Los investigadores han creído durante mucho tiempo que el cerebro controla nuestro sentido del tiempo. Un nuevo estudio sugiere que el corazón desempeña un papel importante.Es una perogrullada que el tiempo parece expandirse o contraerse según nuestras circunstancias: cuando tenemos miedo, los segundos se pueden estirar. Si pasamos un día en soledad, puede pasar lento. Cuando queremos entregar algo a tiempo, las horas transcurren con rapidez.Un estudio publicado este mes en la revista Psychophysiology a cargo de psicólogos de la Universidad Cornell descubrió que, cuando se observa al nivel de microsegundos, algunas de estas distorsiones podrían ser generadas por los latidos del corazón, cuya duración es variable de un momento a otro.Los psicólogos sometieron a estudiantes universitarios a electrocardiogramas para medir la duración de cada latido con precisión y, después, les pidieron que estimaran la duración de tonos de audio breves. Los psicólogos descubrieron que tras un intervalo más largo de latido, los sujetos tendían a percibir que el tono era más largo; los intervalos más cortos llevaron a los participantes a evaluar el tono como más corto. Tras cada tono, los intervalos de latidos de los sujetos se alargaban.Saeedeh Sadeghi, una doctoranda en la Universidad Cornell y autora principal del estudio, mencionó que un ritmo cardiaco más bajo pareció ayudar a la percepción.“Cuando necesitamos percibir cosas del mundo exterior, los latidos del corazón son ruido para la corteza cerebral”, explica. “Puedes asimilar más el mundo —es más fácil procesar cosas— cuando el corazón está en silencio”.Sadeghi indica que el estudio brinda mayor evidencia, después de una era de investigación enfocada en el cerebro, de que “no es solo una parte del cerebro o del cuerpo la que lleva registro del tiempo, sino toda una red”. Y añadió: “El cerebro controla el corazón y el corazón, a su vez, impacta al cerebro”.El interés en la percepción del tiempo ha tenido un auge desde el inicio de la pandemia de la COVID-19, cuando las actividades fuera del hogar se detuvieron en seco para muchos y personas de todo el mundo se enfrentaron a tramos de tiempo que no podían diferenciar.Un estudio de la percepción del tiempo realizado durante el primer año de confinamiento en el Reino Unido halló que el 80 por ciento de los participantes reportaron percibir distorsiones en el tiempo, en distintas direcciones. En promedio, la gente de mayor edad y más aislada de contextos sociales reportó que el tiempo se ralentizaba; mientras que gente más joven y activa reportó que se aceleraba.“Nuestra experiencia del tiempo es afectada de maneras que se asemejan, en general, a nuestro bienestar”, explicó Ruth S. Ogden, catedrática de Psicología en la Universidad John Moores de Liverpool y autora del estudio durante el confinamiento: “Las personas con depresión experimentan una lentificación del tiempo y esa ralentización se percibe como un factor que empeora la depresión”.El nuevo estudio de Cornell aborda algo diferente: cómo percibimos el paso de los microsegundos. Odgen señaló que entender esos mecanismos podría ayudarnos a manejar el trauma, en el que experiencias instantáneas son recordadas como prolongadas.La académica manifestó que, cuando se intenta evaluar la importancia de una experiencia, “nuestro cerebro simplemente hace una retrospección y dice: ‘Bueno, ¿cuántos recuerdos generamos?’”.Y añadió: “Cuando tienes un recuerdo muy vívido, más intenso del que normalmente obtendrías de un periodo de 15 minutos de tu vida, tu mente puede hacerte creer que fue muy largo”.Hugo Critchley, un profesor de Psiquiatría en Brighton and Sussex Medical School que ha estudiado cómo los latidos afectan nuestra forma de recordar palabras y responder ante el miedo, afirmó que, hasta hace poco, la investigación sobre la percepción del tiempo se había enfocado en distintas áreas del cerebro.Critchley, quien no estuvo involucrado en el estudio de los latidos de Cornell, aseguró: “Creo que ahora se aprecia mucho más que las funciones cognitivas están vinculadas de manera íntima, tal vez incluso cimentadas, en el control del cuerpo, mientras que la mayoría de los estudios de psicología hasta la década de 1990 ignoraron el cuerpo desde el tronco encefálico”.El catedrático opinó que las investigaciones previas han explorado cómo la excitación física está conectada con el procesamiento del estrés y estados emocionales como la ansiedad y el pánico. El nuevo estudio ahonda en eso al centrarse en el papel del corazón en una función no emocional, la percepción del tiempo, que puede vincularse a distorsiones más grandes en el pensamiento.“La función cognitiva no se puede examinar en aislamiento”, añadió. “Incluso al entender cómo el cerebro se desarrolla y comienza a representar estados mentales internos, la gente ve la preeminencia de la información interna indispensable que se debe controlar para sobrevivir”.Adam K. Anderson, un profesor de psicología en Cornell y coautor del nuevo estudio, aseveró que una razón por la que el cuerpo podría estar íntimamente involucrado en la percepción del tiempo es que el tiempo está muy relacionado con las necesidades metabólicas.“El tiempo es un recurso”, concluyó Anderson. “Si el cuerpo fuera una batería o un tanque de gasolina, intentaría averiguar en tiempo real: ‘¿Cuánta energía tenemos?’. Percibimos que el tiempo corre más lento o más rápido según cuánta energía corporal tenemos”.Ellen Barry cubre salud mental. Ha sido jefa del buró del Times en Boston, corresponsal internacional jefa en Londres y jefa de los burós en Moscú y Nueva Delhi. Fue parte de un equipo que ganó el Pulitzer al Reportaje Internacional en 2011. @EllenBarryNYT

Researchers have long assumed that the brain controls our sense of time. A new study suggests the heart plays an important role.It is a truism that time seems to expand or contract depending on our circumstances: In a state of terror, seconds can stretch. A day spent in solitude can drag. When we’re trying to meet a deadline, hours race by.A study published this month in the journal Psychophysiology by psychologists at Cornell University found that, when observed at the level of microseconds, some of these distortions could be driven by heartbeats, whose length is variable from moment to moment.The psychologists fitted undergraduates with electrocardiograms to measure the length of each heartbeat precisely, and then asked them to estimate the length of brief audio tones. The psychologists discovered that after a longer heartbeat interval, subjects tended to perceive the tone as longer; shorter intervals led subjects to assess the tone as shorter. Subsequent to each tone, the subjects’ heartbeat intervals lengthened.A lower heart rate appeared to assist with perception, said Saeedeh Sadeghi, a doctoral candidate at Cornell and the study’s lead author.