In this review, we describe the sex differences in prevalence, onset, symptom profiles, and disease outcome that are evident in schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and posttraumatic stress disorder. Women with schizophrenia tend to exhibit less disease impairment than men. By contrast, women with post-traumatic stress disorder are more affected than men. The most likely candidates to explain these sex differences are gonadal hormones. This review details the clinical evidence that oestradiol and progesterone are dysregulated in these psychiatric disorders. Notably, existing data on oestradiol, and to a lesser extent, progesterone, suggest that low levels of these hormones may increase the risk of disease development and worsen symptom severity. We argue that future studies require a more inclusive, considered analysis of gonadal steroid hormones and the intricacies of the interactions between them, with methodological rigour applied, to enhance our understanding of the roles of steroid hormones in psychiatric disorders.

In this article, I identify how the Amazon television series Transparent deploys narrative thematics of home, belonging and importantly, a journey to becoming, to stage a limited representation of transgender lives within a heterosexual economy. Transgender studies has long been preoccupied with the transition narrative as a primary tool of representation, it is a vehicle through which the disjointedness of gender transition can be reformed into a narrative that enables intelligibility and fosters a sense of belonging. I argue however that the transition narrative, which aims to make transgender lives visible (and consumable) to an audience of trans and non-trans folk, is limiting in its representational scope and may impede, rather than mobilise, this agenda. The transition narrative constructs transgender lives within normative frames of time and place, and in the codes of textual conventions that compulsively render transgender transition into narrative. In Transparent, the themes of home and belonging are used to lend a sense of cohesion to the experience of transition in ways that implicate the representation of its trans characters in a ‘universalising narrative of liberal democratic progress’ ( Keegan 2013 ). I will examine the various ways this text employs the conventions of narrative and in doing so, fails to confront its audience with the daily cultural and social transgressions that make up the lived experiences of transition.

A large body of work implicates cytokines and their related pathways in the pathophysiologies of mood disorders. Much of the data on the role of cytokines in major depression and bipolar disorder suggest that pathways regulated by tumor necrosis factor (TNF)‐α make a significant contribution to their pathophysiologies. In the present review, we contrast the well‐established role of TNF‐related pathways acting to mediate classic pro‐inflammatory cytokine activity with growing evidence that such pathways have more diverse functions in the human central nervous system. Here, it will be argued that changes in levels of the TNF receptor type 2 in mood disorders would be consistent with a neuroprotective role for the receptor against the pathophysiologies of mood disorders. This hypothesis is of significance when considering how interventions that act to modulate TNF‐regulated pathways can be used to treat the symptoms of mood disorders.