vaughanbell

Inside Britain’s highest security psychiatric hospital

The Independent has an article giving a rare look inside Broadmoor Hospital, one of only four high security psychiatric hospital in the UK, which houses some of the most severely dangerous offenders with mental illness.

Broadmoor is the oldest and most well-known high secure hospital in Britain, having housed a string of high profile murders and other violent offenders since Victorian times to the present day.

The article focuses on the Paddock Centre, a new section to treat people with a dangerous and severe personality disorder (DSPD).

DSPD is not a medical diagnosis, it is a category created by the UK government to classify a group of offenders with a diagnosable personality disorder who are thought to be at risk of violent offending in the future.

The category was devised because the government wanted to find a way in which psychiatrists could treat persistently violent offenders with an antisocial personality disorder diagnosis, because the mental health act only allowed people to be detained if their condition was treatable.

Since there was no treatment, psychiatrists couldn’t detain such people and refused to do so, so the government created the category and changed the law so they could.

Hence we now have the rapidly expanding DSPD Programme and Broadmoor houses the Paddock Centre, the biggest DSPD centre in the country.

The category has caused a great deal of ethical debate and even heated argument, as it allows currently untreatable people to be detained on the basis of risk, rather than for committing a specific crime.

However, the Independent article is more focused on the day-to-day running of the unit, talking to its lead psychiatrists and giving a picture of how it functions.

Journalistic insights into Broadmoor are incredibly infrequent, so this is a rare opportunity to get a glimpse of what goes on. The only other recent example I can think of was a 2004 edition of BBC All in the Mind that you can still listen to online.

Link to Independent ‘Exclusive: Inside Broadmoor’.

The risks of cognitive enchantment

The New Yorker has a fantastic in-depth article about ‘cognitive enhancement’ that talks to some of the neuroscientists studying the effects and some of the mind tweakers who regularly pop pills to give themselves an edge.

One of the issues it touches on is whether cognitive enhancers really ‘enhance’ people, and there’s good evidence that for the highest achievers, the pills might not be of much benefit.

Even worse, it’s also likely that the amphetamine-based drugs (Ritalin, Adderall) could actually impair your performance even though you might feel as if you’ve had a mental boost.

Amphetamine has the effect of increasing focus, confidence and giving a euphoric feeling. Although the effects are less marked in the slow release amphetamines used for ADHD and appropriated for illicit mind tweaking, the effect is certainly still there.

What we do know, however, is that people with certain genotypes actually show a decrease in working memory performance when they take amphetamine.

And it turns out that these are the people most likely to already be at the high end of mental performance. This is from a classic study on the effect:

Amphetamine enhanced the efficiency of prefrontal cortex function assayed with functional MRI during a working memory task in subjects with the high enzyme activity val/val genotype [of the COMT gene], who presumably have relatively less prefrontal synaptic dopamine, at all levels of task difficulty.

In contrast, in subjects with the low activity met/met genotype who tend to have superior baseline prefrontal function, the drug had no effect on cortical efficiency at low-to-moderate working memory load and caused deterioration at high working memory load

In other words, it’s possible that high achievers might be popping stimulants, feeling like it boosts their performance, when in fact, it’s doing exactly the opposite.

The article explores more than just this area though, and is incredibly wide-ranging, looking at the neuroscience, the underground use of the drugs, legal aspects, new and current compounds, and so on.

It’s also one of the most interesting articles I’ve read on the subject for a while, which, for an area which attracts of lot of attention, has got to be a good thing.

Link to ‘The underground world of ‚Äúneuroenhancing‚Äù drugs’.

Choice blindness

New Scientist has a fascinating article on some ‘I wish I’d thought of that’ research that looks at how we justify our choices, even when the thing we’ve chosen has been unknowingly swapped. It turns out, most of the time we don’t notice the change and precede to give reasons for why the thing we didn’t choose was the best choice.

It’s a fantastic use of stage magician’s sleight of hand to make a change outside conscious awareness.

We have been trying to answer this question using techniques from magic performances. Rather than playing tricks with alternatives presented to participants, we surreptitiously altered the outcomes of their choices, and recorded how they react. For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them to choose the most attractive. In some trials, immediately after they made their choice, we asked people to explain the reasons behind their choices.

