By Astrid Landon Schizophrenia is tough to diagnose. Patients may present with hallucinations (sometimes), social withdrawal (maybe) or delusions (not always). More generally, they just sound unlike themselves. Clinicians rely on their expertise and subtle cues to determine how different patients’ speech is, along with which symptoms appear over time, to justify leaning toward schizophrenia rather than another mental illness. This leads to delays in diagnosis. Americans with psychotic disorders — more than 3 million of whom have schizophrenia — receive a diagnosis a year and a half, on average, after their first symptoms appear. Researchers are now investigating whether artificial intelligence could improve diagnosis and care by listening to and analyzing what clinicians can’t hear or quantify, even if the software is working off just a few minutes of conversation. AI won’t make its grand entrance into the clinic tomorrow. But it’s being hailed as the new frontier in psychiatric care, one that could enable early, accurate detection and personalized monitoring of illnesses based on indistinct symptoms. “We have the tools to do that with the kind of precision that we have never had before,” says Thomas Insel, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who led the US National Institute of Mental Health for 13 years. Schizophrenia is a disorder that interferes with people’s perception of reality, their thinking and their emotional regulation. It affects about 23 million people worldwide and is usually diagnosed between the late teens and early 30s. No one knows what causes it, but research suggests it could be a combination of genetics, environment, brain chemistry and substance use. Clinicians stress the importance of detecting the disorder as early as possible, because the longer it is left untreated, the poorer the response to treatment and the greater the risk of brain tissue loss, worsening symptoms and suicide. But psychiatrists often make errors. © 2026 Annual Reviews

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Robotics
Link ID: 30407 - Posted: 09.12.2026

By Andrew McLean Drugs for treating depression are among the most prescribed category of medications in the U.S.—1 in 6 American adults take them. Some health researchers and advocates have raised concerns that too many patients are using antidepressants and that patients who want to stop taking them struggle to do so. One of the most prominent voices on this point is Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who launched an effort in May 2026 encouraging doctors to find other ways besides antidepressants and other psychiatric drugs to treat depression when possible. As a psychiatrist for over 35 years, including a past role as the medical director of North Dakota’s Department of Human Services, I’ve seen both the benefits and the problems with antidepressants. In my view, there are grains of truth to claims that they are overused, but the full picture is much more nuanced. What Are Antidepressants, and Who Takes Them? Over half of all antidepressant medications prescribed are a type of drug called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs. The first SSRI—fluoxetine, better known by its brand name Prozac—was approved in 1987. A handful of other types of SSRIs, which work through different mechanisms, also exists. Antidepressants can be helpful for moderate to severe depression, but they are typically not warranted for mild depression, as the side effects might outweigh any potential benefits. For mild depression, many effective nonmedication treatments exist. However, the distinction between mild and more severe symptoms sometimes gets lost. In everyday language, people use the term “depression” to describe everything from a minor sense of the blahs to a serious clinical condition requiring treatment.

Keyword: Depression; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30405 - Posted: 09.12.2026

By Meghan Rosen The mysterious pain disorder fibromyalgia may have some surprising genetic roots. An analysis of 2.5 million people suggests fibromyalgia is neurological in nature, scientists report July 28 in Nature Medicine. The genetics study is the latest — and largest — to try and get a grasp on a long-debated condition. The work establishes a biological basis for fibromyalgia, which was historically thought to be psychological. Evidence of the condition’s biological origins has been accumulating for years, says Michael Wainberg, a geneticist at the University of Toronto. “But now,” he says, “I think it’s absolutely indisputable.” Fibromyalgia is known for causing widespread pain and fatigue, though symptoms can look different among patients. They may also have anxiety, depression and sleep disruptions, says Jonathan Aebischer, a chronic pain researcher and clinician at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland who was not part of the new study. “I can’t say that I’ve ever seen two cases of fibromyalgia that are exactly alike,” he says. And though fibromyalgia has real, physical symptoms, they can appear to be invisible, says Kristal Kent, a patient advocate at the nonprofit organization Veteran Voices for Fibromyalgia, based in Cleveland. “One day, I can seem OK,” she says, “and the next day I could be crashed out in a flare-up.” For her, some of the biggest symptoms are chronic fatigue and brain fog. Fibromyalgia affects some 4 million adults in the United States, but the true number of people affected might be even higher, says Hanna Ollila, a genetic epidemiologist at the University of Helsinki. Besides the symptom variability, there are no blood tests to screen for fibromyalgia and it can be misdiagnosed as other diseases. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2026.

