Category: Togetherness

Last August, we interviewed editor of the Philadelphia Weekly and mental health campaigner Liz Spikol. Part of her work as a journalist and campaigner involves her blog The Trouble with Spikol, which includes regular video updates conveying her whimsical view of the world of journalism.

Recently, she’s just begun a video series tackling current issues in mental health, drawing both from her own experience and her knowledge of psychiatric treatment and the mental health system.

The first is both frank and witty (the reference to Touched with Fire, Kay Redfield Jamison’s book on the link between creativity and manic depression made me laugh out loud) and hopefully will be the first of many to come.

Link to Liz Spikol video update.

The Hospital de la Caridad was founded in 1674 by Don Miguel de Mañara to care for physically and mentally ill of Seville who were too poor to afford treatment.

Don Miguel de Mañara was supposedly the inspiration for Byron´s Don Juan as he left a life of debauchery to found the hospital after having an intense religious vision in which he saw his own funeral procession.

He subsequently built the hospital and adjoining church and dedicated his life to charity and the religious order that runs the institution.

The church and hospital are still working, although it now focuses on caring for the elderly of Seville.

Link to Hospital de la Caridad website.

While many people will get first aid training through school, college or work, few will be taught what to do when they encounter someone who is experiencing severe mental illness and needs help.

An Australian campaign is now trying to remedy the situation by running mental health first aid courses that teaches people the skills they need in an emergency situation with someone who is, for example, suicidal or suffering from severe psychosis.

The campaign also has a website with information and advice so you can educate yourself, wherever you live, so you can help people in crises.

The course manual is online as a pdf file and there’s also some brief advice which is suitable for all situations in which someone might have mental health difficulties.

Apparently, the campaign is going to be launched world-wide, so hopefully courses will be coming to a location near you.

Link to Mental Health First Aid website.

Neurocritic has just published a fantastic summary of Professor Martha Farah’s recent work on the effects of poverty on mind and brain function.

For example, it is known that poor diet alone can restrict the development of certain skills and abilities.

However, one of Farah’s main findings is that those from poorer backgrounds do not usually show a global impairment in mental function.

The main differences between children from a poor background, and those from a wealthier background were in tests of language, working memory, cognitive control and memory. No difference was found for reward processing, spatial cognition, or visual cognition.

With the functional brain-scanning data the researchers also collected, the evidence suggests that poverty can have varying effects on brain development.

Neurocritic notes that the this is quite a complex picture but is a refreshing change to the raft of poorly designed (and usually well-publicised) studies which simply correlate IQ with [something] and argue that [something] must therefore be linked to intelligence.

Link to ‘Childhood Poverty and Neurocognitive Development’ from Neurocritic.

The media has just been full of reports about research that suggests that while male sex drive stays constant, female sex drive reduces significantly after several years in a long-term relationship.

Sex and relationship psychologist Dr Petra Boyton has an excellent analysis of the study, its conclusions and the media reports.

Particularly, she notes that the researchers have opted for an evolutionary explanation for why this might occur.

Evolutionary explanations are sometimes uncritically applied to sex research (after all, sex is about mating right?) when other, more straightforward explanations will probably be more useful.

Rather than explaining these outcomes as related to changing lifestyle factors or practical alterations in women’s lives that may lead to them reporting less desire for sex, the researchers compare the outcomes to the behaviour of female prairie voles and argue the results are due to women keeping her ‘resources’ scarce to keep a male partner interested in her. Males keep a higher sex drive to keep their mate faithful and other males away.

The study will of course get lots of coverage since it has a media-friendly mix of hormones, evolution and comparisons with small mammals which journalists always love.

Link to BBC News article ‘Security ‘bad news for sex drive’.
Link to commentary from Petra Boyton.

Partly motivated by his increasing brushes with psychosis, by the early 1970s, Philip K. Dick was struggling with increasing doubts over the nature of reality and personal identity. Perhaps unsurprisingly, characters with unstable worlds and existential doubts are a familiar focus of his work. Dick was interested in more than just description however, and often used his novels to explore personal theories of existence.

During his research, he discovered the work of Roger Sperry, who had rocked the foundations of neuroscience by discovering that when separated, the hemispheres of the brain seemed, at least to some degree, independently conscious. Worried about his own perception of reality, Dick considered that this could explain his increasing feelings of alienation and self-detachment. These reflections resulted in A Scanner Darkly, a partly autobiographical near-future novel that remains an incisive commentary on society, psychosis and the brain.

