Apocalypse Tao: Austerity Hits the Export Economies
Agence France-Presse, via MSN News, calls our attention to the typically under-stated way in which the 2nd trumpeter plays his solo*:
Large-scale strikes have hit China in recent weeks, as workers resentful about low salaries or lay-offs face off with employers juggling high costs and exports hit by lower demand from the debt-burdened West.
Politburo member Zhou Yongkang said authorities needed to improve their system of “social management”, including increasing “community-level” manpower.
“In the face of the negative impact of the market economy, we have not formed a complete system of social management,” Zhou said in a Friday speech to officials reported by the state Xinhua news agency at the weekend.
“It is urgent that we build a social management system with Chinese characteristics to match our socialist market economy.” China’s economy grew by 9.1 percent in the third quarter, down from 9.5 percent in the previous quarter. Manufacturing — a key engine of growth —…
Fetuses Can Sense Mothers’ Psychological States, Study Indicates
Via ScienceDaily:
As a fetus grows, it’s constantly getting messages from its mother. It’s not just hearing her heartbeat and whatever music she might play to her belly; it also gets chemical signals through the placenta. A new study, which will be published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, finds that this includes signals about the mother’s mental state. If the mother is depressed, that affects how the baby develops after it’s born.
In recent decades, researchers have found that the environment a fetus is growing up in — the mother’s womb — is very important. Some effects are obvious. Smoking and drinking, for example, can be devastating. But others are subtler; studies have found that people who were born during the Dutch famine of 1944, most of whom had starving mothers, were likely to have health problems like obesity and diabetes later.
Curt A. Sandman, Elysia P.…
Marijuana Will Make You Sad (If You Are Prone To Be Depressed)?
Via Science Daily:
Young people who are genetically vulnerable to depression should be extra careful about using cannabis: smoking cannabis leads to an increased risk of developing depressive symptoms. This has emerged from research carried out by Roy Otten at the Behavioural Science Institute of Radboud University Nijmegen that is published in the online version of the scientific journal Addiction Biology. Two-thirds of the population have the gene variant that makes one sensitive to depression.
Many young people in the Netherlands use cannabis. Nearly 30% of 16-year-olds indicate that they have used cannabis on at least one occasion, and 12% that they have used it during the past month. Besides worse performances at school, the use of cannabis also increases the risk of developing schizophrenia and psychosis. Smoking hashish and weed were thought to increase the risk of depression but no conclusive evidence for this was available to date. Otten suspects that…
40 Percent Of Europeans Have Mental Illness
The percentage will only increase, with an aging population, the stresses of modern life, et cetera, which leads to the question: What happens when the majority of the public across an entire continent are classified as ‘mentally ill’? Via Reuters:
Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.
With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden — measured in the hundreds of billions of euros — as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.
“The immense treatment gap … for mental disorders has to be closed,” said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany’s Dresden University and…
Anti-Depressant Patients Are More Likely to Suffer Depression Relapse
Photo: Tom Varco (CC)
From ScienceDaily:
In a paper that is likely to ignite new controversy in the hotly debated field of depression and medication, evolutionary psychologist Paul Andrews concludes that patients who have used anti-depressant medications can be nearly twice as susceptible to future episodes of major depression.
Andrews, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, is the lead author of a new paper in the journal Frontiers of Psychology.
The meta-analysis suggests that people who have not been taking any medication are at a 25 per cent risk of relapse, compared to 42 per cent or higher for those who have taken and gone off an anti-depressant.
Andrews and his colleagues studied dozens of previously published studies to compare outcomes for patients who used anti-depressants compared to those who used placebos.
They analyzed research on subjects who started on medications and were switched to placebos, subjects who were administered placebos…
Are Teens Into Music More Likely To Be Depressed?
Photo: Nishauncom
Which came first, the music or the depression? They say classical music boosts your baby’s brain activity. And music has been known to soothe the savage beast. Now music may play a hand in your teenager’s depression. Via PsychCentral:
The link between media exposure and adolescent emotional health continues to be a hot research area. In a new study, researchers found that teens who spend more time listening to music, rather than reading books, are more likely to be depressed.
Researchers said this study was unique as it sampled the behaviors of study participants in real time using a technique called ecological momentary assessment.
The method is more reliable than standard surveys and helped researchers recognize this large association between exposure to music and depression, said Brian Primack, M.D., Ed.M., M.S., assistant professor of medicine and pediatrics at Pitt’s School of Medicine, who led the study.
Some 106 teens were involved in the…
For Second Straight Year, Military Suicides Outnumber Combat Deaths
The U.S. military continues to experience a disturbingly high suicide rate, arguably the deadliest hazard that troops now face. Via Congress.org:
For the second year in a row, the U.S. military has lost more troops to suicide than it has to combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The reasons are complicated and the accounting uncertain — for instance, should returning soldiers who take their own lives after being mustered out be included? But the suicide rate is a further indication of the stress that military personnel live under after nearly a decade of war.
