Category: Togetherness

Just in case you’re still looking for ways to mark National Epilepsy week, a recent edition of Case Notes had a special on epilepsy, outlining the science and impact of this curious condition.

In one particularly interesting section, they discuss research on using neuroimaging to replace the Wada test – the procedure where the barbiturate drug sodium amobarbital is injected into the carotid artery to temporarily disable one hemisphere of the brain.

This is used in people about to undergo neurosurgery to remove a brain area that may be causing uncontrollable and dangerous epileptic seizures.

It is particularly important to know which hemisphere of the brain is most involved in language, so the surgeons know where to tread carefully to make sure the patient’s language ability isn’t damaged.

Obviously, injecting strong sedative drugs directly into major brain arteries has its risks; both to the patient (there is a small risk of stroke), and the clinicians – such as the occasional patient going bezerk on the drugs.

This has led researchers to try and replace the Wada test with something less invasive and somewhat safer, namely scanning the brain with fMRI (e.g. see this pdf).

The technology is still being developed, however, as the results of the Wada test and an fMRI scan don’t always match, although new developments are improving the accuracy of these brain scan techniques as time goes on.

Link to webpage on Case Notes special on epilepsy.
realaudio of programme.
Link to information on the Wada test from epilepsy.com

UK education and support charity Epilepsy Action has launched this year’s National Epilepsy Week, running from 14th-20th May.

The theme of the 2006 event is children and young people and the charity is focusing on encouraging schools to maximise the potential of pupils with epilepsy.

In a recent survey, only 19% of schools felt that staff knowledge of epilepsy was good.

Consequently, Epilepsy Action has produced a raft of information to support parents and teachers in their care of affected pupils, including an online guide: Essential Information for Teachers.

Even if you’re not involved with children or schools you can learn how to help someone who has a seizure. You could save their life.

Link to information on National Epilepsy Week.
Link to Essential Information for Teachers.
Link to first aid for seizures.

Adam Joinson discusses the process of community building via technology in his book Understanding the Psychology of Internet Behaviour (p11, ISBN 0333984684), noting that there is nothing new under the sun:

The cost and lack of privacy tended to inhibit personal communication between members of the general public using the telegraph. However, for the telegraph operators the network provided an ‘online community encompassing thousands of people, very few of whom met face-to-face’ (Standage, 1999, p122-3). The sense of community among telegraph operators was heightended by their own norms and customs, vocabulary, the use of short (usually two or three letters) signatures or ‘sigs’ and the sense of ownership of a particular line. According to Standage, experienced operators could even recognise their on-line friends simply from their style of morse code.

pdf of Joinson’s chapter on the history of tech-mediated communities.
Link to Adam Joinson’s homepage.
Link to Tom Standage’s homepage.

ABC Radio National has a Health Report special on the science, myths and realities of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

The show talks to psychiatrists Dr John Constantino and Dr Eric Fombonne who discuss the features and attributes that a diagnosis of autism describes.

They also tackle the evidence for claims of an autism epidemic and the controversial link between autism and mercury-based vaccinations.

On an artistic note, the Wisconsin Medical Society has some online video of artist Stephen Wiltshire MBE who has autism and was featured in Oliver Sacks’ book An Anthropologist On Mars.

Wiltshire is taken for a helicopter ride to view Rome, and subsequently demonstrates his startling artistic talents by drawing an almost perfect, four metre long aerial panorama of the city.

mp3 or realaudio of Health Report on Autism Spectrum Disorder.
Link to page with transcript.
Link to page with video on Stephen Wiltshire.

I’m just reading Ray Robinson’s breathtaking debut novel Electricity (ISBN 0330444506) about Lily O’Connor – a young woman with epilepsy and a troubled past who’s trying to track down her lost brother.

Robinson wrote the novel as part of his PhD in creative writing and spent a considerable amount of time reading scientific literature on epilepsy and interviewing people with the condition.

Although the book doesn’t attempt to explain the science behind it, it does brilliantly capture the idiosyncratic experience of epilepsy in the sometimes wonderfully poetic language from the book’s protagonist – an otherwise plain speaking northern girl.

the room cracks and shatters, the colours wrapping their arms around me but I can’t hold them back, it’s like rain running down windows, the air’s melting in front of me, colours like feelings inside, suffocating but nice
   like storm clouds up there
   like bullies, black lightning off and on in their fat bellies and I need to pull at everything, need to touch and tug and twist and poke and push because it’s all slipping away from me
   and I know
   – Mel?
   I know she’s here in my room, but I can’t let go of the chair, my fingers crack-cracking the corners and I

   can’t catch my
   can’t catch my

Link to review from The Guardian.
Link to review by The Independent.
Link to information on the novel from Lancaster University.

