June 18, 2026
“In long COVID it was insomnia, not depression, that flagged the most widespread myelin loss – and the highest levels of an anti-myelin autoantibody.”
“Thinner right prefrontal cortex did not merely accompany the disorder – it scaled with its severity, marking somatic symptoms as a mechanism written into cortical structure rather than a complaint without substrate.”
“The computation a patient used to decide whether a reward was worth the effort predicted the severity of their negative symptoms better than their diagnosis did.”
“Part of why bodily distress slides into depression is not the body at all – it is the isolation that the symptoms quietly impose.”
“A score of 12 today is not the score of 12 a clinician calibrated against in 2012 – somatic symptom burden rose, and the norm band has to move with it.”
“For the first time the world has attached a number to mental health access – 150 million more people by 2030 – and a number, unlike a percentage of suffering, can be audited.”