Category: News

A study just published in the Journal of Trauma found that across 50 US States, home gun ownership was linked to an increase in the risk of gun-related suicide.

The man-in-the-street wisdom on suicide goes something like this: ‘If someone wants to kill themselves, they’ll always find a way to do it’.

In actual fact, we now know that availability of an easy method of suicide makes it more likely.

Many drugs are no longer provided in pill bottles, but instead, in blister packs and this is linked to a reduced severity of overdose.

You would think that if someone wanted to die by overdose, pushing pills out a blister pack would be no less of an obstacle than emptying them out of a bottle, but simple measures such as this can be an effective form of self-harm prevention.

Why is this? Well, it’s not really clear, but possibly because every action someone takes on the path to suicide has to be contemplated and thought about.

Perhaps each contemplation makes people reflect and less likely to act impulsively. Certainly, in some people (but not all it seems) impulsivity is linked to a history of suicide attempts.

Pushing 100 pills out of a blister pack is 99 more actions than emptying a bottle of pills, so maybe this gives more time for people to halt any impulsive actions.

Guns are an instant way of killing yourself and this is one explanation of why they might be linked to a higher rate of suicide.

One objection to the gun-suicide association might be that this is just a correlation and suicidal people might be more likely to have guns in their house because they have acquired a method to kill themselves, or otherwise lead lifestyles that would make both owning a gun and killing themselves more likely.

The finding in the Journal of Trauma study is indeed a correlation, but an experimental approach that would find a true causal link – e.g. putting guns in randomly selected households and seeing if more people kill themselves in these homes – would be highly unethical.

However, the study controlled for a number of factors that are typically given as reasons other than just gun ownership for the link, such as poverty, urbanisation, unemployment, mental illness, and drug and alcohol dependence and abuse.

Still the link remained, and remained only for death by firearm, not suicide by any other method.

Link to summary of study (via Furious Seasons).
Link to abstract of scientific study.

This month’s Prospect Magazine has an article by neuropsychologist Paul Broks that takes a recent book on consciousness as a starting point for an exploration of how the brain generates this curious form of self-awareness.

The book in question is Nicholas Humphrey’s Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness (ISBN 0674021797) that takes an evolutionary approach to understanding the ‘hard problem‘.

Broks wrote a fantastic meandering book on the effects of brain injury on consciousness called Into the Silent Land (ISBN 1843540347) and writes in a wonderfully conversational style.

He highlights Humphrey’s novel approach to understanding consciousnes and how this may have arisen through natural selection:

In his 1992 book A History of the Mind, Humphrey argued that consciousness is grounded in bodily sensation rather than thought, and proposed a speculative evolutionary account of the emergence of sentience. Seeing Red is a refinement and extension of those ideas. Put simply, we don’t so much have sensations as do them. Sensation is “on the production side of the mind rather than the reception side.”

The article is both a review and a summary of Humphrey’s ideas and is well worth checking out.

Link to Prospect article ‘The Mystery of Consciousness’.

BBC Radio 4’s All in the Mind has just kicked off a new series with features on the psychological effects of Alexander Litvenenko’s Polonium-210 poisoning and whether there is still value in detailed individual case studies in psychiatry.

Litvenenko’s poisoning made headline news and was a significant public health risk owing to the powerful radioactive poison.

Considering this, and the 2005 terrorist bombings in London, the programme looks at the psychological impact of these scares on the public, and what this tells us about how we react to large-scale risk.

Detailed case studies have been critically important in the history of psychiatry, with Freud making particular use of individual cases on which to base psychoanalytic theory.

They have recently fallen out of fashion, however, with some researchers and clinicians thinking they are no better than anecdotal evidence.

Others have argued that they provide a different sort of evidence to group studies that rely on quantification, and they are complementary to the wider quest to understand and treat mental disorder.

Link to BBC All in the Mind webpage with realaudio archive.

April 9th’s New Yorker has a cracking article on the current controversy on whether it’s possible (or even valid) to diagnose bipolar disorder in children.

