By Daniel Bergner Marie began taking fluoxetine, the generic form of Prozac, when she was 15. The drug — an S.S.R.I., a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor — was part of her treatment in an outpatient program for an eating disorder. It took its toll on her sexuality. “I was in touch with initial sparks of sexual energy relatively young,” she said, remembering crushes as far back as the age of 6 or 7. Shortly before starting on the drug, she was dazzled, from a distance, by a blue-eyed hockey player at school, tall and funny and charismatic. She recalled the fluster and fantasies he stirred. But on the medication, she felt the infatuation vanish swiftly. Listen to this article, read by Eric Jason Martin “And then,” Marie said, “I realized, Oh, I’m not developing new crushes.” She had no clue that the drug might be the cause: “I wasn’t informed about sexual side effects.” Even as the worst of the eating disorder abated, psychiatrists and family doctors told Marie and her parents that she should stay on an antidepressant. She complied, while trying and failing to escape the sexual side effects. She traded fluoxetine for other antidepressants, including Wellbutrin, a different class of antidepressant, which is sometimes prescribed to combat low libido. She’s 38 now and has been off psychiatric medication for six years. But sexual desire remains absent. “For me it’s just an empty dark space,” she said. “There’s nothing there.” Marie told me she has PSSD, post-S.S.R.I. sexual dysfunction, a loss of sexuality that persists after the drug is no longer being taken. It’s a controversial designation, because while the sexual side effects of S.S.R.I.s are well established — depleted or deadened desire, erectile dysfunction for men, elusive arousal for women, delayed and dulled orgasms or the inability to reach orgasm at all — the general assumption is that they subside completely when the drug is no longer in your system. Some psychiatrists suspect that PSSD is actually a result not of repercussions from the drugs but of the problem that led the patient to be medicated in the first place. Depression itself can stymie sexuality. So can anxiety, the other leading reason patients are prescribed S.S.R.I.s. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression; Sexual Behavior
Link ID: 30006 - Posted: 11.12.2025

By Ramin Skibba In August, two parents in California filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, claiming that the company was responsible for their teenage son’s suicide. The previous fall, according to Maria and Matthew Raine, their 16-year-old, Adam, had started using the company’s popular AI chatbot ChatGPT as a homework helper. Over the course of several months, the Raines alleged, it shifted to a digital companion and then to a “suicide coach,” advising the teen how to quietly steal vodka from his parent’s liquor cabinet, urging him to keep his suicidal ideations a secret, and then guiding him about the feasibility and load-bearing capacity of a noose. By the time of Adam’s death in April, according to the Raines’ complaint, the chatbot had used the word “suicide” 1,275 times, six times more often than Adam himself. The case of Adam Raines was not an isolated incident, though publicly available data remains limited. And experts worry that more mental health crises, including suicides — the second leading cause of death among people between ages 10 and 24 years — could arise as users increasingly turn to generative AI chatbots for emotional support. Although it is difficult to pinpoint just how many people are relying on chatbots in this way, according to a recent Harvard Business Review survey based primarily on data collected from Reddit forum posts, the practice is common for therapy, companionship, and finding purpose. Researchers have scrambled to understand the trend, including both the potential risks and benefits of the chatbots, most of which were not designed to be used for mental health support. Some users claim that the bots help them, citing their perception that the tools won’t judge or stigmatize them, while others are seeking a substitute for therapy when they can’t access or afford it, experts say. Some users also don’t think of the chatbots as a form of therapy, but rather a kind of mindful journaling as they work through their emotions and problems. According to one example in the Harvard Business Review report, a Reddit user said, “I found a thread where people talked about using AI to analyze their moods, essentially having low-barrier ‘therapy’ sessions.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29999 - Posted: 11.05.2025

