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The Accelerating Medicines Partnership® Schizophrenia (AMP®SCZ) is a large-scale study designed to identify biomarkers that predict and explain clinical outcomes in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis. Nearly 2,000 CHR and 640 community participants will be followed for two years, with biomarker assessments at baseline and two months....

In the canonical model of sensory processing, primary sensory cortex initiates a hierarchical transmission of information to higher-order cortices. Here, we identified alternative sensory pathways that bypass the primary auditory cortex and directly activate higher-order cortex within <10 ms, revealing parallel and distributed processing of fast sensory information across cortical...

The concepts set and setting have been thought to be crucial to outcomes from psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy for 50 years, but they have faced several methodological challenges. Here we highlight an underappreciated challenge: that they have been vaguely defined in a way that limits research advances and clinical guidance. After outlining...

Ovarian steroids, like estrogen and progesterone, affect brain activity, including energy use and serotonin signaling, especially during changes in the female reproductive cycle or menopause. Studies using brain imaging techniques suggest these hormones can influence brain metabolism and might have potential roles in brain protection and inflammation, but more research...

On June 18–19, 2025, ACCESS Mental Health welcomed ten undergraduate students from local universities to the UNC School of Medicine’s Roper Hall for the inaugural 2025 Psychiatry Careers Pathway Program (PCPP), a two-day immersive experience for undergraduate students to explore psychiatry as a potential career. Throughout the program, students engaged...

Via usual smartphone use following trauma exposure, this study identified language markers associated with patient-reported severity and change in severity for multiple symptoms. Using language markers as a proxy for the status of and changes in specific symptoms supports efficient remote health status monitoring and can provide clinicians with valuable...

Hyperarousal symptoms such as jumpiness and over-alertness are central features of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and are partly explained by hyper-reactivity of the right amygdala, a brain region involved in emotional learning. In the current study, we found that people who showed right amygdala hyper-reactivity shortly after trauma were more...

In a survey of adults with cystic fibrosis attending a large, academic medical center, 32% scored high enough on a standardized screening tool to suggest they probably have obsessive-compulsive disorder. This rate is much higher than the rate in the general population and 2-3 times higher than in other populations...