Category: News

Neurophilosophy has found a fascinating black and white TV documentary on Mexican hallucinogenic mushrooms from 1961, where the presenter samples some of the psilocybin-containing fungus and reports the effects during the trip.

In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.

The programme was apparently inspired by a 1959 book called The Sacred Mushroom, by parapsychologist Andrija Puharich, who is known for taking the spoon-bending fraudster Uri Geller to the United States for investigation.

As Neurophilosophy notes, this was before the dawn of the psychedelic age, and so it was unlikely that this would have been connected to drug culture as we might do today, but was likely to be viewed as a documentary on the strange ways of ‘them overseas’.

It has some interesting parallels to a 1955 BBC documentary on mescaline, where the Labour MP Christopher Mayhew took a fairly stiff dose and narrated the effects (“Tubby is disappearing in time…”).

The magic mushroom documentary also has some wonderfully stilted dialogue in places, and mentions that they could be used to treat mental disorder – an area which is being researched once more.

We’ll have some more on this research shortly, so look out for a forthcoming interview.

Link to Neurophilosopy with documentary video.

Time reports that Oregon State Hospital, the psychiatric hospital used to film the Oscar-winning movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, is being demolished.

It’s not the hospital that Kesey based his play on, but it’s interesting that even the demolition of the hospital which was the background for the movie makes big news.

The book, film and play have fascinated me for years, not least because they are still where most people get their mental images from when they think of a psychiatric hospital. Needless to say, the images are usually pretty stark.

The other image people seem to have, which I call the ’12 Monkeys’ scenario, is where lots of wacked out patients wearing pyjamas acts as if they’re in a world of their own, while a TV set shows old cartoons in the corner.

Needless to say, modern hospital care bears little resemblance to these stereotypes and tends to go from what I call ‘airport departure wards’ at the worst (full of bored people, sitting around, waiting to leave) to comfortable and relaxing environments with constructive activities available and a good medical team at the best.

However, there is generally a move away from monolithic psychiatric hospitals to having psychiatric wards as part of general hospitals.

As we noted earlier this year, the sometimes beautiful buildings of these older hospitals are rapidly disappearing, often because people are uncomfortable with either the troubled past of the hospital, or with the idea of madness in general.

On a similar note, ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind has just started a 3-part series, exploring the oral history of one of Australia’s biggest and oldest hospitals, built in 1865.

Link to Time article ‘Cuckoo’s Nest Hospital to be Torn Down’ (via BB).
Link to AITM on the history of Goodna Mental Hospital.

Bonkersfest! South East London’s fantastic festival of mirth and madness, kicks off this Saturday with its biggest ever event. It’s also finally getting the recognition it deserves with a fantastic article in The Times and another in the New Statesman covering the upcoming celebrations.

In fact, it was also recently name dropped in a Guardian article and a story in The New York Times, although I can proudly say that we covered the mayhem back when it first started in 2006, when it was launched by the Mayor of Southwark firing a banana laden cannon.

From The Times:

So Dolly Sen, 37, an artist and writer, will spend the day trying to screw a light bulb into the sky because “the world is dark enough as it is”. There will also be a moving padded cell, a de-normalisation programme, and performance art by Bobby Baker featuring seven adults dressed as frozen peas.

Does it sound a bit crazy? Well, that’s the point. “There’s a history of many artists and writers being diagnosed with mental illness,” says Baker. “People who were unusual and different used to be more celebrated and accommodated, but now there’s a tremendous amount of fear. I feel people like me have a sensitivity and creativity that is very valuable, as well as an enormous sense of humour about the whole thing.”

The irreverent tone and celebration of all things outside the norm make it quite different from your average mental health event – even if the rock bands, circus performers and techno DJs are also a giveaway.

Bonkersfest! has just got better each time and always seems to be blessed by wonderful weather and great performers (although, I have to say, I did almost evaporate waiting for John Hegley to come on stage in a rather warm marquee last year).

It’s organised by Creative Routes, a grass roots arts association for people with mental health difficulties, who are one of the gems of South London.

It happens on Camberwell Green (not the site of the original Bedlam Hospital, as the NYT seemed to think) but still only two minutes walk from the Maudsley Hospital – the spiritual home of British psychiatry.

The Times article also features Liz Spikol, whose name I’m sure you’ll recognise if you’re a regular visitor to Mind Hacks.

Also, one of the organisers of Bonkersfest! changed her name by deed poll to Sarah Tonin, and you gotta respect that.