Overall, the services reported 434 suicides by personnel on active duty, significantly more than the 381 suicides by active-duty personnel reported in 2009. The 2010 total is below the 462 deaths in combat, excluding accidents and illness. In 2009, active-duty suicides exceeded deaths in battle.
Last week’s figures, though, understate the problem of military suicides because the services do not report…
Depression May Stem From Your DNA
Albrecht Dürer's 'Melencolia I'
Alice Park reports on a gene that may prove to trigger depression in some people, for TIME:
As powerful as genes are in exposing clues to diseases, not even the most passionate geneticist believes that complex conditions such as depression can be reduced to a tell-tale string of DNA.
But a new study confirms earlier evidence that a particular gene, involved in ferrying a brain chemical critical to mood known as serotonin, may play a role in triggering the mental disorder in some people.
Researchers led by Dr. Srijan Sen, a professor of psychiatry at University of Michigan, report in the Archives of General Psychiatry that individuals with a particular form of the serotonin transporter gene were more vulnerable to developing depression when faced with stressful life events such as having a serious medical illness or being a victim of childhood abuse. The form of the gene that these individuals…
Suicides In Japan Cost Economy $32bn
I would think the number one problem is that Japan has the highest suicide rate in the world, not the fact that it’s hurting the economy. BBC reports:
The government in Japan says suicides and depression cost its economy almost 2.7tn yen ($32bn; £21bn) last year.
The figures refer to lost incomes and the cost of treatment. It is the first time Japan has released such figures.
Japan has one of the world’s highest suicide rates, with more than 32,000 people killing themselves last year. PM Naoto Kan sees it as proof of an economic and emotional downturn.
The government is setting up a task force to try to reduce the rate.
From Friday, it will run a video clip of a footballer from the J-league on its website, urging people to be more aware of the problem.
Continues at BBC News …
Using Psychedelics To Treat Depression
Ecstasy (MDMA)
It’s been a long struggle, more or less since the days of Timothy Leary and Albert Hofmann in the ’60s, but doctors and scientists are finally being allowed to treat depression with some of the most effective drugs known to them: psychedelics. Anne Harding reports for CNN/Health.com:
Pamela Sakuda, 57, was anxious and depressed. After two years of intensive chemotherapy for late-stage colon cancer, and having outlived her prognosis by several months, she’d finally lost hope. She was living in fear and was worried how her impending death would affect her husband.
Sakuda’s doctor prescribed antidepressants, but they didn’t do any good. So, at her wits’ end and feeling that she had nothing to lose, Sakuda volunteered for an experimental depression treatment being studied at UCLA.
In January 2005, with a pair of trained therapists at her side, Sakuda took a pill of psilocybin — a hallucinogen better known as the active…
Eating Chocolate Leads To Depression
Photo: André Karwath (CC)
Call me strange, and many have, but I’ve never liked chocolate. I’ve never been seriously depressed, either. Now it appears there may be a link between the two, reported here by the BBC:
People who regularly eat chocolate are more depressive, experts have found. Research in Archives of Internal Medicine shows those who eat at least a bar every week are more glum than those who only eat chocolate now and again.
Many believe chocolate has the power to lift mood, and the US team say this may be true, although scientific proof for this is lacking. But they say they cannot rule out that chocolate may be a cause rather than the cure for being depressed.
In the study, which included nearly 1,000 adults, the more chocolate the men and women consumed the lower their mood. Those who ate the most – more than six regular 28g size bars…
Head Case: Can Psychiatry Be A Science?
Louis Menand writes in the New Yorker:
You arrive for work and someone informs you that you have until five o’clock to clean out your office. You have been laid off. At first, your family is brave and supportive, and although you’re in shock, you convince yourself that you were ready for something new.
Then you start waking up at 3 A.M., apparently in order to stare at the ceiling. You can’t stop picturing the face of the employee who was deputized to give you the bad news. He does not look like George Clooney. You have fantasies of terrible things happening to him, to your boss, to George Clooney.
You find — a novel recognition — not only that you have no sex drive but that you don’t care. You react irritably when friends advise you to let go and move on. After a week, you have a hard time getting out…
Internet Use and Depression Linked
At the risk of becoming depressed, here’s a report from the Yorkshire Evening Post on a British study tying internet use and depression (if you watched Doug Rushkoff’s excellent Frontline documentary ‘Digital Nation’ this news won’t be in the least bit surprising):
A “dark side” to the internet suggests a strong link between time spent surfing the web and depression, say psychologists. British scientists found that the longer people spent online, the less likely they were to be happy.
A small group of the worst affected individuals were both depressed and addicted. But it was not clear whether using the internet causes mental health problems, or whether people with mental health problems are drawn to the internet.
More work is needed to answer this “chicken and egg” question, say the researchers.
Study leader Dr Catriona Morrison, from the Institute of Psychological Sciences at the University of Leeds, said: “The internet now plays a huge part in…
Antidepressants: The Emperor’s New Drugs?
