April 2026
- Apr 15, 2026IdeasThe Sunday Scaries: Why They Happen and Fixes That WorkA LinkedIn survey of more than 1,000 professionals in 2018 found 80 percent felt Sunday anxiety. The useful move is identifying which mechanism is yours: anticipatory worry, weekend circadian drift, the drop in autonomy, the rumination that fills a quiet afternoon, the Sunday inbox check, or a real mismatch between the work and your values. Each responds to a different fix, and some signals say the job itself is the problem.
- Apr 15, 2026ConceptsEmotional Labor: Why Easy Days Feel ExhaustingArlie Hochschild named this work in 1983: emotional labor, the suppressing, performing and managing of feeling a job requires. She separated surface acting, faking an emotion you do not have, which research consistently finds more depleting, from deep acting, genuinely shifting your state to match the moment. Knowledge workers do far more of it than they count, in meeting faces, softened feedback and stakeholder maintenance.
- Apr 15, 2026ConceptsRejection Sensitive Dysphoria in the WorkplaceWhat RSD is and why it is hard to interrupt in the moment. The response arrives within seconds of a perceived rejection, often before the triggering content has been processed, which is what makes cognitive intervention difficult. Many people describe it as physical pain rather than sadness. Dodson popularized the term from ADHD clinical work, though Downey's rejection sensitivity research treats it as a dimension rather than a category.
- Apr 15, 2026ConceptsHigh-Functioning Anxiety: Signs and StrategiesWhat the pattern is and which interventions have real support. High functioning anxiety is not a formal diagnosis but describes a clinically significant pattern where external performance stays high while internal cost compounds. The Yerkes-Dodson law predicts performance rises with arousal to a point then declines, and this pattern typically holds arousal past that point. Sleep and aerobic exercise are the highest-leverage starting points.
- Apr 14, 2026Work SkillsStep-by-Step Burnout Recovery Plan Backed by ResearchMaslach describes burnout as three dimensions: exhaustion, cynicism and reduced professional efficacy. Recovery runs in phases, stabilizing sleep first, then changing the structural conditions across the six areas where person and job can mismatch, which are workload, control, reward, community, fairness and values. Without that second phase people relapse on returning to unchanged conditions. Salvagioni's review found consequences persisting well beyond the episode.
- Apr 14, 2026ConceptsDark Psychology: Recognizing and Countering ManipulationFreyd's group found that people briefed on DARVO before judging a case were significantly less swayed by it, so naming the pattern is itself a defense. DARVO runs deny, attack, then reverse victim and offender, which raises the cost of pursuing a complaint above the cost of dropping it. Against future faking the counter is evidence-based: judge the last thirty days of observable behavior, not the next thirty days of stated intentions.
- Apr 14, 2026ConceptsHow to Say No Without Feeling Guilty: Practical Assertiveness ScriptsEisenberger, Lieberman and Williams put participants in an MRI scanner for the 2003 Cyberball study and found that exclusion from a simple ball-tossing game engaged the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula, regions also involved in physical pain. The study did not examine assertiveness, so it is one possible explanation rather than proof, but it suggests why anticipated rejection makes refusal hard. The article marks what is research and what is script.
- Apr 13, 2026ConceptsOverthinking and Rumination: Why Thought Loops Persist and What Can HelpWegner's white bear studies showed that suppressing a thought can produce rebound, especially while you keep checking whether it has come back, which is why pushing harder rarely ends a loop. The alternatives rest on different rationales: Edward Watkins on shifting from abstract to concrete thinking, Steven Hayes on defusion, Borkovec's scheduled worry window, behavioral activation. The piece is careful about what each does and does not establish.
March 2026
February 2026
October 2025
September 2025
March 2025
- Mar 29, 2025ConceptsThe Science of PTSD: Understanding Trauma and MemoryWhen the DSM-III added post-traumatic stress disorder in 1980, organized psychiatry acknowledged for the first time that external events rather than constitutional defect could cause lasting illness in previously healthy people. It took a decade of advocacy by two groups treated as separate problems: Vietnam veterans and survivors of sexual and domestic violence. The condition had older names, from shell shock to combat fatigue to Kardiner's physioneurosis.
