Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.
What went wrong?
In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:
1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.
The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.
This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.
Link to paper: https://t.co/ucoGyhEuAj
breaking news from @TheOnion:
due to irreconcilable differences between SCCM & ACEP, SCCM now recommends that *all* sepsis resuscitation be done in the back of an ambulance, followed by direct admit to ICU.
“this frees us up from following evidence we don't like” said the SCCM
You should be so lucky to have people throughout your research career that you can openly bounce ideas to and from - especially if they complement your strengths in your areas of weakness - it is a rare and precious gift.
2 hours of nightly scent exposure boosted memory by 226% in older adults in a small RCT
The scents (rose, orange, eucalyptus, lemon, peppermint, rosemary, and lavender) likely stimulate and strengthen brain pathways directly linked to memory
The hardest lessons after training aren’t always in the OR or clinic.
🙏 I wrote this essay for anyone navigating their first year as an attending.
“Unseen Scars” in @JAMA_current
🔗https://t.co/0e09Zx1nb6
New ICU guidelines led by @CUAnschutz experts, @AndreaSikora and Brian Murray, elevate pharmacists as essential team members. Explore the research from DBMI and @CUPharmacy ➡️ https://t.co/ZzWAv97qkv
Two @OSUWexMed and @osu_pharmacy PGY2 Critical Care Pharmacy Residents were able to share the results from their research projects today at @SCCMohio Spring Symposium!
BRAVO! 👏🏻
CT scans save lives—but at a cost. New @JAMAInternalMed study projects over 10,000 future cancers annually in the U.S. from current CT use. Time to rethink how we image.
https://t.co/0wDEMPoVOb
Still time to register for the journal club tomorrow -Thursday 4/17 @1pm EST
Turns out we have a Sepsis theme so please register 👇🏻to get the zoom link!
https://t.co/LgtTC0fxoM
“Whether you think you PRO-CAN or you think you PRO-CANT… you’re right”
- April 17, 2025
Registration for fun with #procalcitonin: https://t.co/cupJGlKJTw
Please join @SCCMohio for a journal club next week on 4/17 at 1PM.
You need to register to get the zoom link, register 👉 https://t.co/P4yWus2Th4
@EssilvoSillin will be representing
@OSUWexMed critical care pharmacy residency program!
@osu_pharmacy@SICUPharmD
Congratulations to ACCP member Kelli Henry and co-authors on the recent publication of their article in Pharmacotherapy! Access the abstract and/or article here: https://t.co/rKb8FILMMO
#MakingAnImpact#ACCP@PharmacoJournal
😍One very proud RPD! 😍
So happy to have all six of these amazing residents stay on @osu_pharmacy@OSUWexMed for their PGY2!
Follow us on our new Instagram page 👇🏻to learn more about our pharmacy residency programs!
@kennsatterfield@laurenfortinirx