MentalHealthDaily

1 mg Guanfacine for Self-Harm Thoughts in ADHD-PTSD-BPD Case

by GLOOM

MHD featured image for 1 mg guanfacine and self-harm thoughts in complex ADHD, PTSD, BPD, and ASD comorbidity.

A 2026 case report linked 1 mg nightly guanfacine modified-release to first-ever cessation of intrusive deliberate self-harm thoughts in a 16-year-old with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD) traits, borderline personality disorder (BPD) traits, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The same case became more interesting after the patient stopped taking guanfacine and the self-harm …

IV Clomipramine Shows No Clear Edge in Depression or OCD

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of an IV infusion bag and capsule with brain imagery, conveying parenteral vs oral antidepressant pharmacokinetics.

Parenteral clomipramine has a strong clinical myth around it: bypass the gut, raise parent-drug exposure quickly, and maybe accelerate rescue in severe depression or OCD. A 2026 systematic review found the route advantage was not clearly proven: in depression, 5 RCTs without high risk of bias did not show clear IV or IM superiority over …

Dexamethasone Disrupts Mouse Sleep Through Orexin Hyperarousal

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of a steroid pill bottle with overlay of disrupted sleep architecture, conveying glucocorticoid-induced insomnia mechanism.

A 2026 male-mouse study found that 30 mg/kg dexamethasone for 5 days increased light-phase wakefulness (t13 = 4.122, p = 0.0012), decreased NREM sleep (t13 = 4.412, p = 0.0007), and amplified orexin-neuron activity during NREM-to-wake transitions (F1,9 = 6.941, p = 0.0272). The result points to orexin-linked hyperarousal as a testable explanation for steroid-induced …

Lithium Loading Dose Did Not Clearly Beat Standard Acute-Mania Titration

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of lithium tablets and blood-level monitoring chart, conveying acute-mania pharmacological strategy.

A 60-patient randomized trial of lithium loading for acute bipolar I mania reported faster serum lithium attainment than standard titration and a larger 14-day Young Mania Rating Scale (YMRS) change score, but the same accepted manuscript says absolute YMRS scores at Days 3, 7, and 14 were not significantly different between the 2 arms when …

Drug Addiction Linked to Cortical Thinning in 65 of 68 Brain Regions

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of a human brain with cortical regions highlighted across substance categories, representing the cross-substance morphometric pattern in addiction.

Whether alcohol, cocaine, nicotine, and cannabis damage the same brain regions or different brain regions has been hard to settle in the addiction-imaging literature. A 2026 ENIGMA Addiction analysis by Georgiadis et al. — pooling 4,733 brains across 51 sites — now has an answer. Research Highlights Across 2,782 people with substance use disorder (SUD) …

Psychedelic Hallucinations May Reflect Wake-Time Memory Replay

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of a brain shifting between perception and generative imagery under psychedelic influence.

A 2026 eLife computational study modeled classical psychedelics by increasing a network state variable from alpha = 0 to alpha = 1, shifting perception from bottom-up sensory inference toward top-down generative replay. The result is a useful but still unproven oneirogen model: hallucinations look less like random noise and more like wake-time replay of a …

Cannabis After Pregnancy Did Not Increase Hypertension Risk in nuMoM2b

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration of a postpartum woman with stethoscope and cannabis imagery, conveying cardiovascular implications of postpartum cannabis use.

A 2026 nuMoM2b Heart Health Study analysis tested whether urine-confirmed cannabis exposure 2–7 years after a first pregnancy predicted incident stage II hypertension; it did not: adjusted odds ratio (AOR) 1.05, 95% CI 0.63–1.76, with 216 of 4,079 participants developing hypertension.1 Research Highlights The headline result was null: cannabis exposure at the 2–7 year postpartum …