By Ellen Barry One of the most popular mental health innovations of the past decade is therapy via text message, which allows you to dip in and out of treatment in the course of a day. Say you wake up anxious before a presentation: You might text your therapist first thing in the morning to say that you can’t stop visualizing a humiliating failure. Three hours later, her response pops up on your phone. She suggests that you label the thought — “I’m feeling nervous about my presentation” — and then try to reframe it. She tells you to take a deep breath before deciding what is true in the moment. You read her answer between meetings. “I’m pretty sure my boss thinks I’m an idiot,” you type. The therapist responds the next morning. “What evidence do you have that she thinks that?” she asks. She tells you to write a list of the available evidence, pros and cons. Text-based therapy has expanded swiftly over the past decade through digital mental health platforms like BetterHelp and Talkspace, which pair users with licensed therapists and offer both live chat and as-needed texting sessions. A new study published on Thursday in the journal JAMA Network Open provides early evidence that the practice is effective in treating mild to moderate depression, finding outcomes similar to those of video-based therapy. In a clinical trial, 850 adults with mild to moderate depression were randomly assigned to two groups: One group received psychotherapy via a weekly video session; the other received unlimited, as-needed messaging or emailing with a therapist. After 12 weeks, participants in both groups reported similar improvement in depression symptoms. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29995 - Posted: 11.01.2025

By Nima Sadrian In the popular narrative, cannabidiol, or CBD, is portrayed as a natural, non-intoxicating cure for a host of ailments — and sometimes that extends to the anxieties of modern adolescence. CBD is everywhere, infused in products such as gummy candies, vapes, skincare serums, and even fizzy seltzers. Usually derived from the hemp plant, CBD is pitched as a calming remedy with none of the stigma of marijuana. Even a 2018 World Health Organization report noted that CBD shows no signs of abuse or dependence potential. But as a physician and neuroscientist who studies how CBD affects the developing brain, I have to offer a different, more troubling answer: We simply don’t know if it’s safe for teens. And early evidence suggests potential for real, lasting harm. The comforting story our culture tells itself about CBD — that it offers harmless, botanical relief for stress and sleep problems — is dangerously out of step with the science. While we have been sold a simple wellness narrative, my own work and that of other scientists reveal a far more complex and cautionary tale — one that challenges the very foundation of the multibillion-dollar CBD industry. How did a compound that the Food and Drug Administration has only approved as a potent prescription drug for severe childhood epilepsy become a common additive? The answer lies in a catastrophic regulatory failure. The 2018 farm bill legalized hemp, but the legislation and its extensions created no framework to ensure that the products made from it were safe, effective, or accurately labeled, nor did the bill set an age limit for it. The result is a market that operates like the Wild West, a gold rush where consumer safety is an afterthought. The FDA-approved CBD medicine, Epidiolex, comes with a long list of documented risks, including liver damage and suicidal ideation, and requires careful medical supervision. Yet numerous consumer products containing CBD are sold without such warnings, mandatory testing, or oversight.

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29991 - Posted: 11.01.2025

By Sara Talpos As a new Ph.D. student in 2011, Steve Ramirez and his mentor performed a groundbreaking experiment in the field of memory manipulation. They placed a mouse in a small distinctive box and administered a mild electrical shock to its feet. When the rodent was placed in the box a second time, it froze up — anticipating another shock. From there, the young neuroscientists placed the mouse in a different box, one where nothing bad had happened. They then directed pulses of light to a very specific region in the mouse’s brain that had been genetically modified to respond to the light. This caused the mouse to immediately freeze. Ramirez and his mentor, it turned out, had found a way to artificially activate a fear-inducing memory. “How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past,” by Steve Ramirez will be available on November 4, 2025 (Princeton University Press, 256 pages). What was the point? A central goal of such science is to learn how memories form and function in the brain and to then apply this knowledge to treat brain disorders, writes Ramirez in his forthcoming book, “How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past.” Perhaps one day, he suggests, it will be possible to activate positive memories to curb depression or to retrieve memories that have seemingly been lost to Alzheimer’s disease. In the book, Ramirez explores the fascinating science of memory while tracing his own journey to becoming a successful professor at Boston University. His path was not without challenges, including the sudden death of his mentor and a decade-long struggle with alcohol addiction. “This book,” he writes, “is my attempt to make sense of the enigma of memory — the snippets of remembrances, the brief moments in time, the decisions we make, the blackouts, the imagined, and the dreamt of — all the things the brain does to breathe life into the past so that we can heal and become whole again.”

