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Basic Research Has Had a Major Impact on Developing New Treatments for Serious Mental Illnesses
Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, with an estimated $2 trillion annual economic impact. The cost in terms of human suffering is, of course, incalculable. Each year about 8% of adults—nearly 20 million Americans—experience major depression; 8% of adolescents experience at...
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Ketamine for Mental Health Treatment: How Promising Is It?
For centuries, we have sought cures for depression. Some discoveries, such as psychotherapy and medication treatment, are now widely accepted. But they don’t work for everyone. More recently, an unorthodox drug has garnered attention as a new, possible intervention: ketamine. Classified as...
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Depression Detection Has Never Been More Important: PHQ-9 Enables Clinicians and Patients to Track and Address Depression With Combined Physical and Emotion Symptoms Score
The COVID-19 pandemic, armed conflicts, economic dislocations, and other concerns have affected mental health around the globe. Clinical depression, which affects 300 million individuals worldwide, is projected to increase. With findings that are significant for both clinicians and patients,...
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Unique Perspectives: Harnessing Multimodal Assessment to Understand How Children with Autism Decode the Social World
It is well-known that children and adolescents with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) see and make sense of the social world differently than their typically-developing (TD) peers. Often less appreciated is that the way the mind and brain give rise to this social perception and cognition is quite...
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Spotlight on Research: An Interview with Jeffrey Borenstein, MD President and CEO of the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation
What does the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation do? The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation is the largest non-governmental funder of mental health research grants in the world. The Foundation funds the most innovative ideas in psychiatry and neuroscience to better understand the...
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Consumer Perspectives: The Right Research
This article is part of a quarterly series giving voice to the perspectives of individuals with lived experiences as they share their opinions on a particular topic. The authors of this column facilitated a focus group of their peers to inform this writing. The authors are served by Services for...
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What’s New and Promising from the New York State Office of Mental Health Psychiatric Research Institutes
The NYS Office of Mental Health (OMH) operates two institutes, making our psychiatric research enterprise among the largest in the country. We are proud of the work underway at the institutes, knowing that their continued clinical advances will improve the lives of New Yorkers, as well as people...
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The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation: A Personal Perspective
The Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF) is unraveling the many mysteries of mental illness, autism spectrum disorders, and many other diseases and disorders of the brain. I would like to thank Dr. Jeffery Borenstein and his team at BBRF for their help in bringing our salute to their...
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The NYSPA Report: DSM 5 – A New Diagnostic Perspective
With much fanfare and no small amount of controversy the American Psychiatric Association (APA) released the 5th version of the Diagnostic and Statistics manual, DSM-5 in May of this year. Since its release it has been a consistent best seller and is still ranked #19 of all books on Amazon in...
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Considerations for Mental Health Data Collection Using Online Methods
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in the year 2009, 68 percent of households in the USA had internet access from their home computer. Since the early 1980’s there has been more than a fivefold increase in the proportion of households with computers. Among family households with income of...
