An alarming new study by University of Leeds psychologists provides compelling evidence that online chat rooms and social networking sites can have a serious impact on mental health, sometimes leading to moderate to severe depression in users. “The Internet now plays a huge part in modern life, but its benefits are accompanied by a darker […]
A psychiatrist, writing in the British Medical Journal, has lashed out at what he claims is the medicalization of normal human distress. Professor Gordon Parker, a psychiatrist from Australia, says the current threshold for what is considered to be “clinical depression” is too low. He fears it could lead to a diagnosis of depression becoming […]
Scientists from the University of Bristol and University College London have found that treating mice with soil bacteria altered their behavior in a way similar to that produced by antidepressant drugs. The findings, reported in Neuroscience, indicate that the dung-loving bacterium Mycobacterium vaccae activated a group of neurons in the brain that produce serotonin. It […]
Using mice as their subjects, researchers at Southwestern Medical Center, University of Texas, have discovered a potentially better way in which to study depression in humans. During the course of the study, published in the journal Science, the researchers also made an important finding: the absence of a particular gene has the same effect as […]
A brain imaging study at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) has discovered that the fear-processing circuitry in the human brain appears to be short-circuited by the brain chemical oxytocin, sometimes referred to as the “trust” hormone. The scans of oxytocin’s effects on the human brain reveal that it quells the brain’s fear hub, […]