Keyword: Depression; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 29988 - Posted: 10.29.2025

Will Stone Doctors have long known that antidepressants come with side effects for cardiovascular and metabolic health. But a major analysis from a team of researchers in the U.K. has, for the first time, pulled together data from more than 150 clinical trials to compare the physical side effects of dozens of antidepressants. The study, published in the Lancet this week, details how each medication can affect weight, blood pressure, heart rate, cholesterol and other areas of health. The end result is something akin to a "sports league table" for 30 different antidepressants based on their side effect profile, says lead author Dr. Toby Pillinger, a psychiatrist at King's College London. "It's never been done at this scale before and no one's ever put specific numbers to the amount of weight you'll put on, or to the amount that your cholesterol goes up," he says. The findings are based on existing data, mostly from 8-week drug studies, that altogether represent more than 58,000 patients. The most frequently prescribed antidepressants in the U.S. — selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, like Zoloft and Prozac — tended to have fewer physical side effects, according to the analysis. Other medications, particularly some of the older drugs, were shown to have more significant impacts. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29983 - Posted: 10.25.2025

Natasha May Health reporter Women carry a higher genetic risk of depression, a new study has found. Claiming to be the largest genetic study to date on sex differences in major depression, the research published on Wednesday in Nature Communications has found 16 genetic variants linked to depression in women and eight in men. The study, led by Australia’s QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, showed a large proportion of the variants associated with depression were shared between sexes, but there was a “higher burden of genetic risk in females which could be due to female-specific variants”. Dr Brittany Mitchell, a senior researcher at QIMR Berghofer’s genetic epidemiology lab, said “we already know that females are twice as likely to suffer from depression in their lifetime than males”. “And we also know that depression looks very different from one person to another. Until now, there hasn’t been much consistent research to explain why depression affects females and males differently, including the possible role of genetics.” The study acknowledged explanations have been put forward spanning behavioural, environmental and biological domains, including men being less likely to seek help leading to under-diagnosis, and environmental exposures such as women being more frequently exposed to sexual abuse and interpersonal violence. The study stated that together these factors highlight the need for a “multifaceted approach” to understanding the underlying mechanisms of depression but proposed that a “key component of the biological mechanisms underlying these disparities could be differences in genetics”. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: Depression; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29958 - Posted: 10.08.2025

By Devin Effinger, Melissa Herman Psychedelics show growing promise as treatments for a variety of psychiatric diseases. Clinical trials have demonstrated rapid and persistent improvements in major depressive disorder, for example, sparking interest among both psychiatrists and neuroscientists. However, the clinical use of psychedelics is challenging; the drugs induce prolonged visual hallucinations and must be administered and monitored by trained staff, which creates barriers in terms of their availability and accessibility. Clinical trials are also challenging. Psychedelics produce profound subjective effects that make it impossible to properly placebo-control or effectively blind participants. And given the widespread cultural fascination with these drugs, it’s difficult to remove expectancy bias—if someone strongly believes a drug will work, that can influence their perception and reporting of their outcome. Moreover, these drugs are typically delivered and tested in combination with psychotherapy. Discerning whether any treatment effects stem from the drug versus the psychotherapy, as well as the role of therapy in clinical response, is a point of debate within the field. To help resolve some of these issues, we need to better understand the neurobiological mechanisms involved. Human imaging studies have shown that some psychedelics, such as psilocybin, produce long-lasting alterations in global connectivity and negative affect. But to design more effective versions of these drugs, we need to uncover their underlying mechanisms of action at greater resolution—something that is possible only through preclinical research at the level of molecular, cellular and systems neuroscience. © 2025 Simons Foundation

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Depression
Link ID: 29956 - Posted: 10.04.2025

Jon Hamilton A rigorous new study finds that a single dose of LSD can ease anxiety and depression for months. The study involved 198 adults with generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD, a disabling form of anxiety that affects about 1 in 10 people over the course of a year. Participants who got lower doses of LSD (25 or 50 micrograms) did no better than those who got a placebo. But people who received higher doses (100 or 200 micrograms) responded quickly, a team reports in the Journal of the American Medical Association. "By the next day, they were showing strong improvements," says Dr. David Feifel of Kadima Neuropsychiatry Institute in San Diego, one of the 22 centers that participated in the study. "And those improvements held out all the way to the end of the study, which was 12 weeks." But it's unclear whether some of the improvement was related to non-drug factors like the sensory environment in which people were treated, says Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelics researcher at the University of California, San Francisco who was not involved in the study. "The safety looks good, the tolerability looks good," he says, "but where is the depth of information about the way you delivered this product?" Carhart-Harris, like many scientists who study psychedelics, believes that successful treatment is more likely if a person has the right mindset when beginning a trip and if the trip occurs in a place with the right sensory environment. "It's characterized by continuous worry, inability to relax, and all the physical manifestations, racing heart rates and sweatiness," Feifel says. It's also frequently accompanied by depression. Current antidepressant and antianxiety drugs are inadequate for about half of people diagnosed with GAD. © 2025 npr

