Dr. Maryam Shanechi. Cred­it: USC Viter­bi

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Is This the Future of Men­tal Health? (USC Viter­bi School of Engi­neer­ing):

“Brain–machine inter­faces (BMIs) pro­vide a direct path­way to the brain to trans­late brain sig­nals into actions … Below, Shanechi (Note: Maryam Shanechi, PhD, assis­tant pro­fes­sor of elec­tri­cal and com­put­er engi­neer­ing) answers some ques­tions about her work and what the future might hold for our under­stand­ing and treat­ment of men­tal dis­or­ders.

What poten­tial does this hold for the future not just of men­tal health, but of under­stand­ing our brains as a whole?

Neu­ropsy­chi­atric dis­or­ders are a major cause of dis­abil­i­ty world­wide with depres­sive dis­or­ders being the most dis­abling among them. About 30% of major depres­sion patients are treat­ment-resis­tant – that’s about 5 mil­lion peo­ple in the US alone. Read the rest of this entry »

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Psy­chi­atric diag­no­sis ‘sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly mean­ing­less’ (Sci­ence Dai­ly):

“A new study, pub­lished in Psy­chi­a­try Research, has con­clud­ed that psy­chi­atric diag­noses are sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly worth­less as tools to iden­ti­fy dis­crete men­tal health dis­or­ders.

The study, led by researchers from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Liv­er­pool, involved a detailed analy­sis of five key chap­ters of the lat­est edi­tion of the wide­ly used Diag­nos­tic and Sta­tis­ti­cal Man­u­al (DSM), on ‘schiz­o­phre­nia’, ‘bipo­lar dis­or­der’, ‘depres­sive dis­or­ders’, ‘anx­i­ety dis­or­ders’ and ‘trau­ma-relat­ed dis­or­ders’ Read the rest of this entry »

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Researchers have found that CBT is rough­ly half as effec­tive in treat­ing depres­sion as it used to be (The Guardian):

“Every­body loves cog­ni­tive behav­iour­al ther­a­py. It’s the no-non­sense, quick and rel­a­tive­ly cheap approach to men­tal suffering…So it was unset­tling to learn, from a paper in the jour­nal Psy­cho­log­i­cal Bul­letin, that it seems to be get­ting less effec­tive over time. Read the rest of this entry »