Human Ventral Tegmental Local Field Potentials in Treatment-Resistant Depression and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

The ventral tegmental area (VTA) is a key node within the limbic circuitry. Through dense dopaminergic, glutamatergic, and GABAergic projections, the VTA forms reciprocal loops with prefrontal and limbic cortices that are consistently implicated in major depressive disorder (MDD) and obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD) (1,2). Decades of animal research have established the VTA as a central hub for motivational drive and reward prediction error signaling (3,4). Despite its presumed critical role in mental disorders, direct electrophysiological recordings from the human VTA have so far remained absent.

The Biological Psychiatry Family of Journals Is Rewarding Its Reviewers

The Biological Psychiatry family of Journals (Biological Psychiatry (BPS); Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging (BP:CNNI); Biological Psychiatry: Global Open Science (BP:GOS) is pleased to announce a new program that, beginning this year, will both recognize and reward our most productive reviewers. This reward system was developed in collaboration with the leaders of the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) and is underwritten by the Society. We are initiating this program with no changes to publication fees for authors who publish in our Journals and without increasing the cost of SOBP membership.

Predicting consequences of new hepatitis B vaccine recs

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Good morning. The other night I watched a shocking episode of “The Vampire Diaries.” A series of cursed, ghost-like hallucinations attempt to convince a teen vampire to end her own life using some disturbingly coercive, cogent arguments. Ultimately, the character is saved. And while this episode aired more than a decade ago, I was surprised by how many parallels there were to current debates about the risks of AI chatbots and people in mental health crises. 

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