Family History of Psychiatric Disorders Shapes Intellectual Interests
Cleveland tower at the Graduate College, Princeton University. Artist: Magneticcarpet (CC)
Via ScienceDaily:
A hallmark of the individual is the cultivation of personal interests, but for some people, their intellectual pursuits might actually be genetically predetermined.
Survey results published by Princeton University researchers in the journal PLoS ONE suggest that a family history of psychiatric conditions such as autism and depression could influence the subjects a person finds engaging.
Although preliminary, the findings provide a new look at the oft-studied link between psychiatric conditions and aptitude in the arts or sciences. While previous studies have explored this link by focusing on highly creative individuals or a person’s occupation, the Princeton research indicates that the influence of familial neuropsychiatric traits on personal interests is apparently independent of a person’s talent or career path, and could help form a person’s basic preferences and personality.
Princeton researchers surveyed nearly 1,100 students from the University’s Class of 2014 early…
Personality Disorders To Be Removed From Psychiatrists’ Bible
Via ScienceDaily:
A newly published paper from Rhode Island Hospital reports on the impact to patients if five personality disorders are removed from the upcoming revision to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 5th edition (DSM-5).
Based on their study, the researchers believe these changes could result in false-negative diagnoses for patients. The paper is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and is now available online in advance of print.
The DSM-5 Personality and Personality Disorders work group made several recommendations to change the approach toward diagnosing personality disorders. One of those recommendations is to delete five personality disorders as a way to reduce the level of comorbidity among the disorders. The ones originally slated to be removed include paranoid, schizoid, histrionic, narcissistic and dependent personality disorders.
More recently, the Work Group recommended that narcissistic be retained. Lead author Mark Zimmerman, M.D., director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, points out, however, that no…
Twenty Percent Of Americans Had Mental Illness In Last Year
A shocking statistic, made worse when you learn that 60% of the mentally ill did not receive any treatment. From MedPage Today:
About 20% of American adults reported having had a mental illness during the preceding year, a government survey found.
The figure rose to almost 30% of those in the 18 to 25 age group, compared with 14.3% of patients 50 and older, according to researchers from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA).
And of the nearly 46 million U.S. adults who reported having had a mental, behavioral, or emotional disorder when surveyed in 2010, some 60% didn’t receive any treatment for the condition.
The most common reason for not getting mental healthcare was not being able to afford it.
The researchers noted that although the 20% figure is “relatively high,” just 5% reported having serious issues that interfered with their normal activities.
Although more of those with serious mental illness reported…
Sex Addiction – A Real Epidemic?
Newsweek devotes some serious column inches to the “epidemic” that has made its way into popular awareness via notable celebrities such as Tiger Woods and Domenique Strauss-Kahn:
Valerie realized that sex was wrecking her life right around the time her second marriage disintegrated. At 30, and employed as a human-resources administrator in Phoenix, she had serially cheated on both her husbands—often with their subordinates and co-workers—logging anonymous hookups in fast-food-restaurant bathrooms, affairs with married men, and one-night stands too numerous to count. But Valerie couldn’t stop. Not even after one man’s wife aimed a shotgun at her head while catching them in flagrante delicto. Valerie called phone-sex chat lines and pored over online pornography, masturbating so compulsively that it wasn’t uncommon for her to choose her vibrator over going to work. She craved public exhibitionism, too, particularly at strip clubs, and even accepted money in exchange for sex—not out of financial necessity but for the illicit rush such acts gave her.
For Valerie, sex was a form of self-medication: to obliterate the anxiety, despair…
Researchers Extol The Medical Benefits Of Magic Mushrooms
Not only that, but the researchers at John Hopkins say they’ve found the perfect dosage. Sadly, this looks to be one of those cases in which society lags behind science. Via Yahoo News:
Researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine have been studying the effects of psilocybin, a chemical found in psychedelic mushrooms. Now, they say, they’ve zeroed in on the perfect dosage level to produce transformative mystical and spiritual experiences that offer long-lasting life-changing benefits, while carrying little risk of negative reactions.
The breakthrough could speed the day when doctors use psilocybin–long viewed skeptically for its association with 1960s countercultural thrill-seekers–for a range of valuable clinical functions, like easing the anxiety of terminally ill patients, treating depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, and helping smokers quit.
