174 Fun Facts About Mental Health

Which conditions does the WHO count as the most common mental disorders worldwide, among 1.1 billion people affected in 2021?

Anxiety and depression lead the list; the WHO counted about 1.1 billion people living with a mental disorder in 2021, with anxiety disorders the single most common group.

Which mental health professional is a medical doctor who can typically prescribe medication?

Psychiatrists are medical doctors who have specialized training in mental health, enabling them to diagnose mental illnesses, conduct psychotherapy, and prescribe medication.

Mindfulness, adapted from the Buddhist concept of sati, is most often cultivated through which technique?

Meditation is the usual route; a course built on it has been tested head-to-head against staying on antidepressants as a way to stop depression returning, and is offered as an alternative.

Which reformer lobbied states to build mental asylums, then superintended the Union Army's nurses?

Dorothea Dix, a schoolteacher, went to teach a Sunday class at a local jail in 1841, found mentally ill inmates locked up with criminals in wretched conditions, and spent years lobbying legislatures for asylums.

Which condition, once called manic depression, features extreme mood swings between mania or hypomania and depression?

Bipolar Disorder is tricky to treat: an antidepressant taken alone can tip a patient from a low into mania, so doctors rarely prescribe one on its own.

Which lapses can strike a badly sleep-deprived person even at the wheel?

Microsleeps last only seconds, and the eyes can stay open while the brain stops taking in the road ahead, so a driver may never realise they nodded off.

Which brain chemical do antipsychotics chiefly act on?

Dopamine is the target: typical and atypical antipsychotics block D2 dopamine receptors, while third-generation drugs such as aripiprazole partially stimulate those receptors instead.

World Mental Health Day, held every 10 October, was observed for the first time in which year?

1992's first observance was launched by the World Federation for Mental Health; it only gained an annual theme in 1994.

Eli Lilly's antidepressant fluoxetine is better known by which brand name?

Prozac grew out of an allergy drug: Lilly's chemists modelled their test compounds on the antihistamine diphenhydramine in their hunt for a new kind of antidepressant.

Which class of antidepressants is a common first-line treatment because of fewer side effects?

SSRIs are the most widely prescribed antidepressants in many countries and a common first-line choice; NICE's 2022 guidance nonetheless prefers non-drug options first for less severe depression.

Hearing voices counts as which kind of schizophrenia symptom?

Positive here means added, not good: voices and false beliefs are extra experiences, while negative symptoms are things taken away, such as motivation, speech and emotional expression.

Which chemical element, taken as a carbonate salt, has been an FDA-approved psychiatric medicine since 1970?

Lithium carbonate calms mania, but the gap between a helpful dose and a toxic one is so narrow that patients need regular blood tests to check the level in their system.

Where did Jon Kabat-Zinn open the Stress Reduction Clinic behind MBSR in 1979?

The University of Massachusetts hosted Kabat-Zinn's eight-week course from 1979; by taking the Buddhism out of the practice and framing it scientifically, he saw it spread to clinics around the world.

What term covers deliberate steps to protect one's own physical and mental well-being?

Self-care gained a political edge in 1988, when the poet Audre Lorde, writing while she had cancer, called caring for herself an act of self-preservation rather than self-indulgence.

What is a common characteristic used to define a mental disorder?

Impaired daily functioning, or marked distress, is what the definition turns on, which is why ordinary grief after a death is not counted as a disorder, however painful it is.

Which psychotherapy, grown from Aaron Beck's work, teaches patients to spot and challenge negative automatic thoughts?

Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) began when Beck, trained as a psychoanalyst, tested the theory that depression is hostility turned inward and instead found patients' minds full of automatic negative thoughts.

What term describes a perception, such as hearing voices, with no external stimulus?

A hallucination feels real though nothing outside the mind triggers it; it need not signal illness, since seeing or hearing things on the edge of sleep is considered normal.

What class of medications smooths the intense emotional swings of disorders that alternate manic and depressive spells?

Mood stabilizers include several anticonvulsants, drugs first developed to control epileptic seizures, which doctors found could also level out manic highs and depressive lows.

Which mental health condition can follow experiencing or witnessing a terrifying event, with flashbacks and hyperarousal?

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can follow combat, assault or a serious accident, yet most people who live through such events never develop it.

Which eating disorder pairs recurrent binge eating with purging such as self-induced vomiting?

Bulimia nervosa sufferers usually binge and purge in secret, driven by shame and a fear of gaining weight, so the illness can go unnoticed by those closest to them.

Which automatic stress response raises heart rate to ready the body against a threat?

The fight-or-flight response, named by a Harvard physiologist in the early 1900s, runs on adrenaline: the heart beats faster to push blood to the muscles and the airways open wide, all within moments.

Which Oscar-winning 2001 film tells the story of John Nash, a mathematician living with schizophrenia?