Keyword: Stress; Drug Abuse
Link ID: 29917 - Posted: 09.06.2025

Mohana Basu People with a psychiatric disorder are more likely to marry someone who has the same condition than to partner with someone who doesn’t, according to a massive study1 suggesting that the pattern persists across cultures and generations. Researchers had previously noted this trend in Nordic countries, but the phenomenon has seldom been investigated outside Europe until now. The latest study, published in Nature Human Behaviour today, used data from more than 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden. It examined the proportion of people in those couples who had one of nine psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), substance-use disorder and anorexia nervosa. Scientists lack a definitive understanding of what causes people to develop psychiatric disorders — but genetics and environmental factors are both thought to play a part. The team found that when one partner was diagnosed with one of the nine conditions, the other was significantly more likely to be diagnosed with the same or another psychiatric condition. Spouses were more likely to have the same conditions than to have different ones, says co-author Chun Chieh Fan, a population and genetics researcher at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma. “The main result is that the pattern holds across countries, across cultures, and, of course, generations,” Fan says. Even changes in psychiatric care over the past 50 years have not shifted the trend, he notes. Only OCD, bipolar disorder and anorexia nervosa showed different patterns across countries. For instance, in Taiwan, married couples were more likely to share OCD than were couples in Nordic countries. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression; Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29908 - Posted: 08.30.2025

By Eric Reinhart A recent study in the journal JAMA Psychiatry claims to offer reassuring news to hundreds of millions of people who are taking, or considering taking, antidepressants: Withdrawal from the medications, it said, is usually mild and below the threshold for clinical significance. The analysis, which drew on data from more than 17,000 patients, was quickly picked up by international news outlets. Critics responded just as quickly, calling it misleading and dismissive of real-world suffering. As both a practicing psychiatrist and critic of the harms inadvertently inflicted by my own field, I fear we’re having the wrong debate — again. Conceptual image of an orange seesaw with a pink brain and an oversized pill balancing on it, could illustrate ideas around ssri, anti-depressants, headache pills and other medication for mental and brain health Every few years, another study or media exposé reignites controversy over these drugs: How effective are they really? Are withdrawal symptoms real or imagined? Are antidepressants harming people more than they help? These questions, while important, are stuck inside the narrow terms set by a medication-centric psychiatric industry, even when criticizing it. They flatten the experience of patients and ignore the intersecting role of clinicians, families, institutions, media, culture, and public policy in shaping both suffering and relief, trapping us in circular debates and deflecting attention from other ways of understanding and addressing what ails us. Yes, antidepressant withdrawal is real. Yes, some people suffer greatly while trying to come off these drugs, with withdrawal risk varying among different kinds of antidepressants. I have also seen many patients appear to benefit greatly from such medications. But when we focus only on the biology of response and withdrawal, or treat psychiatric medications as purely pharmacologic agents whose harms and benefits can be definitively measured and settled by clinical trials, we obscure the more complex — and far more consequential — dynamics by which these medications affect self-perception, social relationships, and political life.