“When we need to perceive things from the outside world, the beats of the heart are noise to the cortex,” she said. “You can sample the world more — it’s easier to get things in — when the heart is silent.”The study provides more evidence, after an era of research focusing on the brain, that “there is no single part of the brain or body that keeps time — it’s all a network,” she said, adding, “The brain controls the heart, and the heart, in turn, impacts the brain.”Interest in the perception of time has exploded since the Covid pandemic, when activity outside the home came to an abrupt halt for many and people around the world found themselves facing stretches of undifferentiated time.A study of time perception conducted during the first year of the lockdown in Britain found that 80 percent of participants reported distortions in time, in different directions. On average, older, more socially isolated people reported that time slowed, and younger, more active people reported that it sped up.“Our experience of time is affected in ways which mirror, generally, our well-being,” said Ruth S. Ogden, a psychology professor at Liverpool John Moores University and the author of the lockdown study. “People with depression experience a slowing of time, and that slowing of time is experienced as being a worsening factor of the depression.”The new Cornell study addresses something different: how we perceive the passage of microseconds. Understanding those mechanisms may help us to manage trauma, in which instantaneous experiences are remembered as drawn out, Dr. Ogden said.When trying to assess the importance of an experience, she said, “our brain just looks back and says, Well, how many memories did we make?”She added, “When you have this really rich memory, richer than you would normally get in a 15-minute period of your life, that’s going to trick you into thinking that it was long.”Research into perception of time has focused, until recently, on different areas of the brain, said Hugo Critchley, a professor of psychiatry at Brighton and Sussex Medical School who has studied how heartbeats affect memory for words and fear responses.“I think there’s much greater appreciation that cognitive functions are intimately linked, perhaps even grounded in, the control of the body, whereas most of the psychology up to the 1990s dismisses the body as being something controlled at the level of the brain stem,” said Dr. Critchley, who was not involved in the Cornell heartbeat study.Previous research has investigated how physical arousal is connected to stress processing, and emotional states like anxiety and panic, Dr. Critchley said. The new study expands on that by focusing on the role of the heart in a nonemotional function, the perception of time, which can be linked to larger distortions in thinking.“You can’t look at cognitive function in isolation,” he said. “Even understanding how the brain develops and starts representing internal mental states, people are looking at the primacy of the inescapable internal information you need to control to keep alive.”One reason that the body may be closely involved in the perception of time is that time is closely related to metabolic needs, said Adam K. Anderson, a professor of psychology at Cornell and a co-author of the new study.“Time is a resource,” Dr. Anderson said. “If the body was a battery, or a gas tank, it’s trying in the moment to say, How much energy do we have? We’re going to make things seem shorter or longer in terms of time based on how much bodily energy we have.”

Suicide increased among younger Black, Hispanic and Native American people, and declined among whites and older people, the C.D.C. reported.A two-year decline in yearly suicides ended in 2021, as suicide rates rose among younger Americans and people of color, according to a new report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.For decades, suicide rates among Black and Hispanic Americans were comparatively low, around a third the rate recorded among white Americans. But a gradual shift is underway, as suicide rates rise in populations most affected by the pandemic.Between 2018 and 2021, the suicide rate among Black people increased by 19.2 percent, from 7.3 to 8.7 per 100,000. The swiftest rise took place among some of the youngest Black people, those ages 10 to 24. The suicide rate in that group rose by 36.6 percent, from 8.2 to 11.2 per 100,000.Among people ages 25 to 44, suicide rates rose 5 percent overall, and even more significantly among Black, Hispanic, multiracial and American Indian or Alaska Native people. The suicide rate remained highest among Native American and Alaska Native people, increasing by 26 percent, from 22.3 to 28.1 per 100,000, in that period.The only racial group that saw a decrease in suicide rates across age cohorts was non-Hispanic white people. That population saw a decline of 3.9 percent, from 18.1 to 17.4 per 100,000. Suicide deaths in the white population numbered 36,681, more than three-quarters of the total number.Tips for Parents to Help Their Struggling TeensCard 1 of 6Are you concerned for your teen?

Chilling details emerged at an arraignment of Lindsay Clancy, accused of strangling her three children. Her lawyer argued she was mentally ill, but prosecutors outlined methodical planning leading to the deaths.DUXBURY, Mass. — Lindsay Clancy lay paralyzed in a hospital bed on Tuesday afternoon, occasionally blinking or shutting her eyes, unable to do anything but listen as lawyers told two narratives about how she had strangled her three children.The prosecutor said it had been meticulously planned: She had concocted an errand that would keep her husband, Patrick, out of the house for about 25 minutes, just long enough so she could do it.And she had then strangled each of her children with an exercise band, an act that would require holding each of them down for at least four minutes. Then she leapt from a second-story window, a fall that fractured her spine.“The defendant stated that after he left the house that night, she killed the kids because she heard a voice, and had, quote unquote, a moment of psychosis,” Assistant District Attorney Jennifer Sprague said during a virtual arraignment via Zoom.“She heard a man’s voice, telling her to kill the kids and kill herself because it was her last chance,” Ms. Sprague said.The defense lawyer told a different story. Since the birth of her youngest child, eight months ago, he said, Ms. Clancy had repeatedly sought help for postpartum depression, eventually being prescribed 13 psychiatric medications in a four-month period. But suicidal thoughts kept surfacing, culminating in a break on Jan. 24.“This is not a situation, your honor, that was planned by any means,” said Ms. Clancy’s lawyer, Kevin Reddington. “This is a situation that clearly was a product of mental illness.”In the last two weeks, since Mr. Clancy arrived home to a horrific scene, this community has been trying to make sense of it. Ms. Clancy, 32, worked as a labor and delivery nurse. She was known as a generous friend and a doting mother. She had no criminal record, nor any reported history of abusing her children — Cora, 5; Dawson, 3; and the baby, Callan.Ms. Clancy has received a good deal of sympathy, much of it from women who have experienced postpartum depression and psychosis. Online supporters have adopted the hashtag LAOL, which stands for Lindsay’s Army of Love. Mr. Clancy appealed to the public to “find it deep within yourselves to forgive Lindsay, as I have.”But Tuesday’s arraignment made it clear how difficult it would be to untangle Ms. Clancy’s mental state from her actions.Tips for Parents to Help Their Struggling TeensCard 1 of 6Are you concerned for your teen?

