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Bipolar and depression disorders are some of the most common mental health disorders affecting millions of people in low-and middle-income countries, including those in Africa. These disorders are therefore major contributors to the burden of diseases and disability. While an enhancement in income is seen as a major approach towards reducing the burden of these disorders, empirical evidence to support this view in the African context is lacking. This study therefore aims to examine the effect of per capita income growth on bipolar and depression disorders across African countries.

The study uses data from secondary sources comprising 42 African countries over the period, 2002–2019, to achieve its objective. The prevalence of bipolar and major depressive disorders (depression) are used as the dependent variables, while per capita income growth is used as the main independent variable. The system Generalised Method of Moments regression is used as the estimation technique.

In the baseline, the authors find per capita income growth to be associated with a reduction in the prevalence of bipolar (coefficient: −0.001, p < 0.01) and depression (coefficient: −0.001, p < 0.1) in the short-term. Similarly, in the long-term, per capita income growth is found to have negative association with the prevalence of bipolar (coefficient: −0.059, p < 0.01) and depression (coefficient: −0.035, p < 0.1). The results are similar after robustness checks.

This study attempts at providing the first empirical evidence of the effect of per capita income growth on bipolar and depression disorders across several African countries.

Bipolar disorder is associated with poor mental and physical health outcomes, and therefore, it is crucial to research and develop effective interventions for this population (Grande et al., 2016). Unfortunately, research on the efficacy of current interventions shows only small improvements in symptoms and quality of life (Oud et al., 2016). Additionally, individuals with bipolar disorder face barriers to accessing care like social stigma, isolation and financial constraints (Blixen et al., 2016). This paper aims to introduce and examine the effectiveness of an accessible, peer-led group program, Mood Lifters (Votta and Deldin, 2022), in those who completed the program and also self-reported a diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

Mood Lifters is a 15-week, peer-led group program that approaches mental wellness from a biopsychosocial framework using strategies from a variety of evidence-based treatment methods (e.g. cognitive-behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, interpersonal psychotherapy, etc.). Participants meet once a week for 1 hour to review various mental health topics, including behavioral changes and insight into mood patterns. Individuals who participated in nonacademic groups in a company setting and self-reported a bipolar diagnosis were surveyed at the beginning and end of their program to measure various aspects of psychological functioning.

Results suggest that these individuals experienced significant improvements in depression, anxiety, social functioning and perceived stress, along with flourishing and positive and negative affect.

These findings are promising, given that bipolar disorder is historically difficult to treat (Grande et al., 2016). Based on this preliminary evidence, the authors have developed a Mood Lifters program specifically for individuals with bipolar disorder and are launching a randomized control clinical trial.

Dielectric barrier discharge (DBD) is widely used in the treatment of skin disease, surface modification of material and other fields of electronics. The purpose of this paper is to design a high-performance power supply with a compact structure for excimer lamps in electronics application.

To design a high-performance power supply with a compact structure remains a challenge for excimer lamps in electronics application, a current-source type power supply in a single stage with power factor correction (PFC) is proposed. It consists of an excitation voltage generation unit and a PFC unit. By planning the modes of the excitation voltage generation unit, a bipolar pulse excitation voltage with a high rising and falling rate is generated. And a high power factor (PF) on the AC side is achieved by the interaction of a non-controlled rectifier and two inductors.

The experimental results show that not only a high-frequency and high-voltage bipolar pulse excitation voltage with a high average rising and falling rate (7.51GV/s) is generated, but also a high PF (0.992) and a low total harmonic distortion (5.54%) is obtained. Besides, the soft-switching of all power switches is realized. Compared with the sinusoidal excitation power supply and the current-source power supply, the proposed power supply in this paper can take advantage of the potential of excimer lamps.

A new high-performance power supply with a compact structure for DBD type excimer lamps is proposed. The proposed power supply can work stably in a wide range of frequencies, and the smooth regulation of the discharge power of the excimer lamp can be achieved by changing the switching frequency. The ideal excitation can be generated, and the soft switching can be realized. These features make this power supply a key player in the outstanding performance of the DBD excimer lamps application.

