Psychology & Psychiatry

In a research article, researchers have revealed compelling evidence that biological sex significantly influences substance use patterns among individuals with panic disorder, with implications for both clinical assessment and treatment strategies.

Middle-aged Americans have demonstrated some of the highest levels of loneliness in a new study assessing tens of thousands of 50-to-90-year-olds across 29 countries.

A multisource observational study aimed to quantify the change in prevalence and health care utilization of psilocybin users between 2014 and 2023. The study found that the prevalence of psilocybin use increased across all age groups, with those with mental or physical comorbidities among the most common users.

Lucid dreaming is a surreal phenomenon in which people are consciously aware that they are in a dream. Çağatay Demirel, from Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, Radboud University Medical Center, and colleagues shed light on the neural correlates of lucid dreaming in their JNeurosci paper.

An international team including Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Soongsil University, and Sungkyunkwan University has found that Korean adults living alone with both depression and anxiety face a 558% increased risk of suicide. Individuals aged 40 to 64 and men experienced the highest risk.

There has been a troubling rise in adolescent mental health struggles and suicide rates over the past decade, with a dramatic increase following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. This crisis has been accompanied by an increased demand for pediatric inpatient psychiatry units (IPUs) across the United States. However, despite the growing need, which has reached the point of bed shortages, the effectiveness of IPUs on teen mental health outcomes remains understudied.

A new study offers insight into what is happening in our brains when our working memory must use its limited resources to remember multiple things.

It’s hard to imagine now, but people once believed that the bumps on your head could reveal your personality. For one thing, it’s so hard to locate the bumps on your head, let alone the thirty or so bumps the phrenologists said could be discerned. So why was phrenology such an attractive idea for such a long time?

Researchers evaluating a nature-based program of activities for patients with mild to moderate mental health conditions have shown that improvements in mood and anxiety levels can be seen in as little as 12 weeks.

Researchers at Zhejiang University found that acute stress increases natural repair mechanisms in the brain, while chronic stress suppresses them. Autophagy was most affected in the lateral habenula, a brain region linked to emotional regulation. Several antidepressant drugs were tested and found to reverse this suppression, pointing to autophagy in the lateral habenula as a common therapeutic pathway in these treatments.