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Neuroimmunology
Link ID: 30394 - Posted: 09.05.2026

Lynne Peeples Every year, millions of people start taking a drug with therapeutic effects that can’t be fully explained, for a condition that can’t be objectively diagnosed with a laboratory test. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, are among the most prescribed medications in the world. Yet, even after decades of use, scientists are still untangling the biological changes that SSRIs trigger in the brain and body. “We fundamentally don’t know how they work,” says Maurizio Fava, a psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. That uncertainty collided with politics earlier this year when, speaking at a wellness summit focused on mental health, US Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr argued that the drugs are greatly overused and have withdrawal risks that are on a par with heroin. His claims prompted an outcry from some scientists and clinicians, who warned that Kennedy had overstated the concern, potentially scaring people away from life-saving treatment. But others said he had identified a real problem, even if clumsily. “This is a major public-health issue,” says Mark Horowitz, a psychiatrist at Adelaide University in Australia. “I hope the messenger’s controversialness doesn’t kill the message.” The divide reflects how much remains unresolved with regards to SSRIs. Researchers are still piecing together a complicated picture of the drugs’ therapeutic actions, involving neural circuits and their connecting synapses, gene expression, inflammation, stress hormones and psychological expectation. None yet offers a complete explanation. And the chain of biological changes that ultimately relieves symptoms can look very different from one person to the next. “There’s not one route to depression,” says Catherine Harmer, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Oxford, UK. But many scientists say the field is entering a more revealing era, as new tools begin to connect symptoms to biological processes. “We’re at an inflection point,” says Mark Rapaport, a psychiatrist at Stanford University in California and president of the American Psychiatric Association. He likens it to cancer research in the 1990s, when advances in molecular biology and basic science were leading to the development of the first targeted therapies. © 2026 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30391 - Posted: 08.29.2026

By Melinda Wenner Moyer When Juan Rivera was in college, he noticed that the activities he loved, such as going out with friends, had stopped making him happy. “I would be with my friends but not enjoying it fully and just sort of feeling flat,” he said. On bad days, he could barely get out of bed, much less summon the motivation to leave the house. Mr. Rivera, now 35, discussed his struggles with a psychiatrist. She evaluated him, diagnosed him with depression and prescribed an antidepressant. It didn’t work. Over the next few years, she prescribed several others, but those didn’t help him, either. Mr. Rivera, an immigration attorney in Miami, suffers from what most clinicians would call “treatment-resistant depression.” There is no broadly accepted definition of the condition, and there can be various degrees of treatment resistance, said Dr. Gerard Sanacora, director of the Yale Depression Research Program. But many doctors, he said, consider depression to be treatment-resistant if a person has not experienced at least a 50 percent improvement after trying two different antidepressants in succession, each for four to six weeks. Despite its name, treatment-resistant depression can improve and even be cured, experts say. A number of therapies, often in combination, have been shown to help. Why Depression Can Resist Treatment Various factors may increase the likelihood that a person with depression won’t respond to initial drug treatments, said Dr. Debra Kahn, director of the Advanced Psychiatric Therapeutics Clinic at UC Davis Health. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30385 - Posted: 08.22.2026

By Holly Barker Individual structural MRI studies fail to identify reproducible brain signatures for autism and other neuropsychiatric conditions, a new study finds. Brain scans of people with autism, depression and bipolar disorder rarely show consistent differences in cortical thickness or grey matter volume across independent studies, according to the analysis. The study suggests that these structural measures are unlikely to provide reliable biomarkers of those conditions and that different approaches are needed. “The findings are really a wake-up call. We’ve all been operating under the assumption that if we keep doing these studies enough, eventually the noise will wash out and we will converge on some consensus of what the brain changes in a particular disorder are,” says study investigator Alex Fornito, professor of psychology at Monash University. “Our findings suggest if we keep doing that business as usual, that’s not going to happen.” Structural MRI studies have long produced conflicting results. Some have identified greater cortical thickness of select brain regions in people with autism than those without the condition, while others have reported the opposite. Until now, it was unclear whether such discrepancies reflected differences in study design and analysis, or whether structural brain signatures for these conditions do not exist. To address that question, Fornito and his colleagues analyzed MRI scans from thousands of people with neuropsychiatric conditions—including depression, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, autism and bipolar disorder—as well as from people with Alzheimer’s disease. They calculated cortical thickness or grey matter volume using the same analysis pipeline across all datasets and then compared how consistently brain changes were reproduced between independent study sites. © 2026 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Brain imaging; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 30368 - Posted: 08.12.2026