Link to Bonkersfest! website.
Link to article in The Times.
Link to article in the New Statesman.

After a number of investigations into the under-disclosure of drug industry earnings by top psychiatry researchers, The New York Times reports that US Senator Charles Grassley is aiming at the mothership of American psychiatry, the American Psychiatric Association.

Grassley is a Republican senator who has been pushing for transparency in the drug industry for some time and has particularly focused on drug payments to researchers and clinicians in recent months.

He’s been behind some recent high profile investigations which have indicated that some of America’s most influential psychiatrists have been receiving millions of dollars in undisclosed payments.

Grassley has recently focussed his attention on the APA itself, which, according to the NYT piece got about $20 million from the drug industry in 2006. These 2006 figures are the most recent, however, as the full details of the association’s funding are not made public.

The issue is not solely one about funding large organisations or the high flying opinion-leaders though.

Soft money is awash throughout the profession with drug company bonuses being routinely paid to individual psychiatrists who agree to talk on behalf of the company, while those that don’t take hard cash are likely to be taken out for expensive meals, given all expenses trips to plush conferences and given other barely-concealed incentives.

However, it is clear that this is not solely a problem with psychiatrists, as patient groups are often heavily funded by the drug industry, to the point where they’ve been described as being “perilously close to becoming extensions of pharmaceutical companies’ marketing departments”.

Link to NYT article on scrutiny of APA funding (via Furious Seasons).

In early July, London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts hosted three nights of punk rock chaos with a difference, some of the audience were artificially intelligent robots designed to pogo when they recognised punk music being played.

The project was led by artist Fiddian Warman who created the headlining band, Neurotic and the PVC’s for the event, while collaborating on the robot design with computational biologist Peter McOwan and neurologist Barry Gibb.

Actually, this is not the first time we’ve had to resist making a Bee Gees joke about Dr Gibb, as we covered some of the media (over)excitement about a bit in his book The Rough Guide to the Brain last year.

The website for the project is fantastic and has lots of details about the project including a bit about the design of the neural network built and trained to recognise punk rock.

BBC News has some great video of the gigs, and the band even has its own MySpace page with some of the tracks ready for listening (which are actually pretty good).

Link to Neurotic and the pogoing robots website.
Link to BBC News story and video.
Link to Neurotic band MySpace page.

DrugMonkey has alerted to me an interactive map of the USA which displays rates of prescription drug abuse across all 50 states.

You can select the year up the top, the drug of abuse on the left-hand side, and point the mouse at a particular state to get the details.

It’s part of an investigation by the paper into why so many of these drugs are being used illicitly, and why Nevada, the state in which Las Vegas resides, seems to have one of the highest rates of abuse.

All the drugs are opioids and the maps on the right show the rates of consumption for oxycodone, a drug nicknamed ‘hillbilly heroin’.

You can see how the 2000 map clearly shows the highest rates of consumption in the ‘hillbilly’ areas across the Appalachian Mountains, although by 2006 the West Coast has caught up and most of the rest of the country seem to have got into the painkiller habit.

Link to interactive drug map.
Link to Las Vegas Sun series on prescription drug abuse.

The New York Times has a good article on some recent replications of Milgram’s infamous conformity experiment where he ordered participants to give what they thought were potentially lethal shocks to an actor pretending to scream in pain.

They’re not quite replications, because Milgram’s experiment as it was actually run is considered unethical, but they’re pretty close and the results are frighteningly similar.

There’s also an interesting twist in one of the studies, that suggests people who go on to give the more dangerous shocks think about responsibility differently, assuming they are not responsible because they’re being ‘ordered’.

In the other paper, due out in the journal American Psychologist, a professor at Santa Clara University replicates part of the Milgram studies — stopping at 150 volts, the critical juncture at which the subject cries out to stop — to see whether people today would still obey. Ethics committees bar researchers from pushing subjects through to an imaginary 450 volts, as Milgram did.

The answer was yes. Once again, more than half the participants agreed to proceed with the experiment past the 150-volt mark. Jerry M. Burger, the author, interviewed the participants afterward and found that those who stopped generally believed themselves to be responsible for the shocks, whereas those who kept going tended to hold the experimenter accountable. That is, the Milgram work also demonstrated individual differences in perceptions of accountability — of who’s on the hook for what.

I recommend the picture on Jerry Burger’s webpage. I swear he must of practised that movie villain grin especially for the Milgram replications.

Link to NYT article ‘Would I Pull That Switch?’

