Mind Hacks

Drug company pushes jet lag as a medical disorder

The Wall Street Journal’s health blog reports that drug company Cephalon are trying to get jet lag recognised as a ‘circadian rhythm sleep disorder’ in an attempt to promote their stay-up-forever drugs modafinil and armodafinil.

Modafinil, under the trade name Provigil, is currently a big seller for the company owing to the fact that it deletes the need for sleep and improves concentration typically without making the person feel particularly ‘wired’.

It’s licensed for the treatment of narcolepsy but is widely used by people without a prescription to stay awake and fend off mental tiredness.

Unfortunately, for Cephalon, modafinil will go out of patent in 2012, meaning its profit making capabilities virtually disappear as competitors will be able to produce the compound at a markedly reduced price.

In the mean time, the company has been developing a very similar but newly patentable drug named armodafinil. In fact, armodafinil has been created by a common ploy used by drug companies when they need to renew a patent on a drug.

Many drug molecules have two versions – both identical but mirror images of each other. Drugs work when the drug molecule ‘hand’ inserts itself into the appropriately matching neuroreceptor ‘glove’.

In the same way that you can’t put your left hand into a right glove, mirror image drug molecules need their matching receptor and each might have a different effect.

Many drugs, like modafinil, are mixture of both left and right-handed enantiomers, even though only one of the mirror images has the desired effect. In the case of modafinil, it’s the right-handed mirror image that seems the most potent.

So a common drug company ploy is to released a new drug which has been synthesised to remove the inactive or less active molecule.

Armodafinil, their new drug, is just this. It’s just the right-handed modafinil molecules.

So essentially it’s the same drug but without the action of the other ‘half’. This can sometimes reduce side effects, or improve the action of the drug, but in general the difference is relatively minor.

Importantly though, you can get a new patent on this synthesized version, meaning profit is guaranteed as long as you can convince people that your new drug is worth switching too. And this is where the spin comes in.

Because in many countries drug must be approved for a medical problem, Cephalon are trying to get jet lag classified as a disorder so they have a whole new market for their compound.

It also turns out that they’re sharply hiking the price on modafinil, so when the new, initially lower-priced armodafinil appears, people will switch.

They’ll then get used to using armodafinil and when modafinil becomes super-cheap and generic sometime later they’ve already established their market on their ‘premium branded’ new compound. Normally, the price begins to rise afterwards.

Isn’t progress great?

Link to WSJ on Cephalon and jet lag as a ‘disorder’.
Link to WSJ on modafinil price hike strategy.

Everybody can read minds except you

Conch Tees have a wonderfully philosophical or worryingly paranoid t-shirt that reads “Everybody can read minds except you!”.

It’s got an unwrapping brain in the centre, and the company claims it refers to conspiracy theories about other people reading your thoughts.

However, it could also be a reference to the problem of other minds, a key philosophical issue in the understanding of consciousness.

As consciousness is a first-person subjectively experienced state, we can never know whether other people are conscious, or even what their minds are like, so we just have to make our best guess from what they say and do.

They don’t say they can read minds, but they wouldn’t, would they?

Link to Conch Tees mind reading t-shirt.

Neural integration of transplanted hand

Neurophilosophy has an excellent article on a man whose brain’s sensation areas have reorganised to integrate a hand transplanted from a corpse, 35 years after the man’s original hand was destroyed in an accident.

The somatosensory cortex is literally a ‘map’ of the body. Each part on this strip of brain corresponds to an area of the body and is involved in perceiving bodily sensation.

We know that the somatosensory map is quite malleable, and can change when limbs are amputated and so no longer feed information into the system.

What happens when new limbs are attached is still largely a mystery as this type of transplant is a relatively new procedure. Nevertheless, this is now beginning to be studied and, as the Neurophilosophy article recounts, it’s starting to show us how the brain responds to a changing body:

One consequence of this functional reorganization is phantom limb syndrome, which Savage experienced for a short time following removal of his hand. This is thought to occur because although the deprived somatosensory cortical region takes on another function, it somehow retains a representation of the amputated limb. As a result, the amputee will occasionally experience sensations, sometimes painful ones, which are perceived to be in the missing body part.