Continue reading “Neuropsychology and Psychosis in ‘A Scanner Darkly’”

Neuroscientist Jake Young gets stuck into the recent debate on male-female mind and brain differences, inspired by a number of recent articles on the topic (see previously on Mind Hacks).

Jake does an excellent job of not only summarising what is known about gender differences, but looking at how large these differences are.

Sometimes in the scientific literature, any difference, no matter how small is seized upon as significant. Importantly, the extent of this difference is important for gauging what is the likely impact of the difference on the wider world.

In a subsequent article, he tackles whether there is a difference between men and women who perform particularly well.

For example, are the top 1% of women for a particular ability much different from the top 1% of men for the same ability?

Jake focuses particularly on mathematics, which has been a controversial area as it has been widely debated whether women are generally poorer at scientific-type subjects (largely started by the then president of Harvard claiming they weren’t!).

Rather than focusing on a single concept of ‘mathematical ability’, Jake focuses on what abilities maths actually needs, and breaks down the apparent and reported sex differences.

Link to article ‘Combating Injury with Information: Gender Differences in Cognition’.
Link to article ‘Debunking the Upper Tail: More on the Gender Disparity’.

The BBC Radio 4 discussion programme Between Ourselves had a frank and insightful discussion with two people who have been diagnosed with schizophrenia about the experience of voices, delusions, mental health care and the reaction of others.

One of the people interviewed is Dolly Sen, London-based artist, writer, and film-maker who has been heavily involved in Creative Routes, the respected arts organisation run by mental health service users.

One thing that many people might find surprising is that both the guests note that their voices are often unpleasant, but they feel that there would be ‘something missing’ from their lives if they suddenly disappeared.

Both of the guests also talk about the low points and fears caused by the overwhealming delusions they have experienced, and the distress caused by some bad experiences of hospitalisation.

As well as the negative experiences, Sen also describes some of the positive experiences of psychosis, saying “The best part of my voices is that I feel sometimes that the stars are talking to me and their giving me their song and their poetry and their magic”.

All in all, the programme is a fantastic account of the kaleidoscopic experience of psychosis that can be both troubling and profound.

Link to webpage with realaudio archive of Between Ourselves.

ABC Radio’s All in the Mind sees the return of long-time presenter Natasha Mitchell with an interview with philosopher and cognitive scientist Daniel Dennett on a scientific approach to understanding religion.

Dennett is tackled on some of the issues raised in his recent book Breaking the Spell (ISBN 0713997893) and particularly on his reliance on the controversial theory of memes to back up his arguments:

Mitchell: Many would argue that the idea of memes is a seductive idea, others would say, ‘pseudo-scientific wordplay Dan Dennett, this is no more scientific than religion’.

Dennett: Memetics has not been turned into a science yet and it may not be turned into a science, except insofar as we come to understand that if you’re going to do a scientific study of culture you have to keep the space open for cultural themes to change without being changed deliberately by anybody.

Regardless of your views on any of Dennett’s points, he is always an engaging speaker and well worth listening to.

Link to audio and transcript of All in the Mind.

There’s a wonderful piece in yesterday’s British Medical Journal by Raquel Duarte, a fourth year medical student at Edinburgh University, on the sheer exhilaration of being with a manic patient.

She describes the first time she interviewed a manic patient during her attachment to a psychiatric ward.

…my patient sat down in the family room of the inpatient ward, and I proceeded to obtain a full, detailed psychiatric history‚Äîor rather, I tried to. The truth is, she just talked‚Äîabout everything from art, to politics, to literature. Because of my complete inability to direct the interview, I let her carry on. “Been here almost three hours already… Damn, shouldn’t have giggled at the SHO. Never mind, I’ll just have to come back again tomorrow.” Resigned to the fact that I’d have to meet this patient many times before I could get all the relevant facts, I relaxed and was surprised to find myself enjoying all the irrelevant bits of the conversation.

We both laughed and chuckled like a couple of schoolgirls, me and this 65 year old woman, as I got caught up in her contagious joy and boundless energy. Amid deliberations on Monet and reflections on the situation in the Middle East, she told me about her experience of terrible confusion that somehow, like in a dream, makes perfect sense. I heard about her tragic losses and deep despair, about the havoc this disease can wreck on a family and about how her faith had sustained her throughout. “Mania… psychosis… depression.” She didn’t just give me a history of bipolar illness, she told me a story and took me on a journey to discover a person struggling with a disease but who, in spite of or perhaps because of it, was a whole and wonderful human being.

