Category: Togetherness

The New York Times has a short but interesting article on people who find intimate relationships stressful and bad for their mental health.

A close relationship is considered almost universally beneficial, but some people seem to find relationships difficult to deal with, even when they’re going well.

Interestingly, the article describes this as a ‘schizoid’ trait, which is usually considered to be the lack of emotional attachment seen in some people with schizophrenia (although not in all by any means).

While it is a clich√© to say that people with autism or Asperger’s syndrome are loners, many do find intimate relationships difficult, and it’s curious that the article doesn’t mention this as a possible link.

Outsiders is a UK charity set-up by Dr Tuppy Owens to help people who are disabled or socially isolated with starting and maintaining relationships, and has been working in this field for many years.

Link to NYT article ‘Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle’ (thanks Paul and Candace!)
Link to Outsiders.

A list of delusions taken from the psychiatric literature that don’t seem that delusional when you think about them:

“The earth is doomed”
– Patient with Alzheimer’s reported by Sultzer et al. (2003)

“Bill Gates is destroying my files and spying on me”
– 32 year old patient reported by Podoll et al. (2000)

“A local gang is going to mug me”
– South London patient reported by Freeman et al. (2001)

“I drove two people mad when I was 11 to 14 years old”
– Patient from a study by Rhodes and Jakes (2000)

“My thoughts are being controlled by TV newscasters”
– Inpatient reported by Noffsinger and Saleh (2000)

To quote Salvidor Dali “The only difference between me and a madman is that I’m not mad”.

Bollywood, the world’s largest film industry, seems to be showing a new, more positive interest in mental illness.

As The Mouse Trap reports, one of the most popular films of the year, Lage Raho Munna Bhai (‘Carry on Munna Bhai’) depicts a local gangster, Munna, who becomes obsessed with the ideas of Mahatma Ghandi.

Munna subsequently hallucinates the presence of Ghandi and experiences the delusion that he is being guided by the long-dead leader.

The film has won praise from Indian psychiatrists for its positive portrayal of the sorts of unusual experiences that are typical of psychotic conditions.

According to Reuters, the sensitive portrayal of mental illness is set to continue with a forthcoming Bollywood film, provisionally entitled “Bits and Pieces”, which will actually be set inside an asylum.

“Bits and Pieces,” starring Bollywood actor Rahul Bose, known for portraying unconventional roles, promises to be one such film that balances the sensibilities of the art-house genre with popular appeal.

“It is a movie about a writer in India who decides to visit a lunatic asylum for his next novel,” Bose told Reuters. “It shows how he gets emotionally attached to the people living in the asylum, his emotional tumult thereafter and his wish to do something for them.”

Watching inmates of the asylum and their myriad interactions from close quarters make Bose question popular notions of sanity and madness to a point where he seems to find a reason in defense of insanity.

“After seeing the so-called insanes, the writer fails to distinguish whether those who have been put inside the asylum are mad or those who have put them inside are,” Bose, 39, said about the protagonist’s dilemma.

Indian cinema has an long and fascinating history of reflecting cultural attitudes to mental illness.

Psychiatrist Prof Dinesh Bhugra published a landmark paper and book on the representation of madness in Bollywood, and has noted that it often mirrors social and political changes in India itself.

Bhugra argues that in the 1950s and the mid-1960s, the years of ‘hope and achievement’ for India, mental illness was portrayed in a gentle and even romantic way.

As social and political turmoil followed through the 1970s, 80s and 90s, madness became to be portrayed as dangerous and obsessive.

Hopefully, the new optimism in modern India is being reflected in films with positive messages about mental health.

Link to The Mouse Trap on madness in film.
Link to abstract of paper on madness in Bollywood.
Link to details of book ‘Mad Tales from Bollywood’.

There’s nothing more interesting than people. The diversity of the human race is the main reason why I find psychology and neuroscience so fascinating.

The following summary of an article from the Journal of Forensic Science is an amazing demonstration of how diverse the human race can be, sadly with tragic consequences in these cases.

Autoerotic fatalities with power hydraulics

Journal of Forensic Science, 1993, Vol 38, Issue 2, p359-64.

We report two cases in which men used the hydraulic shovels on tractors to suspend themselves for masochistic sexual stimulation. One man developed a romantic attachment to a tractor, even giving it a name and writing poetry in its honor. He died accidentally while intentionally asphyxiating himself through suspension by the neck, leaving clues that he enjoyed perceptual distortions during asphyxiation. The other man engaged in sexual bondage and transvestic fetishism, but did not purposely asphyxiate himself. He died when accidentally pinned to the ground under a shovel after intentionally suspending himself by the ankles. We compare these cases with other autoerotic fatalities involving perceptual distortion, cross-dressing, machinery, and postural asphyxiation by chest compression.