In Savage’s case, it was thought that these changes may be irreversible, because his brain had been deprived of inputs from the right hand for some 35 years. But a team of neuroscientists led by Scott Frey of the University of Oregon now show that this is not the case. In a functional neuroimaging study published today in Current Biology, they report that Savage’s somatosensory cortex has been restored to something like its pre-amputation state, with the transplanted hand “recapturing” the cortical area which represented his own right hand.

The research team have put the full text of the scientific report online as a pdf file if you want to get to the nitty-gritty, otherwise the Neurophilosophy article is an elegant summary of a fascinating study.

Link to Neurophilosophy on neuroscience of hand transplant.
pdf of scientific paper.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Bias we can believe in

Time magazine has a recent article on how the Obama team are making behavioural economics the centre of their financial policies in the hope of altering the behaviour of US citizens. But where are the sceptical voices?

Behavioural economics is primarily an academic discipline where researchers investigate how our cognitive biases divert us from strictly rational reasoning and affect our financial decision-making.

More recently, however, researchers have started touting these findings as a basis for making financial policy. This was most conspicuously done in Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s book Nudge, which the article notes was an inspiration for the Obama campaign.

In fact, the article reveals that several well-known behavioural economists were advisors for the Obama campaign team:

The existence of this behavioral dream team ‚Äî which also included best-selling authors Dan Ariely of MIT (Predictably Irrational) and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein of the University of Chicago (Nudge) as well as Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman of Princeton ‚Äî has never been publicly disclosed, even though its members gave Obama white papers on messaging, fundraising and rumor control as well as voter mobilization. All their proposals ‚Äî among them the famous online fundraising lotteries that gave small donors a chance to win face time with Obama ‚Äî came with footnotes to peer-reviewed academic research. “It was amazing to have these bullet points telling us what to do and the science behind it,” Moffo tells TIME. “These guys really know what makes people tick.”

President Obama is still relying on behavioral science. But now his Administration is using it to try to transform the country. Because when you know what makes people tick, it’s a lot easier to help them change.

And the fact that Obama has picked behavioural economist and Nudge co-author Cass Sunstein to head up the policy tweaking ‘Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs’ office is evidence that behavioural science is being taken seriously in the new administration.

What’s remarkable, however, is how so few of the high profile stories on this new influence in the Obama team has asked any difficult questions – they’re all almost relentlessly enthusiastic.

For example, one major problem is knowing how well largely lab-based studies will scale up to whole-population economic systems.

It’s perhaps no accident that almost all the articles cite a 2001 study that found that simply making the US’s 401(k) retirement savings scheme opt-out instead of opt-in vastly increased participation simply because it’s a hassle to change and employees perceive the ‘default’ as investment advice.

But it’s probably true to say that this example has been so widely repeated but it’s one of the minority of behavioural economics studies that have looked at the relation between the existence of a cognitive bias and real-world economic data from the population.

And it’s notable that behavioural economists who specialise in making this link, a field they call behavioural macroeconomics, seem absent from the Obama inner circle.

In fact, the two most prominent, George Akerlof and Bob Shiller, are certainly guys worth listening to.

Akerlof won the Nobel prize in economics for his work on behavioural macroeconomics and Shiller has predicted the tech crash in his 2000 book Irrational Exuberance, and then the housing crash in the second edition.

It is essential to check lab findings against real-world economic data because the responses of small groups of undergraduates should not be the basis of economic policy.

Link to Time article ‘How Obama is Using the Science of Change’.
Link to Economist on behavioural macroeconomics book by Akerlof and Shiller.
Link to Atlantic interview with Akerlof on behaviour and economic policy.
Link to Atlantic interview with Shiller on the same.

Imaging the transgendered brain

For the first time, the brain structure of male-to-female transsexuals has been investigated in living individuals using MRI brain scans, helping to fuel the debate over the possible neural basis of gender identity.

The scientific article, shortly to appear in the neuroscience journal NeuroImage, used MRI brain scans and a technique called voxel based morphometry to compare grey matter in a group of male-to-female transexuals to groups of males and females who have never had gender-identity concerns.

This is not the first time that brain structure has been compared in this way, but earlier studies had been based on post-mortem comparisons. These three studies had found that certain areas in male-to-female transsexuals more commonly resembled the equivalent area in females than males.

This has led some researchers to go as far as suggesting that perhaps the differences are present from birth and that gender-identity difficulties could result from the body and brain following different paths as the developing foetus begins to develop into a specific sex.

