Online harms research publications: December 2022

This is a selection of research reports to enhance the online harms evidence base. This research has helped improve understanding of harms experienced by adults and children, as well as how online harm can be measured.

Blood tests for mental health problems | Eiko Fried

A new paper was published yesterday on a blood test for schizophrenia, by the same research team that in 2021 published a paper on a blood test for depression . The papers and...

UCLA discovers first stroke rehabilitation drug to repair brain damage

A new study by UCLA Health has discovered what researchers say is the first drug to fully reproduce the effects of physical stroke rehabilitation in model mice.

OpenAI shares data on ChatGPT users with suicidal thoughts, psychosis

The figure could mean potentially hundreds of thousands of users show signs of mental health distress weekly.

On Suicidality

Guest post by Sorbie Richner

A Statistical Interrogation of “The Case for Causality, Part 1” by Rausch and Haidt – Matthew B. Jané

I don’t know anything about the literature on social media and mental health so my focus on this post is to interrogate the statistical approach taken by the article written by Zach Rausch and Jonathon Haidt (link here) and to some extent the original meta-analysis by Ferguson.

Psychiatry at the Margins | Awais Aftab | Substack

Exploring critical, philosophical, and scientific debates in psychiatric practice and the psy-sciences. Click to read Psychiatry at the Margins, by Awais Aftab, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.

Depression doesn't shrink the brain like we thought it did | New Scientist

For the past decade, depression has been linked to a shrunken hippocampus, which has a vital role in memory. But a large study using up-to-date scanning techniques suggests this may not be the case

Experimentally manipulating social media abstinence: results of a four-week diary study

Social media use has a weak, negative association with well-being in cross-sectional and longitudinal research, but this association in experimental studies is mixed. This investigation explores wh...

Do social media experiments prove a link with mental health: A methodological and meta-analytic review.

I wanted ChatGPT to help me. So why did it advise me how to kill myself?

ChatGPT wrote a woman a suicide note and another AI chatbot role-played sexual acts with children, BBC finds.