Open research questions in Mental Health and Psychiatry
298 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,343 Mental Health and Psychiatry papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
The paper identifies a gap in the consideration of historical context and potential biases in psychiatric texts. The author notes that some ideas and practices in the book have not aged well, particularly in relation to cultural shifts post-1990.
Re-examination: J. P. Leff and A. D. Isaacs, Psychiatric Examination in Clinical Practice – Psychiatry in literature · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in the current conceptual orientation of psychiatry, which has led to a detachment from the experiential and expressive texture of psychic life. It claims that the current approach often reduces patients' expressions of suffering to quantifiable diagnostic indicators, stripping them of their expressive density and contextual meaning.
The paper identifies a gap in the understanding of mental processes and their relationship to the sociocultural environment. The research gap is not explicitly stated, but the paper highlights the limitations of the medical model in explaining mental disorders.
One challenge is the potential for futility assessments to increase stigma or be otherwise unwelcome to patients. Another challenge is the need to balance the benefits and burdens of treatment in evaluating futility. A third challenge is the complexity of applying futility concepts in the context of mental health care, where treatment outcomes can be highly variable.
consideration of psychiatric futility highlights the importance of clinical research on treatment-resistant conditions, - evaluation of the concept by representative groups of key interest holders
Future research should move away from traditional single disorder study designs and adopt a transdiagnostic and hybrid dimensional/categorical approach to psychopathology, - Research should focus on developing a precision medicine approach to psychiatric diagnosis
The current approach to psychiatric diagnosis lacks validity and utility. There is a need for new conceptual frameworks to catalyze a genuine paradigm shift. The gap between the current approach and the need for precision medicine in psychiatry is significant.
The paper identifies a gap in the understanding of the consequences of self-diagnosis in neuropsychiatry. It highlights the need to consider the potential impact of self-diagnosis on the social meaning and standing of a diagnosis. The paper argues that self-diagnosis may lead to a shift in focus towards the milder end of the spectrum.
Drawing on phenomenology and clinical psychiatry, this paper proposes that safety in AI systems should be understood as the protection of provisionality-the preservation of the human capacity to remain uncertain long enough to think.
While these conditions are referenced as emblematic examples of misclassified and poorly understood disorders, the five clinical cases discussed in this article do not directly illustrate these diseases.
Case Report: The intersection of psychiatry and medicine: diagnostic and ethical insights from case studies · 2025 · DOIDisturbances regarding the lifeworlds of patients with mental disorders are recurrently mentioned in psychiatric literature, but the concept often remains poorly defined and unclear.
Future studies are required to assess the transferability and applicability of this framework in modern settings worldwide.
Patient–Practitioner–Environment Synchronization: Four-Step Process for Integrating Interprofessional and Distinctive Competencies in Osteopathic Practice—A Scoping Review with Integrative Hypothesis · 2025 · DOIHowever, research on this relationship in the schizophrenia spectrum remains scarce.
Impact of minimal self disorders on naturalistic episodic memory in first-episode psychosis and parallels in healthy individuals with schizotypal traits · 2024 · DOIDespite the increasing criticism and lack of evidence, the debunked chemical imbalance theory of the etiology of depression still dominates the professional and pop/folk understanding and interventions.
The model does not treat cases where biological parameters remain abnormal even when patient-defined goals are successfully supported as failures of integration. The framework may not be applicable in all clinical contexts, such as in emergency situations where time is limited.
The gap between the biomedical account of disease and the phenomenological understanding of illness. The lack of a shared grammar for reasoning about disease and illness. The need for a framework that integrates patient goals into causal reasoning and preserves distinct explanatory roles at each level.
The paper identifies a gap in the current approach to psychiatry, which prioritizes certainty and biological explanations over uncertainty and complexity. It highlights the need for a more nuanced approach that incorporates negative capability and provisional knowledge.