By Camille Bromley When Cameron LaBar was a kid, he was a towhead with bright blue eyes and big feelings. He seemed to sense things more strongly than other children. His family lived in Southern California, and when he was at the beach or playing in the yard, they’d put him on a double layer of towels so he wouldn’t scream when he got sand on his hands or was poked by the grass. Susan LaBar, his mother, called him the flip-top baby. He’d build up to a certain pressure, then erupt in tears. Around the age of 5, his face and body began repetitively twitching in ways he couldn’t control. Ms. LaBar bought books on Tourette’s syndrome and started highlighting things she recognized — until she was almost coloring in whole pages. In fourth grade, his teacher called her and said that he had gotten overwhelmed with instructions on an assignment and froze at his desk. She took him to a pediatric neurologist, who diagnosed him with Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder and generalized anxiety disorder. Of her five children, Ms. LaBar thought, he was the most like her: anxious and sensitive. “He can’t take a deep breath,” she told the doctor. “He’s so knotted up.” The doctor suggested that Paxil, an antidepressant in the category known as S.S.R.I.s, could level things out for him. The doctor told her that Paxil would adjust what was going on in his head so he could do what he needed to do: relax, sit down in class and complete his homework. Giving her son psychiatric medication at 9 years old was not a decision Ms. LaBar took lightly. She thought about it every night for a week, then called the doctor and asked for a prescription at the lowest dose that would help him get unstuck from inside his own head. More than 20 years later, as an adult, Mr. LaBar looks back on that moment with ambivalence and regret. It was the start of a prolonged pharmaceutical spiral that kept him on medication without egress. He believes that the years he spent on antidepressants kept him from feeling the full range of his emotions — from living a full authentic life, even. He was not alone: When he described his experience online, he encountered a multitude of others who had a similar story. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30364 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Jake Currie No one knows what causes Alzheimer’s disease. There are plenty of risk factors associated with the neurodegenerative disease, like inflammation, smoking, and genetics, but so far no single culprit has emerged. A new study published in Translational Psychiatry, however, investigated the link between Alzheimer’s and another risk factor, depression, leading to some surprising results. Neuroscientists led by a team from the University of Southern California analyzed high-resolution MRI scans from more than 2,000 healthy adults between the ages of 50 and 90. Around a third of them (630) had been diagnosed with depression, and these subjects showed a significant decrease in volume in their hippocampus. The entire hippocampus wasn’t affected, though, just a smaller subfield responsible for retrieving memories, reconstructing memories from partial information, and distinguishing between similar experiences. “This study shows why it’s important to look beyond the total size of the hippocampus,” study co-author Meredith N. Braskie said in a statement. “Depression wasn’t related to smaller volume throughout the entire region. The association was concentrated in a particular set of subfields, giving us a more precise picture of how depression may relate to brain health during aging.” © Copyright 2026

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30360 - Posted: 08.08.2026

By Jackie Flynn Mogensen Lindsay Clancy, a 35-year-old former nurse, is on trial in Massachusetts for the murder of her three young children in 2023. The details of the case are disturbing—according to court records, Clancy strangled her children, aged five years, three years and eight months, to death before she attempted to take her own life. Clancy has pled not guilty to the murder charges on the basis that she suffered from a mental health disorder called postpartum psychosis. During this episode, Clancy’s lawyers have said, she was convinced by voices in her head to kill her children and herself. The prosecution has argued the killings were premeditated. The ongoing, high-profile trial has thrust the topic of maternal mental health—and postpartum psychosis in particular—into the national spotlight. But behind the headlines, maternal mental health experts say the disorder is nuanced, understudied and, importantly, treatable. Postpartum psychosis is a rare and severe mental disorder that occurs in people who have given birth. It occurs after about one to two of every 1,000 live births, explains Khatiya Moon, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell. It’s different from postpartum depression—the onset of depression following childbirth—which is more common and can affect around one in five to 10 people who have given birth. The symptoms of postpartum psychosis are “variable,” Moon says, but may include delusions, paranoia, purposeless or repetitive behavior, as well as hallucinations—hearing voices, seeing things or even feeling sensations on the skin that aren’t there. © 2026 SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN INC.