Her simple idea, for patients to write down a plan that would help them weather a suicidal crisis, rapidly spread in clinical settings.Barbara H. Stanley, a psychologist and researcher who developed a simple, effective tool for suicide prevention, died on Wednesday in a hospice in Scotch Plains, N.J. She was 73.Her daughter, Melissa Morris, said the cause was ovarian cancer.Dr. Stanley, a professor of psychology at Columbia University and the director of suicide prevention training at New York State Psychiatric Institute, helped propel a major shift in the field of mental health as researchers began to view suicide as a distinct problem that could be directly addressed, rather than as a symptom of another disorder.Her most prominent contribution was an idea that is deceptively simple. The Stanley-Brown Safety Planning Intervention asks patients struggling with suicidal urges to compose a written plan that lists coping strategies, as well as sources of support or distraction that could help them weather a suicidal crisis.The idea of a written document was not new. For years, clinicians had asked patients to sign a “no-suicide contract,” effectively promising their doctors not to engage in self-harm. But there was little evidence that these agreements had much effect, said Gregory K. Brown, Dr. Stanley’s research partner and the director of the Penn Center for the Prevention of Suicide at the University of Pennsylvania.In 2008, when they first tested the written safety plans, Dr. Stanley and Dr. Brown envisioned them as a short-term measure to tide adolescent patients over while they waited for slow, labor-intensive courses of therapy — the real treatment — to have an effect.But patients right away singled out the written safety plan as so helpful that the team developed it as a free-standing intervention. The researchers often compared the written plans to “stop, drop and roll” fire-safety training, or to the safety cards distributed on airplanes — a way to provide very simple instructions to help people make sound decisions in the midst of overwhelming emotions.“There is something about this kind of intervention,” Dr. Stanley said in a 2019 interview, “that helps them get through that period of time.” Patients, she said, “actually really like the piece of paper.” She recalled hearing from two separate patients who, while standing on bridges considering suicide, changed their minds because they pulled out their safety plan and read it. Even years after composing a safety plan, she said, “almost everybody could tell you the exact location, where it was at that exact moment.”“Over two-thirds of the people had used their safety plan at least once,” she said. “So it was a living, breathing document for them.”Clinicians treating veterans showed immediate interest, and the researchers were inundated with requests for training programs, manuals and handouts, even before the technique’s effectiveness could be demonstrated in randomized controlled trials.Research did eventually bear out their enthusiasm. In 2018, a study of 1,200 suicidal patients at Veterans Affairs hospitals around the country found that two simple interventions in emergency departments — a written safety plan combined with follow-up phone calls — reduced suicidal behavior by 45 percent. The patients were also twice as likely to receive mental health treatment in the six months following their visit.Dr. Stanley’s work helped shift the focus of suicide research toward practical, concrete and timely interventions, said Paul Nestadt, an associate professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies suicide and access to lethal weapons.“Whether someone dies of suicide comes down to that act,” he said. “Intervening in those most important few minutes, between the decision to die by suicide and the act of suicide, is key. It is one of the few things that makes a difference. She knew that.”Dr. Stanley went to great lengths to support young scientists, said Kelly L. Green, a senior research investigator at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine.She recalled being overawed when she met Dr. Stanley for the first time, at an academic conference in Baltimore. Later, when they ran into each other at the railroad station, Dr. Stanley insisted that the two ride the same train back together so they could have time to talk.“She took such an interest in me, and she didn’t have to,” said Dr. Green, who went on to collaborate with Dr. Stanley for years. “No one else at that conference would have gone up to the ticket counter and said, ‘No, I need her on my train.’”Dr. Stanley wrote more than 200 papers. She was president of the International Academy for Suicide Research and served on boards and committees of many professional organizations. She also continued her clinical practice, treating patients who struggled with suicidal feelings.Ms. Morris, Dr. Stanley’s daughter, said that her mother was modest about her professional success but was always thrilled to hear from clinicians in far-flung places who had used the techniques she developed to help patients.“She was deeply touched by that, no doubt,” she said in an interview. “She found it very, very, very meaningful and very passionate. The work was so fulfilling to her, both on a personal level and on a larger level, to have been of service.”Barbara Hrevnack was born on Aug. 13, 1949, in Newark. Her father, John Hrevnack, worked as a tool-and-die maker, and her mother, Marie (Wnukowski) Hrevnack, worked in the claims department of an insurance company.She earned a bachelor’s degree at Montclair State College and a doctorate in clinical psychology at New York University.She married Michael Edward Stanley, a neuroscientist, in 1970, and the two published a number of research papers together on such topics as informed consent and borderline personality disorder. He died in 1993.In addition to her daughter, Dr. Stanley, who lived in Chatham, N.J., is survived by her son, Thomas Stanley, and her siblings, John Hrevnack, Michael Hrevnack and Joanne Kennedy.