This study aimed to examine the mental health information entities and associations between the biomedical, psychological and social domains of bipolar disorder (BD) by analyzing social media data and scientific literature.

Reddit posts and full-text papers from PubMed Central (PMC) were collected. The text analysis was used to create a psychological dictionary. The text mining tools were applied to extract BD entities and their relationships in the datasets using a dictionary- and rule-based approach. Lastly, social network analysis and visualization were employed to view the associations.

Mental health information on the drug side effects entity was detected frequently in both datasets. In the affective category, the most frequent entities were “depressed” and “severe” in the social media and PMC data, respectively. The social and personal concerns entities that related to friends, family, self-attitude and economy were found repeatedly in the Reddit data. The relationships between the biomedical and psychological processes, “afraid” and “Lithium” and “schizophrenia” and “suicidal,” were identified often in the social media and PMC data, respectively.

Mental health information has been increasingly sought-after, and BD is a mental illness with complicated factors in the clinical picture. This paper has made an original contribution to comprehending the biological, psychological and social factors of BD. Importantly, these results have highlighted the benefit of mental health informatics that can be analyzed in the laboratory and social media domains.

The purpose of this paper is to improve the corrosion resistance of stainless-steel bipolar plate by magnetron sputtering.

TiC/amorphous carbon composite film was deposited by magnetron sputter at four different temperature of 25°C, 200°C, 300°C and 400°C. The morphology, composition and structure of the film were characterized by scanning electron microscopy, atomic force microscopy and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. And its corrosion behavior was analyzed through electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, potentiodynamic and potentiostatic polarization tests.

A compact TiC/amorphous carbon film was prepared by magnetron sputtering on 316L stainless steel, and the particles of the film were refined with the increase in sputtering temperature. High temperature promoted the formation of TiC and C–C sp² hybrid carbon, but excessively high temperature caused the oxidation of Ti and a significant decrease in sp² hybrid carbon. The corrosion resistance of the film increased with the temperature, and the corrosion current density polarization at 0.86 V and 1.8 V for TiC/a–C film prepared at 400 °C is only 1.2% and 43.2% of stainless steel, respectively.

The corrosion resistance of amorphous carbon films was improved by the doping of Ti carbide, and the appropriate sputtering temperature was obtained.

This study aims to ground the assessment of the various costing perspectives associated with the dynamics of processed food supply chains (FSCs), for questing the avenues of profitability within a food processing enterprise.

This study underpins the development of the relation hierarchical model, binding the cluster of the key costing enactors, with the various incurred costs in the food supply chain performance system. The developed model is seeded by the inputs gathered from the case enterprises under consideration, which is further contemplated by extending the fundamentals of bipolar fuzzy sets with the methodology of ELECTRE-II.

Secured primacies owing to the mutual correspondence between the costing cluster reveal the impact of procurement cost in the dynamics of FSC. Furthermore, an inference is grounded relative to the other entities of total costs like investment, production, transportation, distribution and retailing by considering the perspective of a case enterprise. It yields that procurement costing procedurals need to be deliberated supremely, considering the vitality of the costing perspective associated with the other procedurals of the case enterprise.

The framework developed in the presented work clusters the various costing enactors along with the costings in processed FSCs, binding its holistic perspective rather than the discrete approach. The present research work provides an origin to explore the various miniatures more precisely succeeding to secure primacies for upscaling the profit-cost notions. As costing determines the avenues bundled with the production and consumption of various food commodities.

These implementations not only generate excessive voltage levels to enhance the quality of power but also include a detailed investigating of the various modulation methods and control schemes for multilevel inverter (MLI) topologies. Reduced harmonic modulation technology is used to produce 11-level output voltage with the production of renewable energy applications. The simulation is done in the MATLAB/Simulink for 11-level symmetric MLI and is correlated with the conventional inverter design.

This paper is focused on investigating the different types of asymmetric, symmetric and hybrid topologies and control methods used for the modular multilevel inverter (MMI) operation. Classical MLI configurations are affected by performance issues such as poor power quality, uneconomic structure and low efficiency.