- Mar 27, 2025ConceptsWhat Is Metacognition? Thinking About Your Own ThinkingJohn Flavell named metacognition in 1976 after noticing that ten-year-olds tested themselves before claiming a word list was learned while six-year-olds declared victory at once. The gap between feeling and fact is measurable: Kruger and Dunning found subjects scoring in the bottom quartile placed themselves near the 60th to 70th percentile. Cepeda and colleagues' 2006 synthesis of 317 experiments found consistent advantages for spacing study out rather than massing it.
February 2025
January 2025
November 2024
August 2024
- Aug 26, 2024ExplainersWhy Loneliness Is Deadly: The Biology of Social IsolationJulianne Holt-Lunstad's 2010 meta-analysis pooled 148 studies and 308,849 participants and found that adequate social relationships were associated with a 50 percent greater likelihood of survival. The damage runs through inflammation, blood pressure, disrupted sleep and a threat-primed gene expression profile. The counterintuitive part is the fix: a 2011 meta-analysis found that addressing the distorted social thinking of lonely people beat simply adding social contact.
- Aug 22, 2024ExplainersWhy Exercise Is Beneficial for Brain HealthThe SMILE trial found exercise, sertraline and the combination all improved depression similarly at 16 weeks, but by ten months the exercise group had the lowest relapse rate. Covers BDNF and hippocampal neurogenesis, why the runner's high is endocannabinoids rather than endorphins, which are too large to cross the blood-brain barrier, and cross-stressor adaptation.
July 2024
- Jul 30, 2024ExplainersWhat Happens When You Take Psychedelics: Neuroscience and EffectsPretreatment with that antagonist makes the 5-HT2A receptor necessary rather than merely correlated, which is rare evidence for any subjective state. The page also explains the duration, since LSD pulls a loop of receptor over itself and stays trapped, which is what sets LSD's 8-12 hour duration. The REBUS account then treats the effect as a flattening of the brain's predictive hierarchy, letting lower-level signal override prior expectation.
- Jul 27, 2024ExplainersEffects of Sleep Deprivation: What Happens Without SleepThey adapt to being impaired and lose any baseline for comparison. Coffee does not help as much as it feels, since blocking adenosine receptors masks the accumulated signal rather than clearing it, which is what produces the crash. The page notes glymphatic waste clearance runs many times faster during sleep, and is careful that whether sleep debt is fully recoverable remains debated.
- Jul 21, 2024ExplainersPsychedelic Therapies: Current Research and ApplicationsGriffiths and colleagues at Johns Hopkins reopened the field in 2006: 67% of volunteers rated a psilocybin session among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives, and the depth of that experience predicted outcomes. MDMA for PTSD reached Phase 3, but in August 2024 the FDA declined to approve it, citing imperfect blinding and documented therapist boundary violations during dosing. Ketamine remains the one legal option in most places.
- Jul 19, 2024ExplainersTrauma and Its Physical Effects on the BodyWhy psychological injury shows up in physical measurements. Van der Kolk began the work at the Boston VA in 1992, and the mechanism runs through the HPA axis, where sustained glucocorticoid exposure is toxic to the hippocampus. Felitti and Anda's Kaiser Permanente study established the relationship as dose-dependent: the more adverse childhood experiences, the worse the adult outcomes, with six or more associated with a 20-year reduction in life expectancy.
- Jul 6, 2024ExplainersSocial Media's Influence on Brain Function and BehaviorFacebook's founding president described the design goal as giving users a dopamine hit to keep them posting. Gloria Mark's workplace data shows average focus on one task falling from about 2.5 minutes in 2004 to about 47 seconds. Haidt and Twenge read the teen mental health timing as causal; Orben and Przybylski put the effect near that of eating potatoes. Experiments favor real but modest harm.
March 2024
- Mar 29, 2024CultureWhy Loneliness Is a Public Health CrisisA survey of more than 55,000 people found 40 percent of 16 to 24 year olds lonely often or very often against 27 percent of those over 75. The mortality evidence is pooled rather than anecdotal, with meta-analyses across 148 prospective studies and then 70 more covering millions of participants, and the page explains the mechanism through chronic cortisol elevation, inflammation and hypervigilance that drives others away.
- Mar 24, 2024Explainers2026 Mental Health Statistics OverviewWhat the prevalence and access numbers show. CDC data has the share of US high school students reporting persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness rising from 28 percent in 2011 to 42 percent in 2023, reaching 57 percent among adolescent girls and 69 percent among LGBTQ+ youth. WHO estimates more than 75 percent of people with mental health conditions in low- and middle-income countries receive no care at all.