A Beautiful Mind gives Nash imaginary companions he can see; the real John Nash described hearing voices, and said he recovered by gradually deciding to stop listening to them.

The term 'shell shock', an early label for combat trauma, originated during which conflict?

World War I produced 'shell shock', a label the army doctor Charles Myers put into the medical press; he soon grew unhappy with it, because many sufferers had never been near an exploding shell.

Loss of interest or pleasure, a core symptom of depression, goes by which clinical name?

Anhedonia, from the Greek for 'without pleasure', can stand in for low mood in the diagnostic rules, so a person can be clinically depressed without feeling especially sad.

Which mood-regulating neurotransmitter is often targeted by antidepressants?

Serotonin is the messenger most antidepressants act on, yet a 2022 review of decades of research found no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin.

'Bedlam', meaning uproar, comes from the nickname of the Bethlem psychiatric hospital in which city?

London's Bethlem began as the Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem; Londoners slurred the name to 'Bedlam', and the asylum's reputation turned it into a word for noisy confusion.

Which hormone, made in the adrenal glands, is commonly called the stress hormone?

Cortisol frees up blood sugar for quick energy under stress, but it is no mere alarm signal: it also peaks naturally around waking each morning and sinks to its lowest late in the evening.

Which complex did Freud name after a mythical king who married his own mother?

The Oedipus complex takes its name from the tragic king of Sophocles' play; when Carl Jung proposed a matching 'Electra complex' for girls in 1913, Freud rejected the term.

Which anxiety disorder, named from the Greek for marketplace, involves fear of crowds and places that are hard to escape?

Agoraphobia is less a fear of open space than of being trapped without help; in severe cases the sufferer only leaves the house with a companion, or not at all.

A persistent, irrational fear of a specific object, activity, or situation is known as a what?

A phobia is an intense, irrational fear of something that poses little or no actual danger, leading to avoidance of the feared object or situation.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is published by which organization?

The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has published the manual since 1952 and revises it by committee; in December 1973 its trustees voted to remove homosexuality from the list of disorders.

Bouncing back from adversity, trauma or heavy stress goes by what name?

Resilience research took off with Emmy Werner's study of 698 children born on Kauai in 1955: about a third of those raised amid serious hardship still grew into capable, caring adults.

Which psychologist's 1967 learned-helplessness experiments on dogs informed later theories of depression?

Martin Seligman and Steven Maier's 1967 experiments found dogs given inescapable shocks later failed to escape avoidable ones; Seligman linked this learned helplessness to depression.

What do psychiatrists call a fixed false belief that no evidence can shake?

A delusion is a fixed false belief held despite clear contrary evidence; a belief shared by the person's culture or religion does not count, so the same idea can be a symptom in one setting and not in another.

Which fear-processing brain region tends to run hot in anxiety disorders?

The amygdala drives the brain's fear response; a woman known as S.M., whose amygdalae were destroyed by a rare disease, handled live snakes and toured a haunted house without feeling afraid.

Which word for the disgrace attached to mental illness originally meant a mark tattooed on slaves?

Stigma was the ancient word for a mark tattooed or burned into slaves and criminals to single them out; fear of being treated differently now leads many people with mental illness to put off seeking help.

What is the term for feeling like a fraud despite evidence of success and competence?

Imposter syndrome was first described in 1978 by Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes, who studied high-achieving women and believed men were less affected; later research finds it about equally in both sexes.

Which therapy treats phobias by having patients gradually face what they fear?

Exposure therapy has patients face what they fear in graded steps; it works because avoiding a fear makes it worse over time, while staying with it shows the mind that the danger is not real.

Which type of depression returns each year as the days shorten in fall and winter?

Seasonal affective disorder, named by Norman Rosenthal in 1984, recurs mostly in autumn and winter; a minority get a summer version, with insomnia and lost appetite instead of oversleeping and carb cravings.

What is the term for repetitive acts, like washing or checking, a person feels driven to perform in response to an obsession?

Compulsion is the 'C' in OCD: washing, checking or counting brings relief, but only briefly, and that relief strengthens the obsession, which is why the cycle is so hard to break.

Which group-taught therapy builds distress tolerance, interpersonal effectiveness, emotion regulation and mindfulness?

Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) was devised by Marsha Linehan, who revealed in 2011 that she had herself been a psychiatric inpatient at 17, decades before she created it.

Which neurodevelopmental condition is commonly treated with stimulants such as methylphenidate (Ritalin)?

Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has been treated with stimulants since 1937, when Charles Bradley gave Benzedrine to children for headaches and saw their behaviour and schoolwork improve instead.

What term describes a state in which a person loses contact with reality?

Psychosis describes a state rather than one illness: it can be set off by lack of sleep, drugs or a medical condition as well as by psychiatric disorders, and has nothing to do with psychopathy.

