International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
January 1, 2025
Marianna de Abreu Costa, Alexander Moreira-Almeida
7 citations
Dualism—the view that mind and brain are separate—remains common, even among mental health professionals, though it declines with age, likely due to generational shifts rather than personal maturation. Academic training often embeds physicalist, reductive views emphasizing biological causes such as gene expression and neurologic alterations. Radical determinism aligned with physicalism can diminish perceptions of responsibility, agency, and free will, affecting personal autonomy and legal systems by portraying individuals as less responsive to rehabilitation and more prone to repeat behaviors. In mental health, these views shape understanding of disorder origins, treatment approaches, patient self-agency, and stigma. Biogenetic models reduce blame but lower perceptions of self-control and increase perceptions of unpredictability.
International review of psychiatry (Abingdon, England)
January 1, 2025
Marianna de Abreu Costa, Alexander Moreira-Almeida
2 citations
Mediums claim to communicate with the deceased or non-material beings. Controlled studies show they can provide accurate information that cannot be explained by normal sensory means or inference. This review examines conventional explanations—fraud, sitter gullibility, wishful thinking, chance, mental disorder, and unconscious personification—alongside the non-conventional hypothesis that the mind exists beyond the brain. The paper critically analyzes evidence from mediumship studies that supports a mind independent of the physical brain, aiming to inform the understanding of consciousness and the mind-brain problem.
Psychiatry research
July 12, 2025
Marianna de Abreu Costa, Patrícia Bado, Maiko Schneider et al.
1 citation
Symptom improvement in generalized anxiety disorder may involve enhanced functional coupling between brain regions critical for emotional regulation, self-referential processing, and stimulus selection, particularly between the left amygdala and right orbitofrontal cortex. In a randomized trial with 20 patients, those receiving mindfulness training showed improvement linked to amygdala connectivity with the default mode and salience networks, while those on fluoxetine showed improvement linked to amygdala-orbitofrontal cortex coupling. However, no significant differences between the two treatment groups were found. Larger studies are needed to clarify treatment-specific neural mechanisms.