Latest Mental Health News

It’s the invasion of the Can’t-Help-Yourself books.

Psychologists now believe fledgling psychopaths can be identified as early as kindergarten. The hope is to teach these children empathy before it’s too late.

A new book by a California psychologist examines obsessions with smartphones and other devices — and suggests ways to overcome the neediness.

We can hire others to do almost anything. But do we want to?

Meaningful increases in intelligence are not likely without a substantial commitment of resources.

Suicides by psychiatric in-patients have fallen to a new low, research just published has found...

During the six years following the withdrawal of the analgesic co-proxamol in the UK in 2005, there was a major reduction in poisoning deaths involving this drug, without apparent significant increase in deaths involving other analgesics. These are the findings of a study by Keith Hawton of the University of Oxford, UK and colleagues and published in this week's PLoS Medicine...

According to a study published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, children born after 42 weeks of pregnancy (post-term birth) are more likely to have behavioral and emotional problems, especially Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) problems, in early childhood...

The United States government would get a better bang for its health-care buck in managing the country's most prevalent childhood disabilities if it invested more in eliminating socio-environmental risk factors than in developing medicines...

People with a greater dopamine response in the reward and motivation areas of the brain - the striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex - tend to try harder, even when the odds are stacked up against them, compared to those with low dopamine response, researchers from University reported in The Journal of Neuroscience. The authors believe that dopamine influences cost-benefit analyses...

Patients with first-episode schizophrenia exhibit abnormalities in skin levels of certain ceramides, suggesting altered sphingolipid metabolism, German researchers report.

Results from a Dutch study suggest that exposure to lithium in utero has no significant long-term negative effects on growth, or neurologic, cognitive, and behavioral development in children.

Adolescents with acute mental illness are more likely to have vitamin D deficiency than healthy individuals, and such deficiency is linked to an increase in the risk for psychosis, say US scientists, although the benefits of supplementation remain unclear.

Antidepressants are frequently used to treat bipolar disorder depression, typically in more severe cases, which may underlie the poorer responses and high rates of mood switching in patients given antidepressants, conclude Spanish scientists.

Patients with early Parkinson’s disease take longer to initiate dopaminergic therapy if they are taking tricyclic antidepressants such as amitriptyline, as opposed to other classes of antidepressant or none, report researchers.