Impact of COVID-19 on the Italian Mental Health System: A Narrative Review

: Italy has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, consequently producing a heavy burden on the Italian National Health Service. From February 2020 until the end of the same year, the Italian Mental Health System (MHS), comprising an extensive network of community services, was subjected to a significant decrease in standards of care followed at the beginning of 2021 by a slow return to usual levels of activity. Data reported in the present article highlight how the Italian MHS - as was the case in the majority of countries-was largely unprepared for this emergency, suggesting an impelling need to develop appropriate supplementary national plans with the aim of preventing similar situations from developing in the future. The upheaval caused by the pandemic has highlighted the need to reinforce, both at a local and national level, the organization and standards of care of the Italian MHS in order to protect and support the mental health of patients with severe mental disorders, health workers, and the general population, thus preventing a potential "pandemic" of mental disorders

Reworsening of Recurrent Guillain-Barré Syndrome Triggered by COVID-19 Infection

Introduction: Guillain-Barré Syndrome (GBS) is an acute, immune-mediated, generalized polyradiculoneuropathy often triggered by a bacterial or viral infection, vaccination, or surgery. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, some patients were reported with GBS associated COVID-19 infection. Case Presentation: We report, herein, a patient who had a recurrent GBS after forty years. Intravenous immunoglobulins (IVIg) induced improvement, but her condition worsened suddenly after twenty days, coinciding with a COVID-19 infection. A second IVIg cycle was administered, and she improved again. Conclusion: The take-home message is that in the current pandemic, any re-worsening or lack of improvement after appropriate treatment of GBS or possibly other autoimmune neurological diseases must be checked to determine if it is related to COVID-19 infection

Evaluation of "Speech System" and "Skill": An Interaction Paradigm for Speech Therapy

Speech therapy is the medical field in which speech impairments are treated. They concern the inability of individuals to adequately enunciate words, construct, elaborate and appropriate sentences when speaking, and overall lack linguistic skills. Although speech impairments can emerge throughout different stages of life, the most common period of time in which they are encountered is childhood. The professionals in this medical field use to treat these impairments with the employment of therapies that are carried out over an extended period of time. This research work aims at proposing and evaluating through a user study a new interactive paradigm that involves ”Speech System”, a web-application, and ”Skill”, a skill for Amazon Alexa. The objective consists in determining the practical feasibility of the solution and investigate the consequences that the use of technology brings to the world of speech therapy. The advantages and disadvantages of the interactive paradigm in question are explored and discussed to define the direction of the next steps in this field

Non-equilibrium thermodynamics with higher order fluxes: Balance laws and exploitation of the entropy inequality

Weakly non-local extended thermodynamics of rigid heat conductors is presented. The two celebrated procedures by Coleman-Noll and Liu for the exploitation of second law of thermodynamics are compared. It is proved that the two procedures are equivalent, if in the Coleman-Noll procedure all relevant equations are taken into account as constraint