Latest news with #ChristinaCaron
New York Times
27-05-2025
- Health
- New York Times
Unpacking Truths Behind Mental Health Trends
TikTok is flooded with videos from users discussing mental health topics that have long been taboo: Managing anxiety. Seeking help for depression. Living with bipolar disorder. In many ways, the shift in America toward cultural openness around these topics is a cause for celebration, said Christina Caron, a reporter who covers mental health for the Well desk of The New York Times. But the proliferation of online discourse around subjects like trauma disorders and cognitive behavioral therapy can come with a downside: misinformation. 'It's hard to know what's true,' Ms. Caron said. In her new monthly column, Psych 101, Ms. Caron tries to combat that uncertainty by unpacking topics like what happens when your moral compass is compromised and how a simple technique known as cognitive shuffling can help calm a busy brain. She speaks with people who have experienced the symptoms that she is writing about, as well as clinicians and researchers. Ms. Caron is a former clinical research coordinator, so she is familiar with weedy medical terminology. But her goal is to provide readers with trusted — and vetted — health information, without the jargon that can sometimes accompany it. In an interview, Ms. Caron shared how she selects topics for the column and which subjects she wants to tackle next. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. Why did you want to start this column? The idea is to look at mental health terms and trends that we think are worthy of bigger conversations. You see a lot of people online talking about, for example, relationship O.C.D. We can add clarity to that and help explain why people are discussing the distinctions between different types of O.C.D., and why it matters. We want to be conversational and help people understand topics and ideas that they either might be hearing a lot about and want to understand better, or that they hadn't heard of before but that really resonate with them. Your recent piece on moral injury comes to mind. I got so much feedback from readers that the phrase was something they identified with, and that they had never been able to put a name to what they were feeling before. Before your journalism days — first at ABC News and NBC News, then The Times — you were a clinical research coordinator at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Was there a learning curve when you shifted to writing for a general audience? I've always had an interest in health and science content, but before I joined the Well desk in 2021, I had never been a health reporter. Over the last four years, I've learned a lot about how to interview people and help them step away from some of the jargon that they're so accustomed to using in their professional lives. Sometimes I say to them plainly: Explain it to me like I'm in junior high. I try to think about this in the way my audience would. They're quickly scrolling through their phones, glancing at headlines, and then they click into my story. I'm always imagining the most accurate way to explain a concept and the most compelling way of phrasing the explanation. What makes a topic a particularly good fit for this column? I'm looking at concepts that are percolating on social media, or ideas that might be especially resonant in light of recent headlines. I like digging into questions that don't have an immediate, obvious answer that you can Google. I want to offer a deeper layer of explanation, or insight that you won't find elsewhere. In the first column, you wrote about a dissociative condition called depersonalization/derealization disorder, or D.D.D., which is thought to occur in only about 1 or 2 percent of the population. Why dedicate a column to such a rare condition? There are a lot of people on TikTok talking about what it feels like to be disconnected from your life, as though you're living in a movie or a dream. It's not clear that all those people necessarily have D.D.D. or would be diagnosed with it, but it's enough to generate a conversation online in which people are examining these symptoms and wondering, 'Is this something I've experienced, too?' The goal of the column was to clarify what the characteristics were, according to the most authoritative sources possible. We're trying to counter any misinformation, and we're also addressing people's curiosity about something they think they might have noticed in themselves. Some experts think D.D.D. might be underdiagnosed. The people I spoke with who had the disorder talked about the difficulty they had in getting diagnosed. In my view, some of the less common disorders deserve more attention, in part because it can be harder to find reliable information about them. You typically start the column with an anecdote from someone who has experienced the symptoms you're discussing. Why? I feel very strongly that we should, whenever possible, include people with lived experience when talking about a disorder, and not just rely on experts. How has the way people talk about mental health changed in recent years? In the last decade, it's changed quite a bit. A lot of people have noted how the pandemic, in many ways, pushed people to think more about their mental health and to talk more openly about it. But that isn't the case across the board. There are still pockets of the country where mental health isn't discussed openly or frequently. But, on average, there is a greater openness to discussing mental health, and you can see evidence of that on social media, which is both good and bad. On the one hand, talking about mental health has been a great way for people to educate one another and to feel less alone. But on the other hand, these conversations do sometimes promote misinformation, or encourage people to label themselves in ways that might be too restrictive. What topics are on your wish list for the column? I'm interested in taking a closer look at tapping, which is also known as the E.F.T., or emotional freedom technique. I also want to look into enmeshment. This is where two or more people, usually family members, are involved in one another's activities and personal relationships to an excessive degree that makes it hard to have healthy interactions, and tough to have autonomy. How is it different from codependency? Is there a way to disentangle yourself? I don't know these answers, but I'm eager to find out.