February 2024
- Feb 21, 2024ConceptsNeuroscience Insights on Why We Get AngryPhysiologically it looks closer to enthusiasm than to distress, which explains why outrage content is sought out and why anger can become habitual, and why it feels like clarity even when the reading is wrong. The page also closes the case against venting, which reliably increases rather than reduces later anger, and identifies hostile attribution bias as one of the strongest predictors of chronic anger.
- Feb 15, 2024ConceptsThe Psychology of Social Comparison and Its ImpactMelissa Hunt randomly assigned students to ten minutes per platform per day across Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat for three weeks. The limited group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression, with the largest effects among those who started with elevated depressive symptoms. Veblen described the mechanism in 1899. What changed is the comparison pool: Festinger predicted we compare to similar others, and a farmer in 1950 compared herself to her county.
- Feb 13, 2024ConceptsThe Psychology Behind ProcrastinationPiers Steel's 2007 meta-analysis put chronic procrastination at an estimated 20 percent of adults and up to 70 percent of college students at clinically meaningful levels. The time-management framing has been dismantled: Pychyl and Sirois repositioned it in 2013 as a failure of emotional regulation, a short-term mood repair that trades long-term wellbeing for immediate relief from an aversive internal state. As Pychyl puts it, an emotion management problem.
- Feb 9, 2024ConceptsUnderstanding Trauma's Psychological ImpactPTSD entered the DSM in 1980 after lobbying by Vietnam veterans, rape survivors and advocates. Before that, intrusive memories, hypervigilance and numbing were dismissed as weakness, malingering or pre-existing character pathology, though clinicians had documented the pattern as soldier's heart in the Civil War, shell shock in the First World War and war neurosis in the Second. The science has since forced a reckoning with a definition drawn too narrowly.
- Feb 8, 2024ConceptsThe Impact of Trauma on Body and MindWhen a veteran throws himself down at a car backfire, his body has not failed to recognize the parking lot. The sound bypassed rational evaluation and triggered a survival system calibrated for a different environment. Bessel van der Kolk calls this the body failing to understand the danger is past, the point of The Body Keeps the Score. Mainstream psychiatry had framed trauma as cognitive and amenable to talking cures while the nervous system was being rewired.
January 2024
- Jan 21, 2024ConceptsComprehensive Overview of ADHD: Symptoms and TreatmentShaw and colleagues tracked 223 children with ADHD and 223 without over about five years, and the lag was largest in the prefrontal cortex. The page reads this as a slower developmental schedule rather than a fundamentally abnormal brain, which explains why some children outgrow the most impairing symptoms. It also takes the overdiagnosis argument seriously while explaining why girls were systematically missed.
- Jan 20, 2024ConceptsThe Multifactorial Causes of SchizophreniaAmphetamine produces paranoid psychosis but not flat affect or memory deficits, while NMDA blockers like ketamine produce all three symptom domains, which points upstream of dopamine. The page presents the integrated model where NMDA hypofunction drives the striatal dopamine excess, and reports prevalence clustering near 1 percent across a ten-country study, a consistency that constrains any purely cultural explanation.
- Jan 19, 2024ConceptsWhat Causes OCD: The Neuroscience and Psychology Behind ItRachman and de Silva collected both sets and the content was virtually identical, covering harm to loved ones, contamination and blasphemous imagery, with 80 to 90 percent of people reporting at least one category. What differs is the appraisal, treating the thought as a signal requiring action, and the suppression it triggers, which Wegner's white bear work shows makes the thought more accessible rather than less.
- Jan 18, 2024ConceptsThe Complex Causes of Eating DisordersThe anorexia genetics study found eight loci and, more consequentially, negative genetic correlations with BMI and fat mass alongside the expected links to OCD and anxiety. The page uses this metabo-psychiatric picture to argue weight restoration is the beginning of treatment, not the end, and keeps the cultural evidence in proportion: media exposure modulates risk in vulnerable people rather than creating the disorder.
- Jan 17, 2024ConceptsUnderstanding the Complex Causes of DepressionMoncrieff and colleagues reviewed metabolites, receptors, transporters, genetics and depletion experiments, and the page is careful that this is not a finding that SSRIs fail to work for many patients, only that the marketed mechanism is not the real one. It then lays out what the evidence does support, including stress sensitization through the HPA axis, an inflammatory subtype, and the neuroplasticity account that explains the weeks-long therapeutic delay.
