Author: vaughanbell

I qualify as a clinical psychologist in September and would like to work in Latin America for 6 months to a year afterwards.

If you know anyone in Spanish speaking Latin America who might be interested employing a newly qualified clinical psychologist who speaks passable Spanish (with room for improvement) and has a PhD in cognitive neuropsychiatry, please get in touch.

I can send my CV in Spanish or English and am happy to consider all types of psychology job.

For those not familiar with the world of psychology, Latin American has a long tradition of valuing psychology as an important scientific and clinical pursuit.

The first university course teaching psychology in Latin America started in 1897 and was taught by Prof Ezequiel Chavez in the Preparatory School of Mexico, five years later to become the National University of Mexico.

The first experimental psychology lab opened in 1891 in San Juan in Argentina, with the first university lab opening in 1898 in the Colegio Nacional of Buenos Aires.

In 1907 Latin America’s first professional psychology association was launched – the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos that gathered psychologists from across the region.

Owing to periods of social and political turmoil, Latin American psychology has traditionally been focused on applied research and practice – aiming to use psychology to improve the health and well-being of the population.

Latin America maintains a leading role in world psychology. As a testament to this, the Internation Neuropsychological Society will be holding their July conference jointly with the Neuropsychology Society of Argentina in Buenos Aires.

So, you can see why I’m keen to work in the region.

pdf of article on the history of Latin American psychology.

New Scientist reports on a neck-band technology that allows the wearer’s silent thoughts to trigger messages over a phone line.

It sounds impressive, but the video that accompanies the story makes it look like the technology reads your inner thoughts and transmits them as sounds, when it fact it does something far more basic.

Whenever we think to ourselves, rather curiously, the vocal chords get activated very slightly – faintly mirroring what would happen if we were to say the words out loud.

This is known as subvocal speech and can be picked up by EMG sensors on the neck that pick up the tiny electrical signals generated by the weakly activated muscles.

While the technology doesn’t exist to turn these signals back into speech, it is possible to train the system to distinguish between a number of different general patterns which can trigger specific computer commands.

Lancet Neurology reported in 2004 that the same team had a basic system running that recognised six words (stop, go, left, right, alpha, omega) and 10 digits, to allow ‘silent’ control of a machine or a software application.

The team seem to have developed the technology and it can apparently now recognise many more commands, however, it doesn’t ‘translate’ thoughts into their corresponding words.

In the video, the wearer is triggering sound recordings of specific sentences, pre-arranged to provide answers to the rehearsed telephone ‘conversation’. Still impressive, but not a genuine conversation in the way we would normally think of it.

As an aside, for more than 20 years now, we’ve know that subvocal speech accompanies hallucinated voices in people who have been diagnosed with psychosis.

This means people who hear constant hallucinated voices will probably not be able to use the system effectively.

However, we now know that healthy individuals have much higher levels of hallucinations than previously thought, although most people are not bothered or distressed by them.

For example, in a 2004 study Louise Johns and colleagues found that 0.7% of the British population had experienced an auditory hallucination in the last year.

It’s interesting to speculate that a significant minority of the population might experience problems with this technology as their hallucinations accidentally trigger commands or send messages on their behalf!

Link to NewSci story ‘Nerve-tapping neckband allows ‘telepathic’ chat’.
Link to video of product presentation.

A recent 60 country World Health Organisation study found that depression is the most serious chronic illness, worse than angina, arthritis, asthma, and diabetes. Unfortunately, the majority of people who experience depression live in low income countries where help is least likely to be available.

The New York Times has a fascinating article on an ongoing project in Goa, India, that screens every attendee at a local health centre and then uses psychological therapy to help with low mood or anxiety.

It’s not a simple case of just using Western techniques in a new environment.

As the NYT article mentions, mental illness carries a significant stigma in many cultures. For example, a diagnosis may not only be stigmatising for the affected person, but it may also mean the person’s children are less likely to be thought of as suitable marriage partners, potentially affecting the whole family’s future.

Futhermore, depression is known to present quite differently in some non-Western cultures. Studies have found that people are more likely to report ‘somatic symptoms’ such as diffuse pains or tiredness, rather than low mood or emotional problems.

This is partly due to stigma, but sometimes because certain languages don’t have the same, or even such a varied vocabulary for emotions and mental states.

I’m currently working with a Pakistani psychiatrist who often surprises me by pointing out that even what I assume are relatively straightforward words, such as depression or anxiety, might not have a direct translation in some Asian languages.

All of these issues mean that the treatment centre in Goa tackles the issue in a slightly different way:

Most are also apparently wary of visiting a mental hospital. In India, the stigma of mental illness remains strong. To minimize the problem, health workers avoid using the words “mental illness,” “depression” or “anxiety” with patients, relying on more commonly used words like “strain” and “tension.”

The patients “are happy to talk,” Dr. Sudipto Chatterjee, a psychiatrist at Sangath, said, “as long as you stay away from the idea of mental illness.”

I find the issue of having different vocabularies for our mental states fascinating.

The philosopher Wittgenstein noted how difficult it is to agree on common words for internal states because errors are so hard to correct.

