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How Memories Might Be Used to Help Heal the Brain

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.”

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 17: Learning and Memory
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory and Learning
Link ID: 29988 - Posted: 10.29.2025

Antidepressant side effects differ greatly depending on the drug

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 4: Development of the Brain
Link ID: 29983 - Posted: 10.25.2025

Postpartum depression: Better remedies, and now a predictive blood test

By Michele Cohen Marill Like many first-time mothers, Lisette Lopez-Rose thought childbirth would usher in a time of joy. Instead, she had panic attacks as she imagined that something bad was going to happen to her baby, and she felt weighed down by a sadness that wouldn’t lift. The San Francisco Bay Area mother knew her extreme emotions weren’t normal, but she was afraid to tell her obstetrician. What if they took her baby away? At about six months postpartum, she discovered an online network of women with similar experiences and ultimately opened up to her primary care doctor. “About two months after I started medication, I started to feel like I was coming out of a deep hole and seeing light again,” she says. Today, Lopez-Rose works at Postpartum Support International, coordinating volunteers to help new mothers form online connections. About one in eight US women go through a period of postpartum depression, making it among the most common complications of childbirth. It typically occurs in the first few weeks after delivery, when there’s a sudden drop in the reproductive hormones estrogen and progesterone. As scientists unravel chemical and genetic changes caused by those shifting hormones, they are discovering new ways to diagnose and treat postpartum depression, and even ways to identify who is at risk for it. Graph showing a steady rise in levels of estradiol and progesterone after conception and then a very steep drop-off right after birth. The hormones estradiol (the main form of estrogen) and progesterone rise during pregnancy. In some women, their sudden drop after childbirth triggers the onset of postpartum depression. The first-ever drug for postpartum depression, containing a derivative of progesterone, received US Food and Drug Administration approval in 2019. That marked a new approach to the disorder. This winter, in another major advance, a San Diego-based startup company will launch a blood test that predicts a pregnant woman’s risk of postpartum depression with more than 80 percent accuracy. © 2025 Annual Reviews

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29972 - Posted: 10.18.2025

Women carry a higher genetic risk of depression

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 12: Sex: Evolutionary, Hormonal, and Neural Bases
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 29958 - Posted: 10.08.2025

Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders, massive study finds

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

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 29908 - Posted: 08.30.2025

Asking the Wrong Questions About Antidepressants

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.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29897 - Posted: 08.23.2025

Why nurturing the gut microbiota could resolve depression and anxiety

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

New Research Questions Severity of Withdrawal From Antidepressants

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

Decades On, SSRIs Remain Mired in Mystery and Debate

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.”

6 things to know about antidepressants

By Meghan Rosen and Laura Sanders Millions of Americans take antidepressants to help manage everything from depression and anxiety to post-traumatic stress disorder. Now, the Trump administration has announced that these drugs, which have been in use for decades and gone through rigorous testing, will be subject to new scrutiny. Invoking a burden of chronic disease, including in children, the administration has pledged to, in its words, “assess the prevalence of and threat posed by” certain commonly prescribed medications. In the coming months, its “Make America Healthy Again” commission plans to review a slew of existing medications, including SSRIs, or selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. More than 10 percent of U.S. adults took antidepressants over the previous 30 days, data from 2015 to 2018 show. And SSRIs are among the most widely prescribed of those drugs. U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has long questioned the safety of antidepressants and other psychiatric medicines, making misleading and unsubstantiated claims about the drugs. For instance, as recently as his January confirmation hearings, he likened taking SSRIs to having a heroin addiction. He also has suggested — without evidence — that SSRIs play a role in school shootings. With the executive order and statements like these, “it’s implied there is something nefarious or harmful” about antidepressants and related medications, says Lisa Fortuna, chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Council on Children, Adolescents and Their Families. “People may think that they’re dangerous drugs.” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Psychedelic drug studies face a potent source of bias: the ‘trip’