- Jan 15, 2024ConceptsWhat Causes Anxiety: The Neuroscience and Psychology of FearCharles Darwin stood at a puff adder's glass cage at the London Zoo and resolved not to flinch. He jumped backward anyway, and wrote that his will and reason were powerless against the imagination of a danger which had never been experienced. The low road from thalamus to amygdala fires in about 12ms, while the high road through the prefrontal cortex takes 30 to 40ms, so the jump completes before the cortex can rule the threat out.
- Jan 8, 2024ConceptsManaging Anxiety: Evidence-Based Strategies and InsightsCraske's work shifted the explanation too. The aim of exposure is not to calm down during the session but to violate the specific prediction that made the situation frightening, so safety behaviors have to go because they block the disconfirmation. The page notes the old fear memory is not erased but outcompeted by new inhibitory learning, and gives exercise a measured effect of 0.48 across 25 randomized trials.
- Jan 4, 2024ConceptsSocial Media's Impact on Mental Health: The EvidenceThe 2021 Facebook Files included a slide from the company's own scientists: we make body image issues worse for one in three teen girls. Twenge's iGen charts show depression and anxiety inflecting around 2012, when teen smartphone ownership crossed 50 percent, though the article notes timing was not proof. Orben and Przybylski put the effect size near wearing glasses or eating potatoes. Two serious teams, overlapping evidence, opposite conclusions.
December 2023
- Dec 29, 2023ConceptsHow Grief Works: The Psychology and Neuroscience of LossGeorge Bonanno's prospective studies of community samples, rather than clinic patients, found that roughly 40 to 65 percent of bereaved people follow a resilience trajectory: genuinely grieving while continuing to function, with no delayed collapse coming. Mary-Frances O'Connor's imaging work shows grief activating the nucleus accumbens, a reward and craving region, fitting grief as an attachment system that cannot complete its circuit.
- Dec 27, 2023ConceptsAddiction: Understanding the Neuroscience of CompulsionThe mesolimbic dopamine pathway runs from the ventral tegmental area to the nucleus accumbens and evolved to assign motivational salience to food, sex and social connection, teaching the organism what is worth seeking. Addictive substances trigger massive dopamine release there, hijacking the system. Three stages follow, each with its own circuitry: binge and intoxication on dopamine, withdrawal on stress systems, then preoccupation in the prefrontal cortex.
November 2023
- Nov 22, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Perfectionism? When Standards Become HarmfulThe high-standards person finds failure informative. The perfectionist finds success a temporary reprieve and failure a confirmation. A meta-analysis spanning three decades and more than 41,000 students found perfectionism has risen since 1989, fastest in the belief that others demand it of you, which is the dimension most tied to anxiety and shame. Delay then creates the very imperfection it was meant to prevent.
- Nov 21, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Impostor Syndrome and Its EffectsClance and Imes named the impostor phenomenon in 1978 from clinical observations of 150 high-achieving women. The mechanism is an inverted attribution: success goes to luck, timing or an easy task, while failure goes to fixed personal inadequacy. That guarantees achievement cannot update self-assessment upward. The impostor cycle completes it, since both over-preparing and procrastinating end in success that gets explained away. It is not in the DSM-5.
- Nov 19, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Gaslighting: Psychological Manipulation ExplainedPaige Sweet's 2019 paper in the American Sociological Review reframed gaslighting as a social phenomenon rather than a private one: it works best when the manipulator can draw on credibility the other person lacks, through professional authority or institutional standing. That is why the doctor dismissing symptoms and the employer denying discrimination belong in one analysis. The article also redraws the lines the word has lost: not criticism, not a single incident.
October 2023
- Oct 10, 2023ConceptsWhy Stress Is Killing You SlowlyThe clearest measure of the cost is cellular. Epel, Blackburn and colleagues, publishing in PNAS in 2004, compared mothers caring for chronically ill children with mothers of healthy children and found the caregiving group had significantly shorter telomeres and lower telomerase activity, a difference corresponding to roughly a decade of extra cellular aging. The article also covers what reduces the load: sleep, aerobic exercise, social ties, and reappraisal.