By Irving Kirsch, Professor of Psychology at the University of Hull in the UK and author of The Emperor’s New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth, writing for the Huffington Post:
Antidepressants are supposed to be the magic bullet for curing depression. But are they? I used to think so. As a clinical psychologist, I used to refer depressed clients to psychiatric colleagues to have them prescribed. But over the past decade, researchers have uncovered mounting evidence that they are not. It seems that we have been misled. Depression is not a brain disease, and chemicals don’t cure it.
My awareness that the chemical cure of depression is a myth began in 1998, when Guy Sapirstein and I set out to assess the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. Instead of doing a brand new study, we decided to pool the results of previous studies in which placebos had been used to treat depression and analyze them together. What we did is called a meta-analysis, and it is a common technique for making sense of the data when a large number of studies have been done to answer a particular question…
Today Is The Most Depressing Day Of The Year
According to the UK’s Daily Mail, you have a ready-made excuse if you were too depressed to show up for work today. In America of course, it’s Martin Luther King Day, so some people have the day off anyway (not at disinformation’s offices though…):
If you think life is a grind and you’d rather be doing anything other than going to work, you’re not alone.
Today is officially Blue Monday – the most miserable day of the year.
A combination of Arctic temperatures, Christmas debt and the next pay day feeling like it’s months away leaves many of us depressed and unable to face work.
And to make matters worse, you probably can’t afford to take time off sick thanks to the recession or because you’ve already had days off as a result of the snow.
The gloomy research was carried out by FirstCare, a company that helps firms tackle absenteeism.
Chief executive Aaron Ross said:…
Sen. Byron Dorgan, Who Predicted Financial Collapse Ten Years Ago, Retiring
How easily we forget this whole mess started under a Democratic president, Bill Clinton, with the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act in 199. Here’s Huffington Post from a few months ago that sums up why a guy like this retiring is a big deal. Dan Froomkin writes:
He got it right last time.
Senator Byron Dorgan, Democrat of North Dakota, was one of eight senators who stood up to oppose the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act in 1999. That repeal, which was signed into law by President Clinton exactly 10 years ago today, broke down the barriers between commercial banking and investment banking, and led to the growth of behemoth financial firms that were able to take enormous risks with impunity, because they were “too big to fail.”
“I think we will in 10 years’ time look back and say we should not have done this,” Dorgan said back then. The video of his speech has become something of a cult favorite for wonks — ten years, a $700 billion bailout and a major financial crisis later.
On CNBC, Strategist Says Dollar Will be ‘Utterly Destroyed’; We Are Moving Toward ‘New World Order’
Wow, this was on CNBC:
The dollar will get “utterly destroyed” and become “virtually worthless”, said Damon Vickers, chief investment officer of Nine Points Capital Partners.
“We don’t have resources. Neither does a lot of Asia to be quite frank,” Vickers said on CNBC’s Asia Squawk Box. “Countries that have resources — the Brazils, the Canadas, Australia — their currencies are doing well.” Vickers noted that their stock markets have done the best year-to-date.
“They have stuff. They’ve got resources. They export real things. The United States exports ‘promises’ and ‘pretty paper’,” he added.
Due to the huge wage disparities between the United States and emerging markets like China, Vickers said that may resolve itself in some type of a global currency crisis.
“If the global currency crisis unfolds, then inevitably you get an alignment of a global world government. A new global currency and a new world order, so we may be moving towards that,” he said.
Vickers added that this is the time where investors should be making money when the trend is developing. “Oil looks higher, gold looks higher, currencies look weaker.”
Depression Link to Processed Food
To the surprise of, well, hardly anyone, the BBC reports on a link between eating a lot of processed foods and depression. As if we needed any more reasons not to eat junk (for more on that see the disinformation documentary film Killer at Large)…
Eating a diet high in processed food increases the risk of depression, research suggests. What is more, people who ate plenty of vegetables, fruit and fish actually had a lower risk of depression, the University College London team found.
Data on diet among 3,500 middle-aged civil servants was compared with depression five years later, the British Journal of Psychiatry reported. The team said the study was the first to look at the UK diet and depression.
They split the participants into two types of diet – those who ate a diet largely based on whole foods, which includes lots of fruit, vegetables and fish, and those who ate a…
Does Depression = Lack of Fun?
“Real science points to one conclusion. “Modern cosmetic pharmacology focuses so heavily on eliminating depression that it entirely misses one essential point: depressed people are suffering from a lack of fun.”
Fun (and adventure) produce both adrenaline and dopamine, while “Having fun with other humans in a social setting stimulates serotonin and oxcytocin, two neurochemicals essential to feelings of security and being loved.” This oversight “will be viewed by future generations as one of the greatest failures of medicine,” argues this article (which appeared in the fall issue of the science magazine H+), concluding that science “has barely scratched the surface on fun.