By Jennifer Couzin-Frankel Sign up for a clinical trial of a psychedelic drug and you’re agreeing to a potentially bizarre experience. “All of a sudden, your dead grandma or Satan is in front of you,” says psychiatrist Charles Raison of the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Some think this consciousness-altering “trip” underlies the potential benefits of drugs such as psilocybin and LSD, which are under study to treat depression, trauma, chronic pain, and more. But the trip can also be a roadblock to assessing the drugs’ effects, making it near-impossible to conceal who is getting an active substance and who’s been assigned to placebo—a trial strategy called blinding that aims to keep participants’ expectations from skewing their response to a drug. This “functional unblinding” is not unique to psychedelics, but it’s especially pronounced in this drug class. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has expressed concern about the issue in psychedelic trials. And it was among the critiques FDA advisers leveled at Lykos Therapeutics, whose application for MDMA to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) FDA rejected last summer. Now, scientists and companies are experimenting with trial designs meant to shield participants from recognizing what they’re getting, or to separate expectations from the drug’s impact on health. These include incorporating a range of doses; giving the drug, with permission, to people who are asleep; and misleading participants about how a trial is set up. Companies running large-scale psychedelic trials mostly view unblinding as inevitable. Participants “are going to feel” the drug, “that’s just how it is,” says Rob Barrow, CEO of MindMed, which has late-stage trials underway to test LSD’s ability to ease anxiety. But he believes there are ways to parse a drug’s efficacy even if people know they’re getting it. In one recent trial, MindMed recruited 198 people with anxiety, giving some a placebo and the others LSD at one of four doses. Virtually all who received active drug correctly guessed that they’d gotten it. But those on the two higher doses saw clinically meaningful reduced anxiety, whereas those on the lower doses didn’t. That split means the benefit “has to be due to something other than thinking you’re getting drug,” Barrow says. MindMed is using a lower, nontherapeutic dose as well as a higher dose in an ongoing phase 3 trial, and hopes to report results next year.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 4: Development of the Brain; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 29691 - Posted: 03.05.2025

‘It felt like dread.’ Hear what severe depression can do to people

By Laura Sanders Depression can affect not just the mind, but the body, too. Inner experiences of mental struggles are private. But in this episode, Jon Nelson and another volunteer, Amanda, let listeners in. Woven into their stories is a brief history of deep brain stimulation, the experimental treatment that involves permanent brain implants. You’ll hear how that research — with its ups and downs — carried the experiments to where they are today. Laura Sanders: This episode deals with mental illness, depression, and suicide. Please listen with care. Previously on The Deep End: Support Science Today. Barbara: He would be up in bed with the lights out or watching like endless hours of television and it was very unpredictable and then there’s a whole life going on downstairs. Jon: That isolation, there’s a little bit of lying involved because you just wanna get out of things, right? Mayberg: I think part of why this kind of treatment resistant depression is so painful and so associated with high rates of suicide, is that you’re suffering. You know exactly what you’re trying to get away from and you can’t move. And if you do move, it follows you. There’s no relief. Jon: I’d be the one standing up in front of everybody leading the champagne toast, and then I’d be driving home and wanting to slam my car into a tree. Sanders: Today we’re going to get into some heavy stuff, but there’s light at the end, I promise. We’re going to pull back the curtain on what depression can do to the body and to the brain. Maybe you know that feeling firsthand. If you don’t, you probably know somebody who does. You’ll also hear the backstory of some people who volunteered for the experiment and the backstory of the science itself. I’m Laura Sanders. Welcome to The Deep End. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025.

Rethinking mental health: The body’s impact on the brain

By Georgia E. Hodes Psychiatric conditions have long been regarded as issues of “mental health,” a term that inherently ties our understanding of these disorders to the brain. But the brain does not exist in a vacuum. Growing evidence over the past 10 years highlights a link between the body and what we think of as mental health. Many studies, for example, report that the peripheral immune system is altered in people who experience neurological and psychiatric conditions, including mood disorders, anxiety and schizophrenia. Researchers traditionally assumed that peripheral inflammation was a downstream effect of these conditions, but basic research is now revealing that the immune system, the gut microbiome and peripheral inflammation are not just bystanders or results of psychiatric conditions—they are active participants and may hold the key to new treatments. Scientists are beginning to uncover the mechanisms by which the body influences the brain, challenging the notion that mental health is solely a matter of brain chemistry and reshaping ideas on the etiology of psychiatric disorders. Like other neuroscience groups, we started our work in this area with the “brain-first” perspective: the idea that immune changes in the brain trigger stress-induced changes in behavior and peripheral inflammation. Our earliest studies supported this idea, demonstrating that directly infusing an inflammatory molecule, the cytokine interleukin 6 (IL6), into an area of the brain associated with reward behavior made male mice more likely to avoid others. Our later work, however, found that the source of IL6 in the brain is actually peripheral immune cells. Either stopping the immune cells from producing this molecule or just blocking it from entering the brain made the animals resilient to social stress. These studies offered some of the first evidence that treating the body with a compound that does not cross the blood brain-barrier could prevent a brain-mediated behavior. Before this, blood markers were considered only indirect indicators of brain changes—and not direct mediators or potential targets for treatment. © 2025 Simons Foundation

