Psychiatry

Culture profoundly shapes our ideas about mental illness, which is something psychologist Nev Jones knows all too well.

• By David Dobbs

For the last decade, forensic psychiatrist Michael Welner has led a curious, self-funded effort to create something he calls the Depravity Standard, a crowd-sourced instrument for objectively scoring the level of evil associated with humanity's most twisted crimes. But can a scientist really define the outer edges of our morality?

• By Rachel Monroe

An early look at a Pacific Standard story that's currently only available to subscribers.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Frontiers in Psychology just published a damning list of terms that researchers abuse. What can journalists learn from it?

• By Ted Scheinman

How does one tell the untraumatized majority about the conditions that constitute the underworld of trauma?

• By Sally Satel

Illinois leads the country in group psychotherapy sessions in Medicare, and some top billers aren’t mental health specialists. The state’s Medicaid program has cracked down, but federal officials have not.

• By Charles Ornstein

Mindi has never harmed her daughter and is capably raising a son, but authorities took her daughter under a concept sometimes called “predictive neglect.”

• By Seth Freed Wessler

A new study gets to the root of our anxieties.

• By Paul Bisceglio

For the month of April we're profiling the individuals who made our inaugural list of the 30 top thinkers under 30, the young men and women we predict will have a serious impact on the social, political, and economic issues we cover every day here at Pacific Standard.

• By Avital Andrews

With psychotropic drug cocktails, of course.

• By Ryan Jacobs

So now what?

• By Lauren Kirchner

And what we might be able to do to calm it down.

• By Lauren Kirchner

Seminal research that changed how we think about homosexuality—one step at a time, over the past century.

• By Pacific Standard Staff

Psychiatry is under attack for not being scientific enough, but the real problem is its blindness to culture. When it comes to mental illness, we wear the disorders that come off the rack.

• By Ethan Watters

The newly revised, hotly contested book of psychiatric diagnoses is finally here. How will it change the way we consider and treat substance use problems?

• By Michael Dhar

What does it mean that the American Psychiatric Association is switching from Roman numerals to Arabic? And will the critics ever be won over?

• By Sharon Begley

Gary Greenberg's new book skewers the inner workings of the DSM just three weeks before the latest version is scheduled to be released.

• By William Georgiades

When the dust of debate settles, the new revision's benefits should be clear: good science, better diagnoses, more individualized care.

• By Mark Willenbring

The 1,000-page psychiatrists' Big Book will redefine addiction. Critics are already demanding a boycott.

• By Michael Dhar

Can mindfulness help heal our wounded soldiers?

• By Kevin Charles Fleming

How two long-time therapies for brain disorders work are finally being understood by the medical community, creating a path to safer alternatives.

• By Michael Haederle