Psych

Improve Your Child’s Academic Performance!

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Phone ban impact on student academic achievement

The top estimate is the estimated average treatment effect of the phone ban on student academic achievement across the full population. The next estimates contain heterogeneous treatment effects for subgroups split by prior average academic achievement (above or below preexperiment median), years of study, and field of study.

Source: Alp Sungu et al.,Phones impede learning: Evidence from a massive phone-free classroom experiment.Science394,178-181(2026).DOI:10.1126/science.aef7249 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aef7249

I’m Taking Your Phone Away (and you didn’t do anything wrong)

When People Did Not Have Access to Mobile Internet, they Spent More Time Socializing in Person, Exercising, and Being in Nature.

Wait…I need to check my phone.

Improve Your Child’s Mental Health and Academic Performance!

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Results  This study included 5515 adolescent participants (2640 [47.9%] female; mean [SD] age 11.93 [0.65] years) using step counters. Higher step count was associated with lower total mental health problems (B [SE], −0.080 [0.015]; t = −5.497; P < .001) and greater cortical thickness in the paracentral (B [SE], 0.057 [0.016]; t = 3.621; P < .001) and rostral anterior cingulate (B[SE], 0.052 [0.016]; t = 3.319; P = .001) regions. Further analyses showed a significant dose-response association, with progressively lower mental health problems across higher step categories compared with the under 5000-step group. Mediation analyses revealed that greater paracentral thickness statistically mediated the association between higher daily step count and fewer mental health problems 1 year later.

Conclusions and Relevance  In this cohort study, higher daily step counts were associated with structural differences in the brains of adolescents, which were in turn associated with better mental outcomes prospectively. Beneficial associations for mental health appeared to accrue continuously across the observed range, with no evidence of a threshold or plateau, highlighting that every step counts and the potential value of promoting daily steps in adolescents. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2854698

Li Q, Paluch A, Rakesh D. Physical Activity and Adolescent Brain Structure, Mental Health, and Academic Outcomes. JAMA Netw Open. 2026;9(10):e2636973. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.36973

Greater cortical thickness too!

WOOHOO.

Bipolar Disorder and Excess Mortality

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BD overall is associated with excess mortality from both natural and unnatural causes. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that all-cause mortality is approximately doubled, with particularly high relative risks for suicide (12-fold) and other unnatural causes (7-fold) alongside a substantial increase in natural-cause deaths (2-fold).9 However, most mortality studies have not separated BD-II from BD-I, leaving BD-II’s specific mortality profile uncertain. Limited data indicate substantial premature mortality in BD-II, for example, an estimated 10- to 20-year reduction in life expectancy,1 with cardiovascular disease a major contributor to natural-cause deaths.10,11 This is likely predicated by shared risk factors and operative biological pathways as well as adverse effects of prescribed agents.12 Unnatural causes, especially suicide, also appear elevated. A large Swedish registry13 reported more frequent suicide attempts in BD-II than BD-I, yet meta-analytic work14 suggests that the risk of suicide death is broadly similar across the 2 subtypes. Many BD-II–focused studies have been underpowered or have not analyzed BD-II separately,11,15–17 rendering conclusions tentative. Whether BD-II differs from BD-I in all-cause or cause-specific mortality remains largely unresolved because direct comparisons are scarce.18

Conclusions and Relevance  In this cohort study, BD-II was associated with a significant risk of premature mortality across multiple causes; even after accounting for shared familial factors and relative to BD-I, all-cause mortality remained elevated. These findings underscore the importance of comprehensive psychiatric care for individuals with BD-II.

All-Cause and Cause-Specific Mortality in Patients With Bipolar II Disorder – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2847398

I Need To Get Out of the House More

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Abstract from the study Home alone: Remote work, isolation, and mental health – Science 4 Jun 2026 Vol 392, Issue 6802 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec7671

How does remote work affect isolation and mental health? We drew on five nationally representative surveys of American workers (N = 588,322) conducted from 2011 to 2024, omitting the peak pandemic years of 2020–2021. Our difference-in-differences approach compared changes in mental health among people in remotable jobs—who experienced a large and persistent rise in remote work since COVID-19—to people in nonremotable jobs, where remote work increased far less. We found that remote work increases time spent alone, worsens mental well-being across multiple measures, and increases the use of mental health services and prescriptions. These effects were concentrated among individuals living alone. We estimate that the rise of remote work explains about a third of the increase in isolation and mental distress between 2011–2019 and 2022–2024.