Late Monday morning, two police officers drove up a gravel driveway to a mobile home in Benton, Tenn., a tiny town in the foothills of the southern Appalachians, to question Susan Meachen, a 47-year-old homemaker and author of romance novels.She had been expecting them. For a week, she had been the focus of a scandal within the online subculture of self-published romance writers, part of the literary world sometimes known as “Romancelandia.”The police wanted to talk to Ms. Meachen about faking her own death. In the fall of 2020, a post announcing she had died had appeared on her Facebook page, where she had often described her struggles with mental health and complained of poor treatment at the hands of other writers.The post, apparently written by her daughter, led many to assume she had died by suicide. It sent fans and writers into a spiral of grief and introspection, wondering how their sisterhood had turned so poisonous.But she wasn’t dead. Last week, to the shock of her online community, Ms. Meachen returned to her page to say she was back and now “in a good place,” and ready to resume writing under her own name. She playfully concluded: “Let the fun begin.”Other writers, seeing this, were not in the mood for fun. Describing deep feelings of betrayal, they have called for her to be prosecuted for fraud, alleging that she faked her death to sell books or solicit cash donations. They have reported her to the F.B.I. cybercrimes unit and the local sheriff and vowed to shun her and her work. Some have questioned whether she exists in real life.Ms. Meachen does exist. In a series of interviews, she said the online community had become a treacherous place for a person in her mental state, as she struggled to manage a new diagnosis of bipolar disorder.“I think it’s a very dangerous mix-up, especially if you have a mental illness,” she said. “I would log on and get in, and at some point in the day my two worlds would collide, and it would be hard to differentiate between book world and the real world. It was like they would sandwich together.”A text message from Ms. Meachen to Samantha A. Cole, another romance writer in her Facebook group.via FacebookWhen she was first introduced to “the book world,” as she calls it, she was alone at home for long stretches while her husband, a long-haul truck driver, traversed the country.She read romance novels, sometimes plowing through more than one a day. She had always been a reader, despite dropping out of school in the 9th grade to marry. The online romance community was a revelation to her, “like an escape, a timeout, a break from everyday reality,” she said.Over time, though, it began to feel more like quicksand. Over the next three years, she self-published 14 novels and maintained a near-constant social media presence. She was also diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a disease characterized by periods of manic activity that can alternate with deep depression.The book world made her disorder worse, she said. Writing often sent her into a manic state, and conflicts on the fan pages left her seething. She knew she should walk away, and she tried. But she said it was “an addiction”; every time she tried to log off for good, her phone would ping.Dead people don’t postRomance writers’ groups can be fizzy, exhilarating places. There is sexy cover art. There is snappy industry jargon, like HEA (Happily Ever After), Dubcon (dubious consent) and Reverse Harem (a female protagonist with multiple male love interests.)At their best, the groups are a fountain of support for “indie” authors, who self-publish their work and help each other with covers and marketing, which is known as “pimping.” At their worst, they can be “epicenters of nonstop drama,” said Sarah Wendell, the co-founder of the romance blog Smart Bitches, Trashy Books.Ms. Meachen’s fan page, The Ward — a humorous reference to a psychiatric hospital — went in that direction. She complained bitterly about colleagues who, she said, she had helped but had failed to help her in return, and threatened to leave the indie world.“Every day it got to the point I’d rather be dead than to deal with the industry and the people who swear they are friends,” she wrote in September of 2020. “I’ve had some dog eat dog jobs in my life but this one is by far the most vicious with the least amount of money.”Ms. Meachen lives in the tiny town of Benton in the Appalachian foothills in southeastern Tennessee.Jessica Tezak for The New York TimesShe described her psychiatric treatment and alluded to past suicide attempts.“Dear Scary people in my head, I truly understand we’ve been doing your story for over a year,” she wrote. “Waking me up with muscles screaming at me to get up and finish does not motivate me.”Ms. Meachen’s psychiatrist, Dr. Niansen Liu, confirmed, with her permission, that she is under his treatment for bipolar disorder and that she has been prescribed medications for anxiety, depression and psychosis. He would not comment further on her case.Her online friends worried about her, and some reached out to express their concern, but there was a limit to what they could do, said Kimberly Grell, who became friendly with her through writing groups.“She was becoming pretty chaotic,” Ms. Grell said. “It just seemed like every problem that surfaced with her she was in the middle of, and it turned to where she was the victim of it all.”She sympathized with Ms. Meachen’s frustration, though, as it became clear that she might not be able to earn money with her writing.“A lot of people get into this type of business thinking they’re going to make their millions, like Stephen King or James Patterson,” said Ms. Grell, who exited the romance industry last year to sell beaded jewelry. “The reality is, it’s a money pit. You are literally tossing your money into a pit hoping someone will find you.”Ms. Meachen’s husband, Troy, said he came to see the “book world” as a danger to his wife’s welfare.When she sent out samples of her work to other authors, the responses she got were often “really brutal,” he said. When writing, he said, she had periods of mania and psychosis; sometimes, he would come home and “she would talk like a character from a book, like she was the individual she was writing.”He worried that it was too dangerous to leave her alone during the day. “It got to the point where it was like, enough is enough,” he said, comparing the community’s effect on her to a whirlpool. “She was going round and round,” he said, “and the bottom was just right there.”This reached a climax in the fall of 2020, according to Mr. and Ms. Meachen and their 22-year-old daughter, who described the episode on the condition that her name not be used.It had been a rough few weeks. In August, someone had called police because they feared she would harm herself. On September 10, Mr. Meachen was away, hauling a shipment of chemicals. Their daughter stopped by to check on her mother, and found her semiconscious.Ms. Meachen had taken a large dose of Xanax, enough to make her “like a limp noodle,” and was “not cognitive or responsive,” Mr. Meachen said. He instructed their daughter to announce her death online, he said.“I told them that she is dead to the indie world, the internet, because we had to stop her, period,” he said. “She could not stop it on her own. And, even to this day, I’ll take 100 percent of the blame, the accolades, whatever you want to call it.”The post on Meachen’s page said she had died two days earlier. “Author Susan Meachen left this world behind Tuesday night for bigger and better things,” it said. “Please leave us alone we have no desire in this messed-up industry.”A follow-up post appeared on Oct. 23. “Sorry thought everyone on this page knew my mom passed away,” it said. “Dead people don’t post on social media.”Ms. Meachen and her husband of 27 years, Troy. He said he came to see the “book world” as a danger to his wife’s welfare.via Susan Meachen‘I feel majorly gaslit’The news of Ms. Meachen’s death radiated out through the fan pages. Ms. Meachen was well known in the community, and had often reached out to new authors, volunteering to provide cover art or help with marketing.“Susan, I will never, ever forget how kind you were to me,” wrote Sai Marie Johnson, 38, the author of “Embers of Ecstasy,” at the time.“I only wish you would have known I would have talked you through the night, I’d have defended you against your bullies,” she wrote. “I will do everything I can to make a difference so your death is not in vain.”Ms. Johnson, who lives in Oregon, was so upset that she reached out to Ms. Meachen’s daughter online and offered to edit her mother’s last book for free, as a tribute. But the damage had been done, she said: Over the months that followed, many members, disgusted by the Mean Girl-ness of it all, migrated out of the community or deleted their accounts.