However, one difficulty is that all the transgender people examined in these post-mortem studies had been on oestrogen treatment to feminize their bodies, and it hasn’t been clear whether the differences were due to the effect of this hormone rather than something present before.

This new study, led by neuroscientist Eileen Luders, specifically recruited male-to-female transsexuals who had never taken oestrogen and, being in living people, wasn’t affected by whatever led to the person’s death.

In contrast to previous investigations, this new study found that male-to-female transsexuals grey-matter was similar in most areas of the brain to the male rather than female comparison group.

Except, that is, for one area, the putamen, a deep brain structure that forms part of the basal ganglia – known for its wide range of functions and connections to the frontal lobes and action control areas.

Because we know so little about the neuroscience of self-image and gender-identity it’s almost impossible to draw any conclusions for the fact that this specific area seems more ‘feminine’, or that the majority of the other areas seem more ‘masculine’ in terms of size.

What this study does do, however, is add to the increasing evidence that there are some detectable neurological differences in the brains of transgendered people. We’re just not in a position to say much about the significance of this yet.

Link to PubMed entry for ‘in press’ paper.

The myth of Thomas Szasz?

Psychiatrist and iconoclast Thomas Szasz takes part in a hard-hitting interview on ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind where he shows that at the age of 89 he’s lost none of his fire which has raged through psychiatry for almost 50 years.

It’s a two part interview with the second appearing next week and it’s classic Szasz.

He’s an important thinker because he relentlessly attacks the conceptual foundations of psychiatry, the definitions which usually can’t be empirically tested because they’re philosophical issues – in other words, the assumptions we need to make about the world before we can start measuring anything.

Szasz comes from a classical liberal perspective, citing the rights and responsibilities of the individual as primary in any social decision-making.

As psychiatry is involved in changing behaviour, detaining individuals against their will, and discharging responsibility for serious crimes through the insanity defence – all based on what Szasz argues is a flawed concept of ‘mental illness’ – he fundamentally opposes much of the psychiatric system.

He’s always fascinating to read or listen to as there are always ‘that man is a genius’ and ‘how can he be so stupid?’ moments following closely together. Of course, not everyone agrees on which are which.

The presenter, Natasha Mitchell, does a fantastic job of pressing hard questions and doesn’t shy away from tackling accusations of anti-psychiatry, medical irresponsibility and collusion with scientology (next week).

Great stuff.

Link to AITM ‘Thomas Szasz speaks’ Part 1.
Link to more background on the AITM blog.

Solitary confinement as psychological torture

The New Yorker magazine has just published an important article questioning whether the widespread use of solitary confinement in the US prison system should be outlawed as a form of torture.

It’s an in-depth piece that piece that looks at numerous cases of people who have experienced solitary confinement first hand, either as hostages or legitimate prisoners, and discusses the psychological impact of this extreme form of social isolation.

I’ve just looked up the research on the effects of solitary confinement and there’s remarkably little, although everything I could find that directly addressed the question found that it had a negative impact on the mind.

In fact, the ‘The Istanbul statement on the use and effects of solitary confinement’ [pdf], an international consensus statement on solitary confinement, notes that it “harms prisoners who are not previously mentally ill and tends to worsen the mental health of those who are” and questions whether it breaches UN Human Rights laws.

It also describes the punishment as being linked to “long list of symptoms ranging from insomnia and confusion to hallucinations and psychosis”.

The New Yorker article contrasts the research findings with the fact that the US has a whole ‘supermax‘ prison system dedicated to solitary confinement and the highest population of prisoners kept in these conditions in the world.

It also notes the fact that there is no evidence that solitary confinement actually reduces prison violence, which it is intended to do.

The article is an important and hard-hitting piece that tries to get to convey the impact of extreme social isolation and asks some difficult questions over a common practice in the US justice system.

Link to New Yorker article ‘Hellhole’.

A dark inheritance

There’s a brief but powerful piece in today’s New York Times on inheritance, environment and suicide by the daughter of poet Anne Sexton, who ended her own life in 1974 while in her mid-forties.

The article reflects on the recent suicide of Nicholas Hughes, the son of poet Sylvia Plath who also die in the same way.

It’s a striking piece because Sexton’s daughter has made her own suicide attempts and tries to untangle what contributes to a risk for self-harm which can run through families.

If you’ve not read it, Edge, Plath’s last poem, written only days before she died is a remarkable thing, dark yet calm and at once fluent and disjointed.

