Childhood Adversity/Trauma

From Critical Psychiatry: The International Society of Psychological and Social Approaches to Psychosis (ISPS) has produced a 'Liverpool Declaration' stating that psychosis needs to be...

Furthering findings that social adversity and urbanicity increase the risk of psychosis, research in Child & Adolescent Psychiatry finds that moving schools, family adversity,...

From The Independent: Over the past several years, mental health awareness has become a high priority. But in order to truly make a difference in people's...

For Aeon, Samira Thomas writes that while resilience is attracting a lot of attention from psychology, patience in an underexplored and undervalued virtue in...

Researchers from Belgium and the Netherlands, publishing online June 20 in Neuroscience, found that prenatal fluoxetine (Prozac) differentially affected the development of glucocorticoid receptors...

A new study finds that clinicians’ disregard for mental health patients’ insight into their own condition may be detrimental to treatment.

In the Boston Globe, Sarah Schweitzer tells the story of a young boy brutally abused by his parents then given to his grandparents who struggled with extreme poverty and homelessness. “Researchers now understood that trauma could alter the chemistry of developing brains and disrupt the systems that help a person handle stress, propelling a perpetual state of high alert. The consequences could be lifelong. As an adult, he’d be more likely to suffer anxiety and depression and heart disease and stroke. His ability to hold a job, manage money, and make good decisions could be compromised. And there was evidence, controversial but mounting, that he could pass on these traits to his children.”

The authors of a recent study acknowledge that "social functioning deficits are a core component of schizophrenia spectrum disorders." [Emphasis added] With this in mind, it seems to me that the best and most parsimonious way to conceptualize the research finding is that children who have poor social skills will, in many cases, grow up to be adults with poor social skills. In particular, there seems to me no justification (other than psychiatric dogmatism) to conceptualize the matter in medical terms, and to impose a medical framework – "a marker of vulnerability" – on the data.

From Medscape: New research shows that individuals who were physically, sexually, or emotionally abused as children are more likely to engage in non-suicidal self-injury. Article →­

From the Monitor on Psychology: One of the greatest misconceptions about psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapy is that it has remained unchanged since Freud introduced it. In...

On May 16, 2014, I retired from a 35-year career as a professor of clinical psychology at Miami University. As a part of my retirement celebration, I gave a Final Lecture to my Department. These Final Lectures give retiring faculty members the opportunity to talk about anything they think is important for their colleagues and the attending students to hear. I focused on the changes I have witnessed in the profession of clinical psychology over my career; changes that were not for the better.

Researchers (including Jim van Os) find, in a three-year cohort study of 1272 people at possible genetic risk of psychosis, that "most transitions (to psychosis)...

Researchers evaluate the impact of a school-based prevention program on anxious and depressive symptoms.

This Sunday, June 12 at 7pm (EDT) on NBCs Dateline will cover MIA author Steve Francesco's book, Overmedicated and Undertreated: How I Lost My...

Researchers recently completed a first of its kind, large-scale international survey of attitudes about mental health and they were surprised by the results. According to their analysis published in this month’s issue of the Journal of Affective Disorders, people in developed countries, like the United States, are more likely to assume that ‘mental illnesses’ are similar to physical illnesses and biological or genetic in origin, but they are also much less likely to think that individuals can overcome these challenges and recover

From MinnPost: According to psychologist Hal Pickett, childhood anxiety is best reduced through self-care and common-sense therapies such as getting enough sleep, maintaining a balanced...

Eve Troeh and Mallory Falk explore the use of trauma informed curriculum in the New Orleans school system following Hurricane Katrina. “Consider the everyday...

A study in Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology finds that in a sample of 641 adopted adolescents, an increase in the level of ADHD...

As the Global Mental Health Movement attempts to address cross-cultural mental health disparities, a new article encourages integrating traditional healing practices with psychotherapy.

From Uplift Connect: Addiction tends to be viewed through one of two lenses - as a genetic disease or a moral failure. According to Dr. Gabor...

Researchers seek to identify adaptive coping responses to discrimination for the transgender and gender diverse community.

Meta-analytic study detects upsurge in patterns of perfectionism in young adults and explores how neoliberalism contributes to this trend.

PsychCentral offers a take on noncompliance: "The moment we decide for others why they experience something as they do is the moment at which...

From BOLD Blog: Starting in the late 1960s, researchers conducted an experiment offering young children a choice between one marshmallow at the present or two...

In this piece for Elephant Journal, one man tells his story of being locked up and forcibly drugged in the psych ward, and how he...