Unknown to them, we sometimes used a double-card magic trick to covertly exchange one face for the other so they ended up with the face they did not choose. Common sense dictates that all of us would notice such a big change in the outcome of a choice. But the result showed that in 75 per cent of the trials our participants were blind to the mismatch, even offering “reasons” for their “choice”.

The idea riffs on the well-known psychological phenomenon of change blindness but this is also a lovely example of what Daniel Dennett called “narratization”, the ability of the mind to make a coherent story out what’s happening, with you as the main character, even when it’s clear that the outcome was determined externally. In a well-known article, Dennett cites this process as the key to our understanding of the ‘self’.

This was vividly demonstrated in split-brain patients who can be shown images to each independent hemisphere.

Each hand picks out a different picture, because the information is only accessible to the side that controls action for one side of the body, but when asked why they chose the two, they give a story of why the two pictures are related, even though they’re not conscious of initially seeing both pictures.

There’s a great summary in this New York Times piece from 2005, that comes highly recommended.

The New Scientist article covers this new technique for investigating this process with a nifty video of the slight-of-hand in action.

Link to NewSci on ‘Choice blindness: You don’t know what you want’.

Seized by the anti-storm

Newsweek has an excellent article on the neuroscience and personal impact of epilepsy. It’s well-researched, gripping in parts and bang up-to-date as it takes us through how neurologists tackle the seizure-prone brain.

I was particularly impressed by the following section as it avoids the common clich√© of the epileptic ‘brain storm’ because, as we’ve discussed before on Mind Hacks, a seizure is not a storm of random brain activity.

In fact, it’s completely the opposite. During a seizure neurons become super-synchronised, pulsing together, so they can’t do their normal job. In effect, it’s an anti-storm.

Conceptually, the job of the cardiologist is straightforward: he needs to restore a damaged heart to its normal rhythm. But epilepsy is the opposite. A normal brain is governed by chaos; neurons fire unpredictably, following laws no computer, let alone neurologist, could hope to understand, even if they can recognize it on an EEG. It is what we call consciousness, perhaps the most mathematically complex phenomenon in the universe.

The definition of a seizure is the absence of chaos, supplanted by a simple rhythmic pattern that carries almost no information. It may arise locally (a “partial” seizure), perhaps at the site of an old injury, a tumor or a structural malformation. A network of neurons begin firing in unison, enlisting their fellows in a synchronous wave that ripples across the brain.

Or it may begin everywhere at once (“generalized” epilepsy), with an imbalance of ions across the cell membrane, usually the result of an inherited mutation. At a chemical signal, whose origin is still a mystery, billions of neurons drop the mundane business of running the body and join in a primitive drumbeat, drowning out the murmur of consciousness. And so in contrast to the cardiologist, the epilepsy doctor must attempt to restore not order, but chaos.

The article is very much epilepsy from the medical perspective, but it is probably the single best mainstream piece I’ve read that attempts to tackle this area.

If you only read a handful of epilepsy articles in your life, make this one of them. Well done Newsweek.

Link to Newsweek article ‘In the Grip of the Unknown’.

Moses extreme reactions

Some statistical tests with wonderful names. From SPSS, one of the standard data analysis software packages used by psychologists.

Kendall’s W
Cochran’s Q
LSD post-hoc
Two-step cluster
Fisher’s exact test
Wald-Wolfowitz runs
Moses extreme reactions

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who has added to our list of wonderfully named statistical tests used by psychologists. Grabbed from the comments, they include:

Tukey’s Honest Significant Difference
Smoothed Bootstrap
Jackknife Variance
Roy’s Largest Root

Psychologists central to war on terror interrogations

The Washington Post has an article exploring recently released ‘war on terror’ interrogation memos, showing that “psychologists, physicians and other health officials” played a key part in interrogations widely condemned as torture.

It’s an interesting revelation because during the long debates, and some say heal-dragging, over whether the American Psychological Association should ban its members from participation, one of their main arguments was that psychologists should participate to prevent any unethical behaviour.

Instead, it looks like the presence of psychologists and other health officials was used to justify the interrogations as reasonable, despite the fact that the Red Cross’s condemnation of techniques as “tantamount to torture” has now been justified by the release of official documents.