“It caused a huge shift in this community,” Ms. Johnson said. “There was a lot of drama, but this was the tidal wave. Nobody before had gotten so abused that they wanted to commit suicide.”The subject receded, replaced by other dramas, until Jan. 2, when Ms. Meachen reappeared on her fan page with the news that she was alive.Ms. Meachen did not see it as a particularly big deal. Eager to resume writing under her own name, she had been considering such a move for about a year, she said. She sat down at the computer, she said, and “hit enter before I could talk myself out of it.”“I debated on how to do this a million times and still not sure if it’s right or not,” the post read. “There’s going to be tons of questions and a lot of people leaving the group I’d guess. But my family did what they thought was best for me and I can’t fault them for it.”For the first few hours, the response was muted. Then, as she put it, “all hell broke loose.” Her post was widely shared by Samantha A. Cole, a romance writer from the suburbs of New York City, along with a seething commentary.“I was horrified, stunned, livid, and felt like I’d been kicked in the gut and the chest at the same time,” wrote Ms. Cole, who previously worked as a police officer, and asked to be identified by her pen name to avoid the notice of people she had arrested.More than anything, Ms. Cole said, she was hurt. She had gone into a “major funk” for months over Ms. Meachen’s death, worried that she had not been a good friend. Worse, in the recriminations that followed, Ms. Cole was accused on one fan page of bullying Ms. Meachen, something both women said was untrue.Ms. Cole, who describes herself as “naturally suspicious,” set about documenting Ms. Meachen’s false claims in a series of screen shots and DMs.An excerpt from Ms. Cole’s Facebook page.via FacebookShe provided screenshots showing that Ms. Meachen had appealed to the group for financial help in medical emergencies and noted that she returned to the fan page under a new identity, T.N. Steele, effectively eavesdropping on her own mourners.“It was important to me because the people that had grieved for her death for so long had a right to know that the whole thing was a hoax,” Ms. Cole said. “That’s what led me to do this, my anger and the sense of betrayal. I needed a way to vent.”Many authors who are angry say it is because they know so many people struggling with mental illness themselves, and that it is despicable to falsify suicide for any reason.”“I feel majorly gaslit,” said Ms. Johnson, who, last week, filed a report about the incident to the cybercrimes unit of the F.B.I. She added, “It doesn’t seem like she is apologetic, and she is trying to cast blame on people, trying to get them to accept that she had a mental illness.”As the scandal drew the attention of mainstream media outlets to the romance industry, many of its senior figures drew a weary sigh.“I do not think it is going to help the romance industry’s persona of being a bunch of overly emotional women,” said Clair Brett, the president of the Romance Writers of America.A twinge of remorseMs. Meachen watched from Benton while the online backlash made headlines in Greece and Britain and France; reporters from various countries were appearing in her DMs, which stressed her out.This meant, among other things, that her real-life neighbors might read her novels, which fall on the racier end of the genre’s spectrum. For years, she has carefully separated her two identities — the romance writer and the homebody — but now they were smashing together.She had not heard again from the police and sounded confident that she would not face charges, saying the family had not received substantial donations after her online death announcement; she had offered the detectives access to her bank accounts to prove it. She did admit feeling remorse for the fans who had grieved her loss.“I’m sorry for their mourning, but from a legal standpoint, I did nothing wrong,” she said. “Morally, I might have done something wrong. But legally, there’s nothing wrong.”If Ms. Meachen was on the edges of a literary world before, she is now cast out of it. Her fan page has gone silent. Her inbox is full of angry messages from former friends. Looking back on the whole story, she said she regrets it all, starting with entering the romance groups.“It wasn’t good for me,” she said. “No, it wasn’t. I wish I had never met the book industry whatsoever.”She has set aside her plans to resume writing fiction, for now, to deal with more immediate concerns. Someone is impersonating her on social media, issuing comments about the scandal, she said, and hoax Susans were bouncing around the internet saying God knows what.“That’s what’s so funny about it,” her husband said. “You can be anybody you want to be on the internet.”

Teens who frequently checked social media showed an increasing sensitivity to peer feedback, although the cause of the changes was not clear.The effect of social media use on children is a fraught area of research, as parents and policymakers try to ascertain the results of a vast experiment already in full swing. Successive studies have added pieces to the puzzle, fleshing out the implications of a nearly constant stream of virtual interactions beginning in childhood.A new study by neuroscientists at the University of North Carolina tries something new, conducting successive brain scans of middle schoolers between the ages of 12 and 15, a period of especially rapid brain development.The researchers found that children who habitually checked their social media feeds at around age 12 showed a distinct trajectory, with their sensitivity to social rewards from peers heightening over time. Teenagers with less engagement in social media followed the opposite path, with a declining interest in social rewards.The study, published on Tuesday in JAMA Pediatrics, is among the first attempts to capture changes to brain function correlated with social media use over a period of years.The study has important limitations, the authors acknowledge. Because adolescence is a period of expanding social relationships, the brain differences could reflect a natural pivot toward peers, which could be driving more frequent social media use.“We can’t make causal claims that social media is changing the brain,” said Eva H. Telzer, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and one of the authors of the study.But, she added, “teens who are habitually checking their social media are showing these pretty dramatic changes in the way their brains are responding, which could potentially have long-term consequences well into adulthood, sort of setting the stage for brain development over time.”A team of researchers studied an ethnically diverse group of 169 students in the sixth and seventh grades from a middle school in rural North Carolina, splitting them into groups according to how often they reported checking Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat feeds.At around age 12, the students already showed distinct patterns of behavior. Habitual users reported checking their feeds 15 or more times a day; moderate users checked between one and 14 times; nonhabitual users checked less than once a day.The subjects received full brain scans three times, at approximately one-year intervals, as they played a computerized game that delivered rewards and punishment in the form of smiling or scowling peers.While carrying out the task, the frequent checkers showed increasing activation of three brain areas: reward-processing circuits, which also respond to experiences like winning money or risk-taking behavior; brain regions that determine salience, picking out what stands out in the environment; and the prefrontal cortex, which helps with regulation and control.The results showed that “teens who grow up checking social media more often are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers,” Dr. Telzer said.The findings do not capture the magnitude of the brain changes, only their trajectory. And it is unclear, authors said, whether the changes are beneficial or harmful. Social sensitivity could be adaptive, showing that the teenagers are learning to connect with others; or it could lead to social anxiety and depression if social needs are not met.Researchers in the field of social media warned against drawing sweeping conclusions based on the findings.