Psychiatric Overdiagnosis: The Price of Prosperity and abundance?

Recommendable! Food for thought! This subject has been debated for several decades in Western countries.

Is the modern world and/or too much leisure time behind the increased diagnosis of mental health issues around the world?

Or do we have too many doctors specialized on mental health always trying to make a living by diagnosing new occurrences and having more patients?

Are we unable to properly distinguish rather harmless from severe cases of mental health issues in too many cases?

Caveat: Behind the Great Firewall of China, I am unable to access this article.

Psychiatric Overdiagnosis: The Price of Prosperity? "Abundance, loose criteria, and perverse healthcare incentives turned normal struggles into a diagnosable epidemic"

Menopause linked to loss of grey matter in the brain, poorer mental health and sleep disturbance with and without hormone replacement therapy

Bad news! Or what is the influence of pre-existing conditions?

"The study ... found that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) does not appear to mitigate these effects, though it can slow the decline in reaction times. ...

The average age of onset of menopause among the participants was around 49.5 years, while the average age that women prescribed HRT began their treatment was around 49 years.

Post-menopausal women were more likely than those pre-menopause to have sought help from their GP or a psychiatrist for anxiety, nerves or depression, and to score more highly on questionnaires for symptoms of depression. Similarly, they were more likely to have been prescribed antidepressants. ...

further analysis showed that these differences in symptoms were already present before menopause. ...

Women post-menopause were more likely to report insomnia, get less sleep, and feel tired. Those on HRT reported feeling the most tired of all three groups ..."

From the abstract:

"Abstract

Background

Menopause is a natural physiological process, but its effects on the brain remain poorly understood. In England, approximately 15% of women use hormone-replacement therapy (HRT) to manage menopausal symptoms. However, the psychological benefits of HRT are not well established. This study aims to investigate the impact of menopause and HRT on mental health, cognitive function, and brain structure.

Methods

We analyzed data from nearly 125,000 participants in the UK Biobank to assess associations between menopause, HRT use, and outcomes related to mental health, cognition, and brain morphology. Specifically, we focused on gray matter volumes in the medial temporal lobe (MTL) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

Results

Menopause was associated with increased levels of anxiety, depression, and sleep difficulties. Women using HRT reported greater mental health challenges than post-menopausal women not using HRT. Post-hoc analyses revealed that women prescribed HRT had higher levels of pre-existing mental health symptoms. In terms of brain structure, MTL and ACC volumes were smaller in post-menopausal women compared to pre-menopausal women, with the lowest volumes observed in the HRT group.

Conclusions

Our findings suggest that menopause is linked to adverse mental health outcomes and reductions in gray matter volume in key brain regions. The use of HRT does not appear to mitigate these effects and may be associated with more pronounced mental health challenges, potentially due to underlying baseline differences. These results have important implications for understanding the neurobiological effects of HRT and highlighting the unmet need for addressing mental health problems during menopause."

Menopause linked to loss of grey matter in the brain, poorer mental health and sleep disturbance | University of Cambridge "Menopause is linked to reductions in grey matter volume in key brain regions as well as increased levels of anxiety and depression and difficulties with sleep, according to new research from the University of Cambridge."

Emotional and cognitive effects of menopause and hormone replacement therapy (open access)

The Misdiagnosis of American Mental Health in the age of social media and smartphones

Recommendable! Food for thought! The alarmism and hysteria surrounding social media and smartphone use!

George Santayana's 1905 famous quote "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" fully applies here! How often in the past were then new technologies decried as causing mental health issues. Very often, too often like superstition! Why is superstition still alive at the end of the first quarter of the 21st century? No matter how many PhDs, true human intelligence and knowledge is rare and highly distributed across the entire population irrespective of formal education! Stupidity is much more common across all strata of human society.

"The United States has serious issues with mental health, but many popular explanations for the problem—such as loneliness, screen time, and social media—are built on thin evidence and inflated comparisons. ...

