Face Shapes Could Indicate Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder

It might be hard to learn about a person's mental illness just by looking at their face, but a new study seemingly points to some facial features that could make it easier to identify those with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. 

The new study published in the Psychiatry Research journal broke down just what the international team of scientists found. Using 3D laser surface imaging, they scanned the faces of 93 subjects—49 controls, 22 with schizophrenia, and 22 with bipolar disorder—and found that the controls "showed marked asymmetries" in their face shapes. By contrast, "in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder these normal facial asymmetries were diminished," the team wrote, noting that the evening out of certain facial asymmetries while developing in the womb was associated with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as an adult. 

"These findings indicate a trans-diagnostic process that involves loss of facial asymmetries in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder," the study said. "Embryologically, they implicate loss of face-brain asymmetries across gestational weeks seven to 14 in processes that involve genes previously associated with risk for schizophrenia." Even more interesting was the gender gap, as their previous September 2024 study found facial shape variation was associated with a 5.9 percent schizophrenia diagnosis among women compared to men at 4.2 percent. Meanwhile, for bipolar disorder, major facial differences were only found in male participants. 

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Still, simply analyzing someone's face is not enough to accurately diagnose them with one of these mental illnesses. "Facial features alone would... not be useful for diagnosing these disorders," researchers Neus Martínez-Abadías and Mar Fatjó-Vilas said in a statement. "The same applies to other morphological features of the brain and genetic characteristics. No single biomarker has sufficient diagnostic potential."

For now, examining one's face shape could be a helpful indicator, but by no means is it an accurate measure of mental health. 

"The hypothesis is that, by combining the potential of facial, brain, and genetic biomarkers, we could develop a complementary tool to the clinical interview that could help clinicians make diagnoses more quickly and accurately," author Noemí Hostalet concluded. "Therefore, this study could represent a potential complementary tool to the current ones to make earlier and more accurate diagnoses, provided that the necessary ethical and privacy aspects are rigorously guaranteed."