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As Nature Mental Health closes in on one year of publication, there is a special opportunity to reflect on the state of mental health in 2023 to shape the mental health priorities for 2024. The journal considers the role of some of these defining issues as it readies for the new year.
This Perspective presents concepts and foundations of data analysis and interpretation of microbiome experiments with a focus on the microbiome–gut–brain axis domain.
In this Perspective, the authors present techniques from other disciplines that could help to enrich and inform the analysis of microbiome–gut–brain axis data.
Chiba & Ide et al. used the data from a Japanese longitudinal cohort study to investigate the suicide risk in the general population before and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Nicotine withdrawal and anxiety symptoms are overlapping barriers to smoking cessation. We examined the effects of a smoking cessation treatment — noninvasive neuromodulation — on nicotine withdrawal and anxiety symptoms, which revealed information on how neuromodulation can treat substance use disorders.
Short-lived online social network experiments show that making the in-game wealth of immediate neighbors invisible improves the subjective wellbeing (SWB) of poorer participants. This status invisibility reduced the strength of the positive association between in-game wealth and SWB in social networks. However, in real-world settings, status is often visible.
In this Perspective the authors detail the potentially parallel systemic economic risk of psychological distress and climate change, and argue for the adoption of a similar set of policy interventions, including bolstering cross-agency capability and capacity and increased investment in targeting root causes and solutions.
A neuroimaging study using repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation on unmedicated patients with depression reveals a link between response in the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex and clinical improvement.
Using two series of online experiments involving a public goods game and manipulation of wealth visibility, the authors show that invisible wealth achieved higher subjective well-being, particularly among poorer subjects leading to a reduction in the economic gradient in well-being.
In this randomized, crossover study, the authors applied high-frequency repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or to the visual cortex (V5) in patients with tobacco use disorder to elucidate the underlying cognitive and affective mechanisms of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for smoking cessation.
Voetterl and colleagues examined the application of ‘Brainmarker-I’, an age- and sex-normalized electroencephalogram measure of individual alpha peak frequency, on predicting remission to therapeutic noninvasive neuromodulation protocols (repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and electroconvulsive therapy).
Deciding between treatments in depression relies on trial-and-error following the stepped-care approach (escalating to more intensive treatments after treatment failures). Recent research is focused on biomarkers and precision psychiatry; however, we argue that stratified psychiatry could be a practical alternative for individuals with mental health disorders.
Hansen et al. investigate the applicability of machine learning models in identifying diagnosis-specific speech or text-based markers of neuropsychiatric disorders.
Early evidence suggests psychedelics could help alleviate end-of-life anxiety and depression. Yet there has been little study or discussion of their integration into hospice and palliative care settings, where patients often have complex comorbidities and medication regimens. The authors discuss relevant clinical challenges and approaches.
This Comment proposes to increase knowledge of the effects of urbanicity on brain and mental health by linking existing human spatial data with macroenvironmental and regional socioeconomic data. It introduces hypothesis-free models to capture the data and model life in the city and suggests refinements for future studies into conditions that will soon affect the majority of the earth’s population.
The world’s population is becoming increasingly urbanized, which brings new considerations for the effects of urbanicity on physical and mental health. Despite the complexity, there is a tremendous opportunity for research to use new tools to examine the reciprocal relationship between mental health and urban environments to improve outcomes and communities.
Analysis of brain functional connectivity cross-scan stability in a large-scale Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development dataset reveals that functional network connectivity can identify a given child from a large group with high accuracy and that variations across scans are associated with a range of health measures.
In this Perspective, Kucyi and co-authors explore some of the recent developments in neuroscience, including investigations of network dynamics and neural mechanisms that support off-task thoughts, and consider the implications for maladaptive forms of thought in mental health.
