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one night in October she logged on to character.ai – a neural language model that can impersonate anyone from Socrates to Beyoncé to Harry Potter – and, with a few clicks, built herself a personal “psychologist” character. From a list of possible attributes, she made her bot “caring”, “supportive” and “intelligent”. “Just what you would want the ideal person to be,” Christa tells me. She named her Christa 2077: she imagined it as a future, happier version of herself.

Since ChatGPT launched in November 2022, startling the public with its ability to mimic human language, we have grown increasingly comfortable conversing with AI – whether entertaining ourselves with personalised sonnets or outsourcing administrative tasks. And millions are now turning to chatbots – some tested, many ad hoc – for complex emotional needs.

ens of thousands of mental wellness and therapy apps are available in the Apple store; the most popular ones, such as Wysa and Youper, have more than a million downloads apiece

The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting people's mental health.

The Covid-19 pandemic is impacting people's mental health.

"On the one hand, such drastic changes to daily routines can be detrimental to mental health," explains Professor Andrew Gloster from the University of Basel, co-leader of the study now published in PLOS One. "On the other hand, because the entire population was more or less equally affected during the lockdown, it remained unclear whether this impact would occur."

Anxiety has now surpassed depression as the most common mental health diagnosis among college students, though depression, too, is on the rise. More than half of students visiting campus clinics cite anxiety as a health concern,

Nearly one in six college students has been diagnosed with or treated for anxiety within the last 12 months

The causes range widely, experts say, from mounting academic pressure at earlier ages to overprotective parents to compulsive engagement with social media.

There’s a consensus that the Covid-19 pandemic and lockdowns have created a mental-health crisis, as increasing numbers of children and adolescents suffer with depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. It’s more accurate to say that Covid exacerbated a crisis that was already building.

the way to protect children’s mental well-being in the long term is strong parental care from an early age.

Many stressors play a role in the current mental health crisis: academic and social pressure, unrealistic parental expectations, political and financial instability, the overpowering presence of social media and other technology, and the loss of community in favor of individualism.

the lab offers this answer: Sunday, May 31. That day was not only the saddest day of 2020 so far, it was also the saddest day recorded by the lab in the last 13 years. Or at least, the saddest day on Twitter.

measuring word choices across millions of tweets, every day, the world over, to come up with a moving measure of well-being.

the main finding to emerge was our tendency toward relentless positivity on social media.

Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.

Van Gogh dismissed the episode as "a simple artist's bout of craziness" and later a "mental or nervous fever".But research in the Netherlands has thrown new light on his mental state.

In Van Gogh's case, the epileptic activity could have been caused by brain damage as a result of his lifestyle. Alcohol abuse, malnutrition, poor sleep and mental exhaustion could all have been factors, researchers say.

given the range of evidence and the fact that the biggest increases relate to a specific group (teenage girls) and a specific set of issues clustered around anxiety and body image I would assign a high probability to it being a real issue. Especially as it fits the anecdotal conservations I have with headteachers and parents.

Is social media the cause?

One of the most commonly identified culprits is social media. Until recently I’ve been sceptical for two reasons. First I’m allergic to moral panics.

How We Should Talk About Mental Health in 2016

The human ramifications of the mental healthcare failings of 2015 make for upsetting reading.

That people have become so active around such issues should mean that conversations about mental health will be more frequent in 2016, better informed, and more encouraging of empathy, because this is what helps break down social stigma.

Just as vigorous exercise tires our bodies, intellectual exertion should drain the brain. What the latest science reveals, however, is that the popular notion of mental exhaustion is too simplistic. The brain continuously slurps up huge amounts of energy for an organ of its size, regardless of whether we are tackling integral calculus or clicking through the week's top 10 LOLcats. Although firing neurons summon extra blood, oxygen and glucose, any local increases in energy consumption are tiny compared with the brain's gluttonous baseline intake. So, in most cases, short periods of additional mental effort require a little more brainpower than usual, but not much more.

something must explain the feeling of mental exhaustion, even if its physiology differs from physical fatigue. Simply believing that our brains have expended a lot of effort might be enough to make us lethargic.

a typical adult human brain runs on around 12 watts—a fifth of the power required by a standard 60 watt lightbulb. Compared with most other organs, the brain is greedy; pitted against man-made electronics, it is astoundingly efficient. IBM's Watson, the supercomputer that defeated Jeopardy! champions, depends on ninety IBM Power 750 servers, each of which requires around one thousand watts.