The article comes at a time when the diagnosis of bipolar disorder is being increasingly used for young children with behavioural difficulties.

It has been of particular interest after the tragic case of four-year-old Rebecca Riley, who died, according to the prosecutors, due to an overdose of psychiatric drugs prescribed after being diagnosed with the disorder.

Her parents, who have been accused of causing her death, have denied the charges.

The case is continuing but it has raised a number of questions about whether it is possible to diagnose the condition in children, or whether it even appears so early in life.

The New Yorker piece traces the popularity of the diagnosis to a book called The Bipolar Child, where psychiatrist Demitri Papolos and his wife included a screening questionnaire so parents can ‘diagnose’ their children.

Notably, there are currently no widely accepted diagnostic criteria, and a number of clinicians quoted in the article criticise the book for including vague or otherwise normal experiences (such as ‘irritability’ or ‘boredom’) as part of the diagnosis.

Unfortunately, the article isn’t available in the New Yorker website, but it was written by Dr Jerome Groopman who usually posts all his articles for the magazine online, so hopefully it should appear there shortly.

Otherwise, catch it in the shops or down your local library.

Link to April 9th New Yorker table of contents (via TWS).
Link to Jerome Groopman’s New Yorker articles.

Professor Philip Zimbardo, famous for the Stanford Prison Experiment, is speaking in London on Tuesday 17th April where he’ll be giving a talk entitled ‘The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil’.

The title of the talk is also the name of his new book that explores how people can be influenced to commit extreme acts that would otherwise seem out of character but seem sanctioned, or even encouraged, by the system they find themselves in.

He makes particular reference to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, which he has highlighted as an example of the psychology of institutional abuse in action.

The talk is being organised by the London branch of the British Psychological Society, and, unfortunately, only BPS members are allowed to apply for tickets, although they can buy them for non-members:

Tickets cost £5 for BPS members and £10 for non-members (in advance), and may be obtained electronically by using the booking form or by telephoning 01332 227774. Tickets for non-members may only be purchased by members, who may buy up to 5 tickets in total.

If you’re not able to catch him in London, there’s a webpage that lists his upcoming interviews and talks.

UPDATE: Today’s New York Times has a video interview with Zimbardo on this topic. Thanks Dennis!

Link to details and booking for talk.
Link to website for The Lucifer Effect.

The Bad Science column is always a great read, but this week’s piece is particularly worth checking out, as Ben Goldacre tackles a move by the pharmaceutical industry to be allowed to selectively educate the public about medical issues and human biology.

They currently target this at health professionals, and it involves promoting theories that best favour their product.

Pushing the virtually unsupported ‘serotonin theory of depression’ to bolster sales of serotonin acting SSRI drugs is a notorious example.

The column describes how drug marketing operates, highlights plenty of great material to show it in action, and also links to a fantastic (and laugh out loud) video advert for a common social anxiety drug.

Link to Bad Science article ‘The Pill Problem’.

Jonathan Edwards was a physicist, turned Olympic triple-jumper, turned BBC science presenter, and his latest radio series has been distinctly psychological – investigating beauty, sports psychology and artificial intelligence.

The programmes are archived online and are generally a successful look at to the topics, taking an eclectic approach by interviewing philosophers, artists, engineers and sports people as well as psychologists and neuroscientists.

I particularly enjoyed the edition on artificial intelligence where Edwards goes to talk to some of the AI people at Edinburgh Uni that hosts a large and world leading research community.

They have a fantastic centre in a converted church which is well worth visiting if you get the chance.

One of the highlights is the Neuroinformatics Summer School, where students can attend for a week and be trained in creating simulations of neurobiological systems.

They even have bursaries available, so if you’re a postgraduate student in cognitive science, check the webpage and think about applying. The deadline for this year is June 6th.

Link to BBC Radio 4 webpage for ‘Jonathan Edwards looks into…’
Link to Edinburgh Neuroinformatics Summer School info.