I’ve just bought an excellent book called Invention of Hysteria which is about how the use of photography by the 19th century French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot helped shape the our concepts of ‘hysteria‘ – a disorder where psychological disturbances manifest themselves as what seem like neurological symptoms.

Such patients would today be diagnosed with ‘conversion disorder’, usually after presenting to a neurology clinic with paralysis, blindness or epilepsy, only for it to be found that there is no damage to any of the areas you might expect or no seizure activity in the brain during a ‘fit’.

Importantly, the patients aren’t ‘faking’, they genuinely experience themselves as paralysed, blind, or otherwise impaired.

What recent research suggests is that there may be a disturbance in higher level brain function which may be suppressing normal actions or sensation.

To use a business analogy, none of the workers are on strike but the management is causing problems so the work can’t be carried out.

Charcot revived interest in this disorder through his weekly, somewhat theatrical, case demonstrations, and, as the book discusses, through some striking and equally theatrical photos and illustrations.

This wonderfully illustrated book examines the history of Charcot’s work at the Salp√™tri√®re, the famous Paris hospital, and how the newly developed technology of photography played a key role in popularising the disorder and shaping our ideas about hysteria.

In the last few decades of the nineteenth century, the Salpêtrière was what it had always been: a kind of feminine inferno, a citta dolorosa confining four thousand incurable or mad women. It was a nightmare in the midst of Paris’s Belle Epoque.

This is where Charcot rediscovered hysteria. I attempt to retrace how he did so, amidst all the various clinical and experimental procedures, through hypnosis and the spectacular presentations of patients having hysterical attacks in the amphitheater where he held his famous Tuesday Lectures. With Charcot we discover the capacity of the hysterical body, which is, in fact, prodigious. It is prodigious; it surpasses the imagination, surpasses “all hopes,” as they say.

Whose imagination? Whose hopes? There’s the rub. What the hysterics of the Salpêtrière could exhibit with their bodies betokens an extraordinary complicity between patients and doctors, a relationship of desires, gazes, and knowledge. This relationship is interrogated here.

What still remains with us is the series of images of the Iconographie photographique de la Salpêtrière. It contains everything: poses, attacks, cries, “attitudes passionnelles,” “crucifixions,” “ecstasy,” and all the postures of delirium. If everything seems to be in these images, it is because photography was in the ideal position to crystallize the link between the fantasy of hysteria and the fantasy of knowledge.

A reciprocity of charm was instituted between physicians, with their insatiable desire for images of Hysteria, and hysterics, who willingly participated and actually raised the stakes through their increasingly theatricalized bodies. In this way, hysteria in the clinic became the spectacle, the invention of hysteria. Indeed, hysteria was covertly identified with something like an art, close to theater or painting.

The book’s website has the first chapter freely available, but sadly none of the photos.

Most of Charcot’s books, containing many of the wonderful illustrations and photos, are listed on Google Books but for some reason I can’t work out, you can’t view the pages.

As they were published in the late 1800s, they should be well out of copyright, so its a bit frustrating we can’t read them.

To give you an idea, however, the illustration on the left is the ‘Grande Hysterie Full Arch’, one of Charcot’s classifications of hysterical epilepsy.

This is one of Charcot’s many illustrations of amazing bodily contortions that was used as inspiration by the famed and somewhat eccentric French sculptor Louise Bourgeois, as you can see in a (possibly NSFW?) article on her work from the Tate magazine.

Link to details of book with sample chapter.

PsyBlog has collected the responses to its request for the most annoying psychobabble and you can now vote for your favourite worst offender.

The list reminds me of how many terms, particularly from psychoanalysis, have become part of the language, probably without people realising it.

Being ‘in denial’, being ‘anal’, being ‘defensive’, feeling ‘split’ over a decision, ‘projecting’ your fears, ‘repressing’ a thought, having a big ‘ego’, increasing ‘libido’ and feeling ‘castrated’ were all terms created or popularised by Freud and his followers.

Sadly for jargon haters, today’s psychobabble is tomorrow’s everyday language.

As the late psychologist Julian Jaynes pointed out, the Ancient Greek epic the Iliad makes no reference to a concept of the self or any mental states anywhere in the text.

Much of our everyday language of the mind is a relatively new cultural invention, suggesting that language is just another form of technology.

Hopefully though, some of the more annoying linguistic technologies will fall into disuse fairly soon, although I have to say, I have a fondness for some of the more arcane terms.