These measures of time spent alone also revolve around physical proximity, literally being in the room with someone. But what about hanging out online? I’m a pretty big geek, and I play Dungeons & Dragons online with friends from around the country. We’re talking, we’re laughing, we’re having a good time, but we’re thousands of miles away from each other. Shouldn’t that count as time spent with others? ...

met over 100 people [online] that I’ve not met physically. So, I feel, in some ways, more socially connected than I would have been without this technology. On the other hand, it’s probably true that if none of these online avenues were afforded to me, I would go out and meet more people in person. ...

Usually, time spent on social media and on smartphones draws teens and young adults away from television. So television is really the big casualty of the social media age. ...

Now, fifty years ago, people worried about television drawing people away from real-life relationships.

The landline was also the subject of a similar panic 100-plus years ago, but it was about women. There was a sense that women were going to neglect their household duties and find lovers via the telephone.

People also worried about the telegraph.

And at the beginning of the 19th century, people were worried that young people would spend hours looking into kaleidoscopes and ruin their lives. So, there is a cycle of panic that goes on and on without anybody worrying too much about evidence. ...

First, in most countries that have adopted smartphones and social media, we do not see a pattern of declining youth mental health. It seems to be something very specific to the United States. For various reasons, I think the best metric to track is suicides, because a body is a body, and self-report tends to be rubbish. And in most European countries, and in Japan, Australia, and New Zealand, we don’t see any evidence of a youth mental health crisis. In the United States, there was an increase in youth suicide in the 2010s, but it has now begun to reverse. Maybe it will reverse again, but so far, we’re seeing an improving trend for youth in the United States.

Second, the increase in suicide was actually much worse for middle-aged adults than it was for teens. Everybody’s worried about teenage girls, but a white male from 45 to 55 has roughly a three to five times elevated suicide risk compared to a teenage girl. ...

We also have hundreds of studies that look at time spent on social media and mental health. Generally, across this literature, we do not find that time spent on social media or smartphones is predictive of negative mental health outcomes, nor do we find that reducing social media time improves mental health in experimental studies. ...

You can also technically say that Americans are spending the most time alone that has ever been recorded. But the decrease in time spent with others over the past 20 years was 1.7 percent. So, one version of this story sounds horrible, and the other sounds like not a big deal.

This issue of effect size is a consistent problem with a lot of research in medicine and the social sciences. It’s entirely true that a study can find a statistically significant effect that has no meaning whatsoever in the real world. There’ve been a couple of unpublished studies of cell phone bans in schools that have been hyped as if they provide evidence for these bans, but they don’t, because the effect size is near zero. The actual impact of cell phone bans on student learning is zero. It does not improve student standardized testing scores, grades, or anything else. But when you run 600,000 kids through an analysis, everything is statistically significant. Plucking a hair out of their head once a day could’ve been statistically significant. ..."

The Misdiagnosis of American Mental Health

Beyond Psychedelics: The Next Generation of Precision Neurotherapeutics for Mental Healthcare

Recommendable! An overview article.

"... More specifically, psychedelics transiently and indirectly alter glutamatergic signaling in ways that promote widespread neuroplasticity and emotional recalibration, while ketamine engages similar plasticity-related pathways through NMDA receptor inhibition, increasing glutamate release and AMPA receptor signaling. However, these drugs act broadly across the brain, producing intense, variable, and subjective effects.

This has motivated a shift toward precision neuroscience. Rather than globally altering brain activity, next-generation drugs are being designed to modulate dysfunctional circuitry in two complementary ways:

by targeting glutamatergic signaling in defined brain regions and circuits involved in fear, mood, and emotional regulation, and

by minimizing hallucinogenic or dissociative effects.

Psychedelics revealed the importance of circuit remodeling; precision approaches offer a safer, more scalable path to harness it. ..."

Beyond Psychedelics: The Next Generation of Precision Neurotherapeutics for Mental Healthcare | The Scientist

OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly, but assisted by 170 mental health experts

Cause for concern? Is this mostly curiosity or exploration or is it more serious?

Are these conversations helpful to the users?

How many users are addicted to or infatuated by ChatGPT?

"OpenAI released new data on Monday illustrating how many of ChatGPT’s users are struggling with mental health issues and talking to the AI chatbot about it. The company says that 0.15% of ChatGPT’s active users in a given week have “conversations that include explicit indicators of potential suicidal planning or intent.” Given that ChatGPT has more than 800 million weekly active users, that translates to more than a million people a week. ...

and that hundreds of thousands of people show signs of psychosis or mania in their weekly conversations with the AI chatbot. ..."