If a mother and child see a rabbit and the child says “elephant!”, the mother can point to the rabbit and correct the misnomer. But what can a mother, or anyone do, if someone ‘misnames’ an emotion?

Or to put it another way, as we don’t have external things to refer to for internal states, how do we ever agree on a vocabulary that is at all meaningful?

I’m always curious when I come across differences concerning emotion words in other languages. For example, Spanish has the same word (verg√ºenza) for shame and embarrassment.

From my native language perspective it strikes me as amazing that another language doesn’t individually label these two states which seem to have such different personal and social implications.

I’m sure there are many reverse examples and many other emotional vocabulary mismatches across the world’s languages.

Link to NYT article ‘Psychotherapy for All: An Experiment’.

Discover Magazine has an exposé of a recent surge of news stories on insomnia and sleep disorders that stretch from the dull to the frankly unbelievable.

It turns out a fair number seem to be based on press releases from PR firms, some trying to promote hotels, but others coming from the National Sleep Foundation.

The author of the piece looked at the 2005 financial figures from this organisation and discovered that over 80% of its funding came from drug companies and almost three quarters was spent on ‘public education’ – i.e. advertising the existence of sleep disorders.

Of course, sleep disorders can be distressing, disabling and potentially dangerous but research suggests that particularly for insomnia, the judicious use of drugs should be a last resort (most have the potential for addiction), as behavioural and psychological treatments are safer and more effective for most people.

Unfortunately, these approaches are often not available, meaning ‘public awareness’ increases diagnosis but leads to drug prescription, partly because people go to doctors and list what symptoms they think they have from the advertising rather than describing their experiences.

The National Sleep Foundation do a lot of excellent work but the article suggests that there seems to be an element of disease mongering and astroturfing to their promotions.

Link to article ‘Deflating the Bogus Insomnia ‚ÄúEpidemic‚Äù’

Film-maker Martin Hampton has created a revealing documentary on four people with different degrees of compulsive hoarding, where individuals incessantly collect household objects, even to the point of not being able to throw out rubbish.

Compulsive hoarding is often linked to obsessive-compulsive disorder, where affected people experience intrusive thoughts or urges to complete certain actions (most commonly ‘washing’ or ‘checking’) even though they know how seriously these intrusions are affecting their lives.

Hampton’s documentary is a remarkably well made account of people with similar urges, in this case to collect and retain, and just lets the individuals and the images speak for themselves (it is also freely available online as wide screen HD, so looks wonderful).

Apparently the documentary was created as part of a Master’s course in visual anthropology, a field I’d not come across before, but which seems to be concerned with documenting the diversity of human experience through film.

Possessed does this admirably and seems to have garnered numerous awards since it’s release.

UPDATE: Grabbed from the comments. An update and a request from the director!

I am the director of this film and am now researching the next stage of the project. I am trying to compile a collection of peoples experiences of OCD and other anxiety based disorders. I have found from experience that although symptoms might be similar, the actual particularities of the obsessions and compulsions are often very varied. For example, one might wash ones hands 30 times a day, but have a very unique self discovered reason for doing so. I would be very grateful to hear of your or any friend / acquaintances experiences / difficulties. Many thanks and I hope you find the film interesting. Please email me at martin@martinhampton.com

Link to Martin Hampton’s documentary Possessed (via MeFi).

The New York Times has a fun article on how psychotherapists decorate their office and what this might portray about the inner life of the shrink.

Psychoanalysts (Freudian psychotherapists) in particular are very careful about what sort of impression they project about themselves, preferring, at least initially, to be as insubstantial as possible so the patient can transfer feelings and impressions onto them, allowing relationship patterns and emotional reactions to be uncovered and worked on.

However, many psychotherapists work from home, using rooms in their house as offices. The NYT piece notes that a recent academic paper in the journal Psychoanalytic Psychology caused a storm by questioning the ethics of this practice, as impressions or even people from the therapists family life might interfere in the crucial relationship forming process.

Of course, the office is also a way of making the patient feel comfortable and at ease and so the tension between how the therapist attempts to express this, and how they express themselves, can be quite revealing.

Freud famously had a painting over his psychoanalytic couch of Jean-Martin Charcot (Freud’s mentor) presiding over the swooning and almost bare breasted young woman ‘Blanche’. No wishful thinking going on there of course.

In the UK, where most psychological treatment happens in the NHS, the rooms are often comfortable but plain outpatient appointment rooms that are shared and booked as necessary.

Occasionally, clinicians will have their own office in which to see patients. In these case, I’ve noticed that psychotherapists and counsellors have a much better sense of interior decoration (all rugs and soft lighting) than clinical psychologists, who tend to go for books and photocopied papers look.

Link to NYT article on therapists’ offices.

Thanks to Debbie from the My Mind on Books blog who managed to track down the original academic article from psychologist Benny Shanon who argues that Moses’ experiences on Mount Sinai may have been due to a hallucinogenic experience.

Shannon suggests that a mixture prepared from the acacia tree and the bush peganum harmala could have been responsible.

The article is freely available so you can read it in detail for yourself. As well as Shanon’s main idea, it also contains a wealth of information about the use of psychedelic plants in the ancient world.

Link to article ‘Biblical Entheogens: a Speculative Hypothesis’.