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29897 - Posted: 08.23.2025

Simon Makin Andrew Moseson experienced severe depression for many years. “Some days I wasn’t able to get out bed. I had long periods of unemployment and was living in my car for a time.” He struggled to find relief, nothing worked. “I tried medications, exercise, volunteering, psychedelics. I read books about happiness, about depression,” he says. “Everything helped a little, but it was still there.” Then, in the spring of 2023, he found a clinical trial that would change his life. The trial was for people with clinical depression who, like Moseson, had not found success with existing medication. It involved faecal microbiota transplantation (FMT), in which stool from a healthy donor is transferred into a recipient’s gastrointestinal tract to restore a healthy balance of gut bacteria. The procedure did not work as well for everyone who took part in the trial, but for Moseson the results were transformative — and they came fast. “Within about a week, I started feeling better,” he says. “I felt like my brain was refreshed.” Two years later, Moseson is still taking his previously prescribed medication. “My doctor doesn’t want me to quit my antidepressants,” he says. “There’s a thought that this transplant could make antidepressants work better.” Whatever the mechanism, the change seems stark. “I feel like I’ve been cured,” Moseson says. Numerous psychiatric and neurological conditions have been linked to disturbances in people’s gut microbiota — the community of trillions of microorganisms that live symbiotically in the gastrointestinal tract. These are just correlations, but studies in rodents show compelling evidence of causality, and other animal research points to multiple pathways through which the microbiota communicates with the brain. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Depression; Obesity
Link ID: 29894 - Posted: 08.20.2025

Heidi Ledford Scientists are closing in on the ability to apply genome editing to a formidable new target: the human brain. In the past two years, a spate of technological advances and promising results in mice have been laying the groundwork for treating devastating brain disorders using techniques derived from CRISPR–Cas9 gene editing. Researchers hope that human trials are just a few years away. “The data have never looked so good,” says Monica Coenraads, founder and chief executive of the Rett Syndrome Research Trust in Trumbull, Connecticut. “This is less and less science fiction, and closer to reality.” Daunting challenge Researchers have already developed gene-editing therapies to treat diseases of the blood, liver and eyes. In May, researchers reported1 a stunning success using a bespoke gene-editing therapy to treat a baby boy named KJ with a deadly liver disease. But the brain poses special challenges. The molecular components needed to treat KJ were inserted into fatty particles that naturally accumulate in the liver. Researchers are searching for similar particles that can selectively target the brain, which is surrounded by a defensive barrier that can prevent many substances from entering. Although KJ’s story was exciting, it was also frustrating for those whose family members have neurological diseases, says Coenraads, whose organization focuses on Rett syndrome, a rare disorder that affects brain development. “The question that I hear from our families is, ‘It was done so quickly for him. What’s taking us so long?’” she says. That pool of concerned families is growing as physicians and families increasingly turn to genome sequencing to find the causes of once-mysterious brain disorders, says Cathleen Lutz, a geneticist at The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. “People are starting to now find out that their child’s seizures, for example, are related to particular genetic mutations,” she says. © 2025 Springer Nature Limited

Keyword: Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29891 - Posted: 08.16.2025

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder medication is linked to significantly lower risk of suicidal behaviours, substance misuse, transport accidents and criminality, according to a study of the wider outcomes of treatment. The research, based on the medical records of nearly 150,000 people in Sweden, suggested that the drugs could have meaningful benefits beyond helping with the core symptoms of ADHD. Although the study was not a randomised trial – and so cannot definitively prove that medication caused improved outcomes – it adds to evidence of the substantial value of treatment. “We found that ADHD medication was associated with significantly reduced rates of first occurrences of suicidal behaviours, substance misuse, transport accidents and criminality,” said Prof Samuele Cortese, a child and adolescent psychiatrist and researcher at the University of Southampton. “Our results should inform the debate on the effects and safety of ADHD medications.” After accounting for factors including age, sex, education level, psychiatric diagnoses and medical history, ADHD medication was associated with reduced rates of a first occurrence of four of the five outcomes investigated: a 17% reduction for suicidal behaviour, 15% for substance misuse, 12% for transport accidents and 13% for criminality. It is well established that ADHD, thought to affect about 5% of children and 2.5% of adults worldwide, is linked to higher rates of mental health problems including suicide, substance misuse and accidental injuries. People with ADHD are also disproportionately represented within the criminal justice system. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Keyword: ADHD; Depression
Link ID: 29888 - Posted: 08.16.2025

