis" by Andrei Novac, MD, DFAPA, Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, University of California - Irvine

This is an advance review/blurb of "Psychiatry in Crisis" by Thomas Fröhlich, MD, PhD, Vice President of the European Society for Person Centered Healthcare, Western Europe

Psychology and psychiatry have generated multiple models with competing claims. Changes that are part of knowledge accumulation come under different names – paradigms, theories, and revolutions. Medical and social sciences are replete with binary oppositions and false dichotomies which distract real progress. A framework is outlined for breaking do...

The Case of Ellen West by Ludwig Binswanger [The case of Ellen West: An anthropological-clinical study (trans. by Werner M. Mendel and Joseph Lyons). In: Existence: A new dimension in psychiatry and psychology (Rollo May, Ernest Angel, and Henri F. Ellenberger, Eds.). New York: Basic Books, pp. 237–364, 1958] is at once the founding case of existen...

This chapter offers an overview of the interplay of the mind-brain problem and paradigm formation in psychiatry and the way in which it contributes to controversies and shifts in the dialogue across the disciplines that constitute mental health knowledge. Special attention is paid to implications of Cartesian dualism, eliminative materialism, and r...

Philosophy as therapy – both linguistic philosophy in the Anglo-American tradition and the critical theory of continental philosophy offer philosophy as a kind of treatment for our ills yet fall short of resolving psychiatry’s problems. Leon Eisenberg (1986) once bemoaned a dichotomy he framed as brainlessness (psychoanalysis without brain science)...

This chapter inverts the logic of anti-psychiatry to investigate four key critical psychiatrists whose contributions represent “psychiatry against itself.” They are Italian psychiatric reformer Franco Basaglia, Martinican revolutionary psychiatrist Frantz Fanon, French psychoanalytic rebel Jacques Lacan, and Scottish radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing...

Whereas Protagoras proclaimed that, “Man is the measure of all things,” today’s science has become the all-purpose measure that Stephen Jay Gould (The mismeasure of man. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1996) characterized as “the mismeasure of man.” Much social science and biomedical research is marred by scientism and methodolatry. Psychiatry’s criti...

Psychiatry is explored in terms of knowledge gaps in this chapter with main components addressing taxonomy – terminology and nomenclature – and methods. The first component is projected onto a crisis of identity and the second component onto a crisis of confidence. Each discipline engaged in psychiatry adheres to its epistemic monologue, comprised...

This chapter addresses a great challenge for psychiatry as a medical discipline, namely, its hybrid disciplinary status. On one hand, it belongs to nomothetic and, on the other, explanatory domains of science although it is not properly identified with either of them – thus constituting the so-called explanatory gap. In effect, psychiatric diagnosi...

The prospectus of this volume on Psychiatry in Crisis starts with a survey of typical reactions to the authors’ investigations, from denial of a crisis in psychiatry to its trivialization, opening a discussion of the reductive models of psychiatry and how this creates an impoverished language of psychiatry. The authors then state their major leitmo...

This chapter reviews the history of academic psychology and psychiatry, using trauma as a focus. The history of psychology revolves around the question of consciousness, including the method of introspection, addressing the issue, “What is the subject?” The history of modern psychiatry, on the other hand, revolves around the crucial question of the...

Background After more than eight decades of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) for pharmaco-resistant depression, the mechanisms governing its anti-depressant effects remain poorly understood. Computational anatomy studies using longitudinal T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data have demonstrated ECT effects on hippocampus volume and corti...

Psychiatry remains in a permanent state of crisis, which fragmented psychiatry from the field of medicine. The crisis in psychiatry is evidenced by the many different competing approaches to psychiatric illness including psychodynamic, biological, molecular, pan-omics, precision, cognitive and phenomenological psychiatry, folk psychology, mind-brai...

Citation: Stoyanov, D.; Aryutova, K.; Kandilarova, S.; Paunova, R.; Arabadzhiev, Z.; Todeva-Radneva, A.; Kostianev, S.; Borgwardt, S.

This chapter presents a case study from Eastern Europe illustrating Balkan pluralist cultural values as a resource for balanced dissensual decision-making in values-based practice. In responding to his neighbor Ivailo’s request for a loan, Dr. Petrov has to balance the conflicting demands of financial prudence and humanitarian neighborliness. In th...

Traditional psychiatric diagnosis has been overly reliant on either self-reported measures (introspection) or clinical rating scales (interviews). This produced the so-called explanatory gap with the bio-medical disciplines, such as neuroscience, which are supposed to deliver biological explanations of disease. In that context the neuro-biological...

