Health

THE COUCH IS THE CAUSE, NOT THE CURE:

Unusual low-impact workout alleviates depression symptoms in weeks (Bronwyn Thompson, June 27, 2026, Refractor)

An international team of researchers found that adults with moderate to severe depression who took part in twice-weekly monitored Nordic walking sessions experienced substantial reductions in depressive symptoms, with the most dramatic improvements occurring during the first half of the 10-week program.

By the end of Week 10, between 35% and 53.6% of walkers had achieved what would be clinically described as remission.

ALL DECENT PEOPLE HATE SUMMER:

The Surprising Truth About Seasonal Depression (Maggie Mertens, 3/13/23, The Atlantic)

The term seasonal affective disorder, or rather its catchy acronym SAD, is so popular that it’s used in casual conversation. Steve LoBello, a psychologist and researcher at Auburn University at Montgomery, set out to do his own assessment of the nationwide scale of SAD—annual depression that follows a strict seasonal cycle, typically occurring in fall and winter and receding in spring and summer. LoBello and his team analyzed data from the CDC’s behavioral risk-factor survey, which asks hundreds of thousands of Americans each year about their health and well-being, including a separate screening for depression and anxiety, to see whether major depression rates followed a seasonal trend. “We expected cases to increase in the wintertime and then for that to subside starting in early spring and so forth, and there was nothing like that in the data,” LoBello told me of the study they published in 2016. “It was just flat as a pancake all the way through the year.” They also found no correlation between major depression and the respondent’s latitude (or hours of daylight). A couple of years later, in 2018, LoBello published another paper that found no correlation between even mild depression and the seasons. Still, the idea that we are all more likely to be sad and depressed in winter has dominated, and LoBello argues that that view is more steeped in folklore than science.

ABOVE AVERAGE IS OVER:

Two AIs just matched or beat doctors on diagnosis. The catch: none of the patients were real. (Ana Maria Constantin, June 19, 2026, Next Web)

The first system, Mira, was built by academic researchers in Germany.

Given access to a simulated medical record, it can choose from more than 85,000 actions: tests, prescriptions, even hospital admissions. Across more than 500 emergency-department cases, it reached a diagnostic accuracy of about 87 per cent, against 78 per cent for a panel of six doctors. It was strongest on conditions with clear test results, such as pancreatitis and appendicitis.

The second, Amie, is Google’s, and runs on its Gemini model.

Tested against 21 UK GPs across 100 multi-visit cases, it matched them on clinical reasoning and produced treatment plans that stuck more closely to official guidelines. On a benchmark for tricky medication decisions, it came out ahead.

LUDDISM NEVER HELPS:

What If AI Chatbots Are Saving Lives?: The case for banning teens from AI chatbots rests more on fear than evidence. (Adam Omary and Jennifer Huddleston, Jun 10, 2026, Human Progress)

In a survey of over 1,000 adolescents and young adults, 13 percent had used a chatbot for mental health support, and more than 90 percent of those found it helpful. In another study of over 1,000 users of Replika, a popular AI chatbot, 30 reported without solicitation that their artificial companion saved them from suicide.

We do not know how many lives generative AI has saved by improving access to mental health care. But for every incidence of AI psychosis or suicide, there may be dozens of unobserved positive outcomes. Policy that presumes only the worst outcomes also prevents the best.

GETTING IN ON THE LATEST FAD:

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.

ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER:

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.

MATERIALISM IS A HOAX:

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.

“IF I PRETEND WILL YOU STOP BUGGING ME…”

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.

MOOD IS NOT ILLNESS:

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.

IDENTITARIANISM RUN AMOK:

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.