By Michael S. Rosenwald Sarah Morlok Cotton, the last surviving member of a set of identical quadruplets who charmed Depression-era America with song-and-dance performances, and then took part in a landmark psychological study after being diagnosed with schizophrenia, died on July 7 in Belleville, Mich. She was 95. Her death, at an adult foster home, was confirmed by her son David Cotton. The Morlok Quads, as they came to be known, were a medical marvel and attracted crowds of people to Edward W. Sparrow Hospital in Lansing, Mich., shortly after they were born there on May 19, 1930. Newspapers held naming contests, and the winning entry suggested names that derived from the first letters of the hospital: Edna, Wilma, Sarah and Helen. The quadruplets’ middle names were simply initials denoting their birth order. (Sarah, the third born, was C.) Donations poured in almost immediately. The city of Lansing provided the family with a rent-free home. The Massachusetts Carriage Company sent a custom-made baby carriage with four seats. Businessmen opened bank accounts for each child. “Lansing’s Morlok quadruplets,” The Associated Press wrote, “are the most famous group of babies on the American continent.” The Morloks charged visitors 25 cents to visit their home and see the babies. Carl Morlok, who ran for constable of Lansing in 1931, used photos of his daughters on his campaign ads with the slogan, “We will appreciate your support.” He won in a landslide. Amid the commotion, Sadie Morlok tried to provide her daughters with a sense of normalcy. “Our mother used to dress us in pretty little identical crocheted sweaters and bonnets in spring and summer, or snow pant outfits in winter,” Mrs. Cotton wrote in her autobiography, “The Morlok Quadruplets: The Alphabet Sisters” (2015). “Then, she would carefully seat two of us facing the other two in the carriage and go for a nice stroll around the block to give us sunshine and a breath.” © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 29865 - Posted: 07.26.2025

By Ellen Barry Few practices in mental health are debated more than the long-term use of antidepressant medications, which are prescribed to roughly one in nine adults in the United States, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. A reassessment began in 2019, when two British researchers published a study that found that 56 percent of patients suffered from withdrawal symptoms when they stopped antidepressant medications and that 46 percent of those described their symptoms as severe. The findings made headlines in Britain and had a powerful ripple effect, forcing changes to psychiatric training and prescribing guidelines. And they fed a growing grass-roots movement calling to rein in the prescription of psychotropic drugs that has, in recent months, gained new influence in the United States with the rise of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary. A new study, published on Wednesday in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, makes the case that these warnings were overblown. The authors of the new paper found that a week after quitting antidepressants, patients reported symptoms like dizziness, nausea and vertigo, but that they remained, on average, “below the threshold for clinically significant” withdrawal. Dr. Sameer Jauhar, one of the authors, said the new analysis should reassure both patients and prescribers. “The messaging that came out in 2019 was all antidepressants can cause this and this can happen in this proportion of people, and that just doesn’t survive any scientific scrutiny,” said Dr. Jauhar, a professor of psychiatry at Imperial College London. He criticized the earlier study for including data from online surveys as a quantitative measure, for failing to control for the placebo effect, and for failing to distinguish between various types of antidepressants. These methodologies, he said, led to inflated estimates of withdrawal. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29850 - Posted: 07.12.2025

By Gordy Slack, MindSite News Lauren Kennedy West was still a teenager when she began to smell and hear things that weren’t there. Then to see things, too, that were invisible to others. Meanwhile, her moods began to intensify, sometimes turning very, very dark. “It was confusing, disturbing, and depressing,” she recalls. She had periods of elation, too. But when she came down from these, she’d keep descending until she hit emotional bottom. It got so bad that in her early 20s, at college, Kennedy West tried to end her life twice. Finally, when she was 25, she was diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, a form of schizophrenia with powerful mood swings. The medications she was prescribed eased her worst symptoms, she said, but they also had troubling side effects that ranged from extreme weight gain and “dry mouth” to feeling lethargic and an episodic condition called oculogyric crisis which causes people to continually, involuntarily, gaze upward. Worst of all, she said, was the feeling of being “emotionally blunted.” Learning that she’d likely be taking those medications for the rest of her life was a blow, but the diagnosis gave Kennedy West a meaningful framework for her struggle. To be as stable, happy, and engaged as possible she would have to cultivate acceptance of her condition and the limitations it imposed, she was told. Driven by a hope that others might be spared the disabling confusion and depression she suffered before her diagnosis, Kennedy West and her partner started a YouTube Channel, which they called “Living Well with Mental Illness” (now “Living Well with Schizophrenia“) In frequent posts, Kennedy West recounted her own struggles and triumphs and interviewed experts on mental illness and related subjects. In early 2023, Christopher Palmer was a guest on the channel.

