Rutter had lived with the condition off and on for years, but the burden had grown since the death of his mother in 2011, followed by a relationship break-up and a car accident the year after. It felt as if his brain was stuck on what he describes as “an automatic circuit”, repeating the same negative thoughts like a mantra: “‘Everything I do turns to crap.’ I actually believed that,” he recalls. The visit to Hammersmith was a preview. He would be returning the next day to participate in a study, taking a powerful hallucinogen under the guidance of Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychologist and neuroscientist at Imperial College London. Years of talking therapy and a variety of anti-anxiety medications had failed to improve Rutter’s condition, qualifying him for the trial. “Everyone was super nice, like really lovely, and especially Robin,” Rutter recalls. Carhart-Harris led him to a room with a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machine, so researchers could acquire a baseline of his brain activity. Then he showed Rutter where he would spend his time while on the drug. Carhart-Harris asked him to lie down and played him some of the music that would accompany the session. He explained that he would have on hand a drug that could neutralize the hallucinogen, if necessary. Then the two practised a grounding technique, to help calm Rutter in the event that he became overwhelmed. Without warning, Rutter burst into tears....

With telemedicine likely to expand in the post-Covid world, health care providers will need to work though some fundamental questions. How can we best scale telecare to the broad population? How will it change the way we gather and analyze health care data? And what new models of care will emerge? Specialties like psychiatry, where the use of telecare has been encompassing more than 40% of patient encounters, can help point the way forward....

The COVID-19 pandemic has created much psychological distress. Coupled with the virus's ability to cause neurological symptoms like encephalitis, loss of smell and taste, meningitis, etc. — what else could SARS-CoV-2 be doing to the mind?A recent review published in Brain, Behavior, and Immunity discusses just that. “Are we facing a crashing wave of neuropsychiatric sequelae of COVID-19? Neuropsychiatric symptoms and potential immunologic mechanisms” is the paper’s title — written by Emily Troyer, MD, and her psychiatrist colleagues at the University of California San Diego.During the 18th and 19th centuries after the influenza pandemic, there was a drastic rise in cases of schizophrenia, sleep disorders, anxiety, depression, psychosis, delirium, and suicidality. Scientists called this “psychoses of influenza” — and indeed, influenza is known to invade the brain....