Volume 1 Issue 3, March 2023

We spoke to Thema S. Bryant — the 2023 president of the American Psychological Association (APA), academic, author, podcaster and pastor — about the many roles she has and her singular vision for more inclusive psychology.

Socioeconomic inequalities are antecedents for poor mental health outcomes. Mental illness is highly prevalent internationally — impacting 1 in 8 people, with incidence of anxiety and depression skyrocketing during the pandemic. In the USA, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, the economic outlook remains bleak.

Grace Gatera and Shuranjeet Singh reflect on the benefits of lived experience involvement in mental health science.

Moving the needle in mental health research requires doing justice to the social, psychological, biological and developmental complexities that affect people in their living environments. We developed a comprehensive national research program to achieve scale and depth through translational project bundles focused on early recognition and prevention, urban mental health, and enhanced psychotherapy, underpinned by a range of shared infrastructures. The program was consistently co-created with and will involve people with lived experience at all stages of research.

A new survey from the International Alliance of Mental Health Research Funders explores how funders collaborate with people with lived experience of mental health challenges, and reveals potential routes to improve involvement.

Tully et al. detected increased variability in brain total grey matter volume in individuals with disruptive behaviour disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

Cash et al. examined whether coordinates derived from neuroimaging studies might delineate a dysfunctional brain network in unipolar depression rather than isolated neuroanatomical foci. The authors found highly robust distributed brain networks that closely recapitulate clinically meaningful models of depression circuitry.

Using data-driven disease-progression modelling, Jiang, Wang, Zhou et al. characterized and replicated two distinct ‘trajectories’ of brain atrophy in patients with schizophrenia.

Seitz-Holland et al. examined the relationship between systemic cellular senescence markers and clinical variables in late-life depression. The authors find that signs of enhanced cellular senescence are associated with poor cardiometabolic health, older age, male sex and worse cognition.

Using a sample of more than 1 million individuals, Hatoum et al. identify genomic loci associated with general and substance-specific addiction risk.