Their names are among the few details censored in the long-concealed Bush administration memos released Thursday, but the documents show a steady stream of psychologists, physicians and other health officials who both kept detainees alive and actively participated in designing the interrogation program and monitoring its implementation. Their presence also enabled the government to argue that the interrogations did not include torture.

Most of the psychologists were contract employees of the CIA, according to intelligence officials familiar with the program….

The CIA dispatched personnel from its office of medical services to each secret prison and evaluated medical professionals involved in interrogations “to make sure they could stand up, psychologically handle it,” according to a former CIA official.

The alleged actions of medical professionals in the secret prisons are viewed as particularly troubling by an array of groups, including the American Medical Association and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The documents apparently describe instances where psychologists guided interrogations and provided information about mental weakness of detainees so they could be specifically exploited by interrogators.

Link to WashPost on ‘Psychologists Helped Guide Interrogations’.

Mad, Bad and Sad: A Historical Romance

Lisa Appignanesi’s book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present is a romantic tour through the last 200 years of psychiatry and the feminine, although probably not in the sense you’re thinking of.

The romantic movement was a literary and artistic phenomena that emerged in the 1800s as a backlash to the rationalism of the enlightenment. They railed against science as a dehumanising force, although this view was not its most lasting legacy.

Perhaps the biggest impact of the romantic movement was to seed the idea that the scientific and the humane were contradictory and incompatible, suggesting that it is not possible to be both scientific and compassionate, rational and poetic, or objective and understanding at the same time.

These are the two cultures, of which C. P. Snow famously spoke, and applied to the mind the romantic view suggests that an interpretative psychology touches the very core of our humanity, whereas the empirical barely scratches the surface.

It’s a false dichotomy because we are neither the facts of biology nor the feelings of the mind. We are at all times, both. Each is just a shadow of the whole that, paradoxically, has no single identity.

The colours of romanticism run through Appignanesi’s book, who hails from a cadre of the feminist literati who have become respected psychoanalytic thinkers. As she notes in her book, heavyweights like Julia Kristeva and Juliet Mitchell were literature PhDs before training as analysts, and although Appignanesi maintains a critical distance, the same vein runs through her work.

This is most apparent in her explorations of the lives of famous women who have shaped our ideas about the feminine and mental illness. It is Freudian literary analysis which forms the backbone of personal explanations in the book, as each person’s inner life is poetically explored without significant recourse to other ways of interpreting their motivations and desires.

It is also the case, however, that this period of history is the most gripping of the book, not least because it features the players for which Appignanesi has the most passion, but also because of her careful historical work, weaving the developments in the understanding of the mind to the social, to the personal, and back again.

But it is not the focus on the poetic psychologies that gives the book its romantic tone, so much the coldness for science which most clearly shows itself as the book rolls on to the present.

This is partly reflected in the numerous minor neglectful errors that pop up in the final section: atypical antipsychotics are described as have ‘far fewer side-effects’ than the older types when we’ve known this not to be the case for many years; the ‘diazepams’ are described as a drug class when diazepam is a single specific medication; cognitive therapy is described as being based on an ‘underlying assumption that people are rational beings and ever-capable of self-assessment, without any self-deception’ when it is based, and always has been, on exactly the opposite premise.

With this section also comes unconcealed hostility for new evidence-based methods of mental health: psychometric tests are dismissed as ‘fun as parlour games’, cognitive therapy is bizarrely accused of being akin to ‘brainwashing’ and standardised questionnaires as pathologising teenagers.

The fact that these could be the effective tools of humane and sensitive clinicians seems almost impossible in this light. The rise of science in psychological treatment is portrayed as antagonistic to empathy and the true work of understanding the soul, when, in fact, they are complementary to it.

The likes of Elaine Showalter’s Hystories does not share this romantic slant, and manages to remain more broad in its overview, although is more limited in its scope.

But despite the slant, I found Mad, Bad and Sad both powerful and enlightening, gripping in places, and compelling in many of its arguments.

It is perhaps, the best romantic history of psychiatry available, although, it is not as purely historical as it claims.

Link to book details.

2009-04-17 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The neuroscience of envy and schadenfreude is explored by Pure Pedantry.

The Economist has an article on connectomics and the project to create a complete white matter map of the brain.

Panic! The Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology has an article on drinking on your 21st birthday. Extremely extreme apparently.