The last sentence is typically academic and wonderfully deadpan.

Link to PubMed entry for the article.

Psychflix is a website dedicated to looking at how mental health and mental illness are portrayed in contemporary film.

It includes an extensive review section, and a series of articles that analyse the representation of everything from psychiatry to psychosis on the silver screen.

Link to Psychflix.

There’s a wonderful article in The New York Times about the psychology and sociology of bed sharing.

This is one of the most common of human activities, and like many everyday behaviours, has a significant impact on our lives and yet has been largely ignored by researchers.

In more recent research — on grief — Dr. Rosenblatt interviewed couples whose children had died.

“They quite often would tell me that they dealt with their grief by holding each other and talking together in bed at night,” he said. “It seemed that I kept being reminded of how sharing a bed impacts our lives and sense of well-being.”

And yet, no one had really studied it, perhaps because sharing a bed is so mundane, Dr. Rosenblatt said. So he wrote Two in a Bed: The Social System of Couple Bed Sharing.

The article makes the point that sleep psychology, that looks at mind and brain factors in sleep and drowsiness, largely considers sleep to be a solitary activity, yet the majority is sleeping is a social act.

The first chapter of Rosenblatt’s book is freely available online as a pdf file.

Link to article ‘People Who Share a Bed, and the Things They Say About It’.
pdf of first chapter of Two in a Bed.

There’s an interesting (and actually quite funny) article from The Telegraph on the psychology of humour, written by the comedians Jimmy Carr and Lucy Greeves.

Rather than examining the research on the psychology of humour, it looks at how comedians view jokes and joke telling, relating it both to professional comedy and informal social jokes among friends.

For those wanting a view from the science of humour, however, there’s more on the humour research page.

Link to ‘How to be Funny’ from The Telegraph (via 3Quarks).
Link to Humour Research Page.

“In the Revised Confessions de Quincey tell us how much he suffered from ‘the pressure on my heart from the incommunicable.’ This pressure, no doubt, is known to us all; but it may approach the most agonising level in patients whose sufferings are not only intense, but so strange as to seem, at first, beyond the possibilities of communication.

Such difficulties in communication, clearly, can arise from the very strangeness, the extraordinary quality, of patients’ problems, their experience; but an equal, if not greater difficulty may be created by physicians themselves who, in effect, decline to listen to their patients, to treat them as equals, and who are prone to adopt – from force of habit, or from a less excusable sense of professional apartness and superiority – an approach and language which effectively prevent any real communication between themselves and their patients.

Thus patients may be subjected to interrogation and examination which smack of the schoolroom and courtroom – questions of the form: ‘Do you have this… do you have that…? which by their categorical nature demand categorical answers (yes and no answers, answers in terms of this and that).

Such an approach forecloses the possibility of learning anything new, and prevents the possibility of forming a picture, or pictures, of what it is like to be as one is.

The fundamental questions – ‘How are you?’ and ‘What is it like? – can only be answered analogically, allusively, in terms of ‘as if’ and likeness, by images, similitudes, models, metaphors, that is, by evocations of one sort and another.

There can be no reaching out into the realm of the incommunicable (or scarcely communicable) unless the physician becomes a fellow traveller, a fellow explorer, continually moving with his patients, discovering with them a vivid, exact a figurative language which will reach out towards the incommunicable. Together they must create languages which bridge the gulf between physician and patient, the gulf which separates one man from another.

Such an approach is neither ‘subjective’ nor ‘objective’; it is (in Rosenstock-Hussey’s term) ‘trajective‘. Neither seeing the patient as an impersonal object nor subjecting him to identifications and projections of himself, the physician must proceed by sympathy or empathy, proceeding in company with the patient, sharing his experiences and feelings and thoughts, the inner conceptions which shape his behaviour.

He must feel (or imagine) how his patient is feeling, without ever losing the sense of himself; he must inhabit, simultaneously, two frames of reference and make it possible for the patient to do likewise.”

Oliver Sacks discusses the psychology of communicating with distressed or impaired people, in footnote 104 of Awakenings.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind has just broadcast a panel discussion on psychosis and creativity by three artists who have had their own experience of altered states.

The discussion was part of an exhibition and conference entitled ‘For Matthew and Others: Journeys with Schizophrenia’ that is being held at the College of Fine Arts at the University of New South Wales and includes a number of artists influenced by schizophrenia.

The panel consisted of artists James de Blas, Simon Champ and Martin Sharp, the latter famous for a number of landmark psychedelic album covers from the 60s and illustrations for the notorious Oz magazine.