‘Enthusiastical’, meaning a form of religiously induced madness, is charmingly Dickensian, and ‘alienist’ – the old word for psychiatrist – has a completely different spin now we tend to think of little green men when we hear the word.

Link to PsyBlog psychobabble vote.

PsychCentral, one of the original internet psychology sites, has recently been featured by Time magazine as one of the 50 best websites of 2008.

One of my favourite PsychCentral features is Flashback which says what was featured on the site 1, 5 and 10 years ago.

That’s a fantastic pedigree for an internet site and being featured in Time is surely a testament to the hard work psychologist John Grohol has put into keeping it updated with quality news and information.

Time allows you to rate each site, so if you’re a fan like me, drop by and show your appreciation.

Link to PsychCentral on Time’s 50 Best Websites 2008.

I respect Gary Marcus’ research tremendously, but I found his latest popular science book glib and unconvincing. For details of why read my review of “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind” from BBC Focus magazine #191 (July 2008):

Link

PsyBlog has asked readers to nominate the worst examples of psychobabble, to identify verbal crimes against neuroscience, and to nominate where the language of cognitive science is being most used and abused. The best of the worst will be collected and published online, so now’s your chance to name and shame.

There are a few great examples there already and you can either add your contribution to the comments or email Jeremy with your nomination.

My contribution would be the term “hardwired”, which is surely one of the most abused terms in both science journalism and everyday language.

Presumably, it originally meant an innate behaviour or process that is almost entirely genetically determined, or at least, is present from birth without the need for prior experience.

However, it gets used to refer to almost biological finding or reported sex difference.

According to even usually quite reliable sources, we’re “hardwired” for money, risky behaviour, religion, feeling others’ pain, art, fraud, oh, and liking pink, if you’re a girl of course.

Anyway, if you’ve got any misleading jargon that’s been bothering you, do send them on.

Link to PsyBlog’s request for psychobabble.

The papers are full of reports about Corporal Sarah Bryant, the first female soldier from the UK forces to die in Aghanistan at the tragically young age of 26. Bryant was serving in Afghanistan as a member of the 15 (UK) Psychological Operations Group, a tri-service PsyOps support service to the British Armed Forces.

The group released a 2007/2008 annual report, and the pdf is available online via the excellent PsyWar website.

One of the key roles of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group seems to be similar to the US military’s human terrain system, that is, understanding the structure and dynamics of the local society and influencing the people within it.

The bedrock underpinning effective PSYOPS is Target Audience Analysis (TAA) linked to timely intelligence support. TAA involves the systematic study of people in order to enhance our understanding of a military psychological environment. TAA is crucial to the PSYOPS Estimate process and aims to: identify Target Audience attitudes, vulnerabilities and susceptibilities, developing lines of persuasion, key communicators and appropriate symbology and media to exploit a line of persuasion.

In the introduction to the report, the Group Commanding Officer cites ‘Manoeuvrism‘ as one of their key philosophies – an approach that aims to unpredictably strike the enemy at their weak points, rather than use sheer force in pitched battle.

Needless to say, accurate, up-to-date intelligence is essential for this approach and PsyOps has become a key part in this process.

Which is probably why these services seem to have been keen to recruit human scientists during the last few years to try and expand their services.

pdf of 15 (UK) PSYOPS Group 2007/2008 annual report.
Link to PsyWar website.

Popular psychology magazine Psychology Today have launched their own blog network with some of the biggest names in psychology, psychiatry and philosophy of mind regularly writing for it.

As a magazine, PsyToday has had a long reputation for being a bit populist and light on what most psychologists what actually think of as psychology.

That seems to have been changing in recent years and there’s been a consistent increase in the quality of the articles.

For their blog network, they seem to have recruited some of the most interesting and well-known researchers from around the world to write for them, including Dan Ariely, Jesse Bering, Peter Kramer, Nassir Ghaemi, Roy Baumeister, Nancy Segal, Scott Lilienfeld to name but a few of the many.

The latest posts are at the top, but scroll down for the (huge!) complete list of contributors.

Link to Psychology Today blog network (via Neurophilosophy).

‘Who says Americans don’t do irony?’ I joked the other week, noting the National Center for Responsible Gaming conference on gambling addiction was being held in Las Vegas. According to an article in Salon, the joke has fallen a little flat, as the NCRG is funded by the gambling industry and may have a vested interest in directing research towards certain theories of addiction.