Keyword: Schizophrenia
Link ID: 29842 - Posted: 06.28.2025

By Andrew Jacobs When Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas approved legislation this week to spend $50 million in state money researching ibogaine, a powerful psychedelic, he put the spotlight on a promising, still illegal drug that has shown promise in treating opioid addiction, traumatic brain injury and depression. Interest in ibogaine therapy has surged in recent years, driven in large part by veterans who have had to travel to other countries for the treatment. The measure, which passed the Texas Legislature with bipartisan support, seeks to leverage an additional $50 million in private investment to fund clinical trials that supporters hope will provide a pathway for ibogaine therapy to win approval from the Food and Drug Administration, a process that could take years. The legislation directs the state to work with Texas universities and hospitals and tries to ensure that the state retains a financial stake in any revenue from the drug’s development. “You can’t put a price on a human life, but if this is successful and ibogaine becomes commercialized, it will help people all across the country and provide an incredible return on investment for the people of Texas,” said State Senator Tan Parker, a Republican who sponsored the bill. The initiative, one of the largest government investments in psychedelic medicine to date, is a watershed moment for a field that continues to gain mainstream acceptance. Regulated psilocybin clinics have opened in Oregon and Colorado, and ketamine has become widely available across the country as a treatment for depression and anxiety. There have been speed bumps. Last year, the F.D.A. rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, the first psychedelic compound to make it through much of the agency’s rigorous drug review process. © 2025 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Stress
Link ID: 29833 - Posted: 06.18.2025

By Chris Berdik Yale psychiatrist Albert Powers didn’t know what to expect as he strolled among the tarot card readers, astrologers, and crystal vendors at the psychic fair held at the Best Western outside North Haven, Connecticut, on a cloudy November Saturday in 2014. At his clinic, Powers worked with young people, mostly teenagers, who had started hearing voices. His patients and their families were worried that the voices might be precursors of psychosis such as schizophrenia. Sometimes, they were. But Powers also knew that lots of people occasionally heard voices — between 7 and 15 percent of the population, according to studies — and about 75 percent of those people lived otherwise normal lives. WHAT I LEFT OUT is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, journalist Chris Berdik shares a story that didn’t make it into his recent book “Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back” (Norton, 272 pages). He wanted to study high-functioning voice hearers, and a gathering of psychics seemed like a good place to find them. If clinicians could better distinguish voice hearers who develop psychosis and lose touch with reality from those who don’t, he thought, then maybe he could help steer more patients down a healthier path. Powers introduced himself to the fair’s organizer and explained the sort of person he hoped to find. The organizer directed him to a nearby table where he met a smiley, middle-aged medium. The woman had a day job as an emergency services dispatcher, but the voices made frequent appearances in her daily life, and her side hustle was communicating with the dead.

Keyword: Schizophrenia; Attention
Link ID: 29809 - Posted: 05.28.2025

By Frieda Klotz In 2006, a new study on antidepressants was making headlines with its promising results: Two-thirds of participants who tried various antidepressants recovered from their depression symptoms within less than a year. The findings seemed to offer hope to the tens of millions of Americans who suffer from depression. But Henry Edmund “Ed” Pigott, then a psychologist in private practice, wasn’t buying it. After further exploring the study — a major National Institutes of Health trial that enrolled 4,000 patients — he was convinced that the researchers’ methods greatly inflated their results, almost doubling them. In other words, the drugs may work, but not for as many people as the study suggested. Henry Edmund Pigott, now a retired psychologist, began investigating a major National Institutes of Health trial on depression in 2006. Decades later, after many studies based on the landmark trial have been published, he still has questions. “Once I got started on it, it was like, ‘Okay, this really needs to be exposed,’” said Pigott, who is now retired. His suspicion sparked a two-decade quest to correct the record and obtain a retraction from the authors of the NIH study, whose work had received $35 million of federal funding. In 2023, Pigott and colleagues published a reanalysis of the NIH data in BMJ Open, finding that the original study’s remission rates were roughly half of what was reported. Pigott isn’t against antidepressants wholesale — he said he just wants patients to understand the complete risks and benefits. And many experts and clinicians stress that antidepressants are lifesaving medications. David Matuskey, a psychiatrist and associate professor at Yale University, described them as vital tools to help patients in desperate need: “Is it a perfect tool? No, but it’s an important one.”

Keyword: Depression
Link ID: 29806 - Posted: 05.28.2025