Link to NYT piece ‘A Tortured Inheritance’ (via Trouble with Spikol)

2009-04-03 Spike activity

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The Economist has an article on the impact of poverty on the developing mind and brain.

Orange flavour antipsychotics are launched by seemingly self-paradoying pharmaceutical company Otsuka.

The New York Times has an article on the art and science of dreaming in the 17th century.

The future of Big I artificial intelligence is discussed by H+ Magazine in a report from a recent cutting-edge conference.

The BPS Research Digest has a great piece on the limits of the ‘paradox of choice’.

An interesting new blog by forensic psychologist Marisa Mauro kicks off on Psychology Today

The Wall Street Journal tackles identity construction on social media. Good piece although the same ground covered by Sherry Turkle 15 years ago.

Music as a possible form of cognitive treatment is discussed by The New York Times.

Not Exactly Rocket Science on how the finding of a deformed skull of prehistoric child suggests that early humans cared for disabled children.

A video of a man with a fishing spear in his head accompanies an article by The Times. Despite the dramatic injury, he survived.

Medical Economics on news that the number of Big Pharma lovin’ doctors is dropping in the US.

Autism immerses 2-year-olds in a <a href="http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/42316/title/Autism_immerses_2-year-olds_in_a_synchronized_world
“>synchronized world, reports Science News.

Discover Magazine has video from a neuroscientist panel discussion on unlocking the secrets and powers of the brain.

‘The nightmares of Puerto Ricans’ is an upcoming article in the Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry journal.

The Scientist has several freely available articles on the neuroscience of <a href="Sleep article
http://www.the-scientist.com/toc/2009/4/”>sleep in it’s latest edition.

Philosopher Ned Block puts a pre-print of a paper entitled ‘Comparing the Major Theories of Consciousness’ online as a pdf.

The New York Times discusses how medical dogma often triumphs over scientific evidence if the data seems to contradict a good story or traditional treatment option.

Sociologist Yochai Benkler discusses social reasoning and the myth of rationality in an article for Edge.

The Onion reports the shocking news that 98% of babies are manic depressive.

Spanking ‘brings couples together, says an entirely serious article in New Scientist.

BBC News reports that sleep problems correlate with suicide attempts.

‘Voice lie-detector’ made by lawyer-happy critic-suing company Nemesysco is found to be no better at detecting lies than flipping a coin in an independent test just published in Journal of Forensic Science.

Psychological Science has a study finding that once practical stress is taken out caregiving is associated with a decreased mortality risk.

The neuroscience of the ‘money illusion‘ is discussed in an excellent piece on Frontal Cortex.

A life’s journey in neuroscience

New Scientist has an excellent cover article on ‘The five ages of the brain’, looking at how the brain changes as we grow and how these transformations are reflected in our lives.

It breaks the life span down into ‘five ages’, with a short article for each – tackling gestation, childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.

Each gives a concise introduction to some of the latest findings on how the brain differs in each time period, although for a slight counter-point, I would recommend a recent edition of ABC Radio National’s All in the Mind.

The programme takes a sceptical look at the emerging neuroscience of adolescence, largely based on the fact that adolescence as a distinct developmental stage is a relatively recent cultural invention of the Western world.

Psychologist Robert Epstein argues that the differences in the teen brain are relatively minor, and that the stereotype of the ‘teen in turmoil’ is not a biological fact of brain development, but a result of the cultural pressures put upon adolescents.

The NewSci collection and the All In the Mind programme complement each other nicely and tackle some of the current hot issues in developmental neuroscience.

Link to NewSci ‘Five Ages of the Brain’ special.
Link to AITM on ‘The modern teenager: myth or marvel?’

Brain washing in post-war London

BBC Radio 4 recently broadcast an excellent documentary on psychiatrist William Sargant who began experiments in ‘brain washing’ likely at a behest of the British secret services in post-war London.

Sargant was rumoured to have links to the notorious and secret CIA MKULTRA project that attempted to develop ‘brain washing’ or ‘programming’ techniques that were later condemned as unethical when they came to light in the 1970s.

A pioneer in early medical treatments for mental illness, he became famous after writing his book Introduction to Physical Methods of Treatment in Psychiatry and became notorious after developing techniques to keep patients asleep for weeks on end with barbiturates and electro-convulsive therapy.

After publishing some early work he was apparently contacted by UK spooks and contracted to do secret research on ‘brain washing’ style research.