What term covers conditions marked by challenges with social communication, repetitive behaviours and a strong preference for routine?

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) became a single diagnosis in 2013, when the DSM-5 manual merged Asperger syndrome and other separate labels into one spectrum.

Which psychiatric treatment did Ugo Cerletti first try on a patient in Rome in 1938?

Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) passes a current through the brain to trigger a brief seizure under anaesthesia; Cerletti devised it after inducing convulsions in dogs with electric shocks to the head.

What is the primary focus of 'person-centered therapy,' developed by Carl Rogers?

Offering unconditional positive regard, accepting the client without judgment, is the core; Rogers paired it with congruence and empathy, trusting the client's own 'actualizing tendency' rather than therapist interpretations.

Which Freudian defense mechanism attributes one's own unacceptable thoughts or feelings to others?

Projection first appears in Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess; it spares the mind the anxiety of owning an impulse, as when a man attracted to a colleague accuses her of flirting with him.

Per the WHO, roughly how many people worldwide were living with depression in 2019?

280 million people, about 3.8% of the world's population, were living with depression on the WHO's 2019 figures; in poorer countries more than three-quarters of people with mental disorders get no treatment.

Which of these is a common symptom of Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)?

Excessive worry about everyday matters defines GAD: unlike ordinary nerves it persists when there is little or no reason for concern, and it often brings muscle tension, headaches and poor sleep.

Which neurologist shared the 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine for developing the leucotomy?

António Egas Moniz shared the 1949 prize with Walter Hess; he directed the first prefrontal leucotomy in Lisbon in 1935, and there have since been calls for the Nobel Foundation to rescind the award.

Which sister of a US president was left incapacitated by a lobotomy in 1941?

Rosemary Kennedy was lobotomised in 1941 at age 23 and institutionalised for the rest of her life; her sister Eunice went on to found the Special Olympics.

Walter Freeman's 'ice-pick' lobotomy reached the brain via what entry point?

Under the eyelid, into the eye socket: Freeman tapped an ice-pick-like tool through the thin bone there, turning brain surgery into a quick office procedure that needed no surgeon or operating room.

In what year was Walter Freeman finally banned from performing surgery?

1967 ended Freeman's career: his final patient, Helen Mortensen, died of a cerebral haemorrhage during her third lobotomy and the hospital barred him from operating.

Which drug, developed in 1950 and sold as Thorazine, was the first antipsychotic on the market?

Chlorpromazine began as a surgical drug: a French military surgeon giving it alongside anaesthetics saw how calm it left his patients and urged psychiatrists to try it, and it changed asylum wards within a few years.

In the 1973 Rosenhan experiment, which words did pseudopatients claim to hear voices saying?

'Empty, hollow, thud' were the words Rosenhan said his pseudopatients reported; every one was admitted, he wrote, but a 2019 investigation of his files found inconsistencies in his account of the study.

Under what title was the Rosenhan experiment published in the journal Science?

'On Being Sane in Insane Places' was the Stanford psychologist David Rosenhan's own title; a 2019 book by Susannah Cahalan dug into his files and questioned whether the study happened as he described.

Which German psychiatrist, who named Alzheimer's disease, separated dementia praecox from manic depression?

Emil Kraepelin drew the line in the 1899 edition of his textbook, and his split shaped the diagnostic manuals that followed; the 1910 edition named a newly described dementia after his Munich co-worker Alois Alzheimer.

Pinel was appointed 'physician of the infirmeries' at which Paris hospital in 1793?

Bicêtre, south of Paris, was where Pinel focused on the seventh ward, housing 200 mentally ill men, and worked with its 'governor' Jean-Baptiste Pussin; he moved to the Salpêtrière in 1795.

Philippe Pinel, called the 'father of modern psychiatry', worked to abolish what practice?

Chaining patients was the practice Pinel is credited with ending at two Paris asylums, the Bicêtre and the Salpêtrière; he also largely gave up bleeding, purging and blistering in favour of close, friendly contact with patients.

The York Retreat, a pioneering humane asylum opened in 1796, was founded by members of which religious group?

Quakers led by the tea merchant William Tuke founded it after Hannah Mills, one of their number, died within weeks of entering the York Asylum, where her friends had been refused permission to visit.

The word 'psychiatry' joins the Greek for 'soul' with a Greek word for what?

Healing: the German physician Johann Christian Reil built the word in 1808 from psyche and iatreia, the 'art of healing' that also ends podiatry, choosing a doctor's suffix rather than the '-logy' of study.

Whose Canon of Medicine, completed around 1025, discussed melancholia and other mental disorders?

Avicenna (Ibn Sina) finished the Canon of Medicine around 1025; in Latin translation it remained the basis of medical teaching in European universities until at least the 17th century.

Which artist's series A Rake's Progress ends in Bedlam?