The Johns Hopkins study involved giving healthy volunteers varying doses of psilocybin in a controlled and supportive setting, over four separate sessions. Looking back more than…
‘Knowing It in Your Gut’: Cross-Talk Between Human Gut Bacteria and Brain
Stephen "Gut Feeling" Colbert. Photo: Cliff (CC)
ScienceDaily reports:
A lot of chatter goes on inside each one of us and not all of it happens between our ears. Researchers at McMaster University discovered that the “cross-talk” between bacteria in our gut and our brain plays an important role in the development of psychiatric illness, intestinal diseases and probably other health problems as well including obesity.
“The wave of the future is full of opportunity as we think about how microbiota or bacteria influence the brain and how the bi-directional communication of the body and the brain influence metabolic disorders, such as obesity and diabetes,” says Jane Foster, associate professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Neurosciences of the Michael G. DeGroote School of Medicine.
Using germ-free mice, Foster’s research shows gut bacteria influences how the brain is wired for learning and memory. The research paper has been published in the March issue of…
Can You Improve Your Mental Health From Your Computer?
Via the The Economist:
The treatment, in the early 1880s, of an Austrian hysteric called Anna O is generally regarded as the beginning of talking-it-through as a form of therapy.
But psychoanalysis, as this version of talk therapy became known, is an expensive procedure. Anna’s doctor, Josef Breuer, is estimated to have spent over 1,000 hours with her.
Since then, things have improved. A typical course of a modern talk therapy, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, consists of 12-16 hour-long sessions and is a reasonably efficient way of treating conditions like depression and anxiety (hysteria is no longer a recognised diagnosis).
Medication, too, can bring rapid change. Nevertheless, treating disorders of the psyche is still a hit-and-miss affair, and not everyone wishes to bare his soul or take mind-altering drugs to deal with his problems. A new kind of treatment may, though, mean he does not have to.
O Magazine Touts The Wonders Of Ecstasy
The Oprah Magazine comes out in favor of MDMA as a therapeutic wonder drug, attempting to dispel hysterical, ‘rave’-related media cliches (propagated by Oprah herself, among others) along the way. Writer Jessica Winter tried MDMA for the first time for the sake of the article, and describes the enormous personal benefit she gained in the weeks after:
To a layperson, the notion of using a drug like Ecstasy as a therapeutic tool for healing trauma might make as much sense as adding cocaine to a diabetic’s weight loss regimen. Ecstasy was the signature stimulant fueling a worldwide party culture in the 1980s and ’90s, epitomized by massive all-night dance “raves” crammed with blissed-out revelers and pulsating with electronic music at festivals and exurban warehouses across North America and Europe.
Yet MDMA’s beginnings were innocent, even banal. In 1912 it was included as an intermediate chemical in a patent that the German pharmaceutical company…
God, The Army, And PTSD
From a 2009 article in the Boston Review by Tara McKelvey:
When Roger Benimoff arrived at the psychiatric building of the Coatesville, Pennsylvania veterans’ hospital, he was greeted by a message carved into a nearby tree stump: “Welcome Home.” It was a reminder that things had not turned out as he had expected.
In Faith Under Fire, a memoir about Benimoff’s life as an Army chaplain in Iraq, Benimoff and co-author Eve Conant describe his return from Iraq to his family in Colorado and subsequent assignment to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He retreated deep into himself, spending hours on the computer and racking up ten thousand dollars in debt on eBay. Above all, he was angry and jittery, scared even of his young sons, and barely able to make it through the day. He was eventually admitted to Coatesville’s “Psych Ward.” For a while the lock-down facility was his home. He wondered…
“They Are Our Government, Our Leaders—They Cannot Be Crazy”
Regions of the brain associated with stress and posttraumatic stress disorder.
Are the Israelis repeating Holocaust traumas upon the Palestinians? From the July 1992 issue of Washington Report on Middle East Affairs:
Dr. Jan Bastiaans, a Dutch psychiatrist, is an authority on the Holocaust syndrome, and has treated many survivors. In 1973 he wrote, “In recent years the Ka-tzet (concentration camp) syndrome has suddenly received general recognition…This concept is concerned with…pathological processes that occurred after the war in former concentration camp prisoners…The Ka-tzet syndrome is the expression of a permanent, chronic obstruction of sound human relationships. The victims are not free from the concentration camp…Behind their adaptation facade continues to live the child or adult of [that time] in all fear, in all misery, in all powerlessness.”
Dr. Haim Dasberg, an associate professor of psychiatry at the Hebrew University and medical director of the Ezrat Nashim Jerusalem Mental Health Center, has written extensively…
Top 50 Psychiatrists Paid by Pharmaceutical Companies
An interesting look at the highest paid drug dealers in the psychiatric industry. What is the price of a medical doctor’s immortal soul? This list shows about $200,000 for the shrewdest players. Escobar would be proud. From PsychCentral:
Who were the top 50 psychiatrists in the U.S. paid by the top seven pharmaceutical companies?