O’Reilly Radar has an interesting piece on navigating robots that run on the power of cute.

To the bunkers! US Military wants to offload ‘deep learning’ to computers according to Wired.

What can stage magic tell us about the brain? Asks Science News.

CNN thinks naltrexone is from “a new generation of anti-addiction drugs”. If by new generation they mean from 1974, then yes, they’re right.

Are smart drugs the answer to bad moods and a bad economy? ask Discover Magazine. I’m sure you can guess the answer to that one.

Neurotopia has an excellent piece on the neuroscience of amphetamine.

Research on a ‘video game’ that reduces aggression is covered by Cognitive Daily. Not really a video game, but fascinating research nonetheless.

Medical News reports that increases in psychotic symptoms are more likely to make the person a victim of violence than a perpetrator.

Mind Hacks gets a write-up from Gehirn & Geist magazine. Sadly, I can’t read a word of German but I have it on good authority that it is very flattering (thanks Rich!).

Stanford Magazine has an interview with Henry Greely, co-author of the recent Nature article on why cognitive enhancing drugs should be legally available.

A simple psychological intervention that boosts school performance of ethnic minority students is discussed by The BPS Research Digest.

Eric Schwitzgebel mulls whether scientific ideas about moral development are inherently politically biased.

Epilepsy drug valproate during pregnancy can lower babies IQ, reports The New York Times.

Another from The New York Times: “There are no rules of etiquette for dealing with a person who has a neurological disorder.” Short personal piece on Parkinson’s disease.

The Frontal Cortex has a good piece on the neuroscience of admiration and why Twitter won’t make you immoral.

Psychologist Jesse Bering takes a tour through quirky studies on the effects of alcohol in Scientific American.

A classification of royal stalkers

A fascinating new study on the types of people who stalk or harass the British Royal Family has just been published online by the journal Psychological Medicine.

A group of forensic psychologists examined, by hand, twenty thousand files held by SO14, the Metropolitan Police Service’s Royalty Protection unit, to study people who had made inappropriate approaches or communications with the British royals.

This is the classification of harassers and stalkers by motivation:

Delusions of Royal Identity (i.e. pretenders to the throne or to royal kinship). This was the largest group, accounting for 67 cases (26.9%). Seventeen (6.8%) expressed delusional beliefs that they were the true sovereign. This group often wrote lengthy letters accompanied by family trees and multiple annotated documents in support of their claims. Claims of kinship to the sovereign were made by a further 50 (20.1% of the whole sample). There was often evidence in their writings of complex delusional systems.

Amity Seekers were the 41 (16.5%) subjects who offered their friendship and advice, which they expected to be taken, apparently oblivious to the unrealistic nature of their endeavour.

The Intimacy Seekers consisted of 30 (12%) individuals. Fourteen (5.6%) had clearly erotomanic preoccupations, 10 of whom were male. All expressed the conviction that they were loved by or already married to their royal target. Those who were infatuated but not clearly erotomanic (16; 6.4%) usually wished to express their love or offer their hand in marriage to a royal. They understood that the royal personage did not yet love them or even know of their existence, but they still expressed confidence that they would succeed in their suit.

Sanctuary and Help Seekers made up 22 (8.8%) of the sample and were asking for royal assistance with personal adversity or royal protection from supposed persecutors.

The Royally Persecuted were a small group of only eight (3.2%) subjects, who claimed to be victims of organized persecution orchestrated by a member of the Royal Family.

Counsellors who, though similar in some ways to the Amity Seekers, were a group of 28 (11.2%) individuals who saw it as their role to offer advice and opinions to the Royal Family on how they should live their lives and respond to political situations.

Querulants formed a group of 16 (6.4%) people who were pursuing a highly personalized quest for justice and vindication. They were seeking royal assistance with their claims, or complaining of royal indifference to their cause.

The Chaotic comprised a group of 37 cases (14.9%), where no clear motivation could be assigned because their writings and/or their statements to police were so difficult to follow or understand. It was not that there was insufficient information to assign another category. Rather, their thought processes and behaviour were so disturbed as to make a singularity of purpose unlikely.

The most famous stalker of the British Royal Family was probably Klaus Wagner, a German ex-doctor who believed that the Queen was the beast prophesised in Revelations and that Princess Diana was being persecuted by the Royal Family.