- Oct 5, 2023ConceptsThe Serious Effects of Loneliness on HealthAttention is pulled toward signs of rejection and away from signs of connection, so ambiguous cues get read as exclusion. That is why the meta-analysis of interventions found that changing this threat-focused thinking produced the largest and most consistent effects, while simply providing social opportunities showed smaller effects. Loneliness is also not the same as being alone, since the variable is the gap between the connection you have and the connection you need.
September 2023
August 2023
- Aug 10, 2023ConceptsEvaluating Therapy, Self-Help, and Medication EffectivenessThe mechanisms add rather than overlap, since medication reduces the dysregulation that makes engagement hard while therapy changes the patterns that outlast it. That shows up in relapse, roughly 20 to 30 percent after CBT against 50 to 60 percent for people who responded to medication and then stopped. The page treats medication as a bridge to therapy for moderate to severe presentations rather than a standalone fix.
- Aug 9, 2023ConceptsMeditation vs Exercise: Evidence for Mental HealthMeditation and exercise compared on the evidence, mechanism by mechanism. A 2024 BMJ network meta-analysis of 218 randomized trials covering 14,170 participants found walking or jogging, yoga and strength training moderately effective for depression, with effects comparable to psychotherapy and antidepressants. Mindfulness has its own standout result: MBCT cuts depressive relapse risk by roughly 43 percent over 12 months in people with three or more previous episodes.
- Aug 6, 2023CultureWhat Is the Attention Economy? Capturing Human FocusHow attention became the scarce resource and what the platforms built on it. Simon observed in 1971 that a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, a structural argument about organizational management rather than a prediction about feeds. Google and Meta earned roughly 368 billion dollars from advertising in 2023 between them. Vosoughi's team found false news reached 1,500 people about six times faster than accurate news.
July 2023
May 2023
March 2023
January 2023
- Jan 19, 2023CultureThe Impact of Social Media on Mental Health: Key InsightsWhat the research does and does not show about social media and mental health. The anchor is uncontested: adolescent mental health declined significantly in many Western countries from around 2012 to 2014, with emergency department visits for self-harm among girls aged 10 to 14 more than doubling between 2010 and 2019. Haidt and Twenge argue the smartphone caused it, while Odgers' 2024 Nature review argues the certainty being expressed outpaces what the science supports.
- Jan 6, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Mindfulness? Science and Its ApplicationsGoyal and colleagues reported moderate evidence for anxiety, depression and pain in clinical populations, and no evidence of benefit for attention, sleep, eating habits or weight. Effect sizes were comparable to antidepressants for mild to moderate depression. The exception with strong backing is MBCT for recurrent depression, which NICE recommends and which trials put at roughly 43 to 50 percent lower relapse risk.
- Jan 5, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Emotional Regulation and Why It MattersGross found suppression reduces the expression while leaving the feeling and the physiology intact, and sometimes raising arousal further. The cost spreads, since partners of people suppressing in conversation showed elevated cardiovascular responses without knowing anything was being held back. The physical floor matters as much: one night without sleep raised amygdala reactivity to negative images by roughly 60 percent.
- Jan 4, 2023ConceptsWhat Is Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Its ImpactThe 1979 manual that followed could be taught and tested, which is why CBT now carries more randomized trials than any other therapy. The page does not oversell it. Dimidjian's trial found behavioral activation outperformed cognitive therapy for the most severely depressed patients, and Shedler's point about allegiance effects stands: studies run by researchers loyal to a method tend to favor that method.
- Jan 2, 2023ConceptsUnderstanding Anxiety: Types, Causes, and FindingsWhat anxiety is biologically and where normal worry ends. The anxiety response is a fundamental feature of human neurobiology rather than a malfunction: the amygdala detects potential threat and activates the sympathetic nervous system, raising heart rate, tensing muscles, dilating pupils and suppressing digestion. It becomes a disorder when it is excessive, persistent, disproportionate to the threat, or sustained by the avoidance that temporarily relieves it.
December 2022
October 2022
- Oct 18, 2022ConceptsWhy Self-Compassion Surpasses Self-EsteemWhat self-compassion is and why it beats self-criticism for motivation. Kristin Neff defines it through three integrated components: self-kindness instead of harsh judgment, common humanity recognizing that imperfection is universal rather than a personal anomaly, and mindfulness that holds difficult feelings in balanced awareness. Two decades of research associate it with greater resilience, lower anxiety and, contrary to intuition, stronger motivation for self-improvement.
