MentalHealthDaily

Black Americans Diagnosed with Schizophrenia 2.42x the Rate of White Americans: More Negative Symptoms

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration representing racial stress and mental health, with conceptual imagery of contemplation, identity, and cognitive pathways.

Black Americans are diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders at 2.42 times the rate of White Americans, and they also score higher on negative-symptom measures than White patients carrying the same diagnosis.2 A 2026 paper by Spann and colleagues asks why. Research Highlights Black Americans are diagnosed with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders at 2.42x the rate of White Americans, …

Risperidone Stroke Risk in Dementia: HR 1.28 Across CVD Subgroups

by GLOOM

Conceptual illustration of cerebral blood vessels and a pill, representing risperidone-associated stroke risk in dementia patients.

The risperidone-stroke link in dementia is one of the longest-running safety signals in geriatric psychiatry, anchoring the FDA’s 2005 black-box warning on atypical antipsychotic mortality. Popular framing reduces it to “antipsychotics cause stroke in dementia” — a true sentence that flattens a multi-axis decision. Choma’s 2025 analysis of UK primary care records is the largest …

Lithium in Pregnancy: Why Late Discontinuation Backfires

by GLOOM

Photoreal illustration representing lithium prescribing decisions during pregnancy, with imagery of a pregnant figure and pharmaceutical motifs.

Lithium prescribing during pregnancy sits in a knot of competing risks. The teratogenicity data have been recalibrated dramatically since the 1970s, while the postpartum-relapse data have moved in the opposite direction. Most popular framing still treats lithium as a uniquely dangerous fetal exposure to be avoided when possible. The new Chauhan UK cohort shows what …

Maternal Health and Autism Risk: Most Links Are Genetic, Not Prenatal

by GLOOM

Stylized illustration of a multi-generation family tree branching into cousin pairs, representing the 3-generation registry design used to separate inherited from in-utero genetic effects on autism risk.

For two decades, headlines have linked autism to maternal obesity, depression, anxiety, gestational diabetes, infection, autoimmune disease, and antidepressant use. The studies behind those headlines are well-replicated registry associations. A new design from the Aarhus University iPSYCH group offers the most careful answer yet to what they mean for an individual pregnancy. Most “maternal X …

Ketamine Addiction After One Therapeutic Dose: How Rare Is It?

by GLOOM

Stylized illustration evoking the tension between ketamine's clinical promise for depression and its abuse liability, framed in muted rose and amber tones for the addiction topic.

Ketamine and its S-enantiomer esketamine (sold as Spravato) are now established treatments for treatment-resistant depression and acute suicidality. The standard safety pitch from sponsors and clinics: at single sub-anesthetic doses, in supervised settings, addiction risk is minimal. A new case report in BJPsych Open documents a patient for whom that pitch failed catastrophically — and …

Lupus Psychosis: 4.5% Prevalence and Antibody Predictors

by GLOOM

Stylized illustration of autoantibodies and immune complexes crossing a disrupted blood-brain barrier, evoking the immune-mediated mechanism by which lupus produces psychosis.

Psychosis is one of 19 neuropsychiatric syndromes the American College of Rheumatology recognizes as attributable to systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE), an autoimmune disease that disproportionately affects young women.2 A 2026 systematic review and meta-analysis from Parperis and colleagues in Lupus pooled 65 studies and 31,495 patients.1 The synthesis matters less for the headline 4.5% prevalence …

ECT: A Modern Reappraisal of Suicide, Dementia, and Mortality

by GLOOM

Stylized illustration representing modern electroconvulsive therapy as a calibrated, evidence-supported treatment for severe and treatment-resistant depression.

Modern administrative cohorts find no dementia signal for ECT and link it to lower suicide and mortality. The supportive literature carries known biases worth flagging.