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Jennifer Mitchell, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, witnessed a lot of recreational drug use growing up in the city in the 1970s and later as a college student in Oregon. At the time, drugs such as mushrooms, LSD and marijuana were considered by many to be toxic and frightening, but Mitchell also saw hints of how certain psychedelics could help people in crisis.

“When I first saw things like ibogaine [a dissociative psychedelic] in action, I was blown away,” she told BioSpace, adding that “it was clear [psychedelics] had so much potential.”

The idea of using psychedelics to treat psychiatric disorders has been around since the 1950s, when academics investigated LSD and psilocybin (the psychoactive ingredient in mushrooms) as therapeutics for trauma, depression and addiction. But early work lacked the rigor of today’s standards, Mitchell said, and regulatory agencies wouldn’t touch them. In the 1990s, when she approached the FDA as a graduate student about giving psilocybin to men who had survived the AIDS crisis with lasting demoralization and depression, “I was laughed out of the building,” she said.

And yet today, Mitchell is the lead investigator on a Phase III clinical trial that may well lead to the first true FDA-approved psychedelic therapeutic: a combination of MDMA and psychotherapy used to treat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In the intervening years, cultural shifts combined with rigorous scientific study and investments from biopharma have ushered in a new generation of psychedelic treatments, some of which have already been approved in other countries. As stakeholders in the U.S. await the FDA’s decision on MDMA, industry analysts report that interest in psychedelics is only increasing.

Read more at BioSpace.com.

An Innovative Intervention to Help Asian American Families Cope with Racism and Related Mental Health Difficulties is funded by a Grand Challenges Individual Project Grant from the University of Maryland. This eight-session, culturally sensitive intervention helps Asian American families talk about racism, discrimination and associated mental health issues and learn positive parenting practices and youth coping strategies

The intervention is one of 11 projects involving College of Education faculty that were funded by Grand Challenges Grants earlier this year. In all, the university awarded more than $30 million to 50 projects addressing pressing societal issues, including educational disparities, social injustice, climate change, global health and threats to democracy. The Grand Challenges Grants Program is the largest and most comprehensive program of its type in the university’s history.

Cixin Wang, associate professor, is the principal investigator. Wang explains how racism affects the mental health and well-being of both Asian American parents and youth and how her intervention will help.

Read more at Education.UMD.edu.

Physiological changes recorded by a wearable biosensor and analyzed through a machine-learning approach can help predict aggressive behavior before it occurs in young psychiatric facility patients with autism, new research shows.

The study published in JAMA Network Open last month by Northeastern University researchers adds to research examining whether imminent aggressive behavior among autistic inpatients can be determined via a wearable biosensor and machine learning.

About one in 36 children were diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) in 2020, up from one in 44 in 2018, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Autism and Developmental Disabilities Monitoring (ADDM) Network. The prevalence of aggression among children and adolescents with ASD is high, with parents reporting in a 2011 study that 68 percent had demonstrated aggression to a caregiver and 49 percent to non-caregivers.

Prior research work by the Northeastern University team showed that three minutes of wearable biosensor-recorded peripheral physiological and motion signals gathered from 20 youths with autism could predict aggression toward others one minute before it occurred using ridge-regularized logistic regression.

The new study aimed to extend that research to determine whether the recorded data could be used to predict aggression toward others even earlier.

Read more at MHealthIntelligence.com.

Young people who identify as LGBTQ are less likely to suffer symptoms of depression when they have general support from their parents, researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found. But in cases where young LGBTQ people had not told their parents about their identity and also the parents exhibited psychologically controlling behavior, supportive parenting did not reduce symptoms linked to depression.

Attention to youth mental health has skyrocketed, since a major report from the Centers for Disease Control this spring found high levels of mental distress in young people, particularly LGBTQ youth. The Department of Health and Human Services declared earlier this month that the country is “facing an unprecedented mental health crisis.”

In the new study, published in March in the journal Child Development, researchers Amy McCurdy and Stephen Russell in the Department of Human Development and Family Sciences examined data from youth aged 15-21 in three different cities in the United States.

Among study participants, those who perceived their parents as being generally supportive had fewer reported depressive symptoms than those who perceived their parents as being less supportive.

The researchers also examined the effect of parental control on depressive symptoms in LGBTQ young people. Psychological control, as defined in the paper, includes attempts to intrude into the psychological and emotional development of the child, such as thinking processes, self-expression, emotions and attachment to parents. Study participants who perceived their parents as more controlling had more reported depressive symptoms than participants who perceived their parents as less controlling.

Read more at CNS.UTexas.edu.

Psychotic disorders are serious illnesses that disrupt how a person thinks, feels, and perceives the world. People with these disorders, which include schizophrenia and other disorders with psychotic symptoms, have better outcomes if they receive early and comprehensive care. Without such care, people with psychosis often find it difficult to participate in work, school, or relationships and can experience significant impairment or disability.

Studies from other countries have found demographic differences in the rates at which psychotic disorders are diagnosed. However, few studies looked at these rates in U.S. populations. New research funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) found disparities in psychotic disorder diagnoses and showed that such diagnoses are associated with a range of negative health outcomes.

Researchers led by Winston Chung, M.D. , at Kaiser Permanente and Kathleen Merikangas, Ph.D., and Diana Paksarian, Ph.D., in the NIMH Intramural Research Program examined trends in the diagnosis of psychotic disorders in the United States from 2009 to 2019.

The data suggested disparities in diagnoses for psychotic disorders based on race and ethnicity. The patterns differed for nonaffective compared to affective psychotic disorders.

Read more at NIMH.NIH.gov.

The LGBTQ community is “certainly in a state of crisis, particularly among youth,” Rep. Ritchie Torres, D-N.Y., the first openly gay Afro Latino in Congress, told NBC News in an email. “Asking for help is a sign of strength, but we need to make sure that we have the proper resources in place for those who need help.”

The study’s lead author, Kristen Choi, an adolescent psychiatric nurse and health services researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, said the number of mental health facilities in the U.S. that are trained to serve LGBTQ youth has barely budged over a six-year period, increasing from 25% of all facilities in 2014 to just 28% in 2020.

Mental health resources, she said, are crucial for LGBTQ youth. They face much higher rates of poor mental health when compared with their heterosexual peers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“It was disappointing to see,” Choi said of the findings, which analyzed data from the Department of Health and Human Services’ National Mental Health Services Survey. Many providers and organizations, she said, are not necessarily trained or equipped to interact with LGBTQ kids in a way that is sensitive, affirmative and appropriate.

Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at The Trevor Project, an advocacy group for LGBTQ youth, said being an LGBTQ person can be “very, very stressful”. Improving access to LGBTQ care can be a challenge, DeChants said, because it takes a specific form of training. “And we certainly want folks moving into that space to certainly be qualified,” he said.

Read more at NBCNews.com.