He later wrote a the widely read Battle for the Mind which discussed the psychology and neuroscience of brain washing.

Interestingly, Lord David Owen, the British ex-Foreign secretary, leader of the SDP party and current member of the House of Lords, was Sargant’s registrar when he worked as a doctor at St Thomas’ Hospital in London.

Unfortunately, the BBC have recently butchered their Radio 4 website and ruined their archive by putting everything on iPlayer, so you can only listen to the programme for another 5 days and only if you’re based on the UK.

However, the programme seems to have found it’s way to Google Video, so you can listen to a streamed version there.

Link to BBC iPlayer version.
Link to alternative streamed version.

Chicks dig men in flashy cars, no word on penis size

A study ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology sadly supports the stereotype that chicks dig men in flashy cars.

The attractiveness-boosting effect only affects women’s perceptions of men, however. Men were unmoved by chicks in hot rods, and neither sex’s attractiveness ratings for same-sex drivers was affected by the car they were in.

Effect of manipulated prestige-car ownership on both sex attractiveness ratings.

Dunn MJ, Searle R.

Br J Psychol. 2009 Mar 19. [Epub ahead of print]

Previous studies have shown that male attractiveness can be enhanced by manipulation of status through, for example, the medium of costume. The present study experimentally manipulated status by seating the same target model (male and female matched for attractiveness) expressing identical facial expressions and posture in either a ‘high status’ (Silver Bentley Continental GT) or a ‘neutral status’ (Red Ford Fiesta ST) motor-car.

A between-subjects design was used whereby the above photographic images were presented to male and female participants for attractiveness rating. Results showed that the male target model was rated as significantly more attractive on a rating scale of 1-10 when presented to female participants in the high compared to the neutral status context. Males were not influenced by status manipulation, as there was no significant difference between attractiveness ratings for the female seated in the high compared to the neutral condition.

It would appear that despite a noticeable increase in female ownership of prestige/luxury cars over recent years males, unlike females, remain oblivious to such cues in matters pertaining to opposite-sex attraction. These findings support the results of previous status enhancement of attractiveness studies especially those espousing sex differences in mate preferences are due to sex-specific adaptations.

An interesting study testing a well-known stereotype, but what the world really wants to know is whether the clich√© about men with flashy cars having small penises is true.

Considering the car industry and scientific psychology were born at about the same time, it’s disgraceful that such a fundamental study in the psychology of social willy waving has yet to be completed.

Link to PubMed entry for study.

Duck and coverage

Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe is a comedy news analysis programme that often has a serious point. A recent episode had a section examining TV coverage of the tragic school shooting that recently occurred in Germany and its relation to the motivations of potential copycat killers.

The video clip contrasts the advice of a forensic psychiatrist on how to cover the story in the media to prevent further tragedies and the actual coverage the incident received. I’m sure you can guess the rest.

The forensic psychiatrist being interviewed is Park Dietz, who frequently appears in the media but who has also done a great deal of research in the area, including the classic article ‘Mass, serial and sensational homicides’ where he noted that publicity was a major factor in driving these sorts of public killing sprees.

This was published in 1986 and more than 20 years later satirists are being fed material by TV stations who can’t resist sensationalist coverage.

Both funny and uncomfortably chilling.

Link to Newswipe on media coverage of school shooting.
Link to full text of ‘Mass, serial and sensational homicides’.

Encephalon 67 raises a toast

The 67th edition of the Encephalon psychology and neuroscience carnival has just appeared online, this time put together by the Neuroskeptic blog.

A couple of my favourites include Neurophilosophy on the neuroscience of phantom limbs – apotemnophilia, missing after amputation or additional to the normal four, and a couple of good posts on the neuropsychology of religious belief from NeuroWhoa!.

There’s plenty more where those came from, so do go and check out the latest edition.

Link to Encephalon 67.

Hallucinating roman chariots and goats in overcoats

I’ve just found a description of some spectacular and fantastical hallucinations from a case of Charles Bonnet syndrome, reported in a review article on the neuroscience of this curious hallucinatory state.

It’s one of the most florid cases I’ve ever come across and the experience seems both wondrous and terrifying in equal measure:

A 73-year-old woman who lived alone presented with anxiety-provoking visual hallucinations. Inch-long black ants scurried across her kitchen floor, walls and windows. In desperation, she began spraying insecticide throughout the house. Her neighbour, whose features were seemingly masked by the insects, called an ambulance. Floating seahorses and featherless chickens joined the colonies of ants in the Emergency Department.