William Hogarth's final scene includes two finely dressed women who have come to view the inmates, a real pastime at Bethlem until public visiting was ended in 1770.

Which institution moved into the old Bethlem hospital building in 1936?

The Imperial War Museum took the central block after Lord Rothermere bought the old hospital site and gave its grounds as a public park named after his mother.

Holes bored in Neolithic skulls are evidence of which ancient operation?

Trepanning left many skulls with rounded, regrown bone around the hole, which shows that the patient survived the operation.

Which country began closing its psychiatric hospitals under a 1978 law named for psychiatrist Franco Basaglia?

Italy passed the law after Basaglia's own experiments at the Gorizia and Trieste asylums showed that patients could be cared for outside hospital walls.

The 1963 US Community Mental Health Act was passed as part of which president's agenda?

John F. Kennedy signed the act on 31 October 1963, three weeks before his assassination; it funded community centres meant to replace long stays in state hospitals.

Who described the 'general adaptation syndrome', the body's three-stage response to prolonged stress?

Hans Selye first thought he had found a new hormone, until he saw that every irritating substance he injected into his lab animals set off the same reaction.

Which British prime minister referred to his bouts of low spirits as his 'black dog'?

Winston Churchill used the phrase for his dark moods, though the International Churchill Society argues that the picture of him as a lifelong depressive is a myth.

Which psychologist founded rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT)?

Albert Ellis broke with the psychoanalysis he had trained in and built a more active style that argues clients out of their irrational beliefs.

Which Holocaust survivor founded logotherapy, billed as the third Viennese school of psychotherapy?

Viktor Frankl, while still running a Vienna hospital ward under Nazi rule, wrote false diagnoses to keep mentally ill patients out of the euthanasia programme.

Which psychiatrist argued in a 1961 book that mental illness is a 'myth'?

Thomas Szasz's The Myth of Mental Illness (1961) argued psychiatric diagnoses label 'problems in living' rather than diseases; in 1969 he co-founded the Citizens Commission on Human Rights with the Church of Scientology.

Which Swiss psychiatrist was Carl Jung's chief at Zurich's Burghölzli hospital from 1900?

Eugen Bleuler ran the hospital where Jung carried out the word-association tests that gave him his theory of the 'complex'.

Which illuminated manuscript of Jung's, kept private for decades, was finally published in 2009?

The Red Book sat in a Zurich bank vault while Jung's heirs refused scholars access for decades; historian Sonu Shamdasani finally edited it for print.

Freud and his family lived at what Vienna address from 1891 until 1938?

Berggasse 19 is a museum today, but its most famous object is missing: the analytic couch left with the family in 1938 and has never come back.

Freud published an influential 1884 paper on the palliative effects of which drug?

Cocaine struck Freud as a cure for morphine addiction, so he gave it to his friend Ernst von Fleischl-Marxow, who ended up addicted to both drugs.

Before DSM-IV renamed it in 1994, dissociative identity disorder carried what name?

Multiple personality disorder cases leapt from under a hundred to thousands after the 1973 bestseller Sybil, whose subject once wrote that she had made her other selves up.

The Skinner box, with its lever and food pellets, was built to study which kind of learning?

Operant conditioning worked so reliably that during the Second World War Skinner trained pigeons to steer a guided bomb by pecking at a target, a project shelved in 1944.

Which 1948 utopian novel by B. F. Skinner applied his ideas to a human community?

Walden Two (1948) imagined a community run on behavioural engineering; Skinner's analysis of language, Verbal Behavior, followed in 1957 and drew Noam Chomsky's famous 1959 critique.

In the Little Albert experiment, an infant was conditioned to fear which animal?

A white rat was paired with the clang of a hammer on a steel bar by John B. Watson and Rosalie Rayner; Albert's fear then spread to a rabbit, a dog and even a fur coat.

Which psychologist halted his Stanford prison experiment after six of its planned fourteen days?

Philip Zimbardo called it off after Christina Maslach, a young psychologist brought in to interview participants, objected; he admitted he had been absorbed in his own role as prison superintendent.

Which psychologist coined the phrase 'identity crisis'?

Erik Erikson had reason to ask who he was: born Erik Salomonsen, he was renamed Homburger after his stepfather and never learned who his biological father was.

Which psychologist created the hierarchy of needs that culminates in self-actualization?

Abraham Maslow never drew the famous pyramid: researchers have traced the diagram to management textbooks that simplified his ideas years later.

Which psychiatrist named 'early infantile autism' in a 1943 paper describing 11 children?

Leo Kanner also remarked on the parents' lack of warmth, a comment that fed the 'refrigerator mother' theory, which blamed mothers until it was discredited.

Which US author of A Mind That Found Itself founded the mental hygiene movement?