“They are showing that the way you use it at one point in your life does influence the way your brain develops, but we don’t know by how much, or whether it’s good or bad,” said Jeff Hancock, the founding director of the Stanford Social Media Lab, who was not involved in the study. He said that many other variables could have contributed to these changes.“What if these people joined a new team — a hockey team or a volleyball team — so started getting a lot more social interaction?” he said. It could be, he added, that the researchers are “picking up on the development of extroversion, and extroverts are more likely to check their social media.”He described the paper as “a very sophisticated piece of work,” contributing to research that has emerged recently showing that sensitivity to social media varies from person to person.“There are people who have a neurological state that means they are more likely to be attracted to checking frequently,” he said. “We’re not all the same, and we should stop thinking that social media is the same for everyone.”Over the last decade, social media has remapped the central experiences of adolescence, a period of rapid brain development.Nearly all American teenagers engage through social media, with 97 percent going online every day and 46 percent reporting that they are online “almost constantly,” according to the Pew Research Center. Black and Latino adolescents spend more hours on social media than their white counterparts, research has shown.Researchers have documented a range of effects on children’s mental health. Some studies have linked use of social media with depression and anxiety, while others found little connection. A 2018 study of lesbian, gay and bisexual teenagers found that social media provided them validation and support, but also exposed them to hate speech.Experts who reviewed the study said that because the researchers measured students’ social media use only once, around age 12, it was impossible to know how it changed over time, or to rule out other factors that might also affect brain development.Without more information about other aspects of the students’ lives, “it is challenging to discern how specific differences in brain development are to social media checking,” said Adriana Galvan, a specialist in adolescent brain development at the University of California Los Angeles, who was not involved in the study.Jennifer Pfeifer, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and co-director of the National Scientific Council on Adolescence, said, “All experience accumulates and is reflected in the brain.”“I think you want to put it into this context,” she said. “So many other experiences that adolescents have will also be changing the brain. So we don’t want to get into some kind of moral panic about the idea that social media is use is changing adolescents’ brains.”Dr. Telzer, one of the study’s authors, described the rising sensitivity to social feedback as “neither good nor bad.”“It’s helping them connect to others and obtain rewards from the things that are common in their social world, which is engaging in social interactions online,” she said.“This is the new norm,” she added. “Understanding how this new digital world is influencing teens is important. It may be associated with changes in the brain, but that may be for good or for bad. We don’t necessarily know the long-term implications yet.”

Many parents bring children to emergency rooms to manage aggressive behaviors. But the visits offer little long-term benefit, doctors said.For emergency room doctors, they are a dispiriting and familiar sight: Children who return again and again in the grip of mental health crises, brought in by caregivers who are frightened or overwhelmed.Much has been written about the surge in pediatric mental health emergency visits in recent years, as rates of depression and suicidal behavior among teens surged. Patients often spend days or weeks in exam rooms waiting for a rare psychiatric bed to open up, sharply reducing hospital capacity.But a large study published on Tuesday found a surprising trend among adolescents who repeatedly visited the hospital. The patients most likely to reappear in emergency rooms were not patients who harmed themselves, but rather those whose agitation and aggressive behavior proved too much for their caregivers to manage.In many cases, repeat visitors had previously received sedatives or other drugs to restrain them when their behavior became disruptive.“Families come in with their children who have severe behavioral problems, and the families really just are at their wit’s end, you know,” said Dr. Anna M. Cushing, a pediatric emergency room physician at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles and one of the authors of the study. “Their child’s behavior may be a danger to themselves, but also to the parents, to the other children in the home.”The findings, published in the journal JAMA Pediatrics, analyzed more than 308,000 mental health visits at 38 hospitals between 2015 and 2020.Compared with patients presenting with suicidal or self-harming behavior, those with psychotic disorders were 42 percent more likely to revisit the emergency department within six months, the study found; patients with impulse control disorders were 36 percent more likely; and patients with disorders like autism and A.D.H.D. were 22 percent more likely. Patients who required medications to subdue them were 22 percent more likely to revisit than patients who did not.Tips for Parents to Help Their Struggling TeensCard 1 of 6Are you concerned for your teen?

The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey has been advocating tougher involuntary psychiatric treatment policies for 40 years. Now it’s paying off.BETHESDA, Md. — The psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey is 85 years old and has Parkinson’s disease, the tremors at times so strong that his hand beats like a drum on the table.Still, every morning when he reads the newspapers, he looks for accounts of violent behavior by people with severe mental illness, to add to an archive he has maintained since the 1980s.His records include reports of people who, in the grip of psychosis, assaulted political figures or pushed strangers into the path of subway trains; parents who, while delusional, killed their children by smothering, drowning or beating them; adult children who, while off medication, killed their parents with swords, axes or hammers.Dr. Torrey, who has done pioneering research into the biological basis of schizophrenia, has used these stories in service of an argument: that it was a mistake for the United States to shut down its public psychiatric hospitals without adequate follow-up care. And that to remedy this, the government should create systems to compel seriously mentally ill people in the community to get treatment.For much of his career, Dr. Torrey was a lonely voice on this issue, disavowed by patient advocacy groups and by organized psychiatry. But his ideas are now animating major policy shifts, including the announcement by Mayor Eric Adams of New York last month that city officials would send people with untreated mental illnesses to hospitals, even if they posed no threat to others.“This is the largest single attempt to change the thing that we said we wanted to change,” Dr. Torrey said.“I think the stakes are large,” he added. “Because if it fails, if you have no improvement at all, I think people give up for another decade, just live with it for another decade before somebody else comes along with a new idea.”Dr. Torrey’s influence on New York City’s policy is profound. The mayor’s adviser on this matter is Brian Stettin, who was thrust into mental health policy in 1999 when, as an assistant attorney general for New York State, he was asked to draft Kendra’s Law, named for a woman who was pushed in front of a subway train by a man with schizophrenia. The law allows a court to order a person with mental illness to comply with an outpatient treatment plan, risking involuntary commitment if the person refuses.At the time, Mr. Stettin turned to Dr. Torrey’s organization, the Treatment Advocacy Center, for guidance and became such a believer that after leaving state government, he spent more than a decade as the group’s policy director. In an interview, Mr. Stettin described Dr. Torrey as “the single greatest influence on my thinking about the role of law and policy in ensuring the medical treatment of severe mental illness.”Ira A. Burnim, the legal director of the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law, said that in the course of arguing for his ideas, Dr. Torrey had overstated the dangerousness of people with severe mental illness, changing the way they are viewed.