I’ve never understood
what it is I’m not supposed to feel
like a bird on the wing in a swollen sky
my mind is torn by lightning
as it flies from the thunder behind

From the play 4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane.

Kane suffered from intense periods of depression throughout her life. 4.48 Psychosis was published after her suicide and was probably meant to be published posthumously.

It relates her experiences of depression, psychosis and hospitalisation. Kane is considered one of the most important British playwrights of the late 20th century.

There’s an informed and critical review of the recent coverage about goths, self-harm and success, over at the Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments blog.

One recent study from Glasgow suggested that although goth kids have a higher rates of self-harm, it is more likely that self-harmers are drawn to the goth subculture than vice-versa, as the majority reported that they began harming themselves before becoming goth.

This was reported quite unpredictably in the media, with the goth subculture either being represented as the cause or remedy of these problems.

Another recent study reported that goths are more likely to go into professional jobs and be financially secure later in life, suggesting a good outcome for the majority.

The Anxiety, Addiction and Depression Treatments blog examines the disparity between the recent reporting of these findings and the representation of goth in the mainstream media.

Link to ‘The Rewards of Being Goth’ on AADT blog.

Malcolm Gladwell recently gave a lecture on ‘prodigies and late bloomers in art’ which has been audio archived on The New Yorker website.

The lecture is an engaging tour through the lives of some famous late-starting artists and musings on what contributed to their latent talent, including painter Paul Cézanne and legendary rock-and-roll band Fleetwood Mac!

Be warned, however, the site is very fond of annoying pop-up windows.

Link to Gladwell audio lecture.

Apparently Scientific American have been doing ‘online only’ specials for a while, but they completely passed me by until they just released one on the The Child’s Mind.

It’s a collection of various articles that have been published in SciAm over the past few years on developmental psychology and neuroscience.

The issue is not freely available, it costs $5 to download, but this seems good value for those (like me) not wanting to pay for a full online subscription for issues they might never read.

I quite like the idea of a minimum payment for a one-stop collection of previously published special interest articles and I’m hoping other publishers will consider doing the same.

The special has articles with both clinical and ‘pure research’ angles, including “Why Children Talk to Themselves”, “Scars That Won’t Heal: The Neurobiology of Child Abuse”, “Uncommon Talents: Gifted Children, Prodigies and Savants” and “Think Better: Learning to Focus”.

Link to info on The Child’s Mind online special.

Part II of the Australian All in the Mind two-part series on schizophrenia is now online. The second part focuses on the current range of treatments for people diagnosed with the condition.

This includes both pharmacological and psychological approaches, and the programme discusses the current state of research and the advantages and disadvantages of various therapies.

The programme also explains how many current therapies are attempting to directly address difficulties which have been uncovered by cognitive science research.

mp3 or realaudio of programme.
Link to transcript of programme.

Malcolm Gladwell writes an insightful review of “Why?” (ISBN 069112521X) by renowned sociologist Charles Tilly that tackles the social context and motivations for providing explanations.

A recent article in The Guardian also discussed the new book and summarised Tilly’s five ‘types’ of explanation:

There are, Tilly suggests, at least five different ways to explain why things happen. To take Katrina as the example: the first explanation might be “convention” (there’s always a monumental cock-up after a hurricane); the second, “technical explication” (in which the meteorologists precisely chart how weather conditions created the chaos); third, “codes” (in this case, the federal, state and city ordinances that prevented any clear line of responsibility emerging); fourth, “ritualistic” explanations (God’s wrath or nemesis); and “fifth”, stories.

In Gladwell’s New Yorker review, he highlights the fact that these types of explanations have different social purposes and are typically used to achieve certain persuasive ends in a debate.

Proponents of abortion often rely on a convention (choice) and a technical account (concerning the viability of a fetus in the first trimester). Opponents of abortion turn the fate of each individual fetus into a story: a life created and then abruptly terminated. Is it any surprise that the issue has proved to be so intractable? If you believe that stories are the most appropriate form of reason-giving, then those who use conventions and technical accounts will seem morally indifferent—regardless of whether you agree with them. And, if you believe that a problem is best adjudicated through conventions or technical accounts, it is hard not to look upon storytellers as sensationalistic and intellectually unserious.