This open access book offers essential information on values-based practice (VBP): the clinical skills involved, teamwork and person-centered care, links between values and evidence, and the importance of partnerships in shared decision-making. Different cultures have different values; for example, partnership in decision-making looks very differen...

In order to overcome this problem our group designed a novel machine learning technique, multivariate linear method (MLM) which can capture convergent data from voxel-based morphometry, functional resting state and task-related neuroimaging and the relevant clinical measures. In this paper we report results from convergent cross-validation of biolo...

We constructed a novel design integrating the administration of a clinical self-assessment scale with simultaneous acquisition of functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), aiming at cross-validation between psychopathology evaluation and neuroimaging techniques. We hypothesized that areas demonstrating differential activation in two groups of p...

Major depression is accompanied by increased IgM-mediated autoimmune responses to oxidative specific epitopes (OSEs) and nitric oxide (NO)-adducts. These responses were not examined in bipolar disorder type 1 (BP1) and BP2. IgM responses to malondialdehyde (MDA), phosphatidinylinositol, oleic acid, azelaic acid, and NO-adducts were determined in 35...

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly changed people’s ability to recreate in public green spaces, which is likely to exacerbate the psychological impacts of the pandemic. In the current study, we seek to understand whether greenery can support mental health even with insufficient outdoor exposure in times of physical isolation from the...

Psychiatry remains in a permanent state of crisis, which fragmented psychiatry from the field of medicine. The crisis in psychiatry is evidenced by the many different competing approaches to psychiatric illness including psychodynamic, biological, molecular, pan-omics, precision, cognitive and phenomenological psychiatry, folk psychology, mind-brai...

Psychiatry remains in a permanent state of crisis, which fragmented psychiatry from the field of medicine. The crisis in psychiatry is evidenced by the many different competing approaches to psychiatric illness including psychodynamic, biological, molecular, pan-omics, precision, cognitive and phenomenological psychiatry, folk psychology, mind-brai...

The chapter I have co-authored is about clinical experiences in mental health where spirituality played a significant role, based on experiences from New Zealand. The book is now Open Access. The link is: https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-030-47852-0

Major depression is accompanied by increased IgM-mediated autoimmune responses to oxidative specific epitopes (OSEs). Nevertheless, these responses have not been examined in bipolar disorder type 1 (BP1) and BP2. IgM responses to malondialdehyde (MDA), phosphatidinylinositol, oleic acid, and azelaic acid were determined in 35 healthy controls, and...

Background Healthcare services are increasingly confronted with challenges related to old age mental disorders. The survey aimed to provide an overview of existing psychogeriatric services in Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, and North Macedonia. Methods After identification of psychogeriatric units across the four countries, their head physicians were a...

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is a devastating global health crisis. Without a vaccine or effective medication, the best hope for mitigating virus transmission is collective behavior change and support for public health interventions (e.g., physical distancing, physical hygiene, and endorsement of health policies). In a large-scale international co...

Background: activation of the immune-inflammatory response system (IRS) and the compensatory immune-regulatory system (CIRS) plays a key role in schizophrenia (SCZ) and treatment resistant SCZ. There are only a few data on immune and endogenous opioid system (EOS) interactions in SCZ and treatment resistant SCZ. Methods: we examined serum β-endo...

Psychiatry in Crisis: At the Crossroads of Social Sciences, the Humanities, and Neuroscience Authors: Di Nicola, Vincenzo, Stoyanov, Drozdstoj Offers a critical survey of the history of modern psychiatry Co-authors have dual training in scientific psychiatry and philosophy Written in accessible language with capsule summaries of key areas of the...

Rationale, Aims and Objectives The field of translational neuroscience suffers from an extremely low replication levels compared to other life science fields. The objective of the present study was to test the hypothesis that multivariate analysis of a classical emotional pictures paradigm would produce meaningful brain signatures with some power t...

Background Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), the sense of “hearing voices” in the absence of a corresponding auditory source, are a major symptom in schizophrenia. Hemodynamic and electrophysiology studies have shown aberrant activation in fronto-temporal speech and language areas (Curcic-Blake et al., 2017 for review) – indicating neurobiologi...

Background There is a wealth of evidence showing aberrant functional connectivity (FC) in schizophrenia but with considerable variability in findings across studies. Dynamic FC is an extension of traditional static FC, in that such analyses allow for explorations of temporal changes in connectivity. Thereby they also provide more detailed informati...

Background The Bulgarian Ministry of Health invited the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) to evaluate Bulgarian mental health care service provision in 2018. Bulgarian mental health services face very significant challenges including a legacy of historic underfunding, internal conflicts, poor planning, and the emigration of very high numbers o...

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