“The NCRG is committed to the idea that most ‘normal’ people aren’t at risk of developing a gambling problem,” says Schull. “They’re trying to show that all addicts share a common pathway, which involved the reward system of the brain. This really helps the industry because the idea is, if these people were not to gamble, they would find something else to be addicted to. They come into the world with the brain disposition of an addict, so you can’t blame casinos.”

Schull says the industry has successfully defined the terms of gambling addiction; it’s telling that we speak about problem gamblers, she says, but not problem machines, problem environments, or problem business practices. Currently, Schull is working in the young field of “neuroeconomics.” She says that brain scans and genetics studies are producing fascinating data, but can’t fully explain the complicated problem of gambling addiction. “Doing this research, I’ve become a behaviorist in a weird way,” she says. “I’ve come around to thinking that if you put any rat in a cage, under the right circumstances, you can addict it. Some of us have greater liability than others, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not on a continuum.”

The piece is interesting because it shows the significant ambiguity and disagreement at the heart of gambling addiction, the ‘crown jewels’ of the behavioural addiction field.

This is important because there is an increasing drive to reframe existing disorders and medicalise problems of excess as addictions.

Rather disappointingly, it seems heavily driven by the media who are happy to publicise utter drivel as news when it is nothing more than empty PR.

Here’s a BBC story supposedly on ‘exercise addiction’ which actually is just the private Huntercombe Hospital saying they can treat it. Here’s another story on ‘mobile phone addiction’ based on the fact that a private clinic in Spain announced it was treating two boys. And here’s another on ‘internet dating addiction’ based on nothing except a press release to promote an Australian University.

Not a single one of these is based on research. It’s just people announcing a new form of addiction. That’s all you have to do and you can get international press.

For extra bonus points you can mention dopamine, and it sounds like science.

We know dopamine is involved in drug addiction, but we also know that anything we enjoy, ‘addictive’ or not, also engages the dopamine system. So saying that the activity is addictive because it engages the dopamine system is an empty statement.

What we’ve learnt from the drug industry is that research can be used as a way of advertising theories. Essentially, it’s PR for an industry favourable world view.

And what years of persuasion research has told us is that people who don’t have the time or ability to evaluate the details are often persuaded by a plausible sounding (in this case ‘sciencey’) explanations, however empty.

The Salon piece notes that in its rhetoric the industry tends to cherry pick studies. Rhetoric is currently important to the gambling industry because it is being sued by people who have lost thousands through gambling.

Because the legal system determines responsibility, it’s in the industry’s interest to promote theories which say that problem lies largely in the neurobiology of the individual, rather than in their business practices.

Link to Salon article ‘Gambling with science’

Homosexuality is a mental illness, at least according to the head of Northern Ireland’s health committee. Iris Robinson MP, who, with impeccable timing, put forth her views on a radio show while responding to the news that a local man had been badly beaten in a homophobic attack.

After apparently branding homosexuality as “disgusting, loathsome, nauseating, wicked and vile” she went on to recommend that “I have a very lovely psychiatrist who works with me in my offices and his Christian background is that he tries to help homosexuals – trying to turn away from what they are engaged in”.

The “lovely psychiatrist” turns out to be Paul Miller who doesn’t actually seem to defend the idea that homosexuality is a mental illness but does seem to have a sideline in assisting people to change their sexual orientation.

In a recent newspaper article Miller claims this is based on research:

Dr Miller cited a study by American psychiatrists Stanton Jones and Mark Yarhouse which he said concluded that people can change sexual orientation and that the process of change was not damaging.

“That was a very robust study because in the past, and rightly so, people who worked in this field were criticised for not having robust research.”

So what is this research Miller talks about? A randomised controlled trial from the peer-review medical literature? A meta-analysis of past treatment programmes? Perhaps just an exploratory outcome study?

No, it’s a book released by a Christian publisher and written by a psychologist and psychiatrist employed by a private evangelical college in the States.

In a subsequent BBC interview on her comments, Mrs Robinson well, just keeps on digging.

For those of you interested in the new fangled practice of ‘evidence based medicine’ that seems not to have caught up with Iris Robinson, one of the most influential studies on the mental health of homosexuals was published in 1957.

Conducted by psychologist Evelyn Hooker, it used several measures to profile a group of homosexual and heterosexual males and asked a number of psychiatrists to determine who was gay and straight just by looking at the data from the mental health assessments.

They couldn’t, and two thirds of both of gay and straight samples were rated as well-adjusted. This was the first of many studies that showed that there is nothing innately psychopathological about homosexuality.

Link to Petra Boyton with some good coverage.
Link to full text of Evelyn Hooker’s 1957 study.