The Mach-Gaensslen Foundation of Canada is happy to announce the 2025 winner of the Royal-Mach-Gaensslen Prize for Mental Health Research. This year's recipient is Dr. Lena Palaniyappan with the Douglas Mental Health University Institute in Montreal. www.theroyal.ca/news/dr-lena...

Kick off the new year with the Neurogenesis Speaker Series! 🎤🧠 Join Manuela Ferrari & @lenapl.bsky.social at @theneuro.bsky.social on Jan. 21, 2026, for two exciting talks on their research in mental health, followed by a meet-and-greet reception. 🧀 🫵 Register now: mcgill.ca/x/5kz @mcgill.ca

Quantitative semiology: harnessing AI-generated teaching signals in psychiatry cdnsciencepub.com/doi/10.1139/...

New review paper on theory of mind/mentalizing and spontaneous speech/language. Led by Chaimaa El Mouslih, and co-authored with @vegashodgins.bsky.social and @lenapl.bsky.social www.mdpi.com/2076-328X/15...

Check out this 🆕 paper form @lenapl.bsky.social et al showing that speech spectrograms can track negative symptom severity in schizophrenia www.nature.com/articles/s44...

🚨 NEW RESEARCH! ⚕️ 🩺 🧠 Elleuch et al. explore the association of grammatical challenges in people with Schizophrenia in a systematic review and meta-analysis of 45 studies. https://bit.ly/4kZnq66 @lenapl.bsky.social

One of the largest longitudinal study of computational speech and language features and psychosis from @stanglab.bsky.social Tang & colleagues! www.nature.com/articles/s44...

#ThisWeekInNPP This study identified a prefrontal-limbic structural covariance network with ⬇️ gray matter volume specific to treatment-resistant schizophrenia, linked to serotonergic, glutamatergic, histaminergic, & opioid receptor distributions 🧠 www.nature.com/articles/s41...

www.nature.com/articles/s41... People with schizophrenia that is resistant to treatment may have specific prefrontal-limbic brain deficits linked to non-dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems—highlighting the need for therapies beyond antipsychotics. #schizophrenia #neuroscience #mentalhealth

Very, very obviously we need to emphasize science-informed preventative strategies. Public health experts – myself included – have focused on this for decades! But phrase "root causes" long ago morphed into a red flag for bunk. 🚩 news.immunologic.org/p/real-root-... @drandrealove.bsky.social‬👇

Congratulations to @lenapl.bsky.social, @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social and the whole team on the boost from the @wellcometrust.bsky.social for the DIALOG initiative douglas.research.mcgill.ca/news/underst...

Drs. Peter Van Dyken and Lena Palaniyappan (@lenapl.bsky.social) (‪@schulichmeddent.bsky.social‬)'s research trainee study on graph theory and U-fibre network in people with #Schizophrenia: www.psifoundation.org/funded-resea... #SchizophreniaResearch

Excellent synergy here, looking forward to it @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social !

Western University is seeking applications for Canada Excellence Research Chairs. Please reach out if you are interested in Theme 2: Neuroscience. Western has extraordinary strengths in cognitive, molecular and systems neuroscience across species (rodents, NHPs, humans) uwo.ca/research/cer...

Greening the lab: Researchers are a group that can take concrete steps to reduce the environmental footprint associated with their activities. ➡️ www.jpn.ca/lookup/doi/1...

Topiramate for treatment of behavioural disorders in Prader–Willi syndrome: Topiramate is effective in treating compulsive behaviours associated with PWS, but requires monitoring. ➡️ www.jpn.ca/lookup/doi/1...

📣 We are proud to announce that the Wellcome Trust has awarded Dr. Palaniyappan! 📣 Nous sommes fiers d’annoncer l'obtention d'une subvention de la Fondation Wellcome Trust à Dr Palaniyappan pour soutenir le projet DIALOG! More infos / plus d'infos : douglas.research.mcgill.ca/news/underst...

We show cannabis use disorder is associated with higher midbrain neuromelanin, where such an increase is associated with #psychosis severity. The higher the use, the greater the putative dopamine turnover. Led by Jessica Ahrens @healthsciences.mcgill.ca IPN jamanetwork.com/journals/jam...

