Volume 1 Issue 4, April 2023

Mental health is essential to a person’s wellbeing, and mental health is a crucial component of the positive functioning and flourishing of families, communities and societies. At CNS Summit 2022, held 17–20 November 2022, Murali Doraiswamy asked Joshua Gordon from the National Institute of Mental Health to explain current limitations in the field of psychiatry and future steps to overcome these impediments.

In this Comment, Patwary et al. discuss the mental health needs of the Turkey–Syria earthquake survivors from an internal point of view, providing suggestions on what could be done for short- and long-term mental health improvement.

The mental health implications of the 2023 Turkey–Syria earthquake will probably be profound. Here we present research from prior disasters related to the potential negative mental health effects of the earthquake and its aftermath and provide suggestions for mitigating potential deleterious consequences.

Unipolar depression is a common mental disorder that is increasingly treated with neuroimaging-guided therapeutics. Cash et al. use brain connectomics in 57 heterogeneous neuroimaging studies to report meta-analytic brain networks linked to aberrant emotional and cognitive processing in individuals with unipolar depression.

This study used the DSM-5-recommended diagnostic standard to conduct a nationwide multi-center survey of the non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) behavior of patients with psychiatric conditions. We investigated the prevalence of NSSI in 3,407 patients of various ages and with various psychiatric diagnoses from 15 hospitals in China.

Occhipinti and co-authors argue in this Perspective that by contrast to gross domestic product, the Mental Wealth metric provides an improved indicator for assessing economic and social production, including brain capital, measuring mental health and capital and emotional health and well-being.

Analysis of large-scale representative data from the Chinese National Transgender Survey finds that exposure to gender identity conversion practice is a risk factor for mental health problems, worsens mental health disorder severity and increases suicidality.

In the broader literature and across country contexts, higher levels of non-suicidal self-injury in adolescents and young adults have been reported. These data are a rare, robust and valuable contribution in documenting differences in non-suicidal self-injury in a large, nationally representative sample in China where the participants were diagnosed with Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition criteria.

In this analysis, authors examined the potential interaction of later-life emergent and persistent psychotic symptoms with race and cognition on incident dementia, finding that participants with mild behavioural impairment (MBI) psychosis were at greater risk for incident dementia than those who had no neuropsychiatric symptoms (NPS). Moreover, the risk of incident dementia for Black participants with MBI-psychosis was elevated.

Using machine learning, Zhang et al. identify EEG signature to predict psychotherapy outcomes in PTSD, paving the way towards the development of scalable biomarkers.