Environmental

From The Daily Mirror: According to U.K. academics and mental health groups, five more years of Tory rule would greatly exacerbate people's mental health and cause...

A meta-analysis of known risk factors for psychosis finds elevated risk with the presence of childhood trauma, adverse life events, and affective dysfunction.

Derek Summerfield, consultant psychiatrist at South London and Maudsley National Health Service Foundation Trust, challenges the assumption that Western depression is a universal condition.

Any attempt to establish an alternative diagnostic system to the predominantly biologic DSM-5 classifications or to initiate a transformation of the individually oriented mental health treatment systems needs to critically explore how, not only what, we think about health and healing, about mental and emotional suffering, about traumatic experiences and injustices, and the multiple forms of pain that are part of our human existence. The broad critique of the DSM-5 by so many national and international organizations and individual colleagues will in the end not be powerful and far reaching enough without this inquiry into the foundations of our thinking and without reflection about our ways of thinking.

In recent months, two teams of researchers in the UK and the US published complementary findings about the epigenetic origins of schizophrenia that have scientific communities who indulge in ‘genetic conspiracy theories’ abuzz. While these results are intriguing, and no doubt involve pathbreaking research methodologies, this line of thought represents a decontextualized understanding both of the symptoms that are typically associated with schizophrenia, and their causes.

A new study suggests that epigenetic changes that have been associated with trauma may actually be due to environmental toxins.

In this piece for The Atlantic, Brooke King reflects on how her trauma currently affects and may continue to affect her children, as well as...

In this piece for Aeon, Antonio Melechi explores various historical and contemporary perspectives on the nature and purpose of the unconscious mind.

Social Recovery Therapy shows promising results for individuals who experience first-episode psychosis.

From Sapiens: Researchers are increasingly recognizing the role that social and environmental factors, including childhood abuse, stressful events, and poverty, play in the development of...

Men who report being self-reliant may be at greater risk of suicidal thinking.

In this piece for BBC, Melissa Hogenboom reports on the way that people who have been convicted of crimes and diagnosed with mental illness are...

From My Science Academy: In a recent study, up to 81 drugs and personal care products were detected in the flesh of salmon caught in Puget...

From The Conversation: Many researchers are beginning to acknowledge that the concept of "schizophrenia" as a discrete, hopeless, and deteriorating brain disease does not exist. In...

From ZME Science: More people than ever before are regularly experiencing "brain fog," a collection of symptoms including fatigue, inability to focus, memory deficiency, confusion,...

From Aeon: For the past several decades, mainstream mental health professionals as well as the general public have dismissed Freud's ideas, turning instead to neuroscience...

In this piece for CounterPunch, Roy Eidelson explains the psychology of the persuasion and manipulation tactics utilized by the rich and powerful to maintain the oppressive status quo. "Given their...

From Science of Us: We are often told to "just be ourselves" as if the self is a fixed, unchanging concept. However our personalities change...

According to a study published in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry, people diagnosed with depression in high-income countries are more likely to limit...

Nature magazine reports on recent discoveries by neuroscientists that microbes that live in the intestinal track may have an influence on brain development and behavior. “Researchers have drawn links between gastrointestinal pathology and psychiatric neurological conditions such as anxiety, depression, autism, schizophrenia and neurodegenerative disorders—but they are just links.”

From GoodTherapy.org: Research shows the tremendous impact we each have on one another's emotional and psychological health; our emotions, especially those that are negative, are...

From Aeon: In the early 20th-century Age of Empire, officials in the British Empire sought to better understand their colonial subjects through the use of...

“The point, overall, is that given the dizzying array of possible factors at work here, it’s much too pat a story to say that kids are getting more 'fragile' as a result of some cultural bugaboo,” Jesse Singal writes in response to the flurry of recent think pieces decrying the weakened resolve of today's college students.

Johann Hari, British journalist and author of the new book Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions, continues to speak out...

From CNN: A British study found that Instagram has a negative effect on young people's mental health, especially on young women's body image. The Royal...