Topic
Mental health
How mental-health conditions and their treatments are evaluated, read through the evidence and without stigma.
This page collects every article by Dr. Damon Tojjar in this topic. For all topics see browse by topic, and for the source-anchored record see damontojjar.com/record.
Articles in this topic (20)
- Adult ADHD and the Overdiagnosis Debate, Explained by the Evidence
The disagreement over adult ADHD is less about whether the condition is real, which the evidence firmly supports, and more about where its boundary should sit....
- The Antidepressant Boxed Warning for Young People, and What Followed
In 2004 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration placed its strongest label warning, a boxed warning, on antidepressants after pooling 24 pediatric trials that...
- Therapy, Medication, or Both for Depression: Reading the Comparative Evidence
For most adults with major depression, the strongest comparisons find that psychotherapy alone and antidepressant medication alone perform about equally well on...
- Exercise for Depression: How Strong Is the Evidence Really?
A large 2024 network meta-analysis in The BMJ pooled 218 randomised trials and more than 14,000 people, and its headline is genuinely encouraging: exercise reduced...
- Prescription Digital Therapeutics for Mental Health: What FDA Clearance Does and Does Not Mean
In April 2024, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration cleared Rejoyn, the first prescription digital therapeutic for major depressive disorder, and the single word...
- How a Network Meta-Analysis Ranks 21 Antidepressants
The short answerA network meta-analysis does not crown a single best antidepressant. It pools hundreds of randomized trials into one connected web of comparisons,...
- How Mental Health Apps Are, and Are Not, Regulated
Most mental health apps are never reviewed by the FDA. The agency treats meditation, mood-tracking, and stress-management tools as general wellness products and...
- How the PTSD Treatment Guideline Ranks the Therapies
The 2023 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense clinical practice guideline for posttraumatic stress disorder ranks treatments with GRADE, a...
- The Pharmacology of Coming Off an Antidepressant Slowly
The Pharmacology of Coming Off an Antidepressant SlowlyComing off an antidepressant is harder at the end of the taper than at the beginning because the drug's...
- Involuntary Psychiatric Care: How the Ethics and Evidence Are Weighed
Involuntary psychiatric care places one person's liberty against a claimed duty to protect life, and neither ethics nor evidence settles that conflict cleanly....
- Loneliness and Health: How Strong Is the Mortality Evidence
Loneliness and weak social ties are consistently linked to earlier death across large studies, but that evidence is observational. The widely repeated claim that...
- Measurement-Based Care: What Repeated Symptom Scores Add to Treatment
The short answerMeasurement-based care means administering a validated symptom scale, the PHQ-9 for depression or the GAD-7 for anxiety, at repeated visits and...
- Reading the Psilocybin for Depression Trials Without the Hype
The short versionThe most cited modern trial of psilocybin for depression (Goodwin and colleagues, New England Journal of Medicine, 2022) was a phase 2 dose-finding...
- The Serotonin Theory of Depression: How to Read an Umbrella Review and Its Rebuttals
The short versionAn umbrella review is a review of reviews: it gathers the existing systematic reviews on a question, grades their quality, and reports what the...
- Sleep and Mental Health: What a Randomized Trial Showed About Cause and Effect
What the OASIS trial actually showedThe 2017 OASIS trial gave the strongest experimental signal yet that poor sleep is a cause, not only a symptom, of some mental...
- The Myth That Antidepressants Do Nothing for the First Few Weeks
The idea that antidepressants sit inert for two to four weeks before switching on is one of the most durable pieces of clinical folklore, and it is mostly wrong....
- What the GAD-7 Measures, and Why a High Score Is Not a Diagnosis
The GAD-7 is a seven-item questionnaire that scores how often, over the past two weeks, a person has been bothered by anxiety symptoms, adding up to a single number...
- Why the FDA Declined MDMA Assisted Therapy for PTSD
In August 2024 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration declined to approve midomafetamine (MDMA) capsules paired with psychological support for post-traumatic stress...
- Why Suicide Risk Scores Cannot Predict an Individual
The short answerSuicide risk scores cannot tell you what a single person will do, and the reason is arithmetic rather than a failure of clinical skill. Suicide is a...
- The First Oral Postpartum Depression Pill: Reading a New Approval
In August 2023 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved zuranolone, sold as Zurzuvae, as the first oral medicine indicated for postpartum depression in...