April’s issue of Scientific American has a couple of concise articles that are freely available online: one on the neuroscience of moral decisions, and the second on the science of lasting happiness.

In the first article, author Michael Shermer argues that moral decision-making is implemented in the brain in a similar way to most other forms of decision-making, and is likely a long-standing evolutionary trait.

The second article focusses on the work of psychologist Prof Sonja Lyubomirsky who has spent the best part of a decade studying lasting happiness.

The previous decade has seen an increased interest in ‘positive psychology‘ although many studies have focused on short-term happiness and satisfaction.

Lyubomirsky seems to be following a slightly different tack by looking at what influences long-term contentment.

Lyubomirsky, Sheldon and another psychologist, David A. Schkade of the University of California, San Diego, put the existing findings together into a simple pie chart showing what determines happiness. Half the pie is the genetic set point. The smallest slice is circumstances, which explain only about 10 percent of people’s differences in happiness. So what is the remaining 40 percent? “Because nobody had put it together before, that’s unexplained,” Lyubomirsky says. But she believes that when you take away genes and circumstances, what is left besides error must be “intentional activity,” mental and behavioral strategies to counteract adaptation’s downward pull.

Lyubomirsky has been studying these activities in hopes of finding out whether and how people can stay above their set point. In theory, that is possible in much the same way regular diet and exercise can keep athletes’ weight below their genetic set points.

Link to article ‘Free to Choose’.
Link to article ‘The Science of Lasting Happiness’.

Almost two years ago we covered the launch of the Blue Brain Project an ambitious research programme to create the largest computer simulation of the brain yet created.

Now, Spiegel has an in-depth article looking at how the project is progressing.

The simulation runs on an IBM Blue Gene supercomputer and aims to simulate enough individual neurons to create virtual brain networks.

Brain researchers can use it to reproduce functions from the real organ and test their theories. As they build in new processes, the model grows ever more detailed — a sort of wiki project of the mind. It also offers an important advantage over a natural brain, since it lets researchers monitor each and every (simulated) mental activity in the machine.

But — has there been mental activity?

The newborn “Blue Brain” surprised the designers with its willfulness from the very first day. It had hardly been fed electrical impulses before strange patterns began to appear on the screen with the lightning-like flashes produced by cells that scientists recognize from actual thought processes. Groups of neurons started becoming attuned to one another until they were firing in rhythm. “It happened entirely on its own,” says Markram. “Spontaneously.”

The project has is limitations of course. Single neurons are frighteningly complex, and neuroscientists are still some way from understanding their neurochemistry in sufficient detail to create an adequate working model.

Much computer simulation of the brain (a field known as neuroinformatics) only attempts to simulate approximates of the total complexity, yet has provided some fascinating insights into how mental processes might emerge from the interaction of networks of individual neuron-like units.

Link to Spiegel article ‘Growing a Brain in Switzerland’.
Link to Blue Brain website.

Dr Petra Boyton has spotted another psychologist who seems to have sold out his good name by pushing a Cliff Arnall-like nonsense formula: this time for the ‘perfect breast’.

It all seems to be part of a promotion for a UK Men’s magazine which, in a press release, “reveals the formula for the perfect breast” developed by “University Psychologist Dr. David Holmes”.

I’ve emailed a possible culprit to confirm who it might be and am currently waiting for a response.

Needless to say, the formula itself is complete rubbish. Quite predictably, and rather insultingly, it gets described as ‘science’ in the press release.

There’s more analysis in Petra Boyton’s post if you want the full gory details.

Link to analysis from Petra Boyton.

New Scientist is reporting on a new study that questions the definition of post-traumatic stress disorder, based on the fact that a group of severely depressed patients seem to experience PTSD symptoms despite never having suffered a significant trauma.

PTSD is one of the only psychiatric disorders that includes a specific cause in its definition: a traumatic experience that involved likely death or injury to self or others, which was strong enough to cause fear, helplessness or horror.

If this experience results in intrusive memories of the event, persistent arousal and avoidance or dissociation, a person can be diagnosed with PTSD.

