One of the fundamental shortcomings of the empirical psychological literature on mental disorders, personality aspects, intelligence, or emotions is that there is a lack of depth regarding the discussion what these psychological constructs are. Researchers often use statistical models such as factor models and find 3 depression factors or 5 personality factors, but it remains… Read more »
I had the honor to chair 2 symposia at the International Convention of Psychological Science in Vienna the last days, and gave 3 talks. You can find all presentations below.
Our paper “Estimating psychological networks and their accuracy: a tutorial paper” was published in Behavioral Research Methods as open access paper! You can find the full paper here, and the supplementary materials here. In this paper, we raise the possible danger of an upcoming replicability crisis consistent with the rest of psychology, given that we… Read more »
I wrote this commentary together with Adam Chekroud. You can find a PDF version of this commentary here. Introduction The largest and longest investigation of treatment-resistant depression (TRD) to date, the Sequenced Treatment Alternatives to Relieve Depression (STAR*D), was conducted in four stages. Each stage comprised a different medication, and patients moved to the next… Read more »
I published a new paper in the Journal of Affective Disorders entitled “The 52 symptoms of major depression: Lack of content overlap among seven common depression scales” (PDF). The paper examines content overlap of 7 common depression scales, and concludes that the scales feature 52 distinct depression symptoms that are listed in the main Figure… Read more »
After reviewing the paper “The relative responsiveness of test instruments can be estimated using a meta-analytic approach: an illustration with treatments for depression” by Kounali et al. 2016, the editor invited me to write a response because I raised the point that a large amount of researchers seem to misunderstand the concept of scale responsiveness…. Read more »
We have a new commentary in Molecular Psychiatry entitled “Problems with latent class analysis to detect data-driven subtypes of depression” (PDF; together with the fantastic Hanna van Loo, Rob Wanders & Klaas Wardenaar). This was a response to numerous papers over the last years that found separate latent classes in depression that may be statistical… Read more »
We have a new network paper out in Psychological Medicine entitled “Network Analysis of Depression and Anxiety Symptom Relations in a Psychiatric Sample” (PDF). I tend to think of the paper as a state-of-the-art replication of the great comorbidity paper by Cramer et al. 2010 who investigated the comorbidity of depression and generalized anxiety disorder…. Read more »
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, we are looking for papers on: PTSD symptom networks, either on the level of groups or individuals, in cross-sectional or time-series data The stability of… Read more »
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 a small sample of 14 participants who have the problem Y. You give these 14 participants your novel drug, but you do not enroll a… Read more »
(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 strategies to try to improve treatment for patients suffering from depressive disorders. Adjunctive Nutraceuticals present one such strategy: providing patients with specific forms of dietary… Read more »
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 August 6th 2016, some time after the online first print). For those who don’t know psychiatric journals very well, JAMA Psychiatry is currently ranked highest… Read more »
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 trial consisted of 4 steps: The authors carefully selected 50 patients who had not shown improvements with their current antidepressant. These patients received 2 more… Read more »
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 commentary to Clinical Psych Science, the Editor wrote us that they generally do not publish commentaries, despite the website stating they do. Unfortunate … we’ll… Read more »
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 a strong methodological paper, using state-of-the-art exploratory structural equation models (ESEM). It would have been a pleasure for me to review this paper: a very… Read more »