📣Highlights in Network Science and Mental Disorders! I’ve been fascinated by the application of network analysis in mental disorder research, particularly in exploring brain connectivity networks and symptom networks.

Looking for a 3-year 100% postdoc position at the intersection of mental health, neuroimaging and biological markers? Come join our team:

An important point that the anti-psych folks like Moncrieff get wrong. There isn’t some straightforward, easy to draw distinction between masking a feeling, being distracted from a feeling, reducing the feeling, gaining more autonomous control and capacity for insight despite

I probably missed a lot. What were your favorite ones?

And finally, @LeaSchumacher20, Elisabeth Schramm, Levente Kriston and others showed in World Psychiatry that person-specific symptom networks strongly improved the accuracy of the prediction of psychotherapy response:

Employing data from @enigmabrains, Foivos Georgiadis, @MMG_Kirschner and many others showed that the heterogeneous pattern of cortical alterations can be traced back to common brain circuits:

https://t.co/fDBwOqvT7u

Back to brains, a study by @miklosargyelan, @ZhiDeDeng, Chris Abbott and many others from the @BergenGEMRIC showed that changes in causal depression networks after electroconvulsive therapy relate to treatment outcome in MDD patients. This was published in Molecular Psychiatry:

For an overview of symptom network analysis, please read this great piece by @giovbriganti @BorsboomDenny @EikoFried Tessa Blanken, Richard McNally and others published in the International Journal of Methods in Psychiatric Research: https://t.co/PmAoGQ3H2X

https://t.co/X5mOc958f5

Back to symptom networks, Omar Ebrahimi, @BorsboomDenny, @And_Cipriani and colleagues demonstrated most MDD patients within the same depressive symptom severity group displayed differential symptom dynamics. This was published in the British Journal of Psychiatry:

https://t.co/wNCuZGKs0I

In line, a new approach to study the extent of involved regions in functional brain networks based on repeated measurements showed marked differences in salience network regions in MDD. This work by Charles Lynch, Conor Lyston and others was published in Nature Medicine:

Next, a study on different brain subnetworks by @LeonardoTozzi1 @LMWilliams_PhD and colleagues on brain subnetworks that relate to different symptom dimensions and treatment outcomes in major depressive disorder (MDD) published in Nature Medicine:

Theory: https://t.co/uKP8jVLcAK Practical Implications:

First, a two-part review on the theory and application of A Dynamical Systems View of Psychiatric Disorders written by Marten Scheffer, Barnaby Nelson, @clbockting, @BorsboomDenny and others in JAMA Psychiatry:

With that in mind, I wanted to share some of the most exciting papers I read in 2024 that explore brain or symptom networks in some capacity.

Currently, we’re part of a large consortium called DYNAMIC https://t.co/RtdsD3eKfd focuses on leveraging changes in dynamic network properties across these levels to improve our understanding and treatment of mental disorders.

Great international speakers here in Frankfurt

This is exactly how you push back against biased articles based on outside opinions (!) in psychiatry. Great job, again, @awaisaftab. This is a must-read not only for journalists in UK, but everyone interested in the debate worldwide: