If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
We analysed 14 million Reddit posts to reveal a striking shift in how we talk about mental health (The Conversation, May 28, 2026)
These analyses suggest that on Reddit the mental health landscape has been re-configured. Mood and anxiety disorders once dominated discussions. But discussions of mental health have increasingly pivoted to discussing conditions related to being neurodivergent.
When Covid hit, I started walking 20,000 steps a day. It’s changed my life: Setting a daily goal made me fitter, boosted my mood and allowed me to explore parts of New York I’d never seen before (Isaac Fitzgerald, 6 Nov 2020, The Guardian)
It felt good to move my body. And accomplishing something gave me a jolt of mood-lifting dopamine. In the middle of an achingly difficult year, here was a simple task I could complete – something good for me.Every morning after I woke, and every evening before bed, rain or shine I headed to the park and put one foot in front of the other.
This was a huge triumph. I’d made many attempts to regularly exercise in my adult life, and until now, nothing had stuck. I committed to a goal: 20,000 steps a day, or about 10 miles. As days turned into weeks turned into months, I didn’t always hit that goal, but it didn’t really matter. I walked every day, and if I logged only 15,000, or even 12,000 steps, still considered it a win.
Not surprisingly, walking day in and day out has had positive, if subtle, effects on my body. I’ve grown sturdier. My leg muscles are a little bigger and harder, and I feel generally stronger and more resilient.
It’s also had a positive effect on my mind. I feel sharper, more alert. My morning walks get me charged up for the day, and my sunset walk gives me a boost going into the evening, where before, I would just lie about, wondering why I was so tired.
While I keep my phone on me – how else can the app track my steps? – I try not to look at it while I’m walking. Taking a break from the tiny, upsetting digital universe I keep in my pocket frees me up to be attentive to the world my body moves through, to notice and connect with other walkers I encounter. One man always wears goggles. Another carries a large ball, sometimes bouncing or kicking or throwing it forward before running to catch up with it. There’s a group of women who must keep to the exact same schedule I do, given how often we run into each other. We all give each other the nod when we cross paths, and it feels good.
The brain’s code seems to be in constant flux. Neuroscientists are baffled (Diana Kwon, 5/20/26, Nature)
It is a dogma in neuroscience that certain brain cells respond in the same way to the same thing. Specific neurons always fire, for example, when we see particular shapes and colours; other neurons activate to swing an arm or wiggle a nose. The brain needs this stability, the theory goes, to respond to the outside world in a consistent way.
So, when neuroscientist Laura Driscoll began her doctoral research at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2012, her first task was to establish this baseline by tracking the activity of individual mouse neurons over time.
To Driscoll’s surprise, the baseline kept moving. Over the course of several days, many of the cells’ responses had shifted noticeably. Neurons that had fired when a mouse was in a specific location on day one were barely responding in the same spot after a few weeks. “It absolutely defied all of our expectations,” recalls Driscoll, who is now at the Allen Institute in Seattle, Washington. “This was so surprising that my whole project changed.”
In 2017, she and her colleagues reported findings from that project that flew in the face of neuroscience dogma.
Here’s What Psychiatrists Mean When They Say You Have A.D.H.D. (Awais Aftab, 5/11/26, NY Times)
When psychiatrists say that you “have A.D.H.D.,” what they really mean is something like this: After spending time listening to you, talking with people who know you and observing how you think and behave, I’ve made a judgment call that your experience fits a behavioral pattern we currently call A.D.H.D.
Are we over-diagnosing ourselves? Rethinking the language of mental illness.: As mental health diagnoses become more common and expansive, the labels meant to help us understand our suffering may instead oversimplify it. (Gavin Francis, May 5, 2026, Big Think)
“Life is inherently difficult,” wrote the English psychiatrist and pediatrician Donald Winnicott, and “it follows that in everyone there will be symptoms, any one of which, under certain conditions, could be a symptom of illness. Even the most kindly, understanding background of home life cannot alter the fact that ordinary human development is hard.”
When the feelings that filter through into our awareness are negative, then clinicians call them “symptoms.” When those feelings are positive, we tend to regard them simply as elements of well-being.
Why We’re Turning Psychiatric Labels Into Identities: So you’re on the spectrum, or you’ve got borderline personality disorder, or you’re a sociopath: once you’re sure that’s who you are, you’ve got a personal stake in a very creaky diagnostic system. (Manvir Singh, May 6, 2024, The New Yorker)
The DSM as we know it appeared in 1980, with the publication of the DSM-III. Whereas the first two editions featured broad classifications and a psychoanalytic perspective, the DSM-III favored more precise diagnostic criteria and a more scientific approach. Proponents hoped that research in genetics and neuroscience would corroborate the DSM’s groupings. Almost half a century later, however, the emerging picture is of overlapping conditions, of categories that blur rather than stand apart. No disorder has been tied to a specific gene or set of genes. Nearly all genetic vulnerabilities implicated in mental illness have been associated with many conditions. A review of more than five hundred fMRI studies of people engaged in specific tasks found that, although brain imaging can detect indicators of mental illness, it fails to distinguish between schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depression, and other conditions. The DSM’s approach to categorization increasingly looks arbitrary and anachronistic.
Steven Hyman, who directed the National Institute of Mental Health from 1996 to 2001, told the Times that he considered the manual an “absolute scientific nightmare.” In 2009, four leaders of the DSM-5 revision wrote about their hopes to “update our classification to recognize the most prominent syndromes that are actually present in nature.” The outcome didn’t live up to those aspirations. In April, 2013, weeks before the DSM-5’s slated release, Thomas Insel, then the director of the N.I.M.H., remarked, “The final product involves mostly modest alterations of the previous edition.” As a result, he announced, the institute “will be re-orienting its research away from DSM categories.”
