Psychosis occurs more frequently in men than in women, a finding that holds up consistently across countries, decades of research, and different study designs (Jongsma et al., 2019; Ochoa et al., 2012; Castillejos et al., 2018). This piece walks through the size of that gap, where it comes from biologically and environmentally, how it changes across the lifespan, and what it means for treatment. It also draws a clear line between two terms the general public tends to use inte

Postpartum psychosis is one of the most severe conditions in psychiatry, and also one of the most misunderstood. It gets confused with postpartum depression, with "baby blues," and with psychosis in general, three things it overlaps with but is not the same as. This piece defines each term clearly, walks through what the research actually shows about causes, symptoms, and treatment, and ends with a set of plain-language takeaways. One correction worth making at the outset: po

The pattern described by this research is not a static distribution of harm across two groups. It is a cycle with five connected stages: concentrated power sustains gendered expectations, those expectations produce violence and disposability for both sexes through different mechanisms, the consequences of that violence fall on men and women through different channels, and the pattern is transmitted to the next generation, which reinforces the concentration of power that start

Picture two people filling out the same anonymous survey. One question asks whether they have ever been forced into sex against their will. Another asks whether they have ever forced someone else. Something strange happens when researchers compare the answers across a population: the number of people who say "it happened to me" is consistently, sometimes dramatically, higher than the number of people who say "I did it to someone." That gap is not a paradox. It is a clue, and

When the threat hasn't ended, processing the trauma isn't always the right move yet. Research on continuous traumatic stress points to something different: staying oriented toward your goals, routines, and future. The Short Answer If you're living through an ongoing war, or any situation where the danger hasn't actually passed, you may have been told to "process what's happening" or "sit with your feelings" about it. For once-off trauma, that advice makes sense. For ongoing t

Discovering infidelity during or after living through war isn't one trauma stacked on another. Research shows it changes how the whole event gets processed, and why standard betrayal advice often misses the mark. The Short Answer If you found out your partner was unfaithful while you were living through war, or in the unsettled period right after it, you may have noticed that the pain doesn't feel like ordinary heartbreak. It doesn't feel like ordinary war trauma either. It f

Separation, suppressed conflict, and wartime infidelity don't just strain relationships. Research shows they create a debt that often comes due after the danger has passed. The Short Answer If a marriage survived a war and then fell apart once things were supposed to get better, that's not a rare or strange outcome. It's a documented pattern. Divorce rates spike sharply in the first year or two after conflict ends. Finland recorded over 5,600 divorces in 1945 alone, Denmark s

It describes something real: living under a threat that hasn't ended. Here's why the science hasn't caught up to a formal name for it, and what that gap means for you. The Short Answer If you've read about continuous traumatic stress (CTS) and gone looking for it in a diagnostic manual, you won't find it. It isn't in the DSM-5. It isn't in the ICD-11 either, even though the ICD-11 added several new stress-related categories in its most recent update (Maercker & Brewin, 2024;

Research shows it isn't burnout or ordinary stress. It's trauma — and understanding the difference changes what kind of help actually works. The Short Answer If you're living through war, or loving someone who is, you may have heard people reach for words like "stress" or "burnout" to describe what's happening. Those words weren't built for this. Research on civilian populations exposed to active conflict shows the dominant conditions are post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Not all striving is created equal. The kind of future you're reaching for seems to matter almost as much as whether you reach it. Ask someone what they're working toward and you'll usually get an answer fairly quickly. A promotion, a better relationship, a healthier body, more money, some version of a life that feels more like theirs. What's less obvious, and what the research turns out to have quite a bit to say about, is that these goals aren't interchangeable in how they a

Not someone who never feels jealous, afraid, or inadequate. Someone whose sense of worth doesn't collapse when those feelings show up Direct answer: security shows up in what a man does after the feeling, not in whether he feels it at all I want to start by clearing up the most common misread of what "emotionally secure" actually means, because it shapes everything else in this piece. Becoming a secure adult man doesn't mean he stops feeling jealousy, fear, or inadequacy. He

Not insight alone. It takes repeated, embodied experiences of staying, feeling, and being met differently than he was before Direct answer: security gets built through repetition and response, not through understanding your patterns Here's the finding that reframes almost everything else in this piece, so it's worth leading with. A learning theory of attachment holds that a secure internal working model develops after consistently high levels of contingency across many single

A look at the emerging "mind-mitochondria" link between psychosocial stress and physical health, and why the inflammation story is more complicated than it first appears For a long time, the phrase "stress affects your health" stayed pretty abstract. It lived somewhere between cortisol charts and vague warnings about heart disease. But a newer body of research is getting a lot more specific about where that effect actually lands, and the answer is smaller than most of us expe

On an easy day, insecure and secure men can look nearly identical. Daily diary research shows the real difference surfaces the moment things get hard Direct answer: security is consistency across conditions, insecurity is a pattern that depends on the weather Here's the finding that reorganizes how I think about spotting attachment security in real life. It's not really about how someone acts on an average day, it's about whether how they act changes depending on the day. Dai

Why CBT still leads, why it doesn't work for everyone, and what the research says about who benefits from what If you've spent any time in a waiting room with chronic fatigue, you've probably already heard someone recommend cognitive behavioural therapy. It's the treatment clinicians reach for first, and there's a reason for that. Across decades of trials, CBT keeps showing up as the psychological intervention with the strongest, most consistent evidence for reducing fatigue

A look at the research on pathological social withdrawal, why it takes hold, and what actually helps people come back out Picture a bedroom door that hasn't opened in over a year. Meals get left on a tray outside it. The person inside might be scrolling, gaming, sleeping at odd hours, or just lying there. Nobody in the house is quite sure what to say anymore, so mostly, nobody says anything. That is hikikomori, at least in its more extreme form. The term comes from Japan, whe

News Analysis For two decades surgeons aimed at roughly the same deep brain structures in every patient. A handful of small studies now suggest the best spot differs from person to person, and that finding it individually may work better. Doctors spent several days inside one patient's brain before deciding where the permanent electrodes should go. Using temporary recording wires threaded across the circuit implicated in obsessive-compulsive disorder, they stimulated site aft

Two people, two hallways, roughly one physiology. The first is standing in the wings before a keynote, heart at 110, palms damp, breath high in the chest, stomach doing something unhelpful. The second is in the queue for a rollercoaster with the same heart rate, the same damp hands, the same high shallow breathing. One is bracing. The other is grinning at a friend. If fear, excitement, awe, and joy can be assembled from overlapping bodily ingredients, the interesting question

Racing heart, tight chest, shallow breath, hands damp. That description fits a person cresting the first drop of a rollercoaster and a person sitting in a therapist's office recalling something they have spent years avoiding. One of them is laughing. Nappe (2026) uses close to this pairing to make a point that sounds obvious until you sit with it, which is that a matched autonomic profile can be thrill in one situation and dread in another, and the biology alone will not tell

Go into a grocery store an hour past lunch and the aisles rearrange themselves. Packaging seems brighter, smells arrive sooner, and items you walk past every week suddenly ask for attention. Nothing about the store changed, and nothing about your eyes changed either. What shifted was the state of your body, and there is a growing research literature arguing that this is not a quirk at the edges of perception but a clue about how perception works at all. The starting point is