"... Working with mental health experts who have real-world clinical experience, we’ve taught the model to better recognize distress, de-escalate conversations, and guide people toward professional care when appropriate.

We’ve also expanded access to crisis hotlines, re-routed⁠(opens in a new window) sensitive conversations originating from other models to safer models, and added gentle reminders to take breaks⁠ during long sessions. ..."

OpenAI says over a million people talk to ChatGPT about suicide weekly | TechCrunch

Strengthening ChatGPT’s responses in sensitive conversations (original news release) "We worked with more than 170 mental health experts to help ChatGPT more reliably recognize signs of distress, respond with care, and guide people toward real-world support–reducing responses that fall short of our desired behavior by 65-80%."

Uganda faces mental health crisis

Bad news! "A new survey reveals five million Ugandans — one in eight — face mental health challenges, driven by rising substance abuse and depression. With only one overstretched psychiatric hospital, the nation’s healthcare system teeters on the brink."

Notice in this video, Ugandans are learning the Chinese language (CGTN Africa is a news provider of the Communist Party of China).

How close are we to having chatbots officially offer mental health counseling? Intermediate suicidal risk queries appear to be a weak spot

This has become a hot topic in recent times!

"The parents of two teenage boys who committed suicide after apparently seeking counsel from chatbots told their stories at a Senate hearing last week. ...

The cases joined other recent reports of suicide and worsening psychological distress among teens and adults after extended interactions with large language models, all taking place against the backdrop of a mental health crisis [???] and a shortage of treatment resources. ...

[researchers] recently studied how three large language models, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google’s Gemini, handled queries of varying riskiness about suicide. ..."

From the abstract:

"Objective:

This study aimed to evaluate whether three popular chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs)—ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—provided direct responses to suicide-related queries and how these responses aligned with clinician-determined risk levels for each question.

Methods:

Thirteen clinical experts categorized 30 hypothetical suicide-related queries into five levels of self-harm risk: very high, high, medium, low, and very low.

Each LLM-based chatbot responded to each query 100 times (N=9,000 total responses). Responses were coded as “direct” (answering the query) or “indirect” (e.g., declining to answer or referring to a hotline).

Mixed-effects logistic regression was used to assess the relationship between question risk level and the likelihood of a direct response.

Results:

ChatGPT and Claude provided direct responses to very-low-risk queries 100% of the time, and all three chatbots did not provide direct responses to any very-high-risk query. 

LLM-based chatbots did not meaningfully distinguish intermediate risk levels. Compared with very-low-risk queries, the odds of a direct response were not statistically different for low-risk, medium-risk, or high-risk queries.

Across models, Claude was more likely (adjusted odds ratio [AOR]=2.01, 95% CI=1.71–2.37, p<0.001) and Gemini less likely (AOR=0.09, 95% CI=0.08–0.11, p<0.001) than ChatGPT to provide direct responses.

Conclusions:

LLM-based chatbots’ responses to queries aligned with experts’ judgment about whether to respond to queries at the extremes of suicide risk (very low and very high), but the chatbots showed inconsistency in addressing intermediate-risk queries, underscoring the need to further refine LLMs."

How close are we to having chatbots officially offer counseling?— Harvard Gazette "New research looks at how 3 large language models handle queries of varying riskiness on suicide amid rising mental health crisis, shortage of care"

Evaluation of Alignment Between Large Language Models and Expert Clinicians in Suicide Risk Assessment (open access)

Meeting the mental health needs of formerly and of current incarcerated people

This is a huge skandal! Prisons should not be wardens for mentally ill individuals!

"An estimated two in five people who are incarcerated have a history of mental illness, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Most receive no treatment for their mental health issues during their incarceration in state and federal prisons. 

When they are released, these people are often still coping with mental health problems. But care can be equally hard for them to find on the outside, especially while they are struggling to get on their feet. ...

