Call for papers on PTSD symptomics
I am very happy to announce that Cherie Armour and me are organizing a special issue for the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, together with the editor-in-chief Miranda Olff. In summary,… Read more »
Ketamine as promising treatment for suicidal thoughts?
Imagine you are a group of scientists and want to find out whether a novel drug X works on a specific problem Y. You run the following study: You enroll… Read more »
Adjunctive Nutraceuticals as depression treatment
(Series: critical commentaries on depression trials. Prior posts: 1, 2, 3, 4) Antidepressants only marginally outperform placebos (Khan & Brown, 2015) – which has led to a number of novel… Read more »
Hyperthermia as depression treatment
A few months back, a study was published in JAMA Psychiatry claiming that whole-body hyperthermia is an effective treatment for depression (UPDATE: the paper was published in full now on… Read more »
Adjunctive Brexpiprazole as depression treatment?
Dr. Fava and colleagues have published an antidepressant trial on adjunctive Brexpiprazole, a novel atypical antipsychotic drug that was developed to treat schizophrenia, in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry. The… Read more »
Is Seasonal Affective Disorder really just a “Folk Construct”?
Unpublished commentary. PDF, DOI 10.13140/RG.2.1.5149.7362. By: Eiko I. Fried, University of Leuven, Belgium Lauren M. Bylsma, University of Pittsburgh, USA Randolph M. Nesse, Arizona State University, USA After submitting the… Read more »
Common problems of factors models in psychopathology research
I recently stumbled across the paper “A metastructural model of mental disorders and pathological personality traits”, authored by Aidan Wright and Leonard Simms in 2015. I enjoyed reading it: it’s… Read more »
Prescribing antidepressants to depressed pregnant women
Dr Payne, director of the Women’s Mood Disorders Center and an associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Johns Hopkins University, has written a commentary on the website of… Read more »
Common depression scales are neither unidimensional nor measurement invariant
We published a new study in Psychological Assessment a few days ago, and I would like to take the time to explain what these results imply. You can find the… Read more »
Molecular Psychiatry commentary: Fried & Kievit 2015
On December 15th, Molecular Psychiatry published our commentary “The volumes of subcortical regions in depressed and healthy individuals are strikingly similar: a reinterpretation of the results by Schmaal et al”…. Read more »
Overinterpretation of SSRI study results: Halaris et al. 2015
Halaris and colleagues published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research in which they studied the impact of the SSRI antidepressant escitalopram (ESC) in a group of 30 depressed… Read more »
How to not interpret novel drug results: Fava et al. 2015
Imagine you are the editor of, or reviewer for, a very prestigious scientific journal, and you receive a paper about the efficacy of a novel drug for, say, cancer or… Read more »
New overview article in The Psychologist
The folks at The Psychologist were kind enough to publish a short overview piece that summarizes the current problems we are facing in depression research, the problematic assumptions the research… Read more »
New network study: What are good depression symptoms?
Our new paper “What are ‘good’ depression symptoms? Comparing the centrality of DSM and non-DSM symptoms of depression in a network analysis” was published in the Journal of Affective Disorders… Read more »
Video: Lecture on Symptomics in Psychiatry
I spent the last 2 weeks in Tempe, Arizona, working with the brilliant Randolph Nesse and his lab at the Center of Evolution and Medicine at Arizona State University. During… Read more »