Unfortunately, the whole piece is not freely available available online, but for those who can access the BMJ, you can read it here.

The Guardian recently published an article on the effectiveness and concerns about the push to promote cognitive behaviour therapy as a treatment for a wide range of health problems.

Cognitive behaviour therapy is one of the most researched and effective forms of psychotherapy, but there are worries it is nonetheless being oversold as a panacea for things for which there are currently little evidence for its effectiveness.

There is no couch, no “tell me about your childhood/dreams/father”. Barely any mention will be made of her past. Instead, the therapist tries to encourage Katie to rationalise her thoughts now, to see the connection between her feelings and her actions. He tries to recognise unhelpful patterns of behaviour (“I ate a whole loaf of bread, then made myself sick because I felt ugly and fat”) and replace these with more realistic or helpful ones (“I don’t need to binge. I have other ways of controlling my emotions, like calling a friend or going kickboxing). This very practical, proactive approach is rather different from the classic modes of therapy, which one CBT convert describes as “frustratingly fluffy and meaningless” and “encouraging you to feel you are not responsible for your own personal wellbeing”.

…

But while there are few, if any, mental health specialists prepared to dismiss CBT out of hand, there are a significant number of experts who feel that CBT is being grossly oversold. The primary objection seems to be that it doesn’t work for everybody (not even nearly, say some), and that this one-size-fits-all approach may ride roughshod over more traditional forms of therapy which can be just as – if not more -worthwhile in many cases. A year ago, there was even a debate at the Institute of Psychiatry entitled: “CBT is the New Coca-Cola: This house believes that cognitive behavioural therapy is superficially appealing but overmarketed and has few beneficial ingredients.”

Link to article ‘A little more conversation’.

Ohio’s Free Times has an article on people who believe they are being targeted by top-secret mind-control technology. They regularly lobby government to legislate against such technology, while others claim they are, in fact, experiencing psychosis.

Although distressed, many of the people who have such experiences do not seem particularly disabled by them and are able to run their lives quite effectively, even creating complex websites to make their case.

This, and the fact that many believe that these experiences are due to top-secret technology (which, by it’s nature, can’t be checked out) means that these experiences are not clear-cut signs of psychosis, despite the fact that they resemble some experiences found in people with schizophrenia.

To muddy the waters further, people who are very likely to be mentally ill and experience similar things are likely to be also part of online ‘mind control’ communities (as mentioned previously on Mind Hacks).

Meanwhile, proponents of the existence of mind-control technology point to the CIA’s MKULTRA project which genuinely did test (mainly drug-based) mind manipulation techniques on unsuspecting members of the public.

This leaves a huge grey area for the DSM diagnostic manual, that defines a delusion as a belief that is (among other things) false. In this case, it is difficult, if not impossible, to find out whether beliefs in secret mind-control technology are true or not.

Link to Ohio Free Times article ‘Insanity, Defense’ (via anomalist).

PBS have put an award winning documentary about the number of mentally ill people in America’s prisons online.

The programme recently won the Grand Prize in the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards and asks difficult questions about why so many people with severe mental illness are inmates in the US prison system.

Fewer than 55,000 Americans currently receive treatment in psychiatric hospitals. Meanwhile, almost 10 times that number — nearly 500,000 — mentally ill men and women are serving time in U.S. jails and prisons. As sheriffs and prison wardens become the unexpected and often ill-equipped caretakers of this burgeoning population, they raise a troubling new concern: Have America’s jails and prisons become its new asylums?

The programme makes an interesting contrast to Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum written in 1885 by Mary Huestis Pengilly, and now available online as a Project Gutenberg EBook.

Pengilly describes the experience of being treated like a prisoner in the asylum, which used handcuffs and restraints for the ‘patients’ resident there.

While a century ago, asylums were virtually prisons, it seems increasingly, that prisons are now becoming asylums.

Link to PBS show The New Asylums.
Link to Diary Written in the Provincial Lunatic Asylum (via Dana Leighton).

Kitty Genovese was murdered outside her apartment block in 1964 by a stranger. The story of her death had a massive influence on psychology, leading to the description of the bystander effect – where people are less likely to intervene in an emergency when they’re in groups as when they are alone.

