Adrian Preda M.D.

10/02/2026

A prescription can put medication in someone’s hands. It can’t give them a place to sleep, food to eat, or a ride to their next appointment.

Yet when treatment doesn’t help, we may blame the medication without asking whether it had a fair chance to work.

In my latest Psychiatric News editorial, I propose a different use for some of the money drug companies already spend on medication vouchers: help pay for short-term practical and psychosocial support.

Why would manufacturers do this? Because helping patients benefit from their medications is also in their interest.

The aim is simple: give people access to both a treatment and the conditions that help it succeed.

https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.pn.2026.10.10.21

09/23/2026

Featured today in the UC Irvine School of Medicine Newsroom, on a question I've been turning over for a while: why is mental health so vulnerable to misinformation, and what should psychiatry do about it?

Part of the answer is structural. If a TikTok video convinces you that you have diabetes, your doctor checks your blood sugar and settles the matter. Psychiatry has no equivalent test, so a confident influencer and a careful clinician can sound equally authoritative, and the algorithm rewards whoever holds attention longest.

I don't think this is a PR problem. When stigma is amplified, or when careless media coverage of su***de is followed by contagion, we are looking at a public health problem, and it deserves a public health response.

That means getting more of us, psychiatrists and trainees, into the conversation where people actually are. It also means changing how academia counts that work. Right now a peer-reviewed paper builds a career, and a video that reaches 100,000 people earns no credit at all. I'd like to see a genuine path for "public scholarship."

Grateful to share the piece with Dr. Deven Patel, one of our residents, whose 30-second reel on mental health stigma has done more public education than most journal articles ever will.

Making the case that misinformation is a public health problem, Adrian Preda, MD, argues that the solution requires reorganizing academic practice to incentivize social media content addressing mental health.

09/11/2026

Some good news to share: my commentary "Mental Health Misinformation as a Public Health Problem: The Case for Psychiatric Public Scholarship" was just published in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

The short version: we talk about mental illness more than ever in public — on social media, in entertainment, through influencers — but psychiatry as a field has stayed mostly on the sidelines of that conversation, publishing in journals that the public never reads. Meanwhile, there's real evidence that inaccurate portrayals of mental illness affect how people recognize symptoms, whether they seek treatment, and — in documented cases like the show 13 Reasons Why — su***de risk itself.

My argument is that fixing this isn't about psychiatrists doing more "outreach." It's about academic medicine recognizing public-facing writing and communication as legitimate scholarly work, worthy of the same rigor and the same institutional credit as a clinical trial or a journal article — because right now, the incentives push our most knowledgeable people away from the platforms where public understanding is actually being formed.

If you're curious, the full piece is here:

PsychiatryOnline.org is the platform for all American Psychiatric Association Publishing journals, DSM, and bestselling textbooks, as well as APA Practice Guidelines, and continuing medical education.

05/22/2026

The San Francisco APA Annual Meeting has concluded. As always, it was a valuable opportunity to learn, reconnect with old friends, meet new colleagues, and reflect on where psychiatry stands—and where it may be going.

Two of the most consequential developments discussed throughout the meeting were psychedelics and artificial intelligence. Both hold enormous potential. Both also carry meaningful risks if developed carelessly, prematurely, or without sufficient humility. Psychiatry is entering a period where innovation may be accelerating faster than our collective ability to fully understand its downstream effects. Excitement is warranted. So is caution.

Another theme became increasingly clear during the meeting: psychiatry needs to remain part of the public conversation about mental health, mental illness, treatment, suffering, and healing. If we are absent, others will fill that space. Some voices will be thoughtful and constructive. Others will not.

As a profession, psychiatry has a responsibility to meet people where they are and provide information that is accessible, evidence-based, transparent, and intellectually honest. Mental health conversations are already happening everywhere—online, in the media, in communities, and increasingly through technology itself. The question is not whether these conversations will occur. The question is whether psychiatry will help shape them responsibly.

05/21/2026

Psychiatric News’ Editor in Chief on our busy past year, our exciti...

02/20/2026

01/19/2023

Our research findings suggest that five negative symptom domains, including flattened affect, anhedonia/avolition, autism-like symptoms, and impaired attention/memory are differentially associated with resting state amplitude of low-frequency fluctuations in

This study examined associations between resting-state amplitude of low frequency fluctuations (ALFF) and negative symptoms represented by total score…

01/10/2023

via Goodreads: Consider this:

[...] it would be far simpler if we could limit ourselves to examining the chemistry and physiology of [the patient's] brain, and to treating mental even...

08/06/2022

"Don’t waste your energy trying to convince others of your worth. Those who see it don’t need to be convinced. And those who don’t see it don’t want to be convinced." ~Emily Maroutian

07/08/2022

When less in more: our case series on the dangers of using CIWA indiscriminately.

In this report, we present a case series involving four patients placed on the Clinical Institute Withdrawal Assessment for Alcohol, Revised (CIWA-Ar) protocol for alcohol or sedative-hypnotic withdrawal syndromes, who developed delirium on sustained or increasing symptom-triggered benzodiazepine do...