News by Subject Social & Behavior

They worked in hospitals hundreds of miles from the epicenter of COVID-19. Their city locked down hard enough, and did enough testing, that it only had a few hundred cases of the disease. But hundreds of young Chinese doctors in a new study still experienced a sharp drop in mood, a rise in depression and anxiety symptoms, and a doubling of their fear of workplace violence, in the first month of the coronavirus pandemic.

A rapid review into the mental health impacts of loneliness on children and young people concludes that there could be a spike in demand for mental health services in the years to come.

The anaesthetic drug ketamine has been shown, in low doses, to have a rapid effect on difficult-to-treat depression. Researchers at Karolinska Institutet now report that they have identified a key target for the drug: specific serotonin receptors in the brain. Their findings, which are published in Translational Psychiatry, give hope of new, effective antidepressants.

Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health have found that death records of LGBTQ youth who died by suicide were substantially more likely to mention bullying as a factor than their non-LGBTQ peers.

Young people, men and people in 'individualistic' societies report higher levels of loneliness, according to a large-scale global study.

Identifying anxiety in those with depression could be key to developing successful programmes for tackling mental health problems in low and middle income countries (LMICs), according to a new study.

A blood test may help researchers understand which people may take years to recover from concussion, according to a study published in the May 27, 2020, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University have discovered that alcohol withdrawal impacts somatostatin neurons in key brain regions associated with emotional processing and addiction. The findings are significant as they suggest that somatostatin neurons may be a viable new target for the treatment of depression related to alcohol withdrawal.

Depression, anxiety and PTSD might not be disorders at all, according to a recent paper by Washington State University biological anthropologists. In the paper, the researchers propose a new approach to mental illness that would be informed by human evolution, noting that modern psychology, and in particular its use of drugs like antidepressants, has largely failed to reduce the prevalence of mental disorders.

A recent analysis of discourse on Facebook highlights how social media can be used to dehumanize entire groups of people.