He was eventually sent to jail for stalking Diana, and apparently remained on his quest to defeat the ‘Elizardbeast’ until his death in 2007.

Wagner came to prominence in a controversial UK TV documentary called I’m Your Number One Fan that featured three stalkers of high profile celebrities. It used to be available on the net but has since disappeared, although occasionally turns up on torrent servers.

Interestingly, one of the first cases of what we now call erotomania or de Cl√©rambault’s syndrome, the delusional belief that another person – usually of higher status – is in love with you, featured the British Royal Family.

de Cl√©rambault described the case of a 53 year old French woman who believed King George V was in love with her and would interpret twitches in the curtains of Buckingham Palace as secret love signals from the monarch.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Head first into brain scanner technology

Nature has a great open-access article on the technology of MRI neuroimaging, responsible for the majority of ‘brain scans’ that are used in medical examinations, scientific studies and media reports.

Understanding the technology of MRI scanners is not just of interest to medtech geeks, it is essential to be able to interpret and design brain imaging studies.

We tend to think that all brain scanners do the same thing, but comparing raw data across just two scanners can be a big problem.

Imagine if there were two different ways of measuring the layout of a room, one involving placing paper squares on the floor and another by tying string between all the objects. The conclusions might be similar but trying to merge all the raw results into one big data set would be a pain.

A similar problem affects researchers using brain scanners, because manufacturers may use different magnetic pulse sequences, different coils, different processing software and have to tweak the settings for each individual installation.

As a consequence, various studies are now developing ways (mainly data processing algorithms) to ensure that even relatively simple procedures, like structural scans, can be reliably compared across different scanners.

But even using just one scanner, it’s important to know what the technology is doing because this determines what aspects of the body’s physiology it measures.

The Nature article focuses on the latest developments in MRI scanner technology but also functions as a great brief guide to how scanner go from magnetic coils to measuring brain activity.

Link to Nature on ‘How to get ahead in imaging’ (via @mocost).

The myth of sex addiction

Finally, a sceptical take on sex addiction. The Times just published an excellent article examining the problem with the concept of being ‘addicted to sex’, something that has almost entirely been an invention of private treatment clinics and the media.

There is virtually no published research on ‘sex addiction’ and it isn’t an officially recognised diagnosis, but it has become fashionable to describe compulsive or non-mainstream sexual tendencies in these terms.

Partly, as the article notes, because addiction has become the 21st century’s label of choice for people who want to medicalise less acceptable sexual behaviours, especially when someone gets ‘caught in the act’.

Dr Philip Hopley, an addiction specialist at the Priory Hospital at Roehampton, southwest London, and a consultant psychiatrist for LPP Consulting, says that public scepticism is ‚Äúunderstandable‚Äù. He says: ‚ÄúThe major concern is where sex-related problem behaviour is labelled an ‚Äòaddiction’ when in fact poor decision-making and/or impulse control lie at the root of the problem. What constitutes normal, average or healthy sex? There is no recommended limit for adults as there is for, say, alcohol – and if there was, would it be different for males and females?‚Äù

Phillip Hodson, a Fellow of the British Association of Counselling and Psychotherapy, points out that the whole idea of having an addiction to a natural drive is problematic. ‚ÄúThe excuse, of course, is that nature wants us to have sex to make babies and isn’t bothered about rationing the drive. It’s the same with eating. You cannot really be ‚Äòaddicted’ to normal drives. What’s the cure – to stop procreating or eating?‚Äù Yet perhaps one can’t really blame people for using the term ‚Äúaddiction‚Äù, because compulsivity or mania don’t have quite the same ring. ‚ÄúSex maniac‚Äù sounds like something out of a Carry On film.

The media love sex addiction and go to great lengths to quote media-hungry rent-a-quotes who can make it sound valid.

Unfortunately, the media tends to like people who have already media connections, and so the dissenting voices barely get a byline.

This article is interesting because it is written by Jed Mercurio, a TV drama writer currently researching a book on JFK, so he’s prime ‘get in the papers’ material.

Interestingly though, he used to be a doctor, and knows a fadish medical concept when he sees one. Hence we get a rare sceptical look at a current media obsession.

Link to ‘JFK, Russell Brand and the myth of sex addiction’.