“Every time there was a sensational crime involving a person with mental illness, Fuller Torrey would be out there, saying this is what happens when you have our current civil commitment laws,” he said. “Among the outcomes of Fuller’s work is the fear of people with mental illness.”He added that Dr. Torrey had been extraordinarily effective at building a consensus in favor of compulsory outpatient treatment. “That’s where Torrey wants to go — if you need treatment, you can be picked up,” he said. “We’ve lost. You’ve got to understand, we’ve lost.”The education of a skepticDr. Torrey appeared on C-SPAN in 2008 to discuss his book “The Insanity Offense: How America’s Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens.”C-SPANIt is, perhaps, no surprise that Dr. Torrey became an outlier in his profession. He was a sophomore at Princeton when his mother called to tell him something was wrong with his sister, Rhoda, who had just turned 18 and was due to start college in the fall. She was lying on the front lawn, shouting, “The British are coming!”He accompanied his mother to meetings with eminent psychiatrists, who lectured them on the possible causes of his sister’s schizophrenia. The chief of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital suggested it was the trauma of his father’s death. The chairman of Columbia’s psychiatry department pointed to “family problems.”“I knew it was nonsense from the beginning,” he said. “It made no sense whatsoever.”Later, when he became a psychiatrist himself, Dr. Torrey fantasized about rounding up all the psychiatrists “who had these nonsense theories” and putting them on trial in a football stadium full of patients’ families. As a researcher, he plunged into the task of searching for biological causes for the disease. But it was too late for his mother, who took the Columbia chairman’s word for it.“This was a very important man,” he said. “I think she died thinking it was true.”In the 1970s, when the country was discharging hundreds of thousands of patients from public psychiatric hospitals, it was the era of “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and the move was lauded as a forward-thinking reform. But Dr. Torrey warned that many former patients were being left wandering city streets untreated, describing them in his writing as “a legion of the inner-city damned.”He recalled a woman he had encountered while treating patients at a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. She struck him as familiar, so he pulled out her records: A decade earlier, while psychotic, she had been treated at St. Elizabeths, the public psychiatric hospital where he had worked, after attacking her daughter so brutally that the girl lost her arm. The woman had refused medication once she left the hospital.“I said, ‘There’s something very wrong with this system,’” he said. “How is this woman allowed to be completely psychotic again?”Dr. Torrey and his sister, Rhoda, in the mid-1940s.via E. Fuller TorreyIt was unusual for a psychiatrist to take such a blistering stance against deinstitutionalization, which been celebrated by liberals. Over the years that followed, Dr. Torrey said, his arguments found more support from conservatives, landing on the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal.He went on to challenge all of the profession’s power centers. He lambasted the National Institutes of Mental Health for funding too little research on treatments for debilitating illnesses like schizophrenia. He fell out with the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill over his advocacy of outpatient commitment. He refused to pay dues to his local chapter of the American Psychiatric Association — an act of protest over its spending on a lobbyist — and was expelled, he said.“I’m a longtime friend and colleague of Fuller’s, but Fuller caused institutional psychiatry a big pain in the butt,” said Dr. John Talbott, 87, a past president of the American Psychiatric Association. He traced the friction to deinstitutionalization. “Fuller was one of the few people who said from the very beginning that it was a big mistake. In part, he said it because of his sister.”After her diagnosis, Dr. Torrey’s sister never lived independently again, moving from a public hospital to a series of group homes. She died at 70. It wasn’t a good life, Dr. Torrey said, but someone was always looking after her.He could not say the same of the former residents of public psychiatric hospitals, who, as a result of deinstitutionalization, dispersed to a more isolated, precarious existence in apartment buildings or nursing homes.“Most of us who would be on the street would say, ‘Oh, we’d love to have our own place,’” he said. “I think a lot of these people don’t want their own place. They do better in a group home.” A few of them, he said, discovered a strategy that would send them right back to the state hospital: They set fire to their rooms.An idea takes holdMayor Eric Adams in City Hall in October. “I think that Adams is brave to try it,” Dr. Torrey said. “It’s going to be difficult. Does it make me nervous that it might fail? Yeah.”Dave Sanders for The New York TimesDr. Torrey’s tiny organization, the Treatment Advocacy Center, or TAC, set about changing laws with a twofold strategy.His team sought out legislators who were sympathetic because they had relatives with schizophrenia or had worked with severely mentally ill people. And they pushed for legislation after acts of violence, using the window of public dismay to put forward bills, like Kendra’s Law, that allowed for mandatory outpatient treatment.The group’s record has been striking. Forty-seven states now have laws on assisted outpatient treatment, 30 of them developed with the involvement of TAC. Federal funds began flowing into outpatient commitment programs in 2016, and TAC has received a federal grant to develop programs around the country.In the course of this campaign, Dr. Torrey has used statistics selectively to send a simplified message that untreated mental illnesses are a major cause of violence, said Jeff W. Swanson, a sociologist at the Duke University School of Medicine who has researched dangerousness.“Unfortunately, that doesn’t comport with what the epidemiological research says,” he said. About 4 percent of violent acts can be directly attributed to mental illness, and many of them are low-level assaults, he said, “things like pushing and shoving and slapping people.” But the fear that followed catastrophic incidents proved powerful, politically.“Fuller is a communicator — he wants to put information out there that moves hearts and minds and policymakers,” Dr. Swanson said. He also worried, like other experts interviewed, that tougher commitment laws could work only if mental health services like psychiatric beds and clinical care were widely available, which they are not.“It’s absolutely correct that we need to get severely mentally ill people off the streets and out of awful conditions and into some sort of care,” said Dr. Talbott, who served as superintendent at Manhattan State Hospital, which is now Manhattan Psychiatric Center. “But we have destroyed the care system in large parts. So I don’t know how to do it overnight.”Dr. Torrey said he shared that worry and had little sense of whether New York was prepared.“I think that Adams is brave to try it,” he said. “This is difficult. It’s going to be difficult.” He added: “Does it make me nervous that it might fail? Yeah. If I was 20 years younger, would I go up to New York and help them? I might.”But policy is not the first thing Dr. Torrey thinks of when he wakes up in the morning. What he wants to know is why his sister got sick.He was exuberant last week about new research that had found that wolves in Yellowstone Park made more risky decisions when they were infected with a parasite, toxoplasma gondii. His own research has found evidence that the same parasite plays a role in schizophrenia. He thinks he knows who passed it to Rhoda: the family cat, Butterball.Dr. Torrey also knows that his time is limited. The tremor in his hand began just after his 77th birthday, and he knew right away that it was Parkinson’s. Since then, he has tracked the progress of the disease with close attention that verges, at times, on enthusiasm.“I’ve tried to learn about the brain my whole life, and now my brain’s gone south,” he said. “I get to observe it! That’s exciting! The brain is fascinating! It is me! I am an N of one!”He is now in his 12th year with the disease. By year 15, he said, 80 percent of people with the disease have develop dementia. This is something he wanted Mr. Adams to know.“They better work fast in New York,” he said. “I want to know what happens. I want to see the results of this experiment before I become demented.”