In “DSM: A History of Psychiatry’s Bible” (2021), the medical sociologist Allan V. Horwitz presents reasons for the DSM-5’s botched revolution, including infighting among members of the working groups and the sidelining of clinicians during the revision process. But there’s a larger difficulty: revamping the DSM requires destroying kinds of people. As the philosopher Ian Hacking observed, labelling people is very different from labelling quarks or microbes. Quarks and microbes are indifferent to their labels; by contrast, human classifications change how “individuals experience themselves—and may even lead people to evolve their feelings and behavior in part because they are so classified.” Hacking’s best-known example is multiple personality disorder. Between 1972 and 1986, the number of cases of patients with multiple personalities exploded from the double digits to an estimated six thousand. Whatever one’s thoughts about the reality of M.P.D., he observed, everyone could agree that, in 1955, “this was not a way to be a person.” No such diagnosis existed. By 1986, though, multiple personality disorder was not only a recognized psychiatric label; it was also sanctioned by academics, popular books, talk shows, and, most important, the experiences of people with multiple personalities. Hacking referred to this process, in which naming creates the thing named—and in which the meaning of names can be affected, in turn, by the name bearers—as “dynamic nominalism.”
Three new books—Paige Layle’s “But Everyone Feels This Way: How an Autism Diagnosis Saved My Life,” Patric Gagne’s “Sociopath: A Memoir,” and Alexander Kriss’s “Borderline: The Biography of a Personality Disorder”—illustrate how psychiatric classification shapes the people it describes. It models social identities. It offers scripts for how to behave and explanations for one’s interior life. By promising to tell people who they really are, diagnosis produces personal stakes in the diagnostic system, fortifying it against upheaval.
Just as personality tests (see, I’m an introvert!), astrological signs (I’m a Libra!), and generational monikers (I’m Gen Z!) are used to aid self-understanding, so are psychiatric diagnoses.
Adopting an Identity is an effort to avoid personal responsibility.
Placebo effect can work as well as real medicine – but your body may need permission to use it (Phil Starks, April 21, 2026, The Conversation)
Placebo treatments tend to be more effective when delivered by credible authorities. Pills work better when prescribed by doctors wearing white coats. Expensive pills outperform cheap ones. Injections produce stronger responses than tablets.Some researchers have even removed the deception from placebo experiments entirely. In open-label placebo studies, patients are directly told they are receiving a placebo; and yet many still report significant improvement.
But look more closely at how these studies are run. Patients are not simply handed a sugar pill and sent home. They receive an explanation from a clinician, in a medical setting, within a structured ritual of care: a context that may be doing much of the biological work.
Even when the deception disappears, the social scaffolding remains. The permission to heal is still being granted by someone else.
The placebo effect is often framed as something happening inside an individual. But it does not operate in isolation.Consider what happens in veterinary medicine. Dogs and cats cannot believe a treatment they’re given will work; they have no concept of receiving medication. Yet when owners and vets believe an animal is being treated, they consistently report improvements in pain and mobility that medical tests do not confirm.
In one study of dogs with osteoarthritis, owners reported improvement roughly 57% of the time for animals receiving only a placebo.
‘They Said A.I. Saved Me’: How South Korea Is Checking on Its Seniors (Choe Sang-Hun, April 28, 2026, NY Times)
South Korea is aging faster than any other nation. In a mere 15 years, the number of people over 65 has doubled to more than a fifth of the population. The country does not have enough doctors, social workers or family caregivers to support its elderly. Artificial intelligence is helping fill some of that gap.Talking Buddy, a care call service developed by Naver Cloud and adopted by cities and counties across the country, checks on tens of thousands of seniors living alone in isolation or poverty. It holds tailored conversations that are two- to five-minutes long and designed to ease loneliness, detect emergencies and stimulate cognitive function to stave off dementia.
On a recent morning, the bot noted the fine weather and suggested that a walk would lift Ms. Chung’s spirits. When she mentioned planting flowers, the bot reminisced about “pink and white cosmos with a yellow center,” as if conjuring a memory.
The technology remains a work in progress. It occasionally cuts off a user midsentence or hallucinates unauthorized promises — like the time it impulsively offered to send bags of rice to a cash-strapped resident. Yet, users have embraced it with a warmth that has surprised even its creators. One woman confessed her depression to the bot, saying her dog ran away and never came back. Another played the piano for it; others invited it over for lunch, knowing full well it couldn’t come, according to social workers.“It makes me feel that I am not forgotten, that someone is paying attention to me,” Ms. Chung said.
Wildlife trade increases transmission of pathogens to humans by 50%: Study: Researchers analyzed the wildlife import-export data along with a compilation of host-pathogen relationships. (Maria Mocerino, Apr 12, 2026, Interesting Engineering)
Researchers from Yale, the University of Maryland, and Idaho investigated host-pathogen relationships and found, stunningly, that wild mammals are 1.5 times more likely to share infectious agents with humans. Illegal dealings even increase these adverse interactions.
“It is important to understand that the probability of being infected by playing a piano with ivory keys or wearing fur is almost nonexistent,” explains Jérôme Gippet, first author of the study. “The problem lies at the beginning of the chain: someone had to hunt the animal, skin it, transport it…”
Belief in the lab leak is just Sinophobia.
Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?: Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences (Michael Pollan, 19 Feb 2026, The Guardian)
So is the effort of sampling inner experiences a game worth the candle? The half century Hurlburt has spent collecting samples of conscious experience has yielded some interesting and important findings. The first finding, to which I can personally attest, is just how little most of us know about the characteristics of our own inner experiences. “That’s probably the most important finding that I’ve got,” Hurlburt said.
Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are “inner speakers”. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re “likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought”. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true.
But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.
The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar – not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognise the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word – thinking – and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.