Hemispheres of influence

Discover Magazine has an interesting Carl Zimmer article on one of the most intriguing questions in neuroscience – why do we have two cortical hemispheres? And why are they not quite the same?

It turns out that the ‘brain of two halves’ is incredibly common in the animal kingdom and that many creatures also show the behavioural lateralisation that we most readily see in humans as someone being left or right handed.

But it’s no entirely sure why we, or indeed, or animal compatriots, have evolved this way, although various theories are kicking around:

David Stark of Harvard Medical School recently found additional clues about lateralization in his studies of 112 different regions in the brains of volunteers. He and his collaborators discovered that the front portions of the brain are generally less tightly synchronized across the hemispheres than are the ones in the back. It may be no coincidence that the highly synchronized back regions handle basic functions like seeing.

To observe the world, it helps to have unified vision. At the front of the hemispheres, in contrast, we weave together streams of thought to produce complex, long-term plans for the future. It makes sense that these areas of the brain would be more free to drift apart from their mirror-image partners.

Zimmer goes on to puncture the myth of ‘left brained’ and ‘right brained’ people, or indeed, thinking styles, erroneously labelled with these pseudoscientific terms.

While certain cognitive styles have been correlated to greater activation in the left or right hemisphere, to describe a whole class of problems of thinking methods like this is nonsensical because the two hemispheres of the brain work together.

It’s like claiming someone is a good cook solely because they come from Italy. The generalisation is so broad it just doesn’t apply to individual people or situations.

Anyway, the Discover article is an excellent whistle-stop tour through the curious world of brain lateralisation.

Link to Discover on the brain of two hemispheres (via @mocost).

Microchip-in-a-pill drug monitoring

Furious Seasons covers a new microchip-in-a-pill that monitors the stomach and detects what drugs the patient is taking, reporting back to the doctor in real time.

The blurb from the company is even more astounding:

Proteus ingestible event markers (IEMs) are tiny, digestible sensors made from food ingredients, which are activated by stomach fluids after swallowing. Once activated, the IEM sends an ultra low-power, private, digital signal through the body to a microelectronic receiver that is either a small bandage style skin patch or a tiny device insert under the skin. The receiver date- and time-stamps, decodes, and records information such as the type of drug, the dose, and the place of manufacture, as well as measures and reports physiologic measures such as heart rate, activity, and respiratory rate.

Like Phil Dawdy, I feel a bit freaked out.

This is interesting for psychiatry for two reasons: one, monitoring for recreational drug or alcohol use and two, monitoring compliance with antipsychotics.

Both of these are interesting because these are both controversial legal areas, in that a court can impose an order or conditions that depend on a clean drug screen, and, thanks to the UK’s new ‘now with added coercion’ 2007 Mental Health Act psychiatrists can impose community treatment orders.

This means that a patient can be returned to hospital, against their will, if they’re found not to be complying with their prescribed medication regime. And as involuntary treatment is most commonly imposed on people with psychosis, this usually means taking antipsychotics.

You can see how this technology would be of great use on the monitoring end, but as it supposedly reports on any sort of drug, presumably personal drug use then becomes a data privacy issue.

In other words, you’d have to trust the information technology system to correctly discard the results that you don’t want your doctor to see.

More concerning perhaps is ‘rights slippage’ which is a pervasive problem is psychiatry.

This is the same problem that occurs when a psychiatrist (and thanks to the UK’s new Mental Health Act, now a psychologist) says to a patient who is in hospital of their own free will: “If you leave, I’ll section you”. Essentially, you’re free to go, but if you try, I’ll legally detain you.

You can see how this new technology could be used for similar strategies – if you let us monitor your drug use and medication compliance, we won’t use impose any involuntary treatment, but if you don’t, we will.

For people who voluntarily and knowingly decide to use the monitoring device, you can see how it would be a huge medical benefit, but in psychiatry, where involuntary treatment is possible, the ethical difficulties are amplified.

Also, I don’t think I need to explain the ironies of potentially implanting microchip monitoring devices into people with psychosis who often have delusions about being implanted with microchip monitoring devices.

Link to Furious Seasons microchip drug monitors.
Link to manufacturers website.

Sixty miniature heads used in phrenology

This is a wonderful image of a 1831 set of sixty miniature heads used to demonstrate the principles of phrenology from the Science Museum in London.