Clifford Beers was a Yale graduate who saw attendants beat and choke patients during his own years in Connecticut institutions, and wrote the book to force reform.

Which 1892 Charlotte Perkins Gilman story follows a woman confined to one room for a 'rest cure'?

The Yellow Wallpaper drew on Gilman's own rest cure under Dr Silas Weir Mitchell; she sent him a copy of the story and never received a reply.

Which stage is listed first in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's five stages of grief?

Denial heads a list she drew from her work with dying patients rather than mourners, and she later said the stages were never meant as a fixed sequence.

What did psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi name the state of total absorption in a challenging task?

Flow got its name because the people he interviewed kept describing being carried along as if by a current; he had first seen it in painters who forgot to eat or sleep.

Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House exposed an asylum at which New York location?

Blackwell's Island, renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973, held the Women's Lunatic Asylum; Bly's 1887 exposé prompted a grand jury inquiry and a bigger budget for the city's asylums.

Which newspaper sent Nellie Bly undercover to feign insanity in 1887?

The New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's paper, assigned Bly the story; after a night practising deranged expressions in a mirror she checked into a boardinghouse and feigned madness until police took her away.

Elizabeth Packard was committed to an Illinois asylum in 1860 on whose word alone?

Her husband's word was all Illinois law then required; freed after three years, she campaigned until the state required a jury trial before anyone could be committed.

Which Church of England vicar founded the Samaritans helpline in 1953?

Chad Varah's first funeral as a young curate was for a girl who had killed herself after mistaking her first period for a sexual disease.

Which Radiohead member, himself a volunteer, fronted a 2004 Samaritans recruitment campaign?

Phil Selway, a long-time Samaritans volunteer, fronted the 2004 drive aimed at 18-to-24-year-olds after volunteer numbers hit a 30-year low.

Which three-digit number has connected US callers to the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline since July 2022?

988 replaced the need to remember a ten-digit 1-800 number that had been in use since 2005, and Canada launched the same three digits in November 2023.

Which rapper's 2017 song was titled after the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline number?

Logic's '1-800-273-8255', featuring Alessia Cara and Khalid, reached No. 3 on the Billboard Hot 100; calls to the Lifeline spiked after his 2017 MTV VMAs performance.

Which punctuation mark became a tattoo symbol of suicide prevention through a project founded in 2013?

The semicolon marks a point where an author could have ended a sentence but chose to go on; Amy Bleuel founded the project ten years after losing her father to suicide.

Which psychologist's 1974 paper 'Staff Burn-Out' brought the term burnout into psychology?

Herbert Freudenberger based the paper on what he saw in the volunteer staff, himself included, of a free clinic for drug users.

How does the WHO's ICD-11 classify burnout?

An occupational phenomenon, not a medical condition, is how ICD-11 files it: in a chapter for reasons people seek health care that are not themselves illnesses.

Which psychiatric diagnosis is often cited as having the highest death rate?

Anorexia nervosa kills through the physical toll of starvation and through suicide, which accounts for about one in five deaths among people with the illness.

Marsha Linehan originally developed dialectical behavior therapy to treat which personality disorder?

Borderline personality disorder was Linehan's target, and she later revealed that she had herself been hospitalised as a self-harming teenager with the same symptoms.

Which 20th-century American celebrity developed severe OCD centred on a fear of germs?

Howard Hughes insisted on picking objects up with tissues to shield himself from germs, and his worsening rituals helped turn him into a recluse.

Sufferers often mistake a sudden surge of panic for which medical emergency?

A heart attack is what the pounding chest suggests; panic attacks can strike with no trigger at all, even during sleep, and women are diagnosed with panic disorder about twice as often as men.

For chronic insomnia, which treatment do US physicians' guidelines put first?

A talking therapy comes first for chronic insomnia, the American College of Physicians advised in 2016, with sleeping pills only a second step agreed between patient and doctor.

Brexanolone, a 60-hour infusion, was the first drug approved specifically for which condition?

Postpartum depression is linked in some women to the drop in allopregnanolone, a hormone by-product, after birth, and brexanolone is a lab-made copy of that molecule.

Which disorder is marked by an obsessive preoccupation with perceived flaws in one's own appearance?

Body dysmorphic disorder became a diagnosis in its own right in 1987; many sufferers seek cosmetic surgery, which typically fails to ease the distress.

Which Japanese term describes people who withdraw into their homes for six months or more?

Hikikomori is not only a youth problem: a 2019 government survey estimated that 613,000 Japanese aged 40 to 64 were living as recluses.

Diazepam, launched in 1963, is better known by which brand name?

Valium was the work of Roche chemist Leo Sternbach, who had already stumbled on Librium by accident; it was America's best-selling drug from 1968 to 1982.

Stockholm syndrome takes its name from a 1973 hostage siege inside what?

