217 papers
Understanding the human mind and treating mental health conditions requires a deep blend of biological insight and behavioral science. This category explores the cutting-edge research shaping how we diagnose and treat psychiatric disorders, from depression and anxiety to complex neurological conditions. Here, you will find the latest discoveries that bridge the gap between clinical observation and molecular mechanisms, offering fresh perspectives on patient care and therapeutic innovation.
Gist.Science brings these vital studies directly to you by monitoring medRxiv, the leading preprint server for health sciences. As soon as new manuscripts appear in this field, our team processes them to provide both accessible plain-language summaries and detailed technical overviews. This ensures that complex findings are understandable for everyone, from curious readers to busy professionals who need quick, accurate insights without wading through dense academic prose.
Below are the most recent psychiatry and clinical psychology preprints, curated and summarized to keep you informed on the evolving landscape of mental health research.
This study of 1,247 UK adults demonstrates that AI literacy fosters sustained engagement with AI-powered cognitive behavioural therapy primarily by enhancing trust and perceived therapeutic alliance, though these positive pathways are significantly weakened by mental health stigma.
This paper outlines the protocol for a randomized pilot trial evaluating the feasibility, acceptability, and preliminary effectiveness of COMPASS, an open-source, culturally adapted cognitive behavioral therapy program delivered by lay providers to forcibly displaced Venezuelan adults in Peru.
This study demonstrates that while long-term functioning and quality of life in first-episode schizophrenia patients cannot be reliably predicted from baseline measures alone and require at least one year of follow-up data, negative symptoms can be predicted earlier using baseline severity and duration of untreated psychosis, suggesting distinct underlying mechanisms for these outcome phenotypes.
This study utilizes computational modeling of decision-making tasks to demonstrate that early psychosis is characterized by distinct neurocomputational subtypes driven by elevated uncertainty sensitivity and decision noise, which cause premature transitions from exploitation to exploration independent of reward learning deficits.
This study reveals that dementia remains statistically invisible in the correctional systems of Japan, the US, the UK, and Australia due to three structural mechanisms—reliance on declining self-reports, the absence of a specific dementia classification category, and a lack of routine data collection—rather than clinical ignorance, thereby creating a critical failure in health surveillance for aging prison populations.
This randomized controlled trial demonstrates that a tailored smartphone app (DrinksRation) significantly reduced weekly alcohol consumption and hazardous drinking scores among women UK Armed Forces veterans compared to a standard web-based advice control, while also showing high usability and strong engagement.
This study demonstrates that psychedelics (psilocybin and 2C-B) induce a sustained state of Self-Other mergence by reducing inhibitory neural connectivity from the right temporoparietal junction to the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, a neurocomputational change associated with improved psychosocial wellbeing.
This cross-sectional study provides preliminary evidence that Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is associated with systemic and cellular immunometabolic alterations, specifically characterized by heightened glycolysis and oxidative pentose phosphate pathway activity alongside elevated interleukin-6 levels, despite comparable inflammatory gene expression.
This study replicates findings from Norway by demonstrating that the educational attainment gap between students with ADHD or internalising disorders and their peers in South East London has narrowed over time, a trend that cannot be explained by an earlier age at first diagnosis.
This systematic review and meta-analysis of 33 studies found no significant association between retinal thickness abnormalities and anxiety, depression, or substance use disorders, highlighting substantial heterogeneity and publication bias that currently limit the utility of optical coherence tomography as a reliable biomarker for these conditions.