Highlights from the NPR article People love working from home. But does it love them back? A new study says no – https://www.npr.org/2026/06/08/nx-s1-5848125/remote-work-mental-health-isolation

  • Workers in remotable jobs had experienced a 58% rise in hours spent alone compared to people in non-remotable jobs
  • These workers also saw a 72% rise in chances of spending their whole day with no human contact.
  • Remote workers aren’t making up for that lost social connection by socializing after work.
  • People in remote jobs also saw a rise in symptoms of emotional distress, evaluated with a standardized questionnaire about symptoms of anxiety and depression.
  • They also had more visits to mental health care providers and used more prescription psychiatric meds.
  • Remote workers who live alone saw the largest increase (83%) in chances of spending their days with no social contact.

I really need to get out of the house more.

Chronic Pain? Check This Out

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Curiosity is not a curse. I’ve been expanding my knowledge base this morning.

As I have written before, the key to treating chronic pain often lies in therapies designed to dampen the brain’s response to pain signals. In treating my own chronic pain, I benefited greatly from a mindfulness therapist who helped me develop techniques to redirect thoughts and feelings of pain, push them out of my body. In my case, I met virtually with the therapist, who expertly sussed out my situation and tailored her advice to my needs. She worked at Duke University, in one of their pain clinics, and was an expert at helping people like me. This Online Program Could Be The Solution To Your Chronic Pain – https://www.forbes.com/sites/peterubel/2026/02/07/this-online-program-could-be-the-solution-to-your-chronic-pain/

Here’s the link to Telehealth and Online Cognitive Behavioral Therapy–Based Treatments for High-Impact Chronic Pain A Randomized Clinical Trial – https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2836795 Conclusions and Relevance  Remote, scalable CBT-CP treatments (delivered either via telehealth or self-completed modules online) resulted in modest improvements in pain and related functional/quality-of-life outcomes compared with usual care among individuals with high-impact chronic pain. These lower-resource CBT-CP treatments could improve availability of evidence-based nonpharmacologic pain treatments within health care systems.

Here’s the link to the online resource quoted in the Forbes article https://mypaintrainer.org/login-to-paintrainer/

Full disclosure:

I’ve had chronic pain since 1976 (or was it 1977?) when I had a near fatal encounter with a fast moving car while walking home. I don’t take any pain medications other than the occasional ibuprofen. I have been using an online pain management resource courtesy of my employer (not the resource linked above). A DPT (Doctor of Physical Therapy) and health coach are part of the resources at my disposal. I haven’t used any ibuprofen in quite some time, if that tells you anything.

I will be exploring https://mypaintrainer.org/login-to-paintrainer/ more but at the time of this writing have not looked into their services.

Couples Share More Than We Realize

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The latest study, published in Nature Human Behaviour today, used data from more than 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden. It examined the proportion of people in those couples who had one of nine psychiatric disorders: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, autism, obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), substance-use disorder and anorexia nervosa…

The team found that when one partner was diagnosed with one of the nine conditions, the other was significantly more likely to be diagnosed with the same or another psychiatric condition. Spouses were more likely to have the same conditions than to have different ones, says co-author Chun Chieh Fan, a population and genetics researcher at the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Spouses tend to share psychiatric disorders – https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02772-8

Yikes.

Clearing Up Myths About Older Workers

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In 2001, only about 1 out of every 7 U.S. workers was 55 or older. By 2021, the number jumped to almost 1 out of every 4 workers (a 93% increase). That’s almost twice the proportion of older workers as before.3 Older workers are staying on the job longer for various reasons, ranging from financial needs to the joy of work.  More people are working past the age when they might have retired. They might be responding to the increase in the Social Security full retirement age, needing money or health insurance, or simply enjoying their jobs and being around their friends at work.⁴ Clearing Up Myths About Older Workers While Understanding and Supporting an Aging Workforce — https://blogs.cdc.gov/niosh-science-blog/2023/09/25/older-workers/

I just learned I have a high level of Crystallized intelligence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluid_and_crystallized_intelligence