Jim Coan

Just signed with @wwnorton to write *Why We Hold Hands*! With narrative prose, and illustrations by moi, it will change your view of human relationships. Thanks to my editor Melanie Tortoroli, and my amazing agent, Anna Sproul-Latimer, for shepherding this! #WhyWeHoldHands

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine. What went wrong? In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms: 1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder. 2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology. 3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it. The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress. This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does. Link to paper: michael-inzlicht.squarespace.com/s/The-psycholo…

Regardless of your personal views on Pride events, if you had to choose between living in one of two hypothetical countries you knew nothing about except that one had Pride events and the other had none, you would almost certainly prefer living in the country with Pride events.

@aa_marsh @JAMAPsych A lot comes down to scaling. Efficacy doesn't equal deployability. Efficacy isn't regulated. EST's require training and commitment. Therapists overestimate the value of eclecticism. Patients often don't want ESTs when they promise less and are hard, so there's a market problem.

@jimcoan @JAMAPsych Totally true. I would love to better understand why this is. Do you have a sense??

It is a myth that personality disorders are untreatable. Borderline Personality Disorder has remission rates of up to 80% with dialectical behavioral therapy (DBT)-- long considered the 'gold standard'--and schema therapy may be equally good. @JAMAPsych jamanetwork.com/journals/jamap…

Wow I really agree with this a lot.

Why does free speech have a “branding problem”? Part of it is simple. Once an institution becomes ideologically one-sided, it stops needing free speech and starts seeing it as a threat. That’s what I watched happen on campuses. A slow-motion train wreck.

Can we all agree that in a world of influencers, Z-listers, TikToks, badly acted ads, brand collabs, people filming themselves crying…the Artemis livestream of 4 middle-aged scientists doing their jobs is genuinely the best most authentic content of the century? Thanks @NASA🌚

What the Artemis II astronauts did over the last 10 days was a testament to their bravery. And the fact that they traveled farther from Earth than anyone ever has, re-entered our atmosphere at more than 24,000 mph, and splashed down safely was a testament to human ingenuity. Thanks to everyone at @NASA for making this mission possible, and for taking us along for the ride.

“Easter Trump Speech,” written by Terry Gilliam and directed by David Lynch.

Thomas Jefferson would want to throw up on his shoes

I have never been more terrified in my entire life.

This is my favorite climate change chart. Japanese monks, aristocrats, and emperors kept meticulous records of cherry blossom festivals for 1,200 years and accidentally built the world's longest climate dataset.

Throwing some search terms into Google Scholar and finding an abstract of a scientific article that supports whatever point you want to make is not, in fact, caring about science. It's caring about a *veneer* of science.

🚨NEW: Last year I published a paper detailing the gamete-based definition of the sexes and debunking common activist objections to it. This year, the journal published a critique of it rooted in "feminist epistemology." They invited me to respond. It's now published. The final paragraph of my response (not shown in the screenshots) is: "The renowned geneticist Theodosius Dobzhansky wrote that 'Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,' highlighting evolution as the unifying framework that makes life’s diversity, complexity, and interconnectedness comprehensible. I contend that a parallel statement applies similarly to reproductive biology: Nothing in the biology of the sexes makes sense except in the light of gametes." LINKS Mahr's critique of my paper:link.springer.com/article/10.100… My response to Mahr:link.springer.com/article/10.100…

@KBucko7 @grok please explain this post and the quote in it, what should I understand about it?

It is very strange to publish an article on the gender dynamics of mass shooters and not mention that the two "female" shooters used as flagship examples here were biologically male. Males commit more than 90% of violent crimes.

@SteveStuWill Amazingly, no one writing in this space has done so, at least that I’m aware of.

@jimcoan Interesting idea…

First copy spotted in the wild!

Daylight saving time disrupts circadian rhythm & cognitive health.

@Freyy_is We need a Walkman for 2026, not a tiny casino with Spotify.