Computational Psychiatry Needs Systems Neuroscience

This piece was originally published in The Transmitter. I am adapting it here with some additional context for readers of this newsletter.

Eiko Fried (@eikofried.bsky.social)

Professor of Mental Health & Data Science at Leiden University. Studying mental health problems as systems (http://eiko-fried.com). Building an early warning system for depression (http://WARN-D.com).

Dylan Wiliam on Twitter / X

The best journal article titles tell you what the study actually found, rather than being a teaser to make you read the paper. Here's a good example: "Spaced mathematics practice improves test scores and reduces overconfidence" https://t.co/iXxdkAgYPM ($)— Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) December 31, 2024

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

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.

Dysthymia

Dysthymia is a milder, yet long-lasting form of depression.

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.

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...

Cas (Stephen Casper) on Twitter / X

It is hard to overstate how disappointing I think this new paper from Oxford, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google (et al) is. I can't take it seriously as academic work, just as propaganda. It also has some very bad scholarship and questionable adherence to research ethics. Having… pic.twitter.com/Z5fBx360ya— Cas (Stephen Casper) (@StephenLCasper) May 13, 2026

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.