News by Subject Social & Behavior

A unique new study of young adults finds that negative experiences on Facebook may increase the risk of depressive symptoms, suggesting that online social interactions have important consequences for mental health.

The expression dog is man's best friend might have more weight in the case of first-year university students suffering from homesickness, according to a new UBC study. The study shows that animal-assisted therapy can help students combat homesickness and could be a useful tool in lowering post-secondary drop-out rates.

Researchers found that children who experience low levels of language learning stimulation beginning at three years of age are more likely to experience language delays by first grade and are three times more likely to develop depression by third grade.

Antidepressants are necessary for many with major depressive disorder, but response times and remission rates are a problem. University of Michigan researchers find sleep might play a part.

Personal interactions on Facebook can have a major impact on a person's feelings of well-being and satisfaction with life just as much as getting married or having a baby, a new study by Carnegie Mellon University and Facebook researchers shows. What really makes people feel good is when those they know and care about write personalized posts or comments.

A researcher at Columbia's Mailman School of Public Health studied a hidden source of hardship: energy insecurity, the inability to adequately meet basic household energy needs, and its adverse environmental, health, and social consequences. The study provides real-world examples of three dimensions of energy insecurity: economic, physical, and behavioral; it's one of the first to examine how household utilities, which account for a large share of living expenses, are a critical measurement of material hardship.

Canada needs a national suicide prevention strategy, and it should be included in the 2017 federal budget, argues an editorial in CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal).

A national study shows an uneven picture of states' use of Medicaid to help families with young children gain access to mental health services. A large number- as many as 46 states-- use Medicaid to cover several important mental health services for low-income young children, including screening for social-emotional problems and mental health treatment in home, community and pediatric settings. But other key services were covered by far fewer states.

The children of traumatized people have long been known to be at increased risk for posttraumatic stress disorder, and mood and anxiety disorders. However, according to Rachel Yehuda from the James J. Peters Veterans Affairs Medical Center at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai who led a new study in Biological Psychiatry, there are very few opportunities to examine biologic alterations in the context of a watershed trauma in exposed people and their adult children born after the event.