A bank: four Kreditbanken workers were held in its vault for six days, and one told Sweden's prime minister by phone that she fully trusted the robbers.

The murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 prompted research into what psychological phenomenon?

The bystander effect was studied by Darley and Latané after the 1964 killing; a 2007 American Psychologist article found no evidence for the often-cited 38 inactive witnesses.

What does the Latin word 'placebo' mean?

'I shall be pleasing' was the opening word of the Latin vespers for the dead; medicine later borrowed it for a remedy given to soothe a patient rather than to cure.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was shot inside which real psychiatric institution?

Oregon State Hospital in Salem hosted the shoot, with its superintendent Dean Brooks playing Dr Spivey; the film became the second to win all five major Oscars.

Which 1995 memoir did psychiatry professor Kay Redfield Jamison write about her own mental illness?

An Unquiet Mind came from an expert turned witness: five years earlier Jamison had co-authored the classic textbook on the illness she now described from her own experience.

Alcoholics Anonymous dates its origin to a 1935 meeting between Bill Wilson and whom?

Dr. Bob Smith was the stranger Bill Wilson sought out when a failed business trip to Akron left him tempted to drink; helping the surgeon stop kept Wilson sober too.

PTSD entered the DSM in 1980 largely through studies of which war's veterans?

Vietnam veterans came home to a manual that had dropped its only combat-stress diagnosis in 1968; research on them helped write PTSD into the 1980 edition.

Which two researchers' 1974 paper showed DSM-II diagnoses rarely agreed between practitioners?

Spitzer and Fleiss reanalysed six studies and found poor agreement for most DSM-II categories; Robert Spitzer went on to chair the task force that produced DSM-III in 1980.

A 2004 cross-Europe study found roughly what share of people met criteria for a DSM-IV disorder in their life?

One in four, about 25%, had met criteria for at least one assessed DSM-IV disorder in their lifetime; mood disorders (13.9%) and anxiety disorders (13.6%) were the most common.

Ancient Greek medicine blamed madness on an imbalance of what?

The four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, were thought to govern temperament; black bile's Greek name gives us 'melancholy'.

Roughly what fraction of autistic people experience a mental health problem in their lifetime?

8 in 10 is the commonly cited lifetime figure for autistic people, against about 1 in 4 of the general population; anxiety and depression are the most frequent problems.

Waking from a nightmare with detailed recall of it usually happens during which stage of sleep?

REM sleep takes up more of each sleep cycle as the night goes on, which is why nightmares usually wake people in the second half of the night.

Which suicide-prevention strategy do bridge barriers and smaller paracetamol pack sizes exemplify?

Means restriction, limiting access to lethal methods, has strong evidence: UK paracetamol pack-size limits from 1998 were followed by a sustained fall in overdose deaths.

Benzodiazepines such as diazepam work by enhancing which neurotransmitter's effect?

GABA, the brain's main inhibitory neurotransmitter, is the target: benzodiazepines bind the GABA-A receptor and let more chloride into neurons, which calms their firing and relieves anxiety.

Which herbal supplement is widely sold as a remedy for mild depression?

St John's wort does seem to ease mild depression in trials, but it speeds up the breakdown of other medicines, which can weaken the contraceptive pill.

Francine Shapiro developed which trauma therapy in the late 1980s?

EMDR (eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing) began on a walk in 1987, when Shapiro noticed that moving her eyes seemed to ease her own distressing thoughts.

Which First Lady made mental health her signature cause, serving as honorary chair of a presidential commission on it?

Rosalynn Carter's commission led to the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980, most of which was repealed a year later under Ronald Reagan.

Which famous painting by Vincent van Gogh shows the view from his room at the Saint-Rémy asylum?

The Starry Night dates from June 1889, a month after he admitted himself to the asylum, and the village beneath its swirling sky was his own invention.

Which term for making someone doubt their own sanity comes from a 1944 Ingrid Bergman thriller?

Gaslighting was Merriam-Webster's Word of the Year for 2022, almost eight decades after the film in which a wife is tricked into believing she is going mad.

Which punctuation mark symbolises suicide prevention because it continues a sentence that could have ended?

Semicolon tattoos spread after Amy Bleuel founded Project Semicolon in 2013 in tribute to her father. Its message: 'The author is you and the sentence is your life.'

Which Harry Potter creatures, the guards of Azkaban, did J. K. Rowling base on her own depression?

Dementors drain happiness from anyone nearby and force them to relive their worst memories, which is how Rowling pictured the illness she had lived through.

Which nickname did wartime prime minister Winston Churchill give his recurring bouts of depression?

Black dog was Churchill's name for the low spells he was prone to when out of office, and he fought them off by writing.

The word 'lunatic' preserves an old belief that madness and epilepsy were caused by what?

The Moon gave Latin 'lunaticus', meaning moonstruck, and English law kept the label 'lunatic' until a 1930 act replaced it.