Keyword: Depression; Hormones & Behavior
Link ID: 30351 - Posted: 08.01.2026

by Avery Hurt In 1950, researchers Hector Chevigny and Sydell Braverman set out to, as they put it, “demolish old fables about the emotional life of the blind” and demonstrate that the mental health issues of the blind are no different from those experienced by the sighted. But they did discover one big — and very surprising — difference: There have been no reported cases of schizophrenia in people blind from birth (or who became blind very shortly after birth). At the time, there was limited patient data available, so it wasn’t clear if this astonishing finding would hold up. But in the almost 80 years since, more national databases of mental illness have been maintained, and still no cases have been found, according to a study in Frontiers in Psychology. Is it just a coincidence? Or does never having been able to see somehow offer protection from schizophrenia? And if it does, how would that even work? Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder that interferes with the way people interpret reality, Philip Corlett, a neuroscientist at Yale University who studies psychosis and delusional thinking, told Discover. Schizophrenia can cause symptoms such as hallucinations, disorganized speech and thinking, and in some cases, a lack of motivation or engagement with the world. However, the most familiar characteristic of the illness is what Corlett described as “departures from consensus reality,” or, put another way, believing things that most people in your culture don’t believe. Though the causes and mechanisms of schizophrenia are not yet well understood, one increasingly accepted theory is that the illness results from errors in prediction. To understand that, we need to take a look at how the healthy brain processes information. © 2026 Discover Magazine Inc

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Attention
Link ID: 30320 - Posted: 07.11.2026

By Jeneen Interlandi In the mid-2010s, when they were still postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin kept bumping into different sides of the same obstacle. Poyet, an ecologist and a microbiologist, was trying to study rare bacterial species, the kind that had never been grown in a lab before. Groussin, a computational biologist in the same lab, wanted to understand how humans and microbes evolved together over millenniums. Each was focused on microbes that make their homes in and on the human body, what scientists collectively refer to as the human microbiome. But the only samples they could find to work with came from the same small sliver of humanity, namely populations that were wealthy, Western and white. “About 90 percent of all human diversity has been completely left out of the picture,” Groussin told me recently. It was as if someone had shone a bright flashlight on one small segment of a giant canvas and left the rest shrouded in darkness. The bright spot was well defined (imagine the face of a man). But they couldn’t really tell what they were looking at (whether that man was a monk, for example, or a matador) without seeing the rest of the canvas. Scientists refer to this vast, unexplored terrain as biology’s dark matter. Our bodies are home to more bacteria — on our skin, up our noses, in our guts and mouths and around our genitals — than there are stars in the Milky Way. These microbes have evolved not only with us but inside us, and scientists who study them closely say that hardly a biological process or system exists in which they do not play a role. They helped create our digestive systems and our immune systems. They influence the size and shape of our bodies. At least some research suggests that they also affect our brains, moods, personalities and behaviors. And yet, most of them have still not been identified, let alone studied. It was tantalizing to think about what a fuller picture might reveal. In recent years, scientists had linked the gut microbiome to a long list of conditions, including Crohn’s and irritable bowel syndrome, Parkinson’s, dementia and autism, and they were hopeful that a better understanding of those links would lead to treatments, if not cures. They were also sifting through the nearly unfathomable array of molecules that microbes produce, in search of biological treasures: not only potential medications but also compounds capable of breaking down pollutants or repairing damaged ecosystems. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Obesity
Link ID: 30312 - Posted: 07.08.2026

