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The purpose of this article is to shed light on the challenges of teaching theatre to students with anxiety. It includes specific situations educators have faced, patterns of gaps in training or knowledge, and methods with which educators have handled these situations. The data for this article came from an extensive literature review as well as a qualitative research study wherein 11 educators of differing grade range and location were asked about their personal experiences as professional theatre educators. Subjects were given pseudonyms to protect their anonymity. School, city, and state names were omitted when possible. The data was coded and analyzed, with special note given to patterns in educator experience. The research revealed an almost unanimous gap in training, a wide variety of issues, and some repeated failures in communication between administration and educator. It also revealed a growing pool of practical advice from outside the typical education system. While the challenges explored are told from the educator's perspective, they all originate with student needs and issues. In helping educators prepare for these challenges, one also helps the students who are suffering. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: A major research finding in the field of Biological Psychiatry is that symptom-based categories of mental disorders map poorly onto dysfunctions in brain circuits or neurobiological pathways. Many of the identified (neuro) biological dysfunctions are "transdiagnostic", meaning that they do not reflect diagnostic boundaries but are shared by different ICD/DSM diagnoses. The compromised biological validity of the current classification system for mental disorders impedes rather than supports the development of treatments that not only target symptoms but also the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. The Biological Classification of Mental Disorders (BeCOME) study aims to identify biology-based classes of mental disorders that improve the translation of novel biomedical findings into tailored clinical applications. Methods: BeCOME intends to include at least 1000 individuals with a broad spectrum of affective, anxiety and stress-related mental disorders as well as 500 individuals unaffected by mental disorders. After a screening visit, all participants undergo in-depth phenotyping procedures and omics assessments on two consecutive days. Several validated paradigms (e.g., fear conditioning, reward anticipation, imaging stress test, social reward learning task) are applied to stimulate a response in a basic system of human functioning (e.g., acute threat response, reward processing, stress response or social reward learning) that plays a key role in the development of affective, anxiety and stress-related mental disorders. The response to this stimulation is then read out across multiple levels. Assessments comprise genetic, molecular, cellular, physiological, neuroimaging, neurocognitive, psychophysiological and psychometric measurements. The multilevel information collected in BeCOME will be used to identify data-driven biologically-informed categories of mental disorders using cluster analytical techniques. Discussion: The novelty of BeCOME lies in the dynamic in-depth phenotyping and omics characterization of individuals with mental disorders from the depression and anxiety spectrum of varying severity. We believe that such biology-based subclasses of mental disorders will serve as better treatment targets than purely symptom-based disease entities, and help in tailoring the right treatment to the individual patient suffering from a mental disorder. BeCOME has the potential to contribute to a novel taxonomy of mental disorders that integrates the underlying pathomechanisms into diagnoses. Trial registration: Retrospectively registered on June 12, 2019 on ClinicalTrials.gov (TRN: NCT03984084). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]