After a commission begun by MP Jo Cox, which country named the world's first minister for loneliness?

Britain created the post in January 2018, and later that year published the world's first government strategy for reducing loneliness.

Which Apollo 11 astronaut wrote two memoirs about his depression and alcoholism after leaving NASA?

Buzz Aldrin told the story in Return to Earth and Magnificent Desolation; at one point he spent four weeks in hospital being treated for depression.

Which Peanuts character charges Charlie Brown five cents for advice at her psychiatric booth?

Lucy set up her booth as a parody of the lemonade stands American children run, with a sign announcing whether 'The Doctor is' in or out.

Which Winnie-the-Pooh character did a spoof Canadian medical paper diagnose with chronic low mood?

Eeyore 'would benefit greatly from an antidepressant', the authors of the 2000 paper joked, while 'anxious, blushing, flustered little Piglet' got a write-up of his own.

Which Greek god, whose angry shout spread terror in lonely places, gave English a word for sudden fear?

Pan gave us 'panic': the god of shepherds hated being woken from his afternoon naps, and legend says he struck the same terror into the Persians at Marathon.

What do men grow each November for a charity drive against prostate cancer and men's suicide?

A moustache is the badge of Movember, whose foundation calls its participants 'Mo Bros' and urges them to get annual check-ups.

Which colour of awareness ribbon stands for mental health, as pink does for breast cancer?

Green ribbons carry the mental health message; purple ones stand for Alzheimer's disease, and the red AIDS ribbon was created by a group of New York artists in 1991.

Which Pixar film, made with advice from psychologists, takes place in the mind of 11-year-old Riley?

Inside Out turned Joy, Sadness, Fear, Disgust and Anger into characters, and its advisers highlighted how it shows sadness helping people connect.

Which actor won an Oscar as the therapist who keeps telling Will Hunting 'It's not your fault'?

Robin Williams took Best Supporting Actor for playing Sean Maguire, while Matt Damon and Ben Affleck won for writing the screenplay.

Which fictional mob boss starts seeing Dr. Jennifer Melfi after a series of panic attacks?

Tony Soprano's sessions with Dr. Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco, became a central thread of the series as he tried to balance home life with running a crime family.

Which American gymnast withdrew from most of her Tokyo Olympic events after a case of 'the twisties'?

Simone Biles described the twisties as losing her sense of where she was in the air mid-twist; the following year she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Which tennis star quit the 2021 French Open, citing mental health, after a fine for skipping a press conference?

Naomi Osaka was fined $15,000 after winning her opening match, announced her withdrawal the next day, and then skipped Wimbledon as well.

Which wistful feeling was coined in 1688 as a medical diagnosis for homesick Swiss mercenaries?

Nostalgia was a medical student's invention: Johannes Hofer joined the Greek words for homecoming and pain to name the soldiers' pining for home.

In Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's model of the five stages of grief, which stage comes last?

Acceptance closes a list that opens with denial, though Kübler-Ross, who built the model from her work with the terminally ill, later stressed the stages do not arrive in strict order.

Mental Health America melted down old asylum restraints to cast which symbol of hope?

A bell was poured at a Baltimore foundry in 1953 and inscribed: 'Cast from shackles which bound them, this bell shall ring out hope for the mentally ill and victory over mental illness.'

Which kind of business launched 'Blue Monday', supposedly the gloomiest day of the year?

A travel agency, Sky Travel, put out the claim in 2005 with a formula by psychologist Cliff Arnall, which science writer Ben Goldacre said failed 'to make mathematical sense'.

Which Southern Hemisphere country developed the first Mental Health First Aid training course?

Australia's course, devised by Betty Kitchener and Anthony Jorm, teaches the public how to respond to crises such as panic attacks, and has since been adopted across North America, Europe, Asia and Africa.

Which Japanese word names death from overwork, first reported in 1969 after a newspaper worker's fatal stroke?

Karoshi literally means 'overwork death', and Japanese has a second word, karojisatsu, for suicides driven by workplace stress.

Which Edvard Munch painting of existential dread was inspired by a blood-red sunset over Oslo?

The Scream came to Munch on an evening walk, when he sensed an 'infinite scream passing through nature'; both painted versions have since been stolen and recovered.

Which American poet published her only novel, about a breakdown, under the name Victoria Lucas?

Sylvia Plath's heroine slides into an illness that parallels the author's own experience, and the book first appeared in 1963 under the pseudonym.

Which test, created by a Swiss psychiatrist in 1921, asks people what they see in ten inkblots?

Rorschach inkblots grew out of Hermann Rorschach's study of 400 people, and his book on them drew little attention when it first appeared.

Which TV detective's obsessive–compulsive disorder worsened after a car bomb killed his wife, Trudy?

