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Recovery Update features the most recent articles from throughout the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. Stay up to date on all the latest mental health news through this weekly newsletter.
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A New Mexico court has ordered Meta, the parent company of Facebook, to pay $567M into a fund aimed at redressing adverse mental health impacts from the social media giant's platforms. The ruling comes as a part of the second phase of a landmark trial the social media giant lost in March. At the time, a jury found that the company knowingly harmed children's mental health and concealed what it knew about child sexual exploitation on its platforms, and imposed the maximum penalty: a $375M fine.
In the matter of a few clicks and keystrokes, anyone can find themselves deep in conversation with "Psychologist," a chatbot character that describes itself as an expert in "empathy" and "active listening." It responds to messages of anxiety and sadness with reassurance. It asks questions and offers advice; it even responds with italicized nonverbal cues: "The psychologist's expression softens with compassion."
One of the most vexing problems caused by the pandemic was the toll it took on the mental health of young people. Students struggled with school closures, isolation from their friends, and the difficulties of remote learning.
Indiana officials say the state's push to ensure criminal defendants are competent before trial has reached a breaking point, and it leaves little room for other patients who need psychiatric care. That determination happens through a competency evaluation — a court-ordered assessment of whether a defendant can understand the charges against them and assist in their own defense.
More than 60 House Democrats are pressing Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins for answers about how the agency's mental healthcare has been increasingly strained under President Donald Trump's second administration.
In the last three decades, as involuntary outpatient treatment for people with serious mental health conditions like schizophrenia have expanded to almost every state, the evidence for these programs' efficacy has remained murky. A new evaluation of New York's involuntary outpatient treatment program adds another wrinkle to the complex existing scientific literature on this type of care.
Millions of users turn to consumer artificial intelligence chatbots to discuss emotional, behavioral and mental-health concerns, creating an urgent need for rigorous and scalable safety evaluations. Here we introduce simulated (SIM) vulnerability-amplifying interaction loops (VAILs) (SIM-VAIL), a clinically validated framework for auditing chatbot behavior in mental-health contexts.
Faced with the fact that many AI users treat their chatbots as life coaches, counselors, and therapists, developers of the biggest and best-known large language models now employ psychologists and psychiatrists as "safety experts" to guide the training of new models in these nuanced and high-risk contexts.
The question is no longer whether young people are using AI for mental health care, but the soundness of the advice they receive, health officials say. A recent survey showed that the use of AI chatbots for mental health care among adolescents and young adults has increased 60% in just a year, a trend that survey organizers said is likely to continue.
Noninfectious uveitis was linked to markedly higher rates of various psychiatric conditions, with Black patients disproportionately affected, an analysis of a nationwide U.S. cohort reported. Despite this elevated psychiatric burden, mental health screening was rarely performed, with fewer than 5% of patients completing Patient Health Questionnaires (PHQs).
Mental health conditions are more common among autistic individuals than in the general population, but knowledge about how physical and mental health interact over time has been limited. In the new study, researchers analyzed data from nearly 2 million individuals born in Sweden between 1985 and 2004, including more than 58,000 people diagnosed with autism.
A study led by the Central Institute of Mental Health (CIMH) provides initial evidence that large language models can identify complex psychopathological findings in transcripts of psychiatric interviews with accuracy comparable to that of predominantly young clinicians. The study examined 10 language models and 108 practicing clinicians from three psychiatric clinics.
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