This new study, led by psychiatrist Prof Alexander Bodkin, found that almost 80% of a group of severely depressed patients experienced enough symptoms to be diagnosed with PTSD, despite never having been in a traumatic incident.

This suggests that the mental disorder thought to be specific to PTSD may, in fact, not be specific to trauma.

This is not the first time that the validity of PTSD has been questioned. Indeed, it has been a controversial diagnosis since it was first introduced.

As described by some excellent histories of military psychiatry, the acceptance of PTSD as a psychiatric diagnosis was in no small part due to pressure from Vietnam war veterans’ groups who wanted the military and state to provide treatment for the effects of traumatic combat stress.

Although PTSD is often described as the modern diagnosis of what used to be called ‘shell shock’, records from Word War I show ‘shell shock’ to be quite different in many respects, more closely resembling conversion disorder – a condition where emotional trauma can be expressed as physical symptoms such as paralysis and convulsions.

Before ‘shell shock’, combat stress was often diagnosed as ‘soldiers heart’. It’s interesting to note how the concept of combat stress has become more psychological and less physical as time has progressed.

However, most diagnoses of combat stress, in whatever form they have taken, have usually been strongly opposed by the military – who see it as taking soldiers away from the front line, and the government – who are reluctant to compensate soldiers for the inevitable consequences of life-threatening missions.

Many clinicians will, perhaps, not be concerned on a day-to-day basis if the symptoms of PTSD are found not to be specific to the disorder, as they can still treat the symptoms, regardless of how they are classified.

Nevertheless, the implications for research and health care provision (which often relies on confirming a specific diagnosis) could be more profound, particularly if the definition is changed or rejected as a result.

However, this is not likely to happen in the near future, although no one really knows what modifications to the definition of many mental disorders are due in the next edition of the DSM diagnostic manual.

Link to NewSci article ‘Doubt cast on definition of PTSD’.
Link to study abstract.
Link to excellent review of Shephard’s book War of Nerves.

I’ve spent the day at the 15th European Congress of Psychiatry and have been catching up with some of the latest developments in the field.

As is common with these sorts of things, the exhibition hall is largely an exercise for drug companies to promote their products using giveaways and selective education.

My favourite tagline was on the stand for the antidepressant drug tianeptine: ‘Treating Depression Beyond the Symptoms’.

I can’t quite picture what this refers to. Maybe they send a drug rep round to improve people’s housing, finances and difficult family situation?

In terms of antipsychotic promotion, the big selling point seems to be avoiding weight gain.

Many of the companies are advertising that there drug causes less weight gain, or are promoting ways of using their drug to minimise strain on the cardiovascular system.

In terms of research being presented, there’s a fantastic selection from across Europe. Here’s just a few that have caught my eye.

A study by Esmina Avdibegović and colleagues from University Clinical Centre of Tuzla in Bosnia and Herzegovina found that the suicide rate dropped during the Bosnian war, and that even after the war, less people committed suicide than before.

Another study from the Tuzla Clinic by Izet Pajevic and colleagues looked at religiosity in war veterans from the same conflict, and found that religious practice was associated with better mental health and less risky, agressive and psychopathic behaviour.

In fact, there’s a lot of interesting research here from Bosnia and Herzegovina and I look forward to hearing more.

An elegant study by Krzystof Krstya and colleagues from the Silesian Medical Academy in Poland looked at improvements in cognitive function during treatment for anxiety disorders, and found that combined drug therapy and psychotherapy had the most significant benefit for short-term memory and attention.

Monica Sigaudo and colleagues from the University of Turin Medical School reported that an inert pill could actually increase pain perception when given with the suggestion that it raised sensitivity – something known as the ‘nocebo effect‘.

Finally, a neuroimaguing study by Jan Prasko and colleagues from the Prague Psychiatric Centre found that in the treatment of panic disorder, both cognitive behavioural therapy and antidepressants were equally as effective, and interestingly, had a similar effect on the brain.