A man volunteered to get brain implants for depression. Hear his story

By Laura Sanders Meet Jon Nelson. He’s a dad, a husband, a coach and a professional who works in marketing. But underneath it all, he suffered – for years – from severe depression. His suffering was so great that he volunteered for an experimental treatment called deep brain stimulation, in which electrodes are permanently implanted in his brain. In this episode, you’ll hear from Jon about his life before the surgery, and you’ll be introduced to the neuroscience designed to save him. Laura Sanders: This podcast touches on mental illness, depression, and suicide. There are moments of darkness. There are moments of lightness, too. Please keep that in mind before you listen. Jon Nelson is a guy who’s probably a lot like a guy you know. He lives in Newtown, a picturesque small town northeast of Philadelphia. He has three kids, a loving wife, a dog, a cat, and a bearded dragon named Lizzie. He works in marketing. He coaches his kids in softball and hockey, and he’s a ride-or-die Steelers fan. The Nelsons are, in fact, so perfect that they’re almost a caricature, like a sitcom family with a zany dad who’s fond of the phrase, “I’m going to give you some life advice.” Jon Nelson: You know, we try to do the standard sit down and cook together and have meals together. We’re the messy house in the neighborhood with basketballs outside and, you know, we’re constantly playing and doing stuff like that. But, you know, truly we like to spend time together. Sanders: But the view from the outside was a lot different than what Jon felt on the inside. On the outside, Jon lived a charmed life, but inside, he had been fighting with everything he had to stay alive for years. Jon: I would literally read a newspaper article about a plane wreck and I would have instantaneous, like, “Oh, like why couldn’t I have been on that?” Right? Or, you know, you, somebody died in a car wreck, like, “Why couldn’t that have been me?” © Society for Science & the Public 2000–2025

Welcome to The Deep End, a new podcast about brain implants and depression

By Laura Sanders Brain implants for depression: It sounds like science fiction but it’s real. The Deep End, a new podcast from Science News, will give you a glimpse of what it’s like to live with electrodes in your brain. It might change how you think about mental health, the brain and what makes you you. Transcript Laura Sanders: Inside your brain, there are billions of nerve cells that form trillions of connections. These connections make your thoughts, movements, emotions, and memories. Your first kiss, your favorite song, your dreams. Our brains make us who we are. But sometimes they can betray us. Support Science Today. Thank you for being a subscriber to Science News! Interested in more ways to support STEM? Consider making a gift to our nonprofit publisher, the Society for Science, an organization dedicated to expanding scientific literacy and ensuring that every young person can strive to become an engineer or scientist. Donate Now This is a story about four people whose brains turned against them, plunging their lives into the darkness of severe depression. This is also a story about an experiment designed to pull them back out. Amanda: My initial response was a little bit of skepticism, like, “OK, we’re gonna put a box in you, we’re gonna hook it up to some wires, we’re gonna shove them down in your brain and then electrocute you, and it’s gonna make you feel great.” Like, this doesn’t seem like a, like a safe thing to be doing. Sanders: This experiment sounds like science fiction, but it’s real. This is the Deep End, a new podcast from Science News. I’m Laura Sanders. On this podcast, you’ll hear what led people to sign up for this unconventional experiment and what it was like for them. © Society for Science & the Public 2000–202

Brain implant that could boost mood by using ultrasound to go under NHS trial

Hannah Devlin Science correspondent A groundbreaking NHS trial will attempt to boost patients’ mood using a brain-computer-interface that directly alters brain activity using ultrasound. The device, which is designed to be implanted beneath the skull but outside the brain, maps activity and delivers targeted pulses of ultrasound to “switch on” clusters of neurons. Its safety and tolerability will be tested on about 30 patient in the £6.5m trial, funded by the UK’s Advanced Research and Invention Agency (Aria). In future, doctors hope the technology could revolutionise the treatment of conditions such as depression, addiction, OCD and epilepsy by rebalancing disrupted patterns of brain activity. Jacques Carolan, Aria’s programme director, said: “Neurotechnologies can help a much broader range of people than we thought. Helping with treatment resistant depression, epilepsy, addiction, eating disorders, that is the huge opportunity here. We are at a turning point in both the conditions we hope we can treat and the new types of technologies emerging to do that.” The trial follows rapid advances in brain-computer-interface (BCI) technology, with Elon Musk’s company Neuralink launching a clinical trial in paralysis patients last year and another study restoring communication to stroke patients by translating their thoughts directly into speech. However, the technologies raise significant ethical issues around the ownership and privacy of data, the possibility of enhancement and the risk of neuro-discrimination, whereby brain data might be used to judge a person’s suitability for employment or medical insurance. © 2025 Guardian News & Media Limited

Tiny fish on ketamine may show how drug eases depression

Jon Hamilton A single dose of the anesthetic ketamine can provide weeks of relief from severe depression. One reason may be that the drug causes long-term changes to a brain circuit involved in "giving up," a team reports in the journal Neuron. The team found that in zebrafish, ketamine alters this circuit in a way that causes the fish to persevere in the face of adversity rather than becoming passive. This resilience appears linked to brain cells called astrocytes, which play a central role in the "giving up" circuit. "Something happens within those cells that changes their response" to adversity, says Misha Ahrens, an author of the study and a senior group leader at HHMI's Janelia Research Campus. "We don't know what that is yet." But if scientists can figure it out, they might be able to develop more effective versions of ketamine and other psychiatric drugs, Ahrens says. The research involved the larval zebrafish, which is smaller than a grain of rice and looks like a tadpole. "It's transparent, so you can basically see what's going on in the entire brain all at once," says Alex Chen of Harvard University, another member of the team. For the experiment, the fish had to be kept stationary so scientists could monitor its brain. "But we still want it to feel like it's swimming through a virtual world," Chen says. The team did this by projecting images indicating forward movement when the animal swished its tail. Then they switched to images showing no progress, no matter what the fish did. © 2025 npr

Here’s how Antidepressants can affect weight, mood, libido and other functions.