Hannah Harris Green A range of other medications could serve as alternatives to powerful opioids for pain relief in emergency departments, according to a new study. The review paper examined non-opioid medications available in the emergency department at San Francisco general hospital and examined existing medical literature to figure out which ones might provide pain relief. Opioids have a strong track record of reducing pain effectively, but loose prescriptions with insufficient care towards their addictive properties led to the first wave of the US opioid crisis, which began in the 90s. Akash Shanmugam, a medical student at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) and first author on the study, said the goal of the study was to “create a very targeted list for specific pain conditions”, to help add to the “toolboxes” physicians use to treat patients. The study provides recommendations for the most common types of pain that patients experience in emergency departments; abdominal pain, back pain, chest pain, fracture pain and headache. Shanmugam and Dr Kathy LeSaint, an associate professor of emergency medicine at UCSF and another of the paper’s authors, agree that opioids still have a place in medicine. “The desire to reduce opioids shouldn’t come at the expense of under-treating pain,” Shanmugam said. However, alternatives can also have an important role as physicians have become increasingly aware of possible long-term consequences. LeSaint also pointed out that beyond concerns about opioid addiction and overdose, it’s important to have a variety of medications for pain available because what will work best varies from person to person. This variation is often genetic; for example “the enzymes that are responsible for metabolizing opioids can have different strengths in people”, LeSaint explained. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Pain & Touch; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30283 - Posted: 06.17.2026

Sarah Hendrickx Being autistic can be a lot of fun. I say that as an adult-diagnosed autistic (and ADHD) adult who has spent the past 20 years working in the autism world, meeting thousands of autistic people and their families, writing books, and speaking publicly on the subject. It’s not always fun, that’s for sure, but given that the nature of being human comes with a whole plethora of complexities and contradictions, light and dark, it is, of course, highly possible that a package of atypical cognitive processes, perceptions and behaviours clinically categorised as dysfunctional and disabling can also bring a whole load of satisfaction and pleasure. Even so, I imagine that, for some people, the concept of being autistic as being joyful is a tough one to square, given that the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder defines it as ‘characterised by varying but often marked and persistent deficits in social communication and social interaction’. Still not convinced? Let’s think of being autistic in the same way that we think of a socially driven person who may thrive and excel in a busy environment, and then struggle when alone, or of a highly moral person who may be jubilant when justice prevails, and then devastated when it does not – in other words, one natural tendency can bring us both challenges and elation, depending on the circumstances. The same is true for autistic characteristics. I should note that the following celebration of autistic delight does not negate or trivialise the very real and often disabling experience of living as an autistic person in a non-autistic world. I also recognise my own privilege as an autistic adult who is able to live relatively independently and with agency, but also as an autistic adult who – despite appearances – received my own diagnosis of autism by fair means, complete with the requisite impairments and deficits. © Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026.

Keyword: Autism; Intelligence
Link ID: 30274 - Posted: 06.10.2026

By Ellen Barry Most years, when thousands of psychiatrists gather for the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association, they walk past a scattering of protesters. There are Scientologists with megaphones; Falun Gong groups doing their exercises; and, often, former patients, saying they have been harmed by medications or electroconvulsive therapy. This year, though, the profession is facing criticism from the highest levels of the federal government. The American Psychiatric Association gathered just 10 days after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a set of policies to encourage doctors to deprescribe, or assist patients in stopping, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants. A current of anxiety ran through the meeting, held here this week. Many physicians in the crowd said they worried that Mr. Kennedy’s statements would prompt people to refuse medications, or to quit them and relapse. The plenary session erupted in applause when Dr. Marketa Wills, the organization’s chief executive, declared, “We will never support governmental interference in the practice of medicine.” “We are standing tall for evidence-based care,” she continued. “We are standing tall against stigma, oversimplification, and anything that would move patients further away from the care that they need.” But there were also signs that the field’s leaders are engaging, albeit cautiously, with Mr. Kennedy’s effort to curb overprescribing. Numerous sessions offered training in helping patients taper off medications. In July, the association’s president will take part in a panel convened by the Department of Health and Human Services to develop clinical guidance on tapering antidepressants. In an interview, Dr. Wills said she had been “encouraged” by the invitation to participate in the panel, and she credited the administration with “putting mental health front and center.” © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30256 - Posted: 05.27.2026