They cover a wide range of topics, and largely avoid the hackneyed discussion about whether madness and genius and different sides of the same coin, and don’t always agree on mental influences on the creative process.

Link to audio and transcript of ‘Reclaiming imagination: art, psychosis and the creative mind’.

BoingBoing has alerted me to the fact that a book on psychology of rumours has just been published.

The book is by two psychologists, Profs Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia who have been researching the topic and have consulted on legal cases where rumours have been involved.

It is entitled Rumor Psychology (ISBN 1591474264) and tackles the function and structure of rumour and gossip, and distringuishes between these two forms of social communication.

Exactly what is rumor, and how does it differ from gossip? Even though these terms are commonly used interchangeably, they differ greatly in function and content. While gossip is evaluative social talk that provides social network formation and group solidarity, rumor functions to make sense of an ambiguous situation or to help people adapt to perceived or actual threats. Why do people spread and believe rumors? Rumors are an enduring feature of our social and organizational landscapes. They attract attention, evoke emotion, incite involvement, affect attitudes and actions—and they are ubiquitous. Rumor transmission is motivated by three broad psychological motivations—fact-finding, relationship-enhancement, and self-enhancement—all of which help individuals and groups make sense in the face of uncertainty.

In fact, you can take part in their research online, by completing a survey that asks about a rumour and how you heard about it or discussed it with others.

I’ve not read the book, but I’m always fascinated by books on the psychology of seemingly mundane behaviour.

A recent book by sociologist Charles Tilly, entitled “Why?” (ISBN 069112521X) analysed the reasons people use to explain events or behavior.

He lists four basic types of reasons: conventions (socially accepted clich√©s like “My train was late,” or “We’re otherwise engaged that evening”), stories (simplified cause-effect narratives), codes (legal, religious) and technical accounts (complicated narratives, often impenetrable to nonspecialists).

He argues that the type of reason we give is often determined by the social relation to the people we are talking to in any given situation.

Link to more info on book.
Link to article on Tilly’s arguments in “Why?”.

Thin is a photo essay and award-winning documentary by photographer Lauren Greenfield that charts the lives of patients at the Renfrew Center, a residential centre for the treatment of women with eating disorders.

Although the photo essay is available online, the full documentary is not. However, an extended preview of the documentary is available which is quite moving even in its abbreviated form, showing the emotional turmoil experienced by young women with anorexia and bulimia.

Greenfield is interviewed about the film and gives some of her motivations for pursuing the project:

After some thought, I came to the conclusion that eating disorders were an extremely dramatic and poignant example of the way girls use their bodies instead of their voices to express themselves. I thought this subject could be particularly interesting in film because there are few mental illnesses that have a physical manifestation that can be seen visually.

Link to Thin documentary website (via MeFi).
Link to extended preview.
Link to online photo essay.
Link to information and resources on eating disorders.

A forthcoming article (pdf) in the journal Hormones and Behaviour suggests that as women approach the fertile phase of the menstrual cycle, they are more likely to dress to look most attractive.

The research was led by Prof Martie Haselton who asked 30 women in committed romantic relationships to have a hormone tests to determine where they were in their monthly menstrual cycle, and have their photograph taken on two occasions.

One photograph was taken when the women were most fertile (the follicular phase) and another when they were least fertile (luteal phase).

The photographs were then shown to a panel of people (17 men and 25 women) who were asked “In which photo is the person trying to look more attractive?”.

The panel, who did not know what the rest of the study was about, tended to pick out photographs taken during the women’s most fertile time.

Importantly, the women who volunteered to have their photographs taken, did not know the exact purpose of the study either, so had no reason to dress especially differently for each of the two photographs.

Haselman and her colleagues suggest this may be a human version of an outward display that is common in female animals that signals to potential mates when they are most fertile.

Haselman has done a huge amount of research on sexuality, attraction and evolutionary psychology, most of which is freely available from her website.

pdf of full-text research paper.
Link to coverage from The Guardian.
Link to Prof Martie Haselman’s website.

Living Tech has scanned a 1955 article on ‘Experimental Psychoses‘ that discusses the use of LSD to simulate psychotic states.

When LSD was first discovered, it was thought that the profound alteration of reality that it causes could be used as a ‘model’ for psychosis in psychiatric research.

However, as a recent Canadian Journal of Psychiatry article noted, this idea quickly faded, owing to the fact that the LSD experience and the psychotic experience are typically quite different.

For example, in psychosis ‘hearing voices’ and paranoia are common, whereas after taking LSD visual hallucinations and elation are more common.

Nevertheless, the 1955 article published in Scientific American (ominously only attributed to ‘Six Staff Members of Boston Psychopathic Hospital’), is fascinating glimpse into both the pre-1960s days of LSD research and the early days of trying to understand the neurobiology of psychosis.

