⚡️Ibogaine may be one of the closest things psychiatry has found to a forced state transition. That is the part worth taking seriously. Addiction, trauma, compulsive behavior, some forms of depression, these often look less like isolated symptoms and more like stable attractor states. The brain keeps falling back into the same emotional, behavioral, and predictive loops because the whole system has organized itself around them. Ibogaine appears capable, in some people, of violently loosening that organization. The experience can combine withdrawal suppression, altered autobiographical processing, intense symbolic material, changes in reward circuitry, and a prolonged period where the old behavioral gravity feels weaker. The person can come out feeling as though the system that was pulling them back into the same loop has lost authority. That is why the effect can seem almost impossible compared with ordinary psychiatry. Most psychiatric drugs tune the state. Ibogaine may sometimes knock the system into a different basin altogether. If that survives rigorous trials, the historical significance could be enormous because it would imply that some entrenched disorders are not necessarily permanent traits requiring lifelong management. They may be dynamical states capable of abrupt reorganization. That would change how psychiatry thinks about treatment. And there is an even deeper implication. A drug like ibogaine suggests that identity itself may be more plastic than people assume. The “self” that feels trapped in addiction or trauma can seem fixed because the brain keeps reconstructing the same model of reality, the same emotional salience, the same craving architecture, the same memories with the same weight. Perturb the architecture hard enough, and the person may temporarily get access to a different configuration. That is why reports can sound almost religious. People describe seeing their life whole. Seeing causes rather than fragments. Feeling the compulsion lose its grip. Recognizing patterns that had been invisible from inside the pattern. The phenomenology is exactly what would be expected if the brain had been pushed far enough out of its normal attractor that previously inaccessible relationships suddenly became visible. The ordinary mind may be heavily constrained by the state it is currently occupying. Ibogaine may temporarily relax those constraints so dramatically that the person sees the structure of their own life from outside the usual narrative. That is why the experience can feel like revelation. Ibogaine may eventually be remembered less as a psychedelic and more as the molecule that showed psychiatry that some pathological mental states can be broken open rather than merely managed. That would be a genuine rupture in the field.

Better U and Evernow have joined forces to pair menopause specialists with psychiatry in a nationwide telehealth service. #longevity# #menopause# #psychiatry# #telehealth# #specialists#

From @WSJFreeEx via @WSJOpinion: Who’s afraid of evidence-based medicine? The answer, regrettably, is the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, write @drkaliebe and Kurt Micelli.

🍎 What if the food we eat could help protect our mental health? Meet Professor Felice Jacka, founder of nutritional psychiatry and the 2026 L’Oréal-@UNESCO #ForWomenInScience# International Award Laureate for Asia and the Pacific, as she explores the links between diet, brain health and mental well-being. On #WorldMentalHealthDay#, discover how evidence-based knowledge and healthy dietary habits can support mental health throughout life. 🔗 #FWIS# @FondationLOreal @Deakin

"I Need to Be Cloned. Any Medical Professionals Here?" Bastrykin said after someone remarked that Russia needs more officials like him. There are. The required specialty is psychiatry.

A psychologist at the University of North Carolina spent 20 years proving that a single 20-second hug rewires the human cardiovascular system, and the experiment she ran is so simple you can replicate it tonight at home. Her name is Karen Grewen. She works inside the UNC School of Medicine's Department of Psychiatry. The paper that made her famous was published in 2003, and almost nobody outside her field has read it. Here is what she actually did. She recruited 183 healthy adults living with a long-term partner. She split them into two groups. The warm contact group sat together for 10 minutes holding hands while watching a romantic video. Then they stood up and hugged each other for exactly 20 seconds. The control group sat alone in a separate room for the same amount of time doing nothing. Then she made every single one of them give a public speech in front of a panel. Public speaking is one of the cleanest stressors in psychology. Heart rate spikes. Blood pressure climbs. Cortisol floods the system within minutes. It is the laboratory version of every stressful moment you have ever had at work. The people who had been hugged for 20 seconds before walking into that room had measurably lower blood pressure responses to the stress. Lower systolic. Lower diastolic. Lower heart rate increases. Everything was the same.. the speech, the panel, and fear. But this time completely different physiological response. The hug had not made the stress disappear. It had changed how the body was allowed to respond to it. Two years later Grewen ran the follow-up study that explained why. She drew blood from 38 couples before and after the same warm contact protocol and measured what was actually changing inside them. The answer was a hormone called oxytocin. Oxytocin is the chemical your body releases during childbirth, breastfeeding, and orgasm. It is the same molecule that makes a mother feel calm holding her newborn. Grewen's data showed that 20 seconds of physical contact with a trusted partner triggered a measurable spike in plasma oxytocin in both men and women, and the size of that spike directly predicted how much their blood pressure dropped. The mechanism turned out to be older than recorded history. Oxytocin binds to receptors in your heart, your blood vessels, and the part of your brainstem that controls how aggressively your nervous system reacts to threat. When the hormone shows up, the entire fight-or-flight machine downshifts. Your blood vessels widen. Your heart slows. Your cortisol production gets suppressed. This is not a feeling. This is a chemical instruction your body sends to itself that you can measure with a blood pressure cuff. The detail Grewen kept emphasizing in her interviews was the duration. Three seconds is the average length of a hug between two humans. It is too short. The hormonal cascade does not have time to start. 20 seconds is the threshold where the oxytocin actually crosses into the bloodstream in a quantity large enough to do something measurable. A follow-up study tracked 59 premenopausal women over time and found that the ones who hugged their partners most frequently had lower resting blood pressure and higher baseline oxytocin levels than the ones who did not. The effect compounded. Daily hugs produced a permanent shift in the cardiovascular baseline. A separate review of long-term partner contact research found that married adults with frequent affectionate touch had significantly lower rates of heart disease and all-cause mortality than equally healthy adults without it. The American Heart Association now cites this body of research when explaining why social isolation is treated as a cardiovascular risk factor on the same level as smoking. The most haunting line in Grewen's research is one she said in an interview after publishing the second paper. She pointed out that the average American touches another human being less than they did 50 years ago. Phones replaced eye contact. Texts replaced visits. Hugs at the door got shorter. The thing that used to regulate our cardiovascular system multiple times a day quietly disappeared from most adult lives. Your body still expects it. The hormone receptors are still there waiting. The system was designed to be reset by physical contact with people who feel safe, and the reset takes 20 seconds. You can run the experiment yourself tonight. Hug someone you love for 20 full seconds. Count it out. The first 10 will feel awkward. Around 15 something shifts. By 20 the shoulders drop, the breathing slows, the chest opens. That is not in your head. That is your bloodstream changing.