By Matt Richtel A 27-year-old woman began an experiment on herself early one morning in December 2024. Her laboratory was her childhood bedroom, tucked into a second-floor corner of a pale yellow house in the Boston suburbs. On a bookshelf behind her sat a small stuffed sloth and some favorite books, including “Siddhartha” by Hermann Hesse. Her parents were asleep in the room next door. Her name is Rebecca, but she goes by Becks. Sitting at her desk in a gray T-shirt, she opened a small plastic bag filled with white powder. The bag was stamped “SR-17018,” and “NOT FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION.” She extracted some powder with a red microscooper, poured it onto a digital scale and carefully weighed out 25 milligrams. She gathered this into a blue and white pill capsule and sealed it, and then swallowed the capsule with water. It was 4:27 a.m. “It’s my turn to be a guinea pig,” Becks wrote in the online diary she was keeping of her experience. In sharing her story with The New York Times, she asked that her last name not be used so potential employers don’t discover her drug history. Becks had joined the vanguard of a dangerous, highly speculative do-it-yourself approach to getting sober. For a decade, on and off, she had been addicted to various drugs, most recently kratom, an opiate-like substance, which cleared her head and covered up her pain but required constant dosing. She feared the call of fentanyl, which she’d tried a few times. “Every morning, I woke drenched in sweat from overnight withdrawals. It was a grim existence,” she wrote of her kratom use. She tried various methods to get sober, including three short inpatient detox stays and one monthlong rehabilitation treatment. She had periods of sobriety but couldn’t sustain it. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30241 - Posted: 05.09.2026

By Rachel Nuwer Despite billions of dollars spent on potential drug treatments for cocaine addiction, none have proved effective—and cocaine use is increasing in the United States and around the world. But one class of possible remedy has remained untested: psychedelics, which have shown promise for treating post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, anxiety, alcohol use disorder, smoking, and more. Now, the results of a pioneering randomized trial—more than a decade in the making—reveal a single dose of psilocybin, the psychedelic component of magic mushrooms, brought significant relief for people addicted to cocaine. The study of 40 people, described today in JAMA Network Open, showed that 180 days after treatment, 30% of the psilocybin group was completely abstaining from cocaine, versus none of the placebo group—and those who continued using the drug did so less frequently. “This is significantly better than any medication ever tested to treat cocaine use disorder,” says Stephen Ross, a professor of psychiatry at New York University who was not involved in the work. He called results “remarkable,” and the magnitude of the effects “highly substantial.” The study, funded by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) and the nonprofit Heffter Research Institute, was also notable for its participant pool. Of the 40 people who took part, more than 80% were Black and 65% earned less than $20,000 a year. “Although the study was small, one strength is that most participants had lower than average income and education, which are associated with barriers to addiction treatment,” says Nora Volkow, director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who was not involved in the trial. More research will be needed to replicate the findings, she says, but the study provides evidence “that psilocybin has promise for treating addiction to cocaine and potentially other illicit stimulants.” © 2026 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Drug Abuse
Link ID: 30240 - Posted: 05.09.2026

Ian Sample Science editor A single dose of psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, can induce anatomical changes in the brain, according to research among people who took the psychedelic compound for the first time. Scientists spotted apparent changes in the brain’s structure which were still apparent a month after healthy volunteers took the drug. If confirmed, they may help explain the therapeutic effects that psychedelics can have on anxiety, depression and addiction, researchers said. Evidence for the changes came from specialised scans that measured the diffusion of water along nerve bundles in the brain. They suggested that some nerve tracts had become denser and more robust after the drug was taken. While the findings are preliminary, the scientists said the opposite was seen in ageing and dementia. “It’s remarkable to see potential anatomical brain changes one month after a single dose of any drug,” said Prof Robin Carhart-Harris, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and senior author on the study. “We don’t yet know what these changes mean, but we do note that overall, people showed positive psychological changes in this study, including improved wellbeing and mental flexibility.” Scientists have long sought to understand how psychedelics affect the brain and the work has gained fresh impetus in the wake of trials and studies that suggest the compounds could be used to treat a range of mental health disorders. The drugs are thought to help by boosting flexible thinking and allowing people to escape destructive cognitive ruts. © 2026 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30237 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Jake Currie Psychedelics are getting a renewed boost of interest lately. The FDA recently announced they were fast-tracking research investigating psilocybin, the compound that gives magic mushrooms their magic, as a treatment for depression. Now, new research published in Nature Communications is showing just how powerful a single dose of this psychedelic compound can be. Neuropsychopharmacologists from the University of California, San Francisco recruited 28 physically and mentally healthy people who had never taken psychedelics before and gave them their inaugural magic mushroom trip. But first, they administered a single placebo dose of 1 milligram of the magic mushroom compound. Most of the subjects reported the experience was “no more unusual than an everyday state of consciousness,” which was backed up by EEG readings. After the preview, it was time for the main event. The research team fitted the participants with EEG electrodes and administered a 25-milligram dose of psilocybin. An hour into their trip, the EEGs showed a surge of entropy (or diverse neural activity), indicating they were processing more complex information. The next day all of the subjects (except one) rated the experience as the “single most unusual state of consciousness” they’d experienced in their lives (the lone holdout rated it in the top five). During the following few weeks, the newly minted psychonauts reported experiencing more insight as well as an increased sense of well-being. A full month after their first trip, they performed better on assessments of their cognitive flexibility. “Psilocybin seems to loosen up stereotyped patterns of brain activity and give people the ability to revise entrenched patterns of thought,” study author Taylor Lyons said in a statement. “The fact that these changes track with insight and improved well‑being is especially exciting.” © 2026 Nautilus