Their mental health problems tend to be quite complex. Most people we see carry multiple diagnoses. For example, post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD] and substance-use disorder, or schizophrenia and substance-use disorder, as well as anxiety, depression, bipolar, personality disorder. They are also generally a pretty treatment-naïve group of individuals. Even if they are mandated treatment while still incarcerated, they might not totally receive it because of long waitlists and just not having enough clinicians in the facilities. And what they get is typically not evidence based. ..."

Meeting the mental health needs of formerly incarcerated people | Yale News

Novel Mental Health Care in an Los Angeles Jail: trained Inmates attending to and treating each other inmates

This seems to be a very promising approach! Worth trying!

When mental institutions were systematically closed in the 1950s and 1960s, prisons became mental institutions. What was maybe a well meaning reform back then has come with serious negative side effects!

Then there was the 1962 book and 1975 move called "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"

"About half the people incarcerated in the Los Angeles County jail suffer from mental illness.

The need for treatment and the chronic inability to meet that need led two incarcerated men to create a peer-led initiative, in which participants are trained to assist others with severe mental illness.

In the Forensic Inpatient Stepdown program, now 4+ years old, the assistants provide emotional support, use de-escalation techniques, teach life skills, and encourage peers to follow treatment plans. 

Impact: Since 2021, the program has expanded to reach 400+ patients. 

Units using it report 6X fewer self-harm incidents and 35% fewer returns to hospitals.

Mental health advocates say the program offers a model for improving care and rehabilitation inside jails. ..."

"For years, the Los Angeles County jail has been known as the United States’ largest mental health institution. ...

For years, the U.S. Department of Justice has been monitoring the jail system – also the nation’s largest – to assess its mental health care. ...

And yet it’s making progress, particularly with a peer-to-peer program called Forensic Inpatient (FIP) Stepdown that the [Christian Science] Monitor reported on four years ago. Since then, the nascent program has grown more than sixfold overall, spreading to the women’s jail. Incarcerated people trained as mental health assistants are helping hundreds of others with severe mental illness who are held at the same facility. ..."

Global Health NOW: Argentina’s Health System Overhaul; The Legacy of Nuclear Testing in Kazakhstan; and Novel Mental Health Care in an L.A. Jail

‘Motivated and inspired’: California inmates are improving mental health behind bars

A floor painted by a former mental health assistant shines after a "Double Scrub Monday," which involves cleaning by incarcerated individuals at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles, on April 21, 2025.

Psychiatric surgery stages a comeback

Good news! Have we finally overcome the Lobotomy disaster? Until we have better treatments perhaps psychiatric surgery should be considered in limited, severe cases.

"Lobotomies are no longer a go-to treatment for mental disorders, but growing evidence suggests that a refined version of the technique is effective in some people with severe psychiatric conditions.

Modern neuropsychiatric surgeons use lasers, radiation or focused ultrasound beams to precisely remove small amounts of neural tissue, severing certain connections between brain regions involved in emotion and behaviour. Yet many psychiatrists are still wary of the technique, given that its effects are so permanent."

"... The numbers of patients who receive such treatments is still tiny.

Lipsman’s clinic in Toronto, for example, performs about two psychiatric neurosurgeries a month, though he said it has the capacity to do more.

And the Brown-affiliated program has only seen about 110 patients since 1993, when psychiatric neurosurgery procedures were first offered there. Meanwhile, just a handful of centers in the U.S. offer neurosurgery for psychiatric conditions ..."

Nature Briefing: Translational Research

Cutting Edge: The Cautious Optimism for Psychiatric Brain Surgery "For some patients, removing brain tissue can help treat OCD and other disorders. But ethical concerns remain."

Breaking negative thought patterns could ward off anxiety, depression

This has probably been said many times over during the last 50 years or more! It can not be stated enough!

Break the cycle by changing your life to something meaningful and fulfilling!

Bobby McFerrin - Don't Worry Be Happy (Official Music Video) Dance your troubles away! Or try being natural high! 😊

Caveat: I did not read the article!

Breaking negative thought patterns could ward off anxiety, depression "Newer mental health therapies focus more on how people think than what they’re thinking about"

Warum sind Kiffer schlechter im kopfrechnen: So schadet Cannabis dem Arbeitsgedächtnis

Gute Frage!