Link to article ‘Experimental Psychoses’.
Link to ‘Flashback: Psychiatric Experimentation With LSD in Historical Perspective’ from CJP.

This month’s Nature Neuroscience has published an opinion piece by three leading autism researchers arguing that we should abandon any theory that claims to explain all of the experiences and behaviours that are classified under the banner of ‘autism’.

This includes both simple psychological and neurobiological theories, and instead, the authors claim, we should focus on how a number of different processes could contribute to the range of thinking styles associated with autism and Asperger syndrome.

Similar patterns of behaviour and thought were independently described in children by Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger (pictured on the right) in the early 20th century, later to be turned into the current diagnoses.

This was largely due to the work of Lorna Wing who became interested in the condition after having an autistic daughter herself.

The ‘autism spectrum‘ is associated with difficulties in social interaction and communication, difficulties with certain types of abstract thinking and a restricted or repetitive range of interests or behaviours.

In the Nature Neuroscience article Dr Francesca Happé and her colleagues argue that the evidence now shows that there are non-overlapping genetic influences on these skills, and that they are too diverse to be explained by a single psychological theory.

The authors conclude by suggesting why these traits tend to appear together, despite being potentially explained by separate mechanisms:

In light of the above research, we suggest that it is time to give up on the search for a monolithic cause or explanation for the three core aspects of autism, at the genetic, neural and cognitive levels. Clearly a question remains of why these three features co-occur at above-chance rates. At the genetic level, although the majority of genes appear to be symptom specific, there is evidence for a minority of overlapping genes between domains. At the cognitive level, impairments in more than one domain may interact; compensatory strategies may be reduced in the face of multiple impairments.

Link to full-text of Nature Neuroscience article ‘Time to give up on a single explanation for autism’.

New Scientist reports on research recently presented at the Canadian Sex Research Forum that suggests that men and women take about the same time to reach the maximum level of sexual arousal.

The researchers, led by Tuuli Kukkonen, used a thermal imaging camera to measure increased blood flow in the genitals while participants were watching erotic films.

Although the report doesn’t say, it’s common in these sorts of studies for the male and female participants to be shown different films, as males and females tend to be maximally aroused by different types of erotica.

Both the film shown to males, and the film shown to females, will likely have been rated by members of the same sex for how arousing it is, and the films will have been chosen to match the levels of arousal for men and women.

What the report doesn’t say is that the researchers seemed only to have measured physical arousal.

This is important, as we have known since the eighties that while men typically feel psychologically aroused when they’re physically aroused, women can be physically aroused while not feeling psychologically turned-on in the slightest.

In other words, women can show physical arousal without feeling sexy at all. This rarely happens with men.

In fact, a recent study reported that physical arousal in females seems a relatively automatic response to viewing any sort of sexual activity, gay, straight, male or female, despite the fact that the reported level of psychological arousal varied considerably.

Women in this study even showed some physical sexual arousal when watching a video of mating chimpanzees, despite reporting that they felt less sexy than when watching neutral videos of landscapes and scenery.

Why there is such a marked difference in feeling sexy and being aroused in women is still a mystery, but it is something that needs to be borne in mind when interpreting any study (and particularly, any news story) that talks about ‘sexual arousal’ as a single type of experience.

Unfortunately, Kukkonen and colleagues’ study seems to have been widely and uncritically reported as suggesting that women get ‘hot’ in about the same time as men do, when in fact, the picture is far more complex.

Link to NewSci story ‘Women become sexually aroused as quickly as men’.

The BBC has a focus on bipolar disorder over the next few weeks with a TV documentary hosted by Stephen Fry investigating the condition, and a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s Case Notes on the disorder.

We reported earlier this year that Stephen Fry, diagnosed with bipolar himself, visited Cardiff University’s neuropsychiatric genetics unit to film parts of a documentary.

The first part of the documentary was on last night (I missed it I’m afraid and am currently searching bittorrent trackers for a copy) and the next is on BBC2 next Tuesday.

However, the BBC has a webpage with information about the documentary and the condition, including video clips which are available online.

In the documentary, Fry discusses his own experiences, as well as interviewing people like Carrie Fisher, Robbbie Williams and Tony Slattery about their lives with unpredictable thoughts and moods.

The documentary also tackles the psychology and neuroscience of the condition, with the help of researchers who are attempting to make sense of how this complex condition starts, and impacts upon affected individuals.

BBC Radio 4’s Case Notes also discusses bipolar in detail, including the best current treatments and ways of coping.

Link to BBC website on Stephen Fry’s bipolar documentary.
Link to Case Notes on bipolar disorder.