This past week, ProPublica, an independent, non-profit newsroom that produces investigative journalism in the public interest, recently decided to answer that question by compiling a list of 384 physicians and health care providers who earned more than $100,000 total from one or more of the seven companies that have disclosed payments in 2009 and early 2010. Click here for the full list of 384 physicians.
We combed that list and found the top 50 psychiatry earners for the past two years (2009-2010). You can click on any name below to learn more about the physician.
According to an accompanying article to this…
“I Was a Soldier”: Psychiatric Patient’s Letter to Jesus
This shattering note, in which a mental patient alludes to herself as being confined in a Nazi concentration camp, was recovered from the estate of a doctor who practiced at Willard Psychiatric Hospital, in Willard, NY. In its half-coherent, broken language, it poignantly expresses the crushing, all-pervasive hopelessness and regret of a mental health inmate confronting her mortality:
“Dear Jesus,I am sorry I cannot help you. I tried to spread my grace because of the Britian Prophescy and the German Prophescy Due to cutterage of the Head, Heart, stomach and Reproductive Organs. I am no longer going to be living. I tried as a prophet and person. I don’t even want to be an animal. For what a person does to an animal. I wish to stay in my grave. And not rise again from the Grave.
I have seen too much to life. Now I am blind and deaf. And have lost my feeling too.
I am not Jewish but was put in a Nazi Concentration Camp. And haven’t been released. And I have sinned too. But the Master-Mind won’t let me forget it.
And I have losted my Christianity because of herorhim. – Master Mind…
‘Sanity is Slavery’ Fights Psychiatric Abuse Through Music
For this past year machineKUNT Records (home to Experiment Haywire, Trimetrick, Lady Parasyte, Syrenn etc.) are hard at work on the “Sanity is Slavery” compilation to fight against psychiatric abuse through music.
This is a 2 digipack CD compilation which also includes a digital bonus disc. 10% of proceeds are going to MindFreedom International which is an organization dedicated to mental health rights. The compilation features 48 diverse (mostly unreleased) tracks from artists across the globe including Attrition, Hanin Elias, Leæther Strip, amGod, Pzychobitch, and Trimetrick. It is mastered by Kolja Trelle of Soman.
machineKUNT is currently giving away packages to anybody who pre-orders the compilation as they count down the last days of their Kickstarter fund. With everything from paintings made specifically for the cause to customized songs by Experiment Haywire and Society Burning to customized photoshoots of machineKUNT models to professional remixes by De-Tached to rare Attrition posters there are 14 different packages available to everyone who helps machineKUNT reach their Kickstarter goal.
National Geographic Puts LSD Under The Microscope
That's enough acid to send an army insane!
(Via Sitting Now), National Geographic’s Explorer series examines the myths and effects of LSD:
LSD’s inventor Albert Hofmann called it “medicine for the soul.” The Beatles wrote songs about it. Secret military mind control experiments exploited its hallucinogenic powers.
Outlawed in 1966, LSD became a street drug and developed a reputation as the dangerous toy of the counterculture, capable of inspiring either moments of genius, or a descent into madness.
Now science is taking a fresh look at LSD, including the first human trials in over 35 years. Using enhanced brain imaging, non-hallucinogenic versions of the drug and information from an underground network of test subjects who suffer from an agonizing condition for which there is no cure, researchers are finding that this “trippy” drug could become the pharmaceutical of the future.
Can it enhance our brain power, expand our creativity and cure disease? To find out, Explorer puts LSD…
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…
New Types Of Mental Disorders Recognized
This is pretty big news in the mental health world. There are all sorts of reports on it, this one from the Los Angeles Times:
After years of research, professional infighting and maneuvering from various interest groups, the nation’s psychiatrists Tuesday unveiled proposed changes to the manual used to diagnose and treat mental disorders around the world.
The draft document, released by the American Psychiatric Assn., for the first time calls for binge-eating and gambling to be considered disorders, opening the way for insurance coverage of these problems. But it refrains from suggesting a formal diagnosis for obesity, Internet addiction or sex addiction, as some professionals had proposed.
The document also recommends a single category for autism spectrum disorders, unifying what has been a multifaceted and complicated diagnostic scale.
The fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will be published in 2013. The book, which serves mental health professionals, is…