When we are depressed, we not only have negative thoughts but also experience a muddled, disorganized thinking process. We propose some steps to make progress in understanding and reducing the burden of disorganization in #Depression link.springer.com/article/10.1...

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... We see a prominent excess of first-person pronouns in #schizophrenia, with no excessive inter-individual variability. While not a direct comparison, this effect (d=0.89) is >> than striatal dopamine excess or prefrontal glutamate reduction reported to date.

Dog person open.substack.com/pub/lenapl/p... #poetry

Transcriptional substrates of cortical thickness alterations in anhedonia of #depression ... www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

#Pubmed is down again. #NIH It has never been down like this for more than 20 years that I have been using it. They are likely cleaning up all mentions of gender, race, diversity, ethnicity, humanity, etc. I am confident they will not touch the keyword - 'stupidity'.

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Are hallucinations a result of pathological geenration of words? An experiential account argues so. A commentary with @olidn.bsky.social

Our Ready to Connect (eigsti.psy.uconn.edu/home-2/ready...) project is hiring a postdoc (at UConn): eigsti.psy.uconn.edu/open-postdoc... We investigate conversational success in autistic and non-autistic teenagers during realistic social interactions. Ideal start date: May 15, 2025

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti... Impoverished articulation of perceptual processes in #schizophrenia is linked to the structure of #cerebellum For a special issue in Neuropsychologia edited by @valentinabambini.bsky.social & team!

www.bpsgos.org/article/S266... White matter does not seem to deteriorate in the first few years of #psychosis in patients receiving treatment.But negative symptoms consistently track white matter integrity.

How do stimulants, MDMA, #cannabis, #ketamine and #psychedelics affect speech & language? Can we use these behavioral effects to test for intoxication? Our new pre-registered systematic review journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

If you are in Montreal, apply!

#psychiatry #computational #LLMs jpn.ca/content/50/1... Is pragmatism antithetical to computational psychiatry?

Well just received this email regarding a paper under review:

How long before we lose #pubmed ? I see a weird 'high traffic' notice on the site!

Today is Retraction Day, when we observe the anniversary of the retraction (Feb. 2, 2010) of the fraudulent paper that purported to show a link between vaccines and autism. 🧪#medsky

Congrats all! A proud moment for ceymh-cesmj.ca/youth-family... who shaped 2 of the 4 funded grants this time!

Well done, Tiana! douglas.research.mcgill.ca/news/hsi-wei.... Thanks to @sylvainbaillet.bsky.social & @magnetokrishio.bsky.social 's awesome groups - we are getting full-time into the oscillatory dynamics of psychosis.

I've been working with the Wilson-Cowan neural mass model for a while now and, over time, I've accumulated a bunch of tools to explore/visualize it. I recently decided to collect it all into a github repository available here if anyone is interested: github.com/NeuroLife77/...

Happy 30th birthday year to SPM!! 🎈🍰 To get the party started, we are delighted to announce SPM 25.01, a major new version of the open-source neuroimaging software. Read the preprint to discover what's new arxiv.org/pdf/2501.12081 and download SPM for free from Github github.com/spm/spm/rele...

Reminder! Submit your abstracts for poster and oral presentations for our DISCOURSE Satellite Meeting by 2/14/25! forms.gle/nW5K9MGtBkqQ...

douglas.research.mcgill.ca/offres_d_emp... With ~C$9.5M+ investment from @wellcometrust.bsky.social, we are setting out to study why disorganized speech/behaviour occur in #psychosis #bipolar & how to reverse it. Join us for this 7-country study with MEG+PET+MRI & communication remediation.

www.nature.com/articles/s41.... Both childhood and adult trauma converge on caudate volume. Oxidative stress and glutamate transmission may have an influence on this convergence. With Qiang Luo & team at Fudan.

Great paper on the challenges of precision psychiatry, in particular modelling/predictions re complex causal/risk factors www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

New 📃by #WIN members @andpru.bsky.social, Dr. Stefan Everling, Dr. Wataru Inoue, Dr. Julio Martinez-Trujillo, and colleagues - Spike frequency adaptation in primate lateral prefrontal cortex neurons results from interplay between intrinsic properties... pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39772396/