Causation Theories

For The New Yorker, David Kushner writes about post-traumatic growth, the sense of deepened meaning that many trauma survivors experience. “The existence of post-traumatic...

"During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military plied its servicemen with speed, steroids, and painkillers to help them handle extended combat,” Lukasz Kamienski writes...

A new study finds that prenatal exposure to antidepressant drugs, known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs, is associated with higher rates of...

In this viral video from “Libertarian Socialist Rants,” the idea is put forward that the financial stress and social isolation inherent to life in...

Richard Bentall and David Pilgrim offer their critique of genetic theories of schizophrenia for the Conversation. "The high heritability estimates reported in earlier quantitative...

In an exchange published in the Journal of Clinical Epidemiology, researchers take turns highlighting major problems in the way psychiatry is currently practiced in the United States. In response to an article by Vinay Prasad calling for an insistence on randomized control trials in “evidence-based” medicine, Jose de Leon, from the Mental Health Research Center at the University of Kentucky begins the back-and-forth by pointing out that this type of evidence has been detrimental to the field of mental health.

Past research has revealed the children who get hospitalized in the intensive care unit are more likely to develop the symptoms associated with ADHD....

A new study finds that ninety percent of military veterans who identify as transgender have at least one mental health diagnosis. “Traumatic brain injuries...

In the April issue of Science News, Laura Sanders covers recent studies that have begun turning up tantalizing hints about how microbes, the bacteria...

According to psychologists, “mental illness is largely caused by social crises such as unemployment or childhood abuse.” If this is so, why are we...

New research published in JAMA Pediatrics reveals that transgender women have more than double the prevalence of psychiatric diagnoses than the general US population. The study found that the women, who had been assigned male at birth and now identified as female, had a high prevalence of suicidality, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance abuse, generalized anxiety and major depressive disorder.

The San Jose Mercury News tells the story of Tessa Gallo, who was wrongly diagnosed with bipolar disorder in sixth-grade when she actually had...

Researchers in Seattle found the worrying cocktail of over 81 drugs when testing water quality in nearby Puget Sound. They even found drugs in...

Since the 1980s, antidepressant use has risen by at least four-hundred percent and obesity rates have climbed to include thirty percent of the population....

“Prozac? Actually, percussion.” Researchers in the UK found that a ten-week drumming intervention significantly improved anxiety and depression for people seeking mental health treatment....

"There's no doubt about it, pharmaceuticals are being detected in the environment and there is genuine concern that these compounds, in the small concentrations...

The March 3^rd, 2016 edition of the Wall Street Journal featured an article by past President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA) Jeffrey Lieberman and his colleague, computational neuroscientist Ogi Ogas. The article was entitled “Genetics and Mental Illness—Let’s Not Get Carried Away.” In their piece, the authors started by expressing the belief that a recent study identified a gene that causes schizophrenia, and then discussed whether it is desirable or possible to remove allegedly pathological genes in the interest of creating a future “mentally perfect society.” The authors of the article, like many previous textbook authors, seem unfamiliar with the questionable “evidence” put forward by psychiatry as proof that its disorders are “highly heritable” In fact, DSM-5 Task Force Chair David Kupfer admitted that “we’re still waiting” for the discovery of “biological and genetic markers” for psychiatric disorders.

Research on how the suppression of traumatic memories can reduce our ability to form new memories has implications for such controversial trauma-related phenomena as...

A new study out of the University of Manchester found that personalized exercise programs reduced the symptoms for young people suffering from their first episode of psychosis. Researchers also conducted an accompanying qualitative analysis and found that the participants experienced improved mental health, confidence, and a sense of achievement and felt that autonomy and social support were critical to their success.

According to Jesse Singal, “ever since the 1930s, young people in America have reported feeling increasingly anxious and depressed. And no one knows exactly...

On the Huffington Post, Tracy Gillett discusses Kim John Payne's book, Simplicity Parenting, and wonders if we are overwhelming children with “the burden of too much.”...

Eleanor Morgan writes in the Guardian opinions that the long waiting times for talk therapy and the increasing use of drugs in the UK...

Laura McClure for Ted.com explains why giving amphetamines to children for behaviors deemed abnormal is a societal and public policy issue. “It’s a little...

This week, the National Institute of Health (NIH) released a summary of new research on the effects of early childhood on substance abuse and...

The University of Toronto recently opened a Mental Health and Physical Activity Research Centre to work with individual students, and to study the link...