Neuropsychoanalysis, Deprescribing, and 'Eighth Grade'
"Growing up can be a little bit scary and weird."
🫶 Welcome to Field Report, a brief, digestible, consumable examination of what’s happening right now in psych culture with the movie embellishments from Reel Therapy.
A LIMERENT STATE OF MIND
Researchers think limerence deserves a classification of its own as a mental health disorder in order to better treat it and raise awareness of its severity - including increased risk of self-harm, depression, attachment anxiety, and trauma. Longing for the perfect love may seem harmless, but it isn’t when it becomes an involuntary cognitive-affective state. That’s when it becomes limerence.
First coined in 1979 by psychologist Dory Tennov, limerence was seen as a state of unrequited love that was so intense that it became negative.
“Limerence is not in any way preeminent among types of human attractions or interactions; but when limerence is in full force, it eclipses other relationships.”
– Dorothy Tennov, 1979.
Limerence is not actually love or even a crush, but something more enduring, destructive, and obsessive that can lead to stalking and violence. According to the latest 2026 research on limerence in Acta Psychologica, the excessive and debilitating longing for “perfect love” is associated with anxious attachment styles rather than age, ethnicity, religion, gender, or sexual orientation, but it is more of a behavioral addiction than an attachment disorder. It is linked to trauma, insecure attachment, obsessive cognitive traits, and other mental health disorders.
“Baby Reindeer” (2024) illustrates the extreme and dangerous side of limerence. The character Martha experiences a severe form of this obsession with a baretender/comedian that escalates into stalking and violence. Also, I have an entire Substack on this series called Captive Empathy or the Baby Reindeer Syndrome if you want to read it!
Clip below👇
NEURO + PSYCHOANALYSIS
In his new book, The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing, Mark Solms, who is the Chair of Neuropsychology at the University of Cape Town and the science director for the American Psychoanalytic Association, has coined a new term, neuropsychonalysis. Given his background in neuroscience and his extensive research into Sigmund Freud and the unconscious, he ties concepts like “the pleasure principle” to dopamine in the brain, and “the superego” to the prefrontal cortex’s emotional regulation function. Solms makes two major points worth considering and diving deeper into: 1) The brain’s functions can be linked to Freud’s theories from as early as 1900; 2) Psychoanalysis and psychology are “as dependable as, say, insulin is at managing type 1 diabetes, or as the HPV vaccine is at preventing cervical cancer.”
Watch as Anthony Hopkins plays Sigmund Freud in “Freud’s Last Session” (2023). In this clip, on the eve of the Second World War, Freud explains the definition of insanity to his daughter.
Clip below👇
SOCIAL MEDIA < MATH + READING
In a previous Substack, Surviving Hurricane Social Media, I noted that teens watch their screens (mostly YouTube and TikTok), on average, 8 hours and 39 minutes per day, and teen girls, on average, spend around 2 hours and 15 minutes per day on Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat. You would also know that one of the not-so-good influences of social media is that it can contribute to self-image issues in teens, i.e., body disturbance issues, and that more social media use, such as posting, liking, and commenting on photos, has been linked to more eating disorders, self-objectification, and internalized body shame in teens.
In an August 2026 study in Italy, researchers tested over 5,227 teens and found social media use in 6th, 7th, and 8th grade is linked to lower standardized test scores, lower levels of reading, and lower levels of math in high school. Additionally, they found teens are more distracted in 10th, 11th, and 12th grade if they started social media in middle school versus starting social media in 9th grade (high school). In other words, the earlier the social media account is created, the worse the outcome for the teen in regard to attention and education. There was no difference in their ability to speak English - just standardized tests, reading, and math. This study is more evidence to support the policies and/or plans to delay social media access until children are older (high school). Before that, their brains just are not cognitively mature enough to manage their interaction with it.
In the film, “Eight Grade” (2018), thirteen-year-old Kayla endures the contemporary social media-entrenched adolescence. In this extremely moving and powerful scene, she disclosed to her YouTube audience how she has anxiety and nervousness.
Clip below👇
DEPRESCRIBING ANTI-DEPRESSANTS
While doctors might be deprescribing antidepressants more frequently, many individuals are left in the dark about how to deal with the aftereffects of getting off their medications. Since there is very little research done on tapering off antidepressants, many turn to online communities for support. The Maha Movement (RFK’s platform) is growing in popularity because many believe they were overmedicalized and overtreated for depression by psychiatrists when their sadness may have just been a normal reaction to something difficult and would have passed after 6 months. Some feel that their depression was wrongly treated by doctors like a chronic disease, like having high cholesterol. People struggling with these questions have few places to turn to online, and the Maha communities are gaining momentum because of this. The former President of the American Society of Psychopharmacology, Dr. Joseph Goldberg, recommends that everyone do a medical reassessment once a year of their antidepressants. He also recommends stopping antidepressants if they aren’t working, but the issues many are facing are not with assessments but with how to get off of them. The side effects of tapering off antidepressants and the withdrawal can be incapacitating, dangerous, overwhelming, and debilitating. The bottom line is that more research on how and when to taper off antidepressants safely and holistically is gravely needed.
The first academic book written on deprescribing psychiatric medication is called Deprescribing in Psychiatry (2019). I will leave you with a very interesting interview with one of the authors, Dr. Swapnil Gupta, who is a psychiatrist and associate professor at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.
Listen below👇