@Dino0311 @RobSchneider Yes, the full 2005 Today Show interview with Tom Cruise and Matt Lauer (the heated psychiatry/pharma debate clip) is available on YouTube: It's about 10 minutes long and covers the whole segment.

People who ate breakfast once a week or less had nearly three times the odds of developing depression symptoms over three years, compared with people who ate it every day. A study of 716 workers in Japan found the risk climbed as breakfast got rarer. At a Japanese electrical manufacturer, 716 employees aged 19 to 68 answered detailed questions about what and how often they ate. None of them had depression symptoms or a mental health diagnosis at the start. Three years later, researchers from Japan's National Center for Global Health and Medicine checked who had developed symptoms using a standard depression questionnaire. The study appeared in Psychiatry Research in 2019. Breakfast frequency was sorted into five groups: daily, 5 to 6 times a week, 3 to 4 times, 1 to 2 times, and once a week or less. People in the rarest group had 2.9 times the odds of developing depression symptoms, even after accounting for the rest of their diet and their lifestyle. The odds tended to rise with each step down in breakfast frequency. Low mood can make people skip meals, which raises a chicken-and-egg question. Starting with people who had no depression symptoms helps with that, although it can't settle it completely, and every participant worked for the same company in one country. Among these 716 employees, the ones who almost never ate breakfast were the likeliest to develop depression symptoms three years later.

🚨🚨MA lesbian Gov. Maura Healey wants $2.25 million to send nurses into every new parent’s home... after making it so women could take the lives of their babies until the day they're born!! ⠀ The money would blow up Welcome Family from about 3,000 births a year to the state’s roughly 68,000. Healey announced it Sept. 15 at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. ⠀ About $2 million would go to those Department of Public Health visits. Another $250,000 would go to MCPAP for Moms, a psychiatry-access program for providers. ⠀ The state says a nurse would come within days or weeks, screen for postpartum depression, talk newborn care, and make referrals. Officials keep calling it voluntary and free, with no income test. ⠀ In 2025 the program ran 1,620 depression screens. Two hundred eight came back positive, and the state says every one of those got a referral. ⠀ Healey is the first openly lesbian governor of Massachusetts and was the first openly lesbian state attorney general in the country. She held that AG office from 2015 to 2023. ⠀ As AG she pushed ending mandatory prison terms for nonviolent drug offenders. Massachusetts voters had already decriminalized small possession in 2008 and legalized adult use in 2016. ⠀ As governor she pardoned tens of thousands of old misdemeanor marijuana convictions in 2024. In April 2026 she signed a bill doubling the adult possession limit and loosening other cannabis rules. ⠀ On Aug. 10, 2026, she also signed H.5595, the Prioritizing Patient Access to Care Act. That law stripped the state’s 24-week cap and left later ab*rtions to a physician’s professional judgment. ⠀ The timing sits on the Lindsay Clancy mistrial. Clancy, a former labor-and-delivery nurse, is charged with k*lling her three children in January 2023. Her lawyers have argued severe postpartum mental illness. Prosecutors have fought that claim. ⠀ Critics on X called the home-visit expansion creepy government overreach and said pediatricians already do the screens. Healey told Boston Public Radio every new parent in the state is going to get that visit. This woman is EVIL. Everyone needs to put eyes on this. ⠀ #Massachusetts# #Healey#