Keep on movin’… Even small doses of physical activity can lower our risk of depression

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Elli Kypraiou considers a systematic review published in JAMA Psychiatry, which suggests that relatively small doses of physical activity were associated with substantially lower risks of depression.

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Self Help Plus for refugees: we need effective, low-intensity and scalable interventions

Asylum seekers and refugees in the UK increasingly face challenges impacting on their experiences of resettlement.

Alexis Low considers a meta-analysis which evaluates Self-Help Plus, a promising WHO intervention that could be scaled up to address the mental health needs of refugees and asylum seekers.

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Every Mind Matters: evaluating the mental health literacy campaign

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In her debut blog, Amy Morgan summarises a qualitative study evaluating the government-funded Every Mind Matters campaign in the UK.

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“I’m always going to be tired”: fatigue in adolescent depression

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Georgia Kemp reflects on a recent qualitative paper that looks at adolescents’ personal accounts of fatigue as a symptom in depression.

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Long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment-resistant depression: not cost-effective compared to treatment as usual

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In her debut blog, Ella Tuominen considers the Tavistock Adult Depression Study (TADS), which evaluated the cost-effectiveness of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy for treatment resistant depression compared to treatment as usual.

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Everyday discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic: the toll on mental health

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A group of UCL MSc students summarise a US study on the association of everyday discrimination with depression and suicidal ideation during the pandemic.

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Integrating smoking cessation treatment into routine care for people with mental illness: how will the NHS cope?

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Amelia Talbot summarises a qualitative study on people’s views of integrating smoking cessation treatment into routine care for people with mental illness.

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Psilocybin for ‘treatment-resistant depression’: an island of hope in an ocean of uncertainty?

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In this blog, UCL MSc students consider an RCT published in the New England Journal of Medicine, which suggests that psilocybin-assisted psychotherapy may help reduce depression in people with severe and enduring illness, but side effects are common and more research is needed to look into longer term effects.

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Serotonin hypothesis of depression: balance (and imbalance) is in the eye of the beholder

Sadness,And,Loneliness,Concept.,Despaired,,Stressed,Woman,Body,3d,Rendering.

The 2022 review by Moncrieff et al on the serotonin theory of depression received a great deal of media coverage. In this blog, Rebecca Wilkinson and Sameer Jauhar shed fresh light on this research and what it means for mental health science and practice.

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Parents’ depression can be linked to children’s emotional difficulties

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Lisa Lloyd summarises a new paper in the BJPsych, which focuses on parental depression symptoms in both mothers and fathers, and how they are linked with emotional difficulties in their children.

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