Warum Kiffer schlechter kopfrechnen: So schadet Cannabis dem Arbeitsgedächtnis "Bei jungen Menschen, die viel Cannabis konsumieren, sind im Hirn Bereiche weniger aktiv, die zum Arbeitsgedächtnis gehören und für das Lösen von Problemen zuständig sind."

Jury acquits Daniel Penny in New York City subway self defense chokehold death of a known violent and mentally ill black homeless man

Good news! Bravo! Justice prevailed! As a juror, I probably would have done the same.

Why was this repeat offender, violent, and mentally man not locked up?

It would have been a travesty of justice had he been found guilty of criminally negligent homicide!

Were leftist ideologues trying again to style or spin this case as another phony George Floyd case.

Was the homeless man mentally ill? Was he violent before? Yes!

"... Before his death, Neely did time in Rikers Island for assaulting an elderly woman and had been accused of angrily threatening subway passengers prior to the confrontation with Penny. Over the course of his life, Neely racked up more than 40 arrests and had multiple hospitalizations for mental health issues. ..."

I have recently blogged here about this outrageous case!

Caveat: I am not familiar with the details of the case.

"A jury in Manhattan found Marine veteran Daniel Penny not guilty of criminally negligent homicide Monday for putting a mentally ill homeless man, Jordan Neely, into a chokehold on a subway train, subduing him after he began threatening passengers. ..."

Jury acquits Penny in New York City subway chokehold death | Just The News "A jury on Monday morning acquits Daniel Penny in the New York City subway chokehold death."

Daniel Penny Acquitted in Subway Chokehold Death of Homeless Man

The leftist prosecutor Dafna Yoran. Maybe she should be fired for bringing such frivolous cases! She is the Assistant District Attorney of the infamous DA Alvin Bragg! Dafna Yoran does not even have an official webpage according to Google & Bing search!

What a joke! Another DEI warrior!

Horrific stabbing spree in Manhattan shows how politicians still won't lock up the dangerous mentally ill

Recommendable!

I have blogged here several times about the issue that because of ideology dangerous mentally ill individuals are allowed to be part of society instead of being properly treated and if necessary in confinement.

It dates back to the 1960s/70s when activists demanded and succeeded in the release of all mentally ill individual into society!

It is high time to correct this nonsense!

"... His history of arrests, incarceration and psychiatric hospitalization dates back two decades.

This was a “ticking time bomb” case, to borrow a phrase from our late colleague DJ Jaffe. ..."

Horrific stabbing spree in Manhattan shows how politicians still won't lock up the dangerous mentally ill

Psychological Toll of the daily propaganda and demagoguery of climate change

I guess, many people would be better off if the daily barrage with this nonsense of climate change would end! This alarmism and hysteria needs to stop! It is bad for your health!

"Climate-related changes threaten more than people’s physical safety and livelihoods. These changes also act as a “threat multiplier,” increasing risks for mental health problems. 

Survivors of California’s 2018 Camp wildfire were diagnosed with PTSD at a rate comparable to war veterans.

Slower-onset changes like drought, land cover change, rising sea levels, etc., can cause stress over time that erupts into violence like 2019’s Ogossagou massacre in Mali.

A hefty price tag: Mental disorders due to climate, pollution, and environment-related causes could cost the global economy $47 billion annually by 2030. 

To address these issues, researchers are pushing for mental health to be a focus in climate policy and interventions, such as in countries’ Paris Accord climate action plans."

Global Health NOW: Lebanese Hospitals on Alert; Malaria Becomes ‘Ancient History’ in Egypt; and Switching Sides on the Tobacco Fight

The First National Calculation of Mortality of the US Homeless Population

Recommendable!

It was a huge mistake to close or reduce the capacity of mental institutions in the 1960s/1970s. This was a misguided reform! Quite possibly, homeless individuals with serious mental or substance use disorders could benefit from better medical care in sheltered environments.

"... A recent rise in homelessness, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic and epidemic of deaths from opioids and other substances, has added new urgency to efforts to understand the health disparities faced by this population. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimates that the number of people experiencing homelessness in the US rose by about one-fifth between 2017 and 2023. West Coast cities have witnessed an especially sharp and concentrated increase in unsheltered homelessness ...
Yet, despite extensive qualitative and small-scale research suggesting that poor health is both a cause and consequence of homelessness, data limitations have left significant gaps in our understanding of the relationship between health and homelessness, including fundamental questions about the magnitude of health disparities faced by this population. ...