A Roman chariot, the rider dressed in gold, flashed across the curtain several times. On the ward, tropical vines grew from the foot of her bed. A man stood with thick brown tree trunks for legs and thick green branches for arms. Nurses‚Äô heads would shrink and then expand before melting into the floor. Brightly coloured fairies carrying wands invited her for walks around the hospital grounds.

She once caught herself telling them to get off a road at which point they donned diamond coats, jumped into a wooden carriage, and rode up to her bedside. Ants in the mirror were at times replaced by an elephant‚Äôs trunk blotting out half her face. Her hair in the reflection flowed with cobwebs and the basin was matted with hair and whiskers.

Cobwebs spilled from her cereal bowl at breakfast. The bathroom floor was covered with water that vanished whenever she tried to mop it up. The carpet in the room would lift away from the floor, roll up in the form of a snake, and slither out the door. A little girl and boy with a black and white dog stood next to the bed, as did extraterrestrial-like beings with large domed-shaped heads and slitted black eyes.

Twisted heads with grotesque faces and bulbous eyes peered out from the wall, while little red carriages, trains and push bikes disappeared into it. Further history revealed an experience of ‚Äòant‚Äô hallucinations 4 months previously but the images disappeared after 2 weeks. She did not seek medical advice at that time fearing that she might be considered ‚Äòa bit odd‚Äô.

Throughout the hospital admission she was rarely free from hallucinations and would repeatedly ask for reassurance that she was ‚Äònot going mad‚Äô. Two months after discharge the hallucinations were still intrusive. She owned a small black dog but would see several dogs resembling oversized greyhounds with unusually long snouts in her daughter‚Äôs yard.

A man and a goat, both wearing grey hats and overcoats, often stood beside her before wandering off together down a crooked road. She grew accustomed to seeing a baby seated on the lounge chair wearing grey clothes. It smiled but made no sounds. Caterpillars and tree frogs began joining her for the evening bath.

She began to notice that distractions, such as listening to the radio and attending to household chores, dampened the hallucinations, while solitude, particularly during the evening hours, tended to heighten them.

At follow-up 1 year later, she was experiencing very much the same hallucinations but was more cognisant of their unreality and less anxious as a result. The only new hallucination that had since appeared was that of a bright kaleidoscopic array which would transiently emanate from her central field of vision.

The article has another case study which is also quite spectacular, and, curiously, also features a Roman chariot.

One of the most interestingly things about Charles Bonnet syndrome is that fact that it is typically associated with the most complex hallucinations, but usually due to damage to the retina or early visual pathway.

In other words, damage to the part of the visual system which deals with the most basic aspects of vision (detecting lines, light and dark and so on) can cause the most spectacular visual distortions.

It’s not fully clear why this is, but one of the most popular theories is that visual information gathered by the initial part of the system is used to limit the interpretations made by the perceptual processes later in the stream which are focussed on working out significance and meaning.

We can see this system breaking down a bit when we see momentary ‘pictures’ in TV static or in flames, as the fuzzy input means many interpretations can be made.

However, when we’re looking at more ordered scenes, our interpretation is usually more constrained – it’s more difficult to interpret light patterns from a pencil as something else.

The theory goes that when we can’t process light patterns very successfully, owing to damage to the early visual system, the interpretation processes go wild, so hallucinations are ‘released’ and cavort unconstrained through our conscious mind.

Link to article on the neuroscience of Charles Bonnet syndrome.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Misfortunes, Troubles, Disappointments

I’m just reading Lisa Appignanesi’s so-far excellent book Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present where she reproduces an 1810 table of causes of insanity from London’s Bethlem Hospital on p54.

It was compiled by the physician William Black and lists various afflictions that have apparently caused mental illness followed by a count of the number of affected patients.

Misfortunes, Troubles, Disappointments

Grief (206)
Religion and Methodism (90)
Love (74)
Jealousy (9)
Pride (8)
Study (15)
Fright (31)
Drink and Intoxication (58)
Fevers (110)
Childbed [i.e. birth or nursing babies] (79)
Obstruction (10)
Family and Heredity (115)
Contusions and Fractures of the Skull (12)
Venereal (14)
Small Pox (7)
Ulcers and Scabs dried up (5)