Adrian Monk consults on homicide cases while in therapy, hoping to rejoin the police, and claims in one episode to have 312 separate fears.

The old diagnosis of hysteria takes its name from the Greek word for which supposedly wandering organ?

The uterus, or 'hystera', was blamed for roaming the body and causing illness, so healers used strong smells to coax it back into place.

Which everyday verb preserves the name of a doctor who claimed to heal with 'animal magnetism'?

Mesmerize honours Franz Mesmer, whose cures were put to the test in 1784 by a French royal commission that pioneered blindfolded trials.

Which syndrome of faking illness to win attention is named after a German baron famed for tall tales?

Munchausen was a real soldier whose outrageous war stories made him a minor celebrity, and a doctor borrowed his name for the condition in 1951.

Which youth of Greek myth, who fell in love with his own reflection, gives a personality disorder its name?

Narcissus, in Ovid's famous telling, spurned the nymph Echo and stayed gazing into the pool until he died, and a flower bearing his name sprang up on the spot.

Which brain structure, named after the seahorse, turns short-term memories into long-term ones?

Hippocampus damage left the famous 'Patient H.M.' unable to form new memories after surgery for epilepsy, though he could still recall his childhood.

Which natural painkillers, released by the brain during exercise, act on the same receptors as opioid drugs?

Endorphins came to light in the 1970s, soon after scientists found that the brain has receptors which respond to morphine.

Which hormone does the brain release in response to darkness, helping to set the sleep-wake cycle?

Melatonin was discovered through a pineal gland extract from cows that lightened the skin of frogs, and today it is taken to ease jet lag.

Which term, from the Latin for 'around a day', names the body's roughly 24-hour internal clock?

Circadian rhythm got its name in 1959 from scientist Franz Halberg; the cycle is generated inside the body and only adjusted by cues such as daylight.

Which term describes the brain's ability to rewire its connections, once thought to end after childhood?

Neuroplasticity seems to have been named by Polish neuroscientist Jerzy Konorski, and later research showed that adult brains keep reorganising through learning and practice.

Which brain region behind the forehead, key to planning and decisions, is among the last to mature?

Prefrontal cortex development runs into the mid-to-late twenties, which may help explain why teenagers take more risks around their friends.

Which part of the body contains its own mesh of neurons and is often called the 'second brain'?

The gut is governed by the enteric nervous system, which uses many of the same chemical messengers as the brain and has more neurons than the spinal cord.

Which railroad foreman became famous for personality changes after an iron rod passed through his head?

Phineas Gage lost much of his left frontal lobe in the 1848 accident, and friends found him so altered that they called him 'no longer Gage'.

Julius Wagner-Jauregg won a 1927 Nobel Prize for treating dementia by infecting patients with what?

Malaria brought on long, high fevers that fought the syphilis infection destroying the brain, and doctors then treated the malaria itself with quinine.

In 1973, America's main psychiatric body voted to stop classifying what as a mental disorder?

Homosexuality came off the list a year after a gay doctor addressed the profession's convention in a mask, wig and voice distorter to describe life in hiding.

Which 1964 presidential nominee is the namesake of the rule against diagnosing public figures from afar?

Barry Goldwater sued after Fact magazine polled psychiatrists on whether he was fit to be president, and he was awarded $75,000.

Which signer of the Declaration of Independence is honoured as the 'father of American psychiatry'?

Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician and social reformer, was given the title by the country's psychiatrists in 1965; he also founded Dickinson College.

In which colonial Virginia capital was America's first public hospital for the mentally ill built in 1773?

Williamsburg's hospital took in people who until then were mostly held in the town jail, and it still operates on the edge of the city as Eastern State Hospital.

Which medical specialists coined 'Type A personality' in the 1950s after studying their impatient patients?

Cardiologists Meyer Friedman and Ray Rosenman credited an upholsterer, who pointed out that their waiting-room chairs were worn only on the arms and front edges.

Harry Harlow's infant monkeys clung to a soft cloth 'mother' even when a bare wire one offered what?

Food was not enough: the babies visited the wire figure only to feed, then hurried back to the cloth one, a sign that comfort matters more to bonding.

Bertha Pappenheim, who coined the phrase 'the talking cure', appears in case histories under which alias?

Anna O. also called her sessions with physician Josef Breuer 'chimney sweeping', and he later said the case held 'the germ cell of the whole of psychoanalysis'.

Which principle in a 2008 US law bars insurers from limiting mental health care more than medical care?

Parity means a plan that covers mental health or addiction treatment cannot limit it more tightly than surgery or other medical care; the act is named for senators Paul Wellstone and Pete Domenici.

In which city did Frau Troffea's solo dancing spread to dozens of people in the 'dancing plague' of 1518?

Strasbourg saw between 50 and 400 people dance for weeks that summer, and the leading theory blames mass hysteria brought on by stress.