The science museum has a page dedicated to the set, which comes in a wonderful wooden display case, that also includes some other images and information about the exhibit.

Phrenology originated with Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a German physician, assisted by his colleague, Johann Kaspar Spurzheim (1809-72). Phrenologists believed that the shape and size of various areas of the brain (and therefore the overlying skull) determined personality.

Gall and Spurzheim eventually disagreed and went on to promote rival systems of phrenology. These heads are numbered according to Spurzheim‚Äôs classification. The heads may have been used to teach phrenology but were probably made as a general reference collection.

A wide range of different heads are present. For instance, head number 54 is that of a scientific man; head number 8 is recorded as the head of an ‚Äòidiot‚Äô. The heads were made by William Bally, who studied under Spurzheim from 1828 onwards.

Link to Science Museum exhibit page (via the wonderful <a href"Fortean Times).

The mind of the condemned

How do you cope on death row? In 1962 two psychiatrists were puzzled by the fact that inmates condemned to death in New York’s notorious Sing Sing prison were not overwhelmed by depression or anxiety. They wrote an article for the American Journal of Psychiatry attempting to explain how 13 prisoners managed the fear of their imminent demise.

It’s an uncomfortable and ill-fitting article in many ways. The two psychiatrists are firmly psychoanalytic in their approach, talking of ‘ego defense’ and ‘projective tests’, which seems odd to the modern forensic eye.

Moreover, the liberal use of the contemptuous language of sixties psychiatry pervades the article. The inmates are described variously as “inadequate”, “obsessed with his own power”, “mentally dull”, “self-pitying”, as if these were facts of the world, rather than the disdainful opinions of two comfortably employed prison psychiatrists.

Disturbingly, several of the condemned prisoners are clearly psychotic, and their madness is invariably explained away as a ‘defense mechanism’, little more than a tool for managing their anxieties.

But despite the filtering and selective reporting, it is possible to catch a glimpse of how the inmates managed their lives as the condemned.

This man stands out in the series as being the one who most successfully employed intellectualization as a means of defending against anxiety and depression. He elaborated a philosophy of life and values in which his own criminal career became not only justifiable, but even respectable. He rationalized his crimes by emphasizing the hypocrisy and perfidy of society on the one hand and by comparing himself with policemen and soldiers and others who live honorably ‚Äúby the gun‚Äù on the other. This system was so effective for him that even when execution appeared imminent he maintained his hero‚Äôs martyr role and disdained to request executive clemency.

Of course, we will all die, and in recent years studies on how we live with this knowledge, so called ‘mortality salience’ or ‘terror management theory’ (TMT) research, has become a fertile field of investigation.

Research suggests that when reminded of our own death, we attempt to make ourselves feel better by aligning ourselves more closely with our social groups, cultural values and intimate partners.

But to my knowledge, only one other study has investigated how death row inmates deal with their forthcoming death.

In 2008, two Dutch psychologists, Andreas Schuck and Janelle Ward, analysed the final statements of those executed by the state of Texas to examine how they portrayed themselves and made sense of their situation.

In line with ‘terror management theory’ the majority of the last statements attempted to align the subject with our society’s notion of a ‘good’ person, often in a common pattern or sequence:

subject [reference to the self]; addresses relevant relationships (from closest to furthest); expresses internal feelings (love, hate); defines situation (responsibility, acceptance versus innocence, political statement, denial); deals with situation (self-comfort, religion, wish/hope, forgiveness, self-blame vs. accusation, denial); closure.

It seems that from the prisoner to the public, death makes us conform, and even those who may have been the most callous of killers want to be a good person when they die.

Link to 1962 death row article.
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to study on Texas executions last words.

Easter psychology research

I’ve just found an entry for a delightful looking study on PubMed entitled ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’.

Unfortunately, the paper isn’t available electronically so we’ll never know whether the Easter egg drawings grew, shrunk and stayed the same over the Easter holiday.

However, we do know from a 1993 study that the famous rabbit / duck ambiguous picture is more likely to be recognised as a rabbit during Easter.

Link to entry for ‘Size of Easter egg drawings before and after Easter’
Link to entry for ‘The Easter bunny in October: is it disguised as a duck?’