A landmark 1979 study found that depressed people had a more realistic view of their influence over events. New research calls that into question.Forty-three years ago, two young psychologists, Lauren B. Alloy and Lyn Y. Abramson, reported the results of a simple experiment that led to a seminal idea in psychology.Their aim was to test the “helplessness theory,” that depressed people tend to underestimate their ability to influence the world around them.Dr. Alloy and Dr. Abramson categorized college student volunteers as depressed and nondepressed, based on self-reported symptoms, and provided each person with a button and a light that flashed occasionally. They then asked the volunteers to assess how much control they had over the light when they pressed the button.What they discovered was surprising. The depressed people, it turned out, had a more accurate reading of their ability to affect outcomes. Thus was born the hypothesis of “depressive realism” — the idea that at times depressed people have a more realistic view of their conditions, because they are free of the optimistic bias of their cheerful peers.This idea, summarized in the original paper as “sadder but wiser,” has been taught to decades of Intro Psych students and cited more than two thousand times by other scholars. It also percolated through our culture, introducing the idea that depression, for all its pain, may also provide its sufferers with some gifts.A study published this month in the journal Collabra: Psychology by Amelia S. Dev and others calls that conclusion into question.Recreating the original experiment, in which subjects must assess whether their button-pushing affected the light, the new research team found no association between depressive symptoms and outcome bias. In one sample, the patients with more depressive symptoms overestimated their control; in the second, depressive symptoms did not predict any particular bias.“Across two samples, we find no evidence that depressive symptoms is tied to greater realism,” the study said.Don A. Moore, one of the authors of the new study, said that the team had coalesced around the question of whether “positive illusions” can enhance performance, and that this had led them to back to the 1979 study.“Its impact has been huge, and it’s been pervasive in so many aspects of research and pop culture that it can be hard to wind it back up,” Dr. Moore, a psychological researcher and a professor at the University of California, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said of the original study.Under the influence of this theory, many psychologists taught that “a little bit of self-delusion is helpful for getting through life,” he said. “You have to believe in yourself a little more than reality warrants.”“What we knew,” he said, “made us wonder whether that effect would hold up.”Already, a 2012 meta-analysis of 75 studies on depressive realism had found that the overall effect of depressive realism was small, and that results were influenced by the study’s methodology. But it remained such a well-established notion that “we faced skeptical reviewers along the way,” Dr. Moore said.“If you’re trying to disprove a false positive that has made its way into the literature, that is an uphill climb,” he said.Dr. Alloy, one of the two psychologists who designed the original experiment, said in an interview that she did not believe the new work constituted a major challenge to depressive realism, because the research team failed to directly replicate the original 1979 experiment.“When they say they did a direct replication of our study, they did not,” Dr. Alloy, a professor of psychology at Temple University, said. “It’s not a major challenge. The original findings still hold.”She said differences in the design of the two experiments may account for the variance in results. The new team did not find an “illusion of control” among the nondepressed subjects, as the 1979 team did, which she said was unusual and made it difficult to interpret any results.The new team repeatedly asked subjects to assess the probability of the bulb lighting if they pushed the button throughout the experiment, rather than waiting until the end, as the original researchers did. Also, she said, the new researchers prescreened subjects for symptoms of depression, rather than screening them on the day of the experiment, so their mood may have shifted in that time.She also said the research team recreated only the second of the four experiments in the 1979 paper, which had the least robust findings.Finally, she took issue with the researchers’ characterization of depressive realism, which she said occurred only under certain conditions.“It simply isn’t true that depressed people are more accurate in their perception of the world,” she said. “That is too broad and general a statement.” Subsequent studies identified conditions under which depressive realism was present, which led to “more nuanced, sophisticated conclusions,” she said. “What’s out there in the public might not have kept up with that.”Over the four decades since Dr. Alloy and Dr. Abramson published their paper, the “sadder but wiser” idea has not guided emerging treatments. Clinicians have gravitated to cognitive behavioral therapy, which helps depressed patients identify distortions in their thoughts.“We would do a disservice to the client by accepting that what they say is a reality, rather than through a gentle Socratic process, to ask them to explore and examine their pattern of thinking,” said Allen Miller, a clinical psychologist at the Beck Institute, who was not involved in the study.Dr. Miller described the new paper as “a reasonable attempt to replicate it, which of course they were not able to do.”Brian A. Nosek, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia who coordinated the 2015 Reproducibility Project, described the Dev study as “a solid piece of work, well designed and well reported.”“Inevitably, it does confront us to revise our confidence in prior findings,” he said. “But no replication is definitive.”A decade ago, when young scientists began efforts to replicate published findings, they were often “seen as an attack” on established researchers, Dr. Nosek said. Since then, though, they have “become much more normalized” as part of an ongoing scientific dialogue. Still, he said, “we all have our egos, and our findings are like possessions.”And challenging blockbuster work like the 1979 study, which “provoke such engagement with the mysteries of human behavior and the mind,” has a ripple effect, he added.“This is a classic finding that I really want to be true, and many people do — it gives the Eeyores in all of us a little hope,” he said. “That obviously has implications. Are we pulling down the icons of the field? What is left when we pull those down?”