This arose from the reports that Kitty was killed in sight of 38 of her neighbours, who all assumed that someone else would help or phone the police while she was being fatally stabbed. In the event, she died shortly after.

Like several other founding myths in psychology (such as the stories of Phineas Gage and Little Albert) the truth of Kitty’s murder is not as clear-cut as the textbooks make out.

The ‘bystander effect’ itself is considered to be real. With additional people comes a ‘diffusion of responsibility’ that makes it less likely that individuals feel a personal responsibility to take action.

Nevertheless, the popular story of the the murder is likely to have been muddied.

Joe De May, a current resident of the same apartment block that Kitty lived in, has pieced together a careful account of the murder from news reports and court documents.

It turns out that it is unlikely that Kitty’s murder was witnessed by nearly 40 people who did not act. In fact, only two clear witnesses to the attack were ever found. There are many more details which seem to have made their way into the media, and then into psychological myth, that probably never occurred.

A recent twist saw Kitty’s story told by her girlfriend and lover, Mary Ann Zielonko, in a recent radio interview. Mary Ann describes the Kitty Genovese that is missing from the textbooks, and how her death affected those left behind.

Sadly, Kitty’s death is no less tragic for this historical debunking, and it is no less tragic that the ‘bystander effect’ occurs all too often when people are in trouble.

Link to audio of radio programme ‘Remembering Kitty Genovese’.
Link to Joe De May’s investigation into the case (via MeFi).
Link to Wikipedia page on Kitty Genovese.

National Geographic sent a reporter to take part in an ancient Peruvian shamanic ritual where the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca is used.

The article describes the reporter’s account of what sounds like a profound and terrifying experience, and discusses the culture, traditions and interest from Western science that ayahuasca has inspired.

The taking of ayahuasca has been associated with a long list of documented cures: the disappearance of everything from metastasized colorectal cancer to cocaine addiction, even after just a ceremony or two. It’s thought to be nonaddictive and safe to ingest. Yet Western scientists have all but ignored it for decades, reluctant to risk their careers by researching a substance containing the outlawed DMT. Only in the past decade, and then only by a handful of researchers, has ayahuasca begun to be studied.

At the vanguard of this research is Charles Grob, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at UCLA’s School of Medicine. In 1993 Dr. Grob launched the Hoasca Project, the first in-depth study of the physical and psychological effects of ayahuasca on humans. His team went to Brazil, where the plant mixture can be taken legally, to study members of a native church, the Uni√£o do Vegetal (UDV), who use ayahuasca as a sacrament, and compared them to a control group that had never ingested the substance. The studies found that all the ayahuasca-using UDV members had experienced remission without recurrence of their addictions, depression, or anxiety disorders. In addition, blood samples revealed a startling discovery: Ayahuasca seems to give users a greater sensitivity to serotonin‚Äîone of the mood-regulating chemicals produced by the body‚Äîby increasing the number of serotonin receptors on nerve cells.

Link to article ‘Peru: Hell and Back’ with video clip (via MeFi)
Link to excellent Wikipedia page on ayahuasca.

Psychologist Daniel Gilbert writes about the psychology of happiness and pleasure in a new article for Edge.

He argues that science should be striving to understand happiness, both to capture this sublime aspect of human existence, and to enable us to increase happiness as we go about our daily lives.

For the last decade I’ve been obsessed with one problem: How well can the human brain predict the sources of its own future satisfaction? If the answer were “Very well, thank you,” then I’d be out of a job. Research suggests that I will be employed for a long time to come.

We are often quite poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future for two reasons. First, we have been given a lot of disinformation about happiness by two sources: Genes and culture. Both genes and cultures are self-perpetuating entities that need us to do things for them so that they can survive. Because we are interested in our own happiness and not theirs, both entities fool us into believing that’s what is good for them is also good for us. We believe that having children will make us happy, that consuming goods and services will make us happy. But the data show that money has minor and rapidly diminishing effects on happiness, and that parents are generally happier watching TV or doing housework than interacting with their children.

This is at a time when the Kingdom of Bhutan has included the goal of ‘national well-being’ as a part of its constitution, and UK politicians are promoting the science of happiness as the basis of future policy.

Edge also hosts a 2004 video of Gilbert discussing the mental economics of happiness and ‘affective forecasting’ – the ability of people to predict what will make them happy in the future.

Link to the ‘Science of Happiness’ from Edge.
Link to BBC News article ‘Politics of Happiness’.
Link to Daniel Gilbert’s lab homepage (with articles).