Negative Capability May Solve Psychiatry’s Credibility Crisis Helene Speyer1,2 · David Roe3,4 · Sue Estroff5 · John Strauss6 Received: 3 October 2025 / Accepted: 18 December 2025 / Published online: 22 January 2026 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer…
Existing theories of disease may not be suitable for every pathological condition. There is a need for a culturally sensitive account of mental disorder that draws on the cultural perspective of amafufunyana within the Southern African context.
To further develop the Dimensional Parity Standard and its implications for AI in neurodivergent mental health. To explore the applications of Epistemic Parallax in other domains. To investigate the relationship between Epistemic Parallax and other existing frameworks.
Epistemic Parallax: a theory of structural cognitive misalignment and its implications for AI in neurodivergent mental health · 2026 · DOIThe standard reading of the Flatland thought experiment encodes the deficit model it was designed to challenge. Existing frameworks do not account for the systematic displacement in meaning, classification, and judgment that arises when a cognitive system observes neurodivergent experience from a non-parallel normative frame.
Epistemic Parallax: a theory of structural cognitive misalignment and its implications for AI in neurodivergent mental health · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies a gap in understanding pragmatic competence as a core component of healthcare assessment and practice. The authors note that pragmatic competence is often pursued within separate disciplinary contexts.
The complexity of the issues involved. The controversy surrounding the medicalization of PMS and PMDD. The need for a nuanced and context-sensitive approach to medicalization.
How to deal with controversies in the evaluation of medicalization: a case study of PMS and PMDD · 2026 · DOIThe paper acknowledges that its analysis is limited by the complexity of the issues involved. The paper notes that the debate on good versus bad medicalization is even more complex and multifaceted than already anticipated.
How to deal with controversies in the evaluation of medicalization: a case study of PMS and PMDD · 2026 · DOIThe paper identifies the challenge of balancing the need for diagnostic precision with the need for a more nuanced understanding of psychiatric illness. It highlights the challenge of addressing clinician stigma and bias in psychiatric practice. The paper notes the challenge of providing effective support and resources for clinicians who disclose psychiatric illness.
Most-cited papers in Mental Health and Psychiatry
- A theory of diagnosis from first principles · Artificial Intelligence · 1987 · 1,919 citations
- Who Belongs in the Family? · Psychometrika · 1953 · 1,898 citations
- Age-Ism: Another Form of Bigotry · The Gerontologist · 1969 · 1,585 citations
- The NIMH Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) Project: Precision Medicine for Psychiatry · American Journal of Psychiatry · 2014 · 1,311 citations
- Hospitalism · The Psychoanalytic Study of the Child · 1945 · 1,309 citations
- Health as a Theoretical Concept · Philosophy of Science · 1977 · 1,049 citations
- ‘Discovering’ chronic illness: Using grounded theory · Social Science & Medicine · 1990 · 995 citations
- The concept of mental disorder: On the boundary between biological facts and social values. · American Psychologist · 1992 · 938 citations
- A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry · American Journal of Psychiatry · 1998 · 823 citations
- The rise of surveillance medicine · Sociology of Health & Illness · 1995 · 762 citations
Most recent work
- Predictive coding and neurocomputational psychiatry: a mechanistic framework for understanding mental disorders · Frontiers in Psychiatry · 2026
- Addressing ‘futility’ in psychiatry: a consensus statement · Psychological Medicine · 2026
- Embracing neurodiversity in medicine: insights from the history of psychiatry · The Lancet · 2026
- On Depression and Subjectivity: A Lacanian Approach · Research Output (Edinburgh Napier University) · 2026
- The imaginary divide between mental and “physical” health: Dismantling dualism and reductionism to address a monumental mistake in medicine · JCPP Advances · 2026
- A missed opportunity to examine reliability in computational psychiatry · Nature Mental Health · 2026
- Some Vicissitudes of playing related to containment and disruption · The Psychoanalytic Quarterly · 2026
- Negative Capability May Solve Psychiatry’s Credibility Crisis · Culture Medicine and Psychiatry · 2026
- Implications of Critical Perspectives for Psychiatric Practice · Psychiatric Clinics of North America · 2026
- Being human: ableism, advocacy, and strengthening medicine · The Lancet · 2026
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