By 2021, it is forecast that there will be around 3 billion active monthly users of social media. From the statistics alone, it’s clear that social media has become an integral (and to a large extent, unavoidable) part of our lives.

One implication of social media’s rapid rise, that of its relationship with young people’s mental health, has gathered a significant amount of attention in recent years.

So-called ‘social media addiction’ has been referred to by a wide variety of studies and experiments. It is thought that addiction to social media affects around 5% of young people, and was recently described as potentially more addictive than alcohol and cigarettes

But an appeals court granted a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death.

But an appeals court granted a stay of execution Tuesday, shortly after another appeals court lifted an Indiana judge’s ruling that found she was likely mentally ill and couldn’t comprehend she would be put to death.

“I don’t believe she has any rational comprehension of what’s going on at all,” Henry said.

The human brain is more complex than any other known structure in the universe.

Weighing in at three pounds, on average, this spongy mass of fat and protein is made up of two overarching types of cells—called glia and neurons—and it contains many billions of each.

The cerebrum is the largest part of the brain, accounting for 85 percent of the organ's weight. The distinctive, deeply wrinkled outer surface is the cerebral cortex. It's the cerebrum that makes the human brain—and therefore humans—so formidable. Animals such as elephants, dolphins, and whales actually have larger brains, but humans have the most developed cerebrum. It's packed to capacity inside our skulls, with deep folds that cleverly maximize the total surface area of the cortex.

It’s no surprise that when a person gets a diagnosis of heart disease, cancer or some other life-limiting or life-threatening physical ailment, they become anxious or depressed.

But the reverse can also be true: Undue anxiety or depression can foster the development of a serious physical disease, and even impede the ability to withstand or recover from one.

The human organism does not recognize the medical profession’s artificial separation of mental and physical ills. Rather, mind and body form a two-way street.

Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”

That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption

“We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”

The Associated Press today added an entry on mental illness to the AP Stylebook.

This isn’t only a question of which words one uses to describe a person’s illness. There are important journalistic questions, too. “When is such information relevant to a story? Who is an authoritative source for a person’s illness, diagnosis and treatment? These are very delicate issues and this Stylebook entry is intended to help journalists work through them thoughtfully, accurately and fairly.”

The Associated Press is the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats.

his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research.

senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain.

the capacity for original and creative thinking is markedly stymied by stray thoughts, obsessive ruminations and other forms of “mental load.”

Many psychologists assume that the mind, left to its own devices, is inclined to follow a well-worn path of familiar associations. But our findings suggest that innovative thinking, not routine ideation, is our default cognitive mode when our minds are clear.

We found that a high mental load consistently diminished the originality and creativity of the response: Participants with seven digits to recall resorted to the most statistically common responses (e.g., white/black), whereas participants with two digits gave less typical, more varied pairings (e.g., white/cloud).

Now that we can compare robust data for different countries, we can see not only what we knew intuitively — that inequality is divisive and socially corrosive — but that it also damages the individual psyche.

Our tendency to equate outward wealth with inner worth invokes deep psychological responses, feelings of dominance and subordination, superiority and inferiority. This affects the way we see and treat one another.

To compare mental illness rates internationally, the World Health Organization asked people in each country about their mood, tiredness, agitation, concentration, sleeping patterns and self-confidence. These have been found to be good indicators of mental illness.

Burney’s struggle reminds one that character is not only moral, it is also mental. Heroism exists not only on the battlefield or in public but also inside the head, in the ability to face unpleasant thoughts. She lived at a time when people were more conscious of the fallen nature of men and women. People were held to be inherently sinful, and to be a decent person one had to struggle against one’s weakness.

much of the media, and even the academy, is more geared toward pleasuring consumers, not putting them on some arduous character-building regime.

Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once gave a speech called “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment.” He and others list our natural weaknesses: We have confirmation bias; we pick out evidence that supports our views. We are cognitive misers; we try to think as little as possible. We are herd thinkers and conform our perceptions to fit in with the group. But, in general, the culture places less emphasis on the need to struggle against one’s own mental feebleness. Today’s culture is better in most ways, but in this way it is worse.

But as lockdowns in Britain dragged on and no job emerged, the young man grew cynical and self-conscious

He and his mother contracted the coronavirus in January, forcing them to quarantine in their small London apartment for over two weeks. Concerned by things he was saying, friends raised the alarm and referred him to mental health services.

“He just sounded so deflated,” his sister said of their last conversation, adding that he said he felt imprisoned and longed to go outside.