Category: Research Publications

The MAHA Commission promises to address causes of chronic disease, including those related to mental health. Such a commission could address important barriers in the mental health community. But this Open Forum highlights evidence that the MAHA Commission may not only fail to address these barriers but also exacerbate them...

Description and characterization of an outpatient psychiatry consultation model within a large academic training clinic. The model was associated with observed improvement in depression and anxiety symptoms in those who completed consultation.

We investigated predictors of autism traits in the CDC’s Study to Explore Early Development (SEED), one of the largest studies of young autistic children (ages 2–5 years) in the United States. We found that lower levels of cognitive functioning were associated with greater increases in autism traits between early childhood...

Postpartum psychosis (PPP) is a rare but severe postpartum psychiatric emergency that occurs during a critical time in mother-infant attachment. This study investigated the efficacy, safety, and tolerability of brexanolone, a neuroactive steroid and synthetic form of allopregnanolone, for adult females with PPP.

Microglia are brain cells involved in innate immune responses. This publication finds unique changes in microglia in the post-mortem cerebral cortex of individuals with alcohol use disorder and links them to activation of astrocytes and loss of neurons.

This special issue for the Journal of Healthcare Chaplaincy examines how chaplaincy is evolving and adapting to provide relevant and critical spiritual care services in a time of increasing religious pluralism. Dr. Nieuwsma oversaw the special issue as the senior associate editor.

Our work uncovers a unifying synchronization principle behind both brain rhythms and machine intelligence. By modeling neural oscillations and embedding their dynamics into graph neural networks, we develop a new brain-inspired framework (HoloBrain/HoloGraph) that overcomes GNN over-smoothing and enables more powerful reasoning on graphs.

This study reveals that psilocin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, reduces alcohol consumption in female mice by suppressing specific stress-related neurons in the brain. These findings offer new insight into the biological mechanisms that may allow psychedelic therapies to effectively treat alcohol use disorder.

Restricted and repetitive behaviors (RRBs) are a core symptom of autism. The current diagnostic system separates RRBs into four domains. These findings suggest that, based on data driven methods, RRBs may be best understood as 3 domains in verbally-able individuals and 2 domains in non-verbal individuals.

To improve access to care, we are developing and testing First Approach Skills Training- Disordered Eating (FAST-DE), a brief intervention to treat disordered eating in primary care settings. In this study, we conducted focus groups with adolescents and caregivers from the Latino community who had lived experience with disordered eating...