Anyway, just time to grab something to eat and prepare for my own talk…

PsyBlog has just published the last of its articles on the top ten psychology studies, so you can now read through and vote for your favourite.

The list is wide ranging and comprehensive, covering developmental psychology, perception, false memory, conformity, psychotherapy, personality and several other keys discoveries in the history of psychology.

Head on over for the complete list and cast your vote to support your personal choice for the most influential study in of all time.

Link to PsyBlog’s ‘Top Ten Psychology Studies’.

Just a quick note to say posting may be a bit irregular over the next week or so, as I’m going to be travelling.

I’m off to Madrid at the weekend to attend the European Congress of Psychiatry, where I’ve kindly been invited to speak at the Monday afternoon ‘Fringes of Psychosis’ symposium organised by Andrea Raballo.

I’m then off to the fair city of Dublin to find somewhere to live!

I’m going to be there for four months from the beginning of April working with children and adults with neurodevelopmental disorders and learning disabilities.

Which brings me to a request…

If you know anyone that has a room to rent in Dublin from April to July, do get in touch!

Jeremy Dean, owner of PsyBlog and postgraduate psychology researcher, is asking for participants to take part in an online study looking at the links between music preferences and personality.

The psychology and neuroscience of music has recently become an exciting area, as indicated by the popularity of books and articles on the area.

For example, a few months ago The New York Times ran a feature article that looked at the work of Prof Daniel Levitin and his recent highly-regarded book (as we reported previously on Mind Hacks).

Research into the links between music and personality is also becoming more established, as it becomes clear that our musical preferences are influenced by and reflect our personal characteristics.

One of my favourite studies looked at the links between personality and bass sounds and found that “Psychoticism, gender, and Extraversion are all positively related to preference for enhanced bass”!

Jeremy’s study aims to further this research, and is asking for volunteers to complete some online questionnaires.

Crucially, he’s only recruiting people from United Kingdom or Ireland who are over 18 years of age, but if you fit the bill and are interested in taking part, follow the link below.

UPDATE: Jeremy has emailed to say the study is now over and thanks very much to everyone who volunteered!

Link to PsyBlog page ‘Take Part in Research on Music and Personality’.

New Scientist has a short report on recent research again suggesting that sleeping pill zolpidem (trade name Ambien) might help people with impaired consciousness after brain injury.

This comes after a 2006 study reported that zolpidem temporarily roused three brain-injured patients who were in a persistent vegetative state (PVS) a coma-like state of impaired consciousness.

Consequently, the media was full of new stories that described patients ‘waking’ from ‘coma’ after being given the drug.

The results were treated with some scepticism by the medical community, who are always suspicious of anything sounding like a ‘miracle cure’.

The plot thickened when zolpidem became the focus of a legal case last year when a UK court ruled that it could be given to a patient who had spent three years in a persistent vegetative state, against the wishes of the family.

In the event, the treatment didn’t work, and the patient was eventually allowed to die as the family wanted.

Interestingly, a new paper published in the medical journal Annals of Neurology reports similar results to the initial study, although this time in a patient with akinetic mutism rather than PVS.

Akinetic mutism is a state of absent motivation where a patient does not initiate any action or speech, although may sometimes be capable of it when prompted.

It usually occurs after severe frontal lobe damage or damage to subcortical areas that connect directly to the frontal lobes.

In this case, the patient became able to spontaneously move and walk after being given zolpidem.

Interestingly, the researchers also use a PET brain scan to see how blood flow to the brain changed after zolpidem when compared to placebo.

It turned out that the sleeping pill increased blood flow to the anterior cingulate and orbitofrontal cortices – both areas of the frontal lobe.

It seems the sleeping pill may have paradoxical and poorly understood effects on the damaged brain, but will need to be studied in much more detail to see if it is genuinely an effective treatment for people with certain types of brain injury.

Link to NewSci article ‘Sedative ‘reactivates’ damaged brains’.
Link to abstract of scientific study.