Funding Justice for Two Deported American Activists NIF is funding the legal appeal for two American Jewish women who were detained, deported, and banned from the country after working with Palestinian farmers. 　www.nif.org/stories/huma...

Facing Down Intimidation in Ben Gurion Airport Zak Witus, NIF’s Director of Young Leadership and Education, reflects on the experience of being detained in Ben Gurion airport in a piece published in the Forward.　forward.com/opinion/7870...

I am not too sure of that, Ioana. There are two potential problems here. First the questionable validity of the autism diagnosis. No AI can fix that, probably. Two this questionable diagnosis is sloppily applied in the real world. Maybe the ML algorithm can rectify this to a certain degree.

Our smartphone CBT app, called the Resilience Training App, is the first (as far as we know) to show efficacy among people with no to minimal depressive symptoms. authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Agree. If only we could put ourselves in someone else’s shoes from the start. But better late than never.

Thanks, Martin. This is how MIC and SWD can be connected (but never equated). -- Furukawa TA (2014) How can we make the results of trials and their meta-analyses using continuous outcomes clinically interpretable? Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica, 130, 321-323. 10.1111/acps.12278

Dear Mental Elf, As far as I know, SPARX has never been shown to be better than a control condition in a properly randomized trial, or has it? Happy to be rebutted.

And the distribution of SWD for psychotherapies for depression was very similar. In other words, we must say that there was no clear winner in terms of the population preferences -- or if you are brave enough or cynical enough, we must say there were only losers.

The average SWD for antidepressants for MDD was RD of 20%, and SMD of around 0.5. mentalhealth.bmj.com/content/27/1...

Both are very good points. In the two SWD studies (for antidepressants and psychotherapies), we probably provided more information than is routinely provided yet not fully detailed. Alas! we do not know the exact frequencies at the population level, let alone at the individual level.

Good question. SWD and MIC (MID or MCID) are *completely* different. SWD is a between-group difference, typically between treatment and control, and in balance with the downsides of the treatment. MIC is a within-group pre-post change, typically in the absence of significant treatment burdens.

And abandon your pro-drug or anti-drug ideology and focus on what individual patients actually want.

What does this mean? The authors conclude, "Individual patient value judgements and preferences merit greater attention." Trite but always to be respected.

The SWD (smallest worthwhile difference), a.k.a. SWE (smallest worthwhile effect), represents the smallest benefits of an intervention that patients deem worthwhile given the burdens of the intervention. It is conceptually and numerically distinct from the MIC (a.k.a. MID, MCID).

The SWD (smallest worthwhile difference) for psychotherapies for depression was just about the same as that for antidepressants and only one in three people would be happy to initiate psychotherapies. www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

An Elsevier journal has retracted a study on the placebo effect coauthored by a researcher known for extreme claims that have failed to withstand scrutiny. The move comes after critics said the researchers misunderstood “what a ‘treatment effect’ is.”

Wow! ⬇️ via @retractionwatch.com retractionwatch.com/2025/10/16/c...

ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt reflects on Rosh Hashanah: after meeting Yunis Alkarnawi—a Bedouin father who risked his life on Oct 7 to save Jews & others—he writes that Yunis’ unimaginable courage will stay with him forever, a light reshaping how he sees this year. view.adlmail.org?qs=acfff68e6...

Today I will be chairing this webinar on the largest (less important) and successful (WOW!) suicide prevention trial from Australia. events.zoom.us/ev/AogXbbUoI...

Are they going to learn the first lesson of psychometrics?

And the only validated prescriptive model of alternative psychotherapies (i.e. based not only on prognostic factors but also on effect modifiers, and enabling differential therapeutics) was also based only on boring psychometric and demographic variables. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Well, of course, it's not that strange in medicine. For heart failure, we have literally more than 100 prognostic indexes, none of which works very well ;)

Zach, why do people pursue this pipe dream when dozens of studies and millions of dollars have failed to find a replicable HTE subtypes based on imaging and/or genetics?

Yes, I think Dianne and Steve's scheme goes beyond the GRADEd systematic reviews, when they emphasize effectiveness research, heterogeneity in treatment effects and cost-effectiveness. But we set a higher bar for the very evidence base for "empirically supported therapies" today.

This 30-year-old scheme has served its purpose, but replication alone is insufficient today. We need systematic reviews with minimal publication bias, critically appraised by GRADE. Zach and Daniel, my respected BlueSky friends, shall we not teach this to our next generation?

An apparently fully automated generative AI analysis of our paper on precision psychotherapy (www.nature.com/articles/s41...) popped up in my mailbox. I think I am allowed to cite it here: bgpt.pro?q=Paper%20Re... (if not, pls let me know, BGPT!). It's amazingly accurate.

Very cool! @depressionlab.bsky.social does relevant work in this area 😊

#ClinicalPsychology, #Psychotherapy, #counselling

We believe this is the first-ever system to make evidence-based personalized psychotherapy recommendations about what to do for whom. Or does anyone know such a precedent? #Psychiatry #MentalHealthResearch #AcademicSky

Psychotherapists have claimed for >100 years that they provide/adjust interventions in view of the client's characteristics -- but all based on their personal experiences and opinions. Here we have the first-ever system to do so based on evidence.

Evidence-based personalized & optimized CBT skills for depression, based on a trial of 4469 adults. The Resilience Training App will augment the efficacy by 35% overall over the group average best, and by 64% for those whose best option wasn’t this group average best! www.nature.com/articles/s41...

@ryuheiso.bsky.social This large scale pragmatic cluster randomised controlled trial found no evidence to support the effectiveness of ultra-brief intervention in reducing alcohol consumption compared with simplified assessment only in primary care settings in Japan. bmj.com/cgi/content/...

« Weak campaign against predatory journals: structural issues » New commentary with Alain Braillon and Constant Vinatier. ijme.in/articles/wea...

Yep, but that’s a wrong way to compare treatments. The treatment effect is always a between-group matter.

How can this be? itnewsletter.itnewsletter.co.il/sending/webp...

2025 Youth Peace Camp of Bereaved Israeli and Palestinian teens mailchi.mp/theparentsci...

Really nice opinion in JAMA-Psychiatry about the challenges of #mediation modeling. The issues, such reverse causation and the need for longitudinal data, are clearly laid out. #AcademicSky pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/40266608/

As if we could ever know that… Could someone please calculate the sample size necessary to answer these questions with confidence?

We published the MIC (Minimal Important Change. a.k.a. MID or MCID) of the Gambling Symptom Assessment Scale (G-SAS). A small study but we need more of these to make sense of the research literature. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Excellent and important paper on the efficacy and safety of Esketamine 👇

O, no, no, NO!! You should have a model in your statistical analysis plan based on your prior knowledge before you analyze the data. This is statistics going against science!

One net result of which was: my eldest son believed in Santa Claus until the age of 13, when my youngest son knew that it was a fake story at the age of seven. Which is better?

Excited to share new work in @natmed.nature.com! 🌟 A global collaboration between Kyoto University and d3center director Inbal Billie Nahum-Shani explores smartphone-based CBT for subthreshold depression using an innovative factorial design. myumi.ch/z9ZzZ #BehavioralScience #MentalHealth #CBT

But what good does the knowledge of the "associational variables" do? Non-experimental cross-sectional data is rotten fish. Even the best sushi cook cannot make good sushi with rotten fish. The best you can do is to stay away from it.