Time of India
21-05-2025
- Health
- Time of India
New AI tool can use selfies to predict how long a cancer patient will live
Christina Caron & Mohana Ravindranath It's no secret that some people appear to age faster than others, especially after enduring stressful periods. But some scientists think a person's physical appearance could reveal more about them than meets the eye — down to the health of their tissues and cells, a concept known as 'biological age'. In a new study, published in The Lancet Digital Health, researchers trained artificial intelligence to estimate the biological ages of adults with cancer by analysing photos of their faces. Study participants with younger estimates tended to fare better after treatment than those deemed older by AI, researchers at Mass General Brigham found. The findings suggest that people's biological age estimates are closely linked to their physical health, which could reflect their ability to survive certain treatments, the authors of the study said. Face-based aging tools have 'extraordinary potential' to help doctors quickly and inexpensively estimate how healthy their patients are, compared with existing tests, which use blood or saliva to measure chemical and molecular changes associated with aging, said William Mair, a professor of molecular metabolism at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. FaceAge, the machine learning tool created by researchers at Mass General Brigham, found that study subjects with cancer appeared five years older than their chronological age. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Your Finger Shape Says a Lot About Your Personality, Read Now Tips and Tricks Undo The biological age of people without cancer was typically close to their actual age. And those who were categorised as older were more likely to die, either from cancer or other causes. The researchers are not the first to find a link between facial and biological aging: A study in Denmark found that subjects who looked older than their chronological age tended to die earlier than their twins. Doctors could one day use FaceAge to decide whether to provide different treatment depending on a patient's estimated biological age, said Dr Raymond H. Mak, a radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham who worked on the study. Preliminary data suggests that FaceAge goes beyond the visual markers of age we might look to, like wrinkles, grey hair or baldness, and instead flags less obvious factors like hollowing of the temples (which reflects a loss of muscle mass) and the prominence of the skin folds on either side of the mouth, Dr Mak said. The authors of the study hope to eventually commercialise the technology and create a product that could be used in doctor's offices. They plan to file for a patent once the technology is more developed. The current version of the tool has limitations. It was primarily trained on white faces, Dr Mak said, so it could work differently for people with different skin tones. And it isn't clear to what extent modifications like plastic surgery, makeup, lighting or the angle of the face could affect the results. And while biological aging can be accelerated by a number of factors, like stress, pregnancy, smoking, drinking alcohol and even extreme heat, some of these changes can be reversible — and it's not clear if the tool would pick up those changes over time. Experts in medical ethics also have concerns. 'I'd be very worried about whether this tool works equally well for all populations, for example women, older adults, racial and ethnic minorities, those with various disabilities, pregnant women and the like,' said Jennifer E. Miller, the co-director of the program for biomedical ethics at Yale University. She and others in the field also wondered whether the tool might be used to justify denying insurance coverage or medical treatment. Dr Mak and other researchers who worked on the study have had reservations, too. 'We're really concerned about potential misuse of technology in general,' he said. However, he added, the researchers felt the tool would be more helpful than harmful — and it could be used to support, but not replace, clinicians' judgment. NYT News Service One step to a healthier you—join Times Health+ Yoga and feel the change
Observer
10-05-2025
- Health
- Observer
Can photograph reveal your biological age?
Christina Caron The author is a reporter, covering mental health It's no secret that some people appear to age faster than others, especially after enduring stressful periods. But some scientists think a person's physical appearance could reveal more about them than meets the eye — down to the health of their tissues and cells, a concept known as 'biological age.' In a new study, published on Thursday in The Lancet Digital Health, researchers trained artificial intelligence to estimate the biological ages of adults with cancer by analyzing photos of their faces. Study participants with younger estimates tended to fare better after treatment than those deemed older by AI, researchers at Mass General Brigham found. The findings suggest that people's biological age estimates are closely linked to their physical health, which could reflect their ability to survive certain treatments, the authors of the study said. And in the future, facial age analysis may become more useful than age alone in helping doctors make tough calls about their patients' treatment, they added. Face-based aging tools have 'extraordinary potential' to help doctors quickly and inexpensively estimate how healthy their patients are, compared with existing tests, which use blood or saliva to measure chemical and molecular changes associated with aging, said William Mair, a professor of molecular metabolism at the Harvard T H Chan School of Public Health who was not involved in the study. While doctors usually visually estimate how healthy their patients are for their age, a tool like this could draw in much more data to make a better estimate, he added. FaceAge, the machine learning tool created by researchers at Mass General Brigham, found that study subjects with cancer appeared five years older than their chronological age. The biological age of people without cancer was typically close to their actual age. And those who were categorized as older were more likely to die, either from cancer or other causes. The researchers are not the first to find a link between facial and biological aging: A study in Denmark found that subjects who looked older than their chronological age tended to die earlier than their twins, and other studies have come to similar conclusions. FaceAge was trained on a database of more than 56,000 images of people age 60 and older, mostly sourced from Wikipedia and the movie database IMDB. The researchers then asked it to assess the age of study participants, most of whom had cancer, using photographs alone. Doctors could one day use FaceAge to decide whether to provide different treatment depending on a patient's estimated biological age, said Dr Raymond H Mak, a radiation oncologist at Mass General Brigham who worked on the study. Preliminary data suggests that FaceAge goes beyond the visual markers of age we might look to, like wrinkles, gray hair or baldness, and instead flags less obvious factors like hollowing of the temples (which reflects a loss of muscle mass) and the prominence of the skin folds on either side of the mouth, Mak said.