- Oct 16, 2022ConceptsUnderstanding the Dangers of Toxic PositivityWegner's ironic process theory explains the backfire. Complying with just be positive starts a monitor that hunts for the forbidden thought to suppress it, which keeps that thought active rather than dormant. Molina found invalidation amplified emotion rather than reducing it, with arousal higher in the minutes afterward. The page is precise that optimism is not the problem, and that the same words work once understanding has been shown.
- Oct 13, 2022ConceptsEmotional First Aid: Addressing Psychological InjuriesHypervigilance turns a neutral expression into a frown and a late reply into rejection, so the wound blocks its own repair, which is why the intervention window matters. Winch's wider point is that rumination works like pressing a bruise to check whether it still hurts. The treatment is not suppression but a genuinely absorbing distraction, then deliberate problem-focused reflection that delivers the learning rumination only promises.
September 2022
- Sep 24, 2022Work SkillsUnderstanding Occupational Burnout and Recovery StrategiesMaslach's research treats it as necessary but not sufficient, and the other two dimensions persist after the fatigue lifts, which is why a long vacation often changes nothing. Depersonalization develops after sustained exhaustion, so a nurse treating patients as cases is showing a later stage rather than a personality flaw. The WHO settled the framing in 2019 by classifying burnout in ICD-11 as an occupational phenomenon, explicitly not a personal failing.
- Sep 6, 2022CultureWhat Is the Creator Economy Burnout ProblemWhen advertisers pulled spending during YouTube's 2017 AdPocalypse, creators who depended on ad revenue lost 50 to 90 percent of their earnings within days, many with no connection to the content that caused the panic. Survey estimates putting burnout at 70 to 90 percent of full-time creators should be read cautiously given self-report bias, but the causes are consistent: recency-weighted algorithms, parasocial labor, and no sick leave when absence costs reach.
- Sep 1, 2022ConceptsPsychological Flexibility Explained: Core to ACT TherapySo you can notice the thought that you will embarrass yourself and give the presentation anyway, because the goal is reducing the thought's control over behavior rather than its credibility. Hayes built the approach while his own panic disorder resisted everything he knew, and named the culprit experiential avoidance, the attempt to suppress unwanted inner experience, which predicts problems across depression, PTSD, substance use and chronic pain.
July 2022
- Jul 22, 2022ConceptsCognitive Reappraisal: A Key Emotion Regulation ToolReappraisal was clearly superior for low-intensity stressors, so matching the strategy to the intensity matters more than practicing one of them harder. Against suppression the contrast is sharper, since suppression impairs memory for events during the emotion while reappraisal does not, and a suppressor's conversation partners show elevated stress responses even when the mask holds. The page is also clear that reappraising mistreatment can become accommodation to harm.
- Jul 10, 2022Work SkillsUnderstanding Compassion Fatigue in CaregivingA clear therapeutic framework appears to help rather than harden. Singer and Klimecki found the mechanism in the brain, since empathic distress and compassionate care activate different networks, so caring without fusing with the other person's pain is the sustainable mode. Figley named it in 1995 as secondary traumatic stress, and the key difference from burnout is that intrusive imagery and nightmares appear here but rarely there.
June 2022
- Jun 8, 2022ConceptsIn-Depth Look at Schizophrenia and Its ComplexitiesWhat the diagnosis covers and where treatment falls short. Bleuler coined the term in 1911 for splits between mental functions, not split personality, and the DSM-5 now requires two of five symptom domains over six months. Cognitive symptoms are present in approximately 80 percent of people with schizophrenia and are the strongest predictors of employment and independent living, yet no available medication addresses them.
- Jun 4, 2022ConceptsUnderstanding Major Depressive Disorder: A GuideWhat the diagnosis requires and where the biology stands now. The DSM-5 asks for five of nine symptoms over the same two-week period, at least one being depressed mood or loss of interest, so two people can meet criteria while sharing a single symptom. Moncrieff's 2022 umbrella review found no consistent evidence that depression stems from lower serotonin activity, though critics note umbrella reviews inherit their sources' limits.
- Jun 1, 2022ConceptsExploring the Spectrum of Anxiety DisordersCraske's inhibitory learning theory explains why, since exposure builds a competing memory rather than erasing the fear, so the aim is violating the expected catastrophe rather than waiting for anxiety to subside. That reframing also indicts a common prescription, because benzodiazepines blunt the arousal that drives inhibitory learning and so impair extinction. The median delay to first treatment contact is over a decade.
February 2022
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