Key findings

We find that people who have experienced homelessness face 3.5 times the mortality risk of people who are housed, accounting for differences in demographic characteristics and geography ... This disparity far exceeds the mortality gap between Black and white housed individuals (relative hazard of 1.4) and between poor housed and all housed individuals (2.2). Looking at mortality risk over the life cycle reveals another striking finding: a 40-year-old homeless person faces similar mortality risk to a housed person nearly twenty years older ... By 2022, about 16% of those who were homeless in 2010 had passed away, compared to just 6% of the housed poor sample and 4% of the overall housed sample. ...
one small San Francisco-based study found that a surge in homeless deaths during the [Covid-19] pandemic was due to increased deaths from acute drug toxicity and traumatic injury, not COVID-19 ...
We find, for example, that after controlling for gender and age, people recorded in the Census as sheltered and unsheltered homeless faced similar mortality risk, ...  This finding highlights the health risks faced even by people residing in shelters ...
We also find that white homeless individuals face about 40% higher mortality risk than Black homeless individuals. This pattern is striking because in the housed population, and even among the housed poor, Black individuals face higher mortality risk than white individuals. This reversal in mortality rates by race might hold clues about how the predominant pathways to homelessness differ across groups. For example, it may be the case that white individuals tend to become homeless due to personal difficulties – such as substance abuse and behavioural health issues – while Black individuals are more likely to become homeless due to economic hardship and a lack of resources in friend and family networks to buffer against loss of housing. ...
In other words, elevated mortality risk appears to persist well after people exit literal homelessness, suggesting that the immediate hazards of homelessness are not the primary drivers of premature death in this population. Rather, it may be the case that poor health precedes – or causes – homelessness, or that the health hazards caused by homelessness produce long-term mortality risks. Indeed, both homelessness and elevated mortality risk are likely rooted in a complex interplay between socioeconomic disadvantage and health over the life course. ..."

The First National Calculation of Mortality of the US Homeless Population | American Enterprise Institute - AEI

Data from more than 2000 brains hints at why women develop fewer neuropsychiatric conditions

Amazing stuff! I protest, this is unfair, gender discrimination that women have a "protective effect"! (just kidding) 😊

"Autism spectrum disorder diagnoses are about four times as common in boys than in girls. Nearly two times as many men are diagnosed with schizophrenia as women. In fact, for many neuropsychiatric conditions, there appear to be gendered differences in prevalence, severity, and at what age the disease first manifests. ... Now, researchers have found evidence for a somewhat controversial idea: that for women, more has to go awry before these diseases develop.

The team, who are part of a research consortium called PsychENCODE, examined gene expression in postmortem brain tissue from more than 2000 people. By comparing the genes expressed in the brains of people diagnosed with neuropsychiatric conditions with those expressed in people who had no history of these diseases, the researchers identified sets of genes that are expressed differently in patients diagnosed with autism, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder. But most telling was the greater magnitude of difference between putatively healthy and diagnosed women compared to men.

The findings support a debated theory known as the “female protective effect.” Essentially, it posits that it takes a certain number of factors coming together—such as mutations and environmental exposures—to trigger neuropsychiatric disease, and this threshold is higher in women. As for why that is, the researchers found evidence for particularly strong divergence in expression of genes related to immunity and how neurons connect, so it may stem from differences in how male and female brains develop and differences in their immune systems."

From the editor's summary and abstract:

"Editor’s summary

Xia et al. analyzed transcriptomics data from 2,160 postmortem adult brain samples from patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder. They found that females exhibited a higher burden of transcriptomic dysfunction and greater connectivity variability compared to males. They report enrichment for genes associated with immune and synaptic-related pathways such as SCN2A, FGF14, and C3 in the transcriptomic burden of females compared to males. Understanding this sex-specific difference may lead to better treatments for psychiatric disorders. ...

