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A world of swearing

May 15, 2013 – 6:19 pm

The Boston Globe has a short but fascinating interview on the history of swearing where author Melissa Mohr describes how the meaning of the act of swearing has changed over time. IDEAS: Are there other old curses that 21st-century people would be surprised to hear about? MOHR: Because [bad words] were mostly religious in the […]

Posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (2)

Disaster response psychology needs to change

May 12, 2013 – 10:54 am

I’ve got an article in today’s Observer about how disaster response mental health services are often based on the erroneous assumption that everyone needs ‘treatment’ and often rely on single-session counselling sessions which may do more harm than good. Unfortunately, the article has been given a rather misleading headline (‘Minds traumatised by disaster heal themselves […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (3)

2013-05-03 Spike activity

May 4, 2013 – 12:41 pm

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: I can’t recognise my own face! In my case, it’s because the Botox has worn off but for person described in the New Scientist article it’s because of prosopagnosia. The Guardian reports that the UK Government’s ‘Nudge Unit’ is set to become a commercial […]

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Mind and brain podcast radio rush

May 4, 2013 – 11:35 am

Several new mind and brain radio series have just started in the last few weeks and all can be listened to online. The two ‘All in the Minds’ have just started a new series. BBC Radio 4′s All in the Mind has just started a new series with the first programme including end-of-the-world hopefuls and […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (5)

National Institute of Mental Health abandoning the DSM

May 3, 2013 – 8:27 am

In a potentially seismic move, the National Institute of Mental Health – the world’s biggest mental health research funder, has announced only two weeks before the launch of the DSM-5 diagnostic manual that it will be “re-orienting its research away from DSM categories”. In the announcement, NIMH Director Thomas Insel says the DSM lacks validity […]

Posted in News | Comments (54)

Prescribe it again, Sam

April 28, 2013 – 9:46 am

We tend to think of Prozac as the first ‘fashionable’ psychiatric drug but it turns out popular memory is short because a tranquilizer called Miltown hit the big time thirty years before. This is from a wonderful book called The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers by Andrea Tone and […]

Posted in Remembering | Comments (2)

2013-04-27 Spike activity

April 27, 2013 – 8:39 am

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news: Psychiatry needs its Higgs boson moment says and article in New Scientist which describes some interesting but disconnected findings suggesting it ‘aint going to get it soon. Wall Street Journal has an overenthusiastic article on how advances in genetics and neuroscience are ‘revolutionizing’ our […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (2)

Deeper into genetic challenges to psychiatric diagnosis

April 24, 2013 – 9:45 am

For my recent Observer article I discussed how genetic findings are providing some of the best evidence that psychiatric diagnoses do not represent discrete disorders. As part of that I spoke to Michael Owen, a psychiatrist and researcher based at Cardiff University, who has been leading lots of the rethink on the nature of psychiatric […]

Posted in Theory, Togetherness | Comments (7)

Like a part of me is missing

April 18, 2013 – 8:06 pm

Matter magazine has an amazing article about the world of underground surgery for healthy people who feel that their limb is not part of their body and needs to be removed. The condition is diagnosed as body integrity identity disorder or BIID but it has a whole range of interests and behaviours associated with it […]

Posted in Togetherness | Comments (2)

A stiff moment in scientific history

April 13, 2013 – 8:10 pm

In 1983 psychiatrist Giles Brindley demonstrated the first drug treatment for erectile dysfunction in a rather unique way. He took the drug and demonstrated his stiff wicket to the audience mid-way through his talk. Scientific journal BJU International has a pant-wettingly hilarious account of the events of that day which made both scientific and presentation […]

Posted in Remembering | Comments (4)

Amid the borderlands

April 7, 2013 – 10:00 am

I’ve got an article in The Observer on how some of the best evidence against the idea that psychiatric diagnoses like ‘schizophrenia’ describe discrete ‘diseases’ comes not from the critics of psychiatry, but from medical genetics. I found this a fascinating outcome because it puts both sides of the polarised ‘psychiatry divide’ in quite an […]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Togetherness | Comments (8)

A cuckoo’s nest museum

April 1, 2013 – 3:40 pm

The New York Times reports that the psychiatric hospital used as the backdrop for the 1975 film One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest has been turned into a museum of mental health. In real life the institution was Oregon State Hospital and the article is accompanied by a slide show of images from the hospital […]

Posted in News, Remembering | Comments (2)

Gotham psychologist

March 30, 2013 – 1:50 pm

Andrea Letamendi is a clinical psychologist who specialises in the treatment and research of traumatic stress disorders but also has a passionate interest in how psychological issues are depicted in comics. She puts her thoughts online in her blog Under the Mask which also discuss social issues in fandom and geek culture. Recently, she was […]

Posted in books | Comments (6)

Hallucinating sheet music

March 30, 2013 – 11:06 am

Oliver Sacks has just published an article on ‘Hallucinations of musical notation’ in the neurology journal Brain that recounts eight cases of illusory sheet music escaping into the world. The article makes the interesting point that the hallucinated musical notation is almost always nonsensical – either unreadable or not describing any listenable music – as […]

Posted in Seeing | Comments (5)

The postmortem portraits of Phineas Gage

March 23, 2013 – 1:53 pm

A new artform has emerged – the post-mortem neuroportrait. Its finest subject, Phineas Gage. Gage was a worker extending the tracks of the great railways until he suffered the most spectacular injury. As he was setting a gunpowder charge in a rock with a large tamping iron, the powder was lit by an accidental spark. […]

Posted in Inside the Brain, Remembering | Comments (5)

A new horizon of sex and gender

March 20, 2013 – 11:06 pm

If you only listen to one radio programme this week, make it the latest edition of BBC Radio 4′s Analysis on the under-explored science of gender. The usual line goes that ‘sex is biological while gender is social’ – meaning that while genetics determines our sex, how masculine or feminine we are is determined by […]

Posted in Linkage | Comments (5)
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