Clinicians & therapists

A new study involving interviews with people who have long-Covid has revealed how the prolonged illness has affected patients’ job status and overall wellbeing. On top of symptoms including brain fog, fatigue, weakness and headaches, study participants reported lacking enough energy to do anything after work, loss of income and added insurance expenses when employment [...]

Researchers in the US have developed a new technique that allows scientists to "sculpt" brain activity patterns, enabling people to learn new visual categories without being explicitly taught. The novel technique could one day lead to better treatment of psychiatric and developmental disorders such as depression or autism. Coraline Iordan is an assistant professor of [...]

A new analysis of MDMA-assisted therapy research suggests that the drug could improve outcomes of treatment of a wider range of trauma-related conditions experienced by military personnel beyond the current focus on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) by increasing a collaborative and trusting relationship between a client and therapist. The review paper explains that even in [...]

Voice experiments in people with epilepsy have helped trace the circuit of electrical signals in the brain that allow its hearing center to sort out background sounds from their own voices. Such auditory corollary discharge signals start and end in two subregions of the brain’s top folded surface, or cortex, a new study shows. One [...]

In 1942, Robert Merton proposed four fundamental norms for scientific communities, establishing key principles that psychology, as a scientific discipline, should uphold. These norms are universalism, communism, disinterestedness, and organised scepticism. Merton’s scientific norms demonstrate what scientists and practitioners ‘ought’ to seek to do within research practice. These norms are said to ‘bind’ the man [...]

Subtle signs of Alzheimer’s disease can emerge decades before a diagnosis—often in the form of irregular behaviours that reflect very early stages of brain dysfunction. But until now, identifying and measuring these slight behavioural changes in a scientific way hasn’t been feasible, not even when studying Alzheimer’s in mice. In a study published in Cell [...]

Legislation to reform care for mental health patients is one step closer to becoming law, as the Mental Health Bill has Second Reading in the House of Lords today (25th November 2024).   The Mental Health Bill, introduced earlier this month, aims to modernise the Mental Health Act, giving patients a greater say in their care, [...]

Researchers have uncovered new ways to identify signatures of mental disorders using fMRI scans, finding hidden patterns in the brain that can display brain disorders, including schizophrenia, the impacts of ageing and neurodevelopmental issues. The research is uncovering surprising insights about brain pathways that could offer alternative ways for practitioners to identify early signs of [...]

A new approach to analysing brain scans could help researchers better understand psychiatric illness using much smaller groups of patients than previously thought necessary, potentially accelerating the development of more precise mental health treatments. Until recently, scientists believed they needed scans from thousands of people to draw reliable conclusions about how brain function relates to [...]

A landmark paper presents a masterful synthesis of how depression fundamentally alters the body's stress response systems, challenging long-held views of the condition. The analysis reveals striking brain structure changes in depressed patients, including a 40 per cent reduction in subgenual prefrontal cortex volume—a crucial region for stress response regulation. These structural changes occur alongside [...]