@ellatuominen
UCL Wellcome Trust PhD Student in Mental Health Science @ UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience || interested in avoidance, psychotherapy mechanisms, reinforcement learning, behaviour change, psychedelics, mindfulness ||
Gratuluji Ondrej! 😄 This is amazing
💡 Overall, CBT remains a gold standard for many mental health conditions, but it’s not a universal solution. Limitations in study quality and variable effects remind us of the importance of continued innovation, personalization, and better research designs to improve outcomes for all patients.
🚩 The real-world effectiveness of CBT might be less pronounced than what many controlled trials report, mainly due to the use of inactive control groups. Future research needs to focus more on comparing CBT to active treatments or standard care to provide a clearer picture of its practical value.
🧐 Research quality varied: about 10% of the trials included had a low risk of bias and the effectiveness of CBT appeared inflated in studies using waitlist controls. Comparisons against usual care showed more modest gains, calling into question how broadly this translates to real-world settings.
📊 Large effects were seen for PTSD and phobias, moderate for depression, anxiety, and eating disorders, but small for psychotic and bipolar disorders, indicating that CBT isn’t necessarily a one-size-fits-all solution or a sufficient standalone treatment for these conditions.
A quick summary:
🧠 A major meta-analysis shows #CBT is effective across many adult mental health disorders, with the strongest results for PTSD and specific phobias. Effectiveness and dropout rates vary by condition, highlighting the need for tailored care.
Thank you - had fun writing this one! :) Such an important piece of work too
Diving into how #CBT tackles a wide range of mental health conditions in my new blog, reviewing @pimcuijpers.bsky.social and co new meta-analysis. If you care about evidence-based therapy and when to explore options beyond the basics, check it out on @thementalelf.bsky.social ➡️ buff.ly/DbNCq8k ☀️
My new blog covering @pimcuijpers.bsky.social and collegues paper on CBT's effectiveness across a wide range of mental disorders is out now on the @thementalelf.bsky.social ! Take a look below 👇
Got to share some exciting recent and upcoming work at #CPConf2025 this week. Such a fun conference - talks at a cinema in recliner seats with a tub of popcorn was a first, but I could get used to it. Also thrilled to have won a travel award, thank you and see you next time!
Thank you so much for a brilliant conference! Looking forwards to the next one already
#CPConf2025 is exploring multidimensional reward functions #RufusTempleOrchestra
Great talk at the poster spotlights Laura!
In our preprint "Limited evidence for reduced learning rate adaptation in anxious-depression, before or after treatment", led by @stephsuddell.bsky.social and Lili Zhang, we fail to find a robust association between anxious-depression and learning rate adaptation
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Check our latest work ‘Linking Subjective Experience of Anxiety to Brain Function using Natural Language Processing’. Our analyses link movie-evoked brain activity and subsequent interview recordings in a pediatric sample with and without anxiety disorders (doi.org/10.31234/osf...).
Published today in Nature Medicine. In one of the world’s largest RCTs of its kind (n=3,936), a smartphone app teaching 5 key cognitive-behavioral therapy skills improved subthreshold depression—and the effects lasted 6 months.
www.nature.com/articles/s41...
New systematic review and meta‐analysis looks at
-harm reporting
-risk of bias
-action mechanism specification
-incremental therapeutic effect size
in psilocybin-for-depression RCT literature. I'll briefly summarize below. 🧵
🧪 #psychscisky #episky #medsky #psychiatry
Thank you Alex for chairing a brilliant session - so happy to have got to be a part of it!
At #2025SOBP this week! I was thrilled to present yesterday on bridging the translational gap between animal and human models in anxiety research with computational modeling. Introduced the RL task developed by @ymyymmr.bsky.social and the anxiolytic/anxiogenic manipulations we've been working on.
Got to present the work by Dr Yumeya Yamamori that I'm currently continuing concerning the impact of anxiety increasing (threat of shock) and reducing (benzodiazepine) study manipulations on avoidance at the @uclpals.bsky.social postgraduate group's weekly seminar this week🙌 next up SOBP in Toronto!
#Depression #Trauma #ChildhoodAdversity #Neglect #Abuse #SevereDepression #ChronicDepression #TreatmentResistantDepression #Psychoanalysis #PsychoanalyticTherapy #CBT
Additionally, the significant time commitment and costs required for psychoanalytic psychotherapy do raise practical challenges in many healthcare settings as covered in my previous Mental Elf blog: www.nationalelfservice.net/treatment/ps...
While the study’s five-year follow-up provides rare insights into long-term treatment effects, the large difference in therapy session numbers between the two interventions complicates interpretation. More treatment is likely to be better for outcomes.
Key findings: psychoanalytic therapy showed superior outcomes for patients with higher levels of childhood trauma, especially those with histories of sexual abuse and family instability. The study highlights the need for personalized care based on trauma history.
🧵 Wrote another blog for @thementalelf.bsky.social covering an interesting 5-year study comparing psychoanalytic and cognitive-behavioral therapies for chronic depression in those with experiences of childhood adversity 🧠💡
www.nationalelfservice.net/treatment/ps...
Another blog I wrote for the Mental Elf just published:
A jolly time with our PhD programme at Cumberland Lodge in January - read about it below ⬇️
huge congrats @samuelhewitt.bsky.social ! 🙌
🚨New postdoc job alert!🚨 www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/...
...we are looking for someone with an interest in computational psychiatry and/or naturalistic neuroimaging to work on a new ERC Advanced grant "The Neurocomputational
Mechanisms of Anxiety Treatment Response (MECHANX)". (1/3)