The variations in both carrier and reference signals and their performance are analyzed for the proposed inverter topologies. The simulation result compares unipolar and bipolar pulse-width modulation (PWM) techniques with total harmonic distortion (THD) results. The solar-fed 11-level MMI is controlled using various modulation strategies, which are connected to marine emergency lighting loads. Various modulation techniques are used to control the solar-fed 11-level MMI, which is connected to marine emergency lighting loads. The entire hardware system is controlled by using SPARTAN 3A field programmable gate array (FPGA) board and the least harmonics are obtained by improving the power quality.

The simulation result compares unipolar and bipolar PWM techniques with THD results. Various modulation techniques are used to control the solar-fed 11-level MMI, which is connected to marine emergency lighting loads. The entire hardware system is controlled by a SPARTAN 3A field programmable gate array (FPGA) board, and the power quality is improved to achieve the lowest harmonics possible.

Because of the shortage of energy, the development of green and reliable energy is particularly important. As a green and clean energy, wind power is widely used. As the core component of wind power generation, it is particularly important to choose generators with high reliability. Switched reluctance machine is widely used as generators because of its strong fault tolerance and high reliability. Therefore, this paper aims to propose a power converter and its control strategy to improve the efficiency of switched reluctance generators.

In this paper, a full-bridge power converter (FBPC) instead of the asymmetric half-bridge power converter (AHBPC) is adopted to drive the switched reluctance generator (SRG) system. Compare the FBPC with the AHBPC, the FBPC has several advantages including low cost and modularization, and operation process of SRG winding current direction is variable.

The results show that the SRG system can keep smooth operation by the FBPC with relatively high efficiency.

The FBPC is suitable to drive the SRG system. Meanwhile, this paper introduces two excitation modes of the FBPC as three-phase three-beat mode and six-phase six-beat mode. When the six-phase six-beat control strategy is adopted, the dead band time of the converter can be avoided. At the same time, the SRG has higher efficiency.

The risk of aggression is higher among people with psychiatric disorders. This study aims to determine the association of aggression with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder (BD) and major depressive disorder (MDD) in patients referred to Shahid Beheshti Teaching Hospital in Kerman.

This was a cross-sectional study of 518 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, BD and MDD who met the inclusion criteria and were compared with a comparison group. All participants completed the Buss–Perry Aggression Questionnaire (BPAQ). Independent samples t-test and Pearson correlation coefficient were used to investigate the relationship between the score of BPAQ and other variables. The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI-13), Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS) and Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) were completed by MDD, BD and schizophrenia patients, respectively.

The mean score of total aggression and its components in the comparison group was significantly (P-value = 0.001) lower than that of the other groups. However, no significant difference was observed between the three schizophrenia, MDD and BD groups. The total aggression score of BPAQ had a significant positive correlation with BDI-13 and YMRS and a significant negative correlation with the PANSS score. Single patients with schizophrenia and people in the comparison group with lower education levels had a higher total aggression score.

Suffering from BD, MDD and schizophrenia, especially in single patients with a lower education level, is associated with physical and verbal aggression, anger and hostility, which emphasizes the need for periodic examination and screening of aggressive behaviors in these patients.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the usage of digital technologies (DTs) in improving the mental health of workers on construction sites.

A mixed research approach was used in the study, which comprised a questionnaire survey and two phases of semi-structured interviews. Purposive sampling was used to determine the interviewees and respondents of the questionnaire survey. Weighted mean rating (WMR) and manual content analysis were used to rank and evaluate the collected data.

The findings of this study revealed bipolar disorder, anxiety disorders, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, work-related stress and depression as the six most significant mental disorders (MDs) among the construction workforce and 30 causes for them. Moreover, 27 symptoms were related to the six most significant MDs, and sweating was the most significant symptom among them. Despite that, 16 DTs were found to be suitable in mitigating the causes for the most significant MDs.

There are numerous studies conducted on the application of DTs to construction operations. However, insufficient studies have been conducted focusing on the application of DTs in improving the mental health of workers at construction sites. This study can thus influence the use of DTs for tackling the common causes for MDs by bringing a new paradigm to the construction industry.