Month: May 2007

New Scientist has an open-access article on the increasing tendency for atypical American children to be diagnosed with ‘juvenile bipolar disorder’.

Children are being increasingly diagnosed with bipolar disorder in the US, despite the fact that there is limited evidence for its validity and disagreement about its symptoms.

As we reported in a previous Mind Hacks article, mental disorder presents differently in children (for reasons that are not well understood) and diagnosis is fraught with difficulties.

Not least because children often are not able to report their thoughts and emotions adequately, and many different forms of distress get expressed as ‘misbehaviour’, making it hard to distinguish between different causes.

One of the other effects of the increasing number of children diagnosed with bipolar, is that an increasing number are being medicated with drugs that have barely been tested in anyone other than adults.

This is despite the fact that parenting programmes, such as the Webster-Stratton ‘Incredible Years‘ programme, are known to be effective ways of improving behaviour.

Advocates for the disorder argue that it has been previously unrecognised and only now is it being properly diagnosed, and that it causes serious distress and impairment in affected children and their families.

The NewSci article looks at some of the trends in diagnosis and treatment, and speaks to child mental health researchers on both sides of the fence.

Link to NewSci article ‘Bipolar children – is the US overdiagnosing?’.

Philip Dawdy is an investigative journalist who runs the Furious Seasons blog and he’s been on Eli Lilly’s case for some time.

He’s been following the ongoing legal proceedings over whether the drug company obscured information about the side effects of antipsychotic drug Zyprexa, and has been posting some seemingly incriminating documents online that have probably made the company quite uncomfortable.

His work has just got him a mental health award that was voted for by mental health professionals and service users.

It was created by a corporate sponsor who fund the award but get no say in who receives the honour. The name of the sponsor? Eli Lilly.

I love the smell of irony in the morning.

Link to Furious Seasons on forthcoming award.

Reporter Quinn Norton, who had a magnet implanted into her finger to allow her to ‘feel’ magnetic fields has finally had it removed – returning her to the normal world of the ‘five senses’.

We reported on the operation last year, and Norton wrote up her experiences in an extended Wired article that also looked at the role of body modification in extending the human sense range.

Norton notes that even though she glad she’s had the magnet removed (it wasn’t without problems – it broke up in her body and got infected) she still misses the extra sense:

In the background of all this are the questions the magnet led me to, the ones that make the magnet look pedestrian. Human augmentation and even advanced treatment really begin to erode at what we think humans are, in society, in the justice system, in medicine itself. What are we going to become inevitably is also the question of who we are now, and beginning to ask the former brings home how little we know about the later.

I’m excited and scared to be trying to find out. I miss my magnet, but I knew it wasn’t well understood when I started. I’m glad I know what a spinning drive and a ringing telephone wire feel like. I’m sad I can’t feel them anymore.

Link to Quinn Norton on losing her sixth sense.
Link to Wired article on magnet implant.

Security guru Bruce Schneier has written an insightful article for Wired about rational precautions for rare risks, and why the typical response after a rare catastrophe is usually psychologically satisfying but practically irrelevant.

He writes the article in the wake of the Virginia Tech shootings, which have caused a number of bizarre responses by people worried about whether it might happen again (banning fake guns in theatrical productions, for example).

Trying to reduce the risk from the rare people who are both violent and mentally disturbed is often the responsibility of forensic psychologists and psychiatrists.

Interestingly, they don’t spend their whole time thinking ‘how can we stop this person murdering someone’, as although this is the sort of thing that hits the headlines, it’s actually incredibly rare.

People who have already murdered someone are generally locked away and don’t pose much of a risk, but for someone who has never murdered anyone or never attempted to, predicting whether they will can be very difficult.

In fact, it’s difficult to gather data to determine whether your predictions are accurate or not.

Imagine you have a risk assessment that predicts that a person is highly likely to murder someone.

To best evaluate your prediction, you’d want to wait and see if it turns out to be true, but in these circumstances, you can’t. You have to intervene.

Once you’ve intervened, you don’t know whether your prediction was true or not.

Forensic mental health professions spend a lot of time thinking, as Schneier recommends, ‘have we done everything that is feasible to reduce the risk to the public based on what we know about the most common risks’.

In other words, they focus on the principle of maximising safety, rather spending all their time and energy on highly unlikely events that may be impossible to predict.

As they tend to be so frequently in touch with the legal system, their second line of thinking tends to be ‘if the extremely unlikely does occur, will we be seen to have done everything that was required by the courts’, because at the end of the day, the law is the final say on what is acceptable when predicting the unpredictable.

Link to ‘Virginia Tech Lesson: Rare Risks Breed Irrational Responses’.
Link to information on forensic psychology.
Link to online book on forensic psychiatry from the Royal College of Psychiatrists.

OmniBrain has alerted me to the fact that the winners of the 2007 Visual Illusion contest have been announced, with all of the top ten entries viewable online.

Most of the entries are animated and range from the striking to the subtle.

My favourite is the one pictured, simple but effective, which you really need to see in action to get the full effect.

There’s many more at the link below, most with psychological explanations of how they work.

Link to top 10 winners.

As an update to an earlier story, psychologist Daniel Gilbert’s book Stumbling on Happiness has been announced as the winner of The Royal Society Prize for Science Books.

The book is a hugely entertaining look at the science of happiness, covering everything from brain science to decision making experiments using sandwiches.

It’s perhaps most interesting for presenting research on how bad we are at predicting how happy our choices will make us, and how future events will impact our sense of well-being.

One useful recent additon to the book’s website is a brief study guide for lecturers wanting to use the book, as Gilbert does, for teaching students.

Link to announcement from The Royal Society.
Link to coverage from BBC News.
Link to book website.
Link to Daniel Gilbert’s lab homepage.