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 30236 - Posted: 05.06.2026

By Ellen Barry As Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. sets out to rein in the use of psychiatric medications, a group of prominent psychiatrists are developing guidance for helping patients to stop taking them, noting that providers sometimes “park” patients on medications that are no longer necessary or effective. The experts, whose first recommendations appeared in JAMA Network Open and the British Journal of Psychiatry, identify structural problems that may lead to overprescribing: There are few clinical trials showing when it is advisable to stop a medication; many providers do not regularly review whether a prescription is still needed; and psychiatry residents receive more training in starting drug prescriptions than stopping them. “We have not really taught our trainees to think about, what is the logical endpoint?” said Dr. Joseph F. Goldberg, a past president of the American Society of Clinical Psychopharmacology, which convened a group of 45 psychiatrists to agree on basic principles for “deprescribing,” as supervised drug tapering is sometimes called. “You’ll see a patient in consultation who has been parked on a medication which seems to be ineffective for years, and you’ll ask, ‘Why are you still on this medicine?’” he said. “We’ve got a bugaboo going about passive re-prescribing, and I hope we’ll see much less of that.” The new recommendations come amid rising pressure from Mr. Kennedy and his allies in the Make America Healthy Again movement, who have long made the case that Americans overuse psychiatric medications. The Department of Health and Human Services will convene expert panels on deprescribing the main class of medication used to treat depression — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or S.S.R.I.s — this summer, with an eye toward developing official guidance. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 30228 - Posted: 05.02.2026

By Rachel E. Gross The first question Sophie Davies had was: Will it affect my memory? In the three weeks since giving birth, Ms. Davies had been in a downward spiral. She checked herself into the mother-and-baby unit of her hospital in East Anglia, England, where doctors ratcheted up the dose of Prozac she took to manage her obsessive-compulsive disorder. But every morning she woke up in tears, and every time she looked at her baby boy, she felt hollow with guilt. “I’m never going to be able to be a mom,” she recalled thinking, “or if I am, I’m not going to be able to be a good one.” A month in, a hospital worker suggested she try a headset that used an electric current to treat depression. The word “electric” gave Ms. Davies, then 34, pause. It sounded like electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, the scary-sounding treatment that triggers seizures and can result in memory loss. This therapy was different. Transcranial direct-current stimulation, or tDCS, uses a weak electric current to shock the brain and does not produce seizures. “This is as far from ECT as a jet engine is from my bicycle,” Dr. Mark George, of the Medical University of South Carolina, where he is a leading expert in neuromodulation, a term that encompasses all therapies that use electricity to modify brain function. Ms. Davies did an internet search and confirmed that the side effects of tDCS — ringing in the ears, headaches and mild burns or irritation where the electrode pads touched the forehead — were generally transient and didn’t include amnesia. She decided to give it a try. In England, the brain stimulation device has been approved for treating depression since 2019. It can be prescribed by a doctor or purchased over the counter, where it sells for around $530. © 2026 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Brain imaging
Link ID: 30225 - Posted: 04.29.2026