7 Things Everyone Should Know About Antidepressants By Christina Caron Even if you’ve never taken an antidepressant, you’re probably familiar with the criticism and controversy that surrounds these drugs. It’s not uncommon to hear things like: “Those pills are just a placebo.” “You’ll definitely gain weight.” “Once you start, you’ll become dependent on them.” Is any of this true? Some of these statements have “a kernel of truth,” said Dr. Gerard Sanacora, a professor of psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine. And it’s important to set the record straight because the expectations people have about their treatment — whether good or bad — “really do play a large role in how the treatment actually unfolds,” he added. Dr. Sanacora and other experts addressed some common questions and misconceptions about antidepressants. Will antidepressants change who I am? When an antidepressant starts to work, you may feel like a different person in some ways, said Naomi Torres-Mackie, a clinical psychologist in New York City. “Picture this giant, dark cloud weighing you down — as that lifts, the world is going to look different,” she said, adding: “But as you get used to it, you may see that it actually allows you to have more joy in your life.” On the other hand, up to half of people who take antidepressants may experience some degree of emotional blunting or numbed emotions, and research suggests that the blunting is more likely to happen with a higher medication dosage. When antidepressants are working correctly, patients should still feel a range of emotions, even if the sadness they used to feel every day is gone, said Dr. Laine Young-Walker, chair of the department of psychiatry at the University of Missouri School of Medicine. © 2024 The New York Times Compan

More than an hour of exercise a week may help with ‘baby blues'

Andrew Gregory Health editor Doing more than an hour of moderate intensity exercise each week may reduce the severity of “baby blues” and almost halve the risk of new mothers developing major clinical depression, the largest analysis of evidence suggests. However, researchers behind the study acknowledged that finding the time amid so many new responsibilities and challenges would not be easy, and recovery from childbirth should be prioritised. New mothers could restart exercise with “gentle” walks, which they could do with their babies, and then increase to “moderate” activity when they were ready, they added. This moderate physical activity could include brisk walking, water aerobics, stationary cycling or resistance training, according to the team of academics in Canada. Maternal depression and anxiety are relatively common after giving birth and associated with reduced self-care and compromised infant caregiving and bonding, which could in turn affect the child’s cognitive, emotional and social development, the researchers said. Conventional treatments for depression and anxiety in the first weeks and months after giving birth mostly involve drugs and counselling, which are often associated with, respectively, side-effects and poor adherence, and lack of timely access and expense. Research has previously shown that physical activity is an effective treatment for depression and anxiety in general. But until now it has not been known whether it could reduce the severity of the baby blues in the first few weeks after giving birth or lower the risk of major postpartum depression several months later. © 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited

Is Depression Contagious? The Science Is Uncertain.

By Joshua Cohen The contagious nature of bacterial or viral infections like strep throat or influenza is well understood. You’re at risk of catching the flu, for example, if someone near you has it, as the virus can be spread by way of droplets in the air, among other modes of transmission. But what about a person’s mental health? Can depression be contagious? A JAMA Psychiatry paper published earlier this year seemed to suggest so. Researchers reported finding “an association between having peers diagnosed with a mental disorder during adolescence and an increased risk of receiving a mental disorder diagnosis later in life.” They suggested that, among adolescents, mental health disorders could be “socially transmitted,” though their observational study could not establish any direct cause. It makes some intuitive sense. Psychologists have studied how moods and emotions can spread from person to person. Someone howling with laughter might be contagious in the sense that it makes you laugh, too. Similarly, seeing a friend in emotional pain can evoke feelings of despair — a phenomenon termed emotional contagion. For more than three decades, researchers have investigated whether mental health disorders, too, may be induced by our social environment. Studies have found mixed results on the extent to which friends’, peers’, and families’ mental health can impact an individual’s mental health in turn. The JAMA Psychiatry study — conducted by researchers at the University of Helsinki and other institutions — analyzed nationwide registry data on 713,809 Finnish citizens born between 1985 to 1997. The research team identified individuals from schools across Finland who had been diagnosed with a mental disorder by the time they were in ninth grade. They followed the rest of the cohort to record later diagnoses, up until the end of 2019.

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