Symptoms, Risk Factors, and Treatment Options for Eating Disorders

There is a commonly held misconception that eating disorders are a lifestyle choice. Eating disorders are actually serious and often fatal illnesses that are associated with severe disturbances in people’s eating behaviors and related thoughts and emotions. Preoccupation with food, body weight,...

An Overview of Seasonal Affective Disorder

Many people go through short periods of time where they feel sad or not like their usual selves. Sometimes, these mood changes begin and end when the seasons change. People may start to feel “down” when the days get shorter in the fall and winter (also called “winter blues”) and begin to...

Implementing Universal Suicide Risk Screening in Healthcare Settings: Model Could Help Hospitals Better Identify and Aid Youth at Risk for Suicide

A new report, authored in part by researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health, provides guidance on how to implement universal suicide risk screening of youth in medical settings. The report describes a way for hospitals to address the...

Soldiers at Increased Suicide Risk After Leaving Hospital

United States Army soldiers hospitalized with a psychiatric disorder have a significantly elevated suicide risk in the year following discharge from the hospital, according to research from the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers (Army STARRS). The yearly suicide rate for...

Suicide in the Military: Army NIH-Funded Study Points to Risk and Protective Factors

The largest study of mental health risk and resilience ever conducted among U.S. military personnel today released its first findings related to suicide attempts and deaths in a series of three JAMA Psychiatry articles. Findings from The Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers...

NIMH Director’s Blog: A New Research Agenda for Suicide Prevention

More than 38,000 Americans died by suicide in 2010, the most recent year for which we have national data. This makes suicide, once again, the tenth leading cause of death for all ages; the second leading cause of death for young adults ages 25 to 34.1 Despite changes in recent decades that might...

Scan Predicts Whether Therapy or Meds Will Best Lift Depression

Pre-treatment scans of brain activity predicted whether depressed patients would best achieve remission with an antidepressant medication or psychotherapy, in a study funded by the National Institutes of Health. “Our goal is to develop reliable biomarkers that match an individual patient to the...

Understanding and Treating Eating Disorders

An eating disorder is an illness that causes serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating. A person with an eating disorder may have started out just eating smaller or larger amounts of food, but at some point, the urge to eat...

FAST-PS: A New Initiative for Developing Novel Treatments for Psychosis and Other Mental Disorders

The National Institute of Mental Health will fund research at Columbia University Department of Psychiatry and New York State Psychiatric Institute (NYSPI) to speed the development of effective psychotropic agents and improve treatment for those suffering from mental illnesses There is a serious...

Understanding and Treating Depression

Everyone occasionally feels blue or sad. But these feelings are usually short-lived and pass within a couple of days. When you have depression, it interferes with daily life and causes pain for both you and those who care about you. Depression is a common but serious illness. Many people with a...