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A new Yale-led study found that more than one-third of Israeli adults surveyed during the third month of the Israel-Hamas war suffered from probable post-traumatic stress disorder, revealing widespread psychological distress among people in Israel.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosurgery at Yale School of Medicine has launched a pioneering study aimed at uncovering the neural and genomic mechanisms that drive anxiety.

A new study in NPJ Digital Medicine found OpenAI’s artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT shows signs of anxiety when its users share “traumatic narratives” about crime, war, or car accidents. And when chatbots get stressed out, they are less likely to be useful in therapeutic settings with people. Ziv Ben-Zion, PhD, postdoctoral fellow, is the study's first author.

Using functional brain imaging and machine learning, Yale researchers were able to predict PTSD symptoms 14 months after the initial traumatic event.

Arielle Rubenstein, PhD, clinical psychologist at Yale School of Music, and Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD, professor of psychiatry and of psychology, are first and senior authors, respectively, of a review in APA PsycNet that aims to answer the question of whether exposure is necessary to treat posttraumatic stress disorder by integrating clinical and research literature from multiple perspectives.

Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD, professor of psychiatry and of psychology, has been invited to speak at the Neuroscience for Primetime Symposium at the Society of Biological Psychiatry (SOBP) Annual Meeting in May.

The paper "In PTSD, Evidence That a Single Ketamine Infusion May Enhance Extinction of Recalled Traumatic Memories" by Or Duek, PhD, assistant professor adjunct in psychiatry, and Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD, professor of psychiatry and of psychology, has been named a 2023 Leading Research Achievement by the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation.

Investigators from Yale and Mount Sinai schools of medicine studied the neural activity of 28 people diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). They found that autobiographical memories for sad and neutral memories are processed differently in the brain than for traumatic memories. The findings were published in Nature Neuroscience. The co-senior author is Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD, professor of psychiatry and of psychology at Yale School of Medicine.

Ian Fischer, PhD, postdoctoral fellow; Robert Pietrzak, PhD, MPH, professor of psychiatry and public health; and Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, PhD, professor of psychiatry and of psychology, are co-authors of a commentary in The Lancet Psychiatry that suggests post-traumatic stress disorder should be considered a lifetime diagnosis with remission periods.