Gladwell (who was recently profiled in Psychological Science) makes links between Tilly’s work and the work of the late sociologist Erving Goffman who similarly examined seemingly straighforward social interactions.

In his classic book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life Goffman argued that how we present ourselves to others is often like a stage appearance, which we try to manage as much as possible to control the impressions that others draw from our ‘performance’.

UPDATE: The first chapter of “Why?” is freely available from Princeton University Press in html or pdf format.

Link to Gladwell’s review of “Why?” in The New Yorker.
Link to Guardian article on Tilly’s “Why?”.

A poem by John Hegley from his 1993 collection Five Sugars Please (ISBN 0413773000).

Outsider art
As a bit of a break for Albert
from the hospital of the mind
I accompanied him to the park for a picnic
and a bit of crayoning enjoyment;
using just the one crayon
he liked to attend to a piece of paper
and meticulously obliterate the surface area.
Some time into the process
a couple who shared Albert’s middle age
came sneaking a fascinated peek
over the shoulder of what they took to be
an amateur landscape artist
but found his interpretation of reality
just a little too modern.

The other All in the Mind (broadcast by Australian station Radio National) has the first of a two-part special on schizophrenia and psychosis.

The presenter talks to Angela, a young woman who has experienced some intense psychotic episodes and has been diagnosed and treated for schizophrenia.

Angela’s experiences were so severe as to need several years recovery. Despite this, Angela is now back at work and enjoying a full life.

The programme also includes input from several researchers and clinicians who explain what is known about schizophrenia-related changes in the brain, as well as known risk factors for developing the condition.

Part two of the programme is due online next week.

The picture on the left is by artist Maureen Oliver and depicts the experience of psychosis (click for more information).

mp3 or realaudio of prgramme.
Link to transcript of programme.

“One of the paradoxes of the war – one of the many – was that this most brutal of conflicts should set up a relationship between officers and men that was…domestic. Caring. As Layard [a traumatised soldier Rivers hadn’t been able to help] would undoubtedly have said, maternal. And that wasn’t the only trick the war had played. Mobilization. The Great Adventure. They’d been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure – the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they’d devoured as boys – consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that promised so much in the way of ‘manly’ activity had actually delivered ‘feminine’ passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known. No wonder they broke down”.

The thoughts of army psychiatrist W.H.R. Rivers from the novel Regeneration by Pat Barker. In Regeneration, the first of a trilogy, Barker blends fact with fiction in her depiction of the relationship between Rivers and the celebrated poet Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart during the First World War. One more excerpt to follow.

This is one I missed when it first appeared – the United Colors of Benetton magazine Colors had an issue focusing on mental illness and its treatment around the world.

Despite the flash-heavy website, there’s some beautiful photography in there, including some self-portraits taken by patients (like the one on the right).

The issue features patients from Cuba, Ivory Coast, South Africa, Belgium and Los Angeles, and shows the striking inequalities in mental health treatment throughout both the developed and developing world.

The photographs from Cuba are also currently part of an exhibition at London’s Institute of Psychiatry, where they are contrasted with photographs of patients resident in the Bethlem Royal Hospital during Victorian times.

Many of these Victorian-era photographs from the Bethlem are reproduced in a thought-provoking book called Presumed Curable (reviewed here).

Link to issue of Colors on madness.
Link to details of Institute of Psychiatry exhibition.
Link to review of Presumed Curable.

The Glasgow Herald reports on the work of neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick, who is investigating ‘deathbed phenomena’, the unusual experiences that are often reported by a dying patient or their relatives.

Fenwick and his team have just published the results of a study in the American Journal of Hospice and Palliative Care that notes that these experiences are not the result of medication and are relatively common.

Furthermore, they tend to be quite diverse and not simply the traditional ‘light at the end of a tunnel’ or ‘friendly figure’ appearing at the end of the bed.

Their origin is still a mystery, but Fenwick is running an ongoing research project to better understand the experiences to try and improve care and support for the dying person and their familes.

Link to article ‘Visions of the Dying’ in the Herald.
Link to website of Fenwick’s research project.