Abstract

Many psychiatric disorders exhibit sex differences, but the underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. We analyzed transcriptomics data from 2,160 postmortem adult prefrontal cortex brain samples from the PsychENCODE consortium in a sex-stratified study design. We compared transcriptomics data of postmortem brain samples from patients with schizophrenia (SCZ), bipolar disorder (BD), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD) to transcriptomics data of postmortem control brains from individuals without a known history of psychiatric disease. We found that brain samples from females with SCZ, BD and ASD showed a higher burden of transcriptomic dysfunction than did brain samples from males with these disorders. This observation was supported by the larger number of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and a greater magnitude of gene expression changes observed in female versus male brain specimens. Additionally, female patient brain samples showed greater overall connectivity dysfunction, defined by a higher proportion of gene co-expression modules with connectivity changes and higher connectivity burden, indicating a greater degree of gene co-expression variability. We identified several gene co-expression modules enriched in sex-biased DEGs and identified genes from a genome-wide association study that were involved in immune and synaptic functions across different brain cell types. We found a number of genes as hubs within these modules including those encoding SCN2A, FGF14, and C3. Our results suggest that in the context of psychiatric diseases, males and females exhibit different degrees of transcriptomic dysfunction, and implicate immune and synaptic-related pathways in these sex differences."

Data from more than 2000 brains hints at why women develop fewer neuropsychiatric conditions

Transcriptomic sex differences in postmortem brain samples from patients with psychiatric disorders (no public access)

Teens’ latest social media trend? Self-diagnosing their mental health issues on their smarphones

How healthy is that? As with most subjects, there are positive and negative things to consider here. There is probably no easy solution.

How much of this turns out to be a fad or a mania we will find out as time goes on.

As a minimum, it probably requires to help young people to find reliable and accurate information and warn them about and help them to identify charlatans etc.

Caveat: I was not able to quickly find this poll on the Education Week Research Center website. 

"Teenagers are increasingly using social media to self-diagnose their mental health issues, alarming parents and advocates who say actual care should be easier to access.  

A poll by EdWeek Research Center released this week found 55 percent of students use social media to self-diagnose, and 65 percent of teachers say they’ve seen the phenomenon in their classrooms. ...

The trend is affecting not only how students view themselves, but also how they view others.  ..."

Teens’ latest social media trend? Self-diagnosing their mental health issues

What’s Left of Psychoanalysis? A Freudian slip?

Good question! To me psychoanalysis has been for a long time more associated with pseudo science or quackery.

In the 1970s/1980s in Germany it was almost a fashion statement to see a psychoanalyst. At parties, people would exchange their latest psychoanalytic adventures and so on. People would compete to get appointments with the best and busiest psychoanalysts in town.

"... After several decades of declining influence, psychoanalysis is now enjoying a revival of public interest and intellectual esteem. Recent graduates from the analytic institutes are finding their services in demand. Gone is the dour, conventional, Germanic Sigmund Freud we knew when psychoanalysis was the dominant mode in postwar American psychiatry. That Freud was an anti-utopian, who once joked that the goal of analysis was to replace neurotic misery with ordinary human unhappiness. Now we have the anarchic Freud, the sexual liberator, the enemy of repression. This battle over the true meaning of his work began when he was still alive and has never really stopped. Freud now seems to have been repurposed for a new era of consumer demand. ..."

What’s Left of Psychoanalysis? | City Journal With its original premises overthrown in many respects, a refashioned discipline can still help reconcile us to our limitations and sufferings.

Police statewide were warned about the alleged Maine mass shooter weeks before he massacred 18 people

As happens too often warning signs are ignored or not taken serious enough! That needs to change! Sometimes it would be very advisable to confiscate the weapons as a precaution and err on the side of caution.

There were apparently multiple credible warnings about the individual before the mass shootings occurred.

In this case: "New York State Police officers were reportedly called on July 16 to West Point by his superior officers regarding his behavior and threats he had made against other reservists. As a result of the NYSP intervention, he underwent two weeks of mental health evaluation at the Kelly Army Community Hospital at the U.S. Military Academy. ...

"If in fact the suspect was hospitalized for two weeks for mental illness, that should have triggered the yellow-flag law and he should have been separated from his weapons," said U.S. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), reported Connecticut Public."

Police statewide were warned about the alleged Maine mass shooter weeks before he massacred 18 people | Blaze Media