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THE-TLSThe literary glamour of madness
Take a quick glance at the annals of literature and you can find madness in bucketloads: Hemingway undergoing painful electroconvulsive treatment, Robert Lowell’s stint in McLean Hospital, David Foster Wallace’s post-suicide canonization, Virginia Woolf with her pockets stuffed full of stones. Suffering can seem like a vital ingredient in the production of great art.
SCIENCEDIRECTAluminium in brain tissue in autism
Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder of unknown aetiology. It is suggested to involve both genetic susceptibility and environmental factors including in the latter environmental toxins. Human exposure to the environmental toxin aluminium has been linked, if tentatively, to autism spectrum disorder.
NATUREAI-controlled brain implants for mood disorders tested in people
Researchers funded by the US military are developing appliances to record neural activity and automatically stimulate the brain to treat mental illness.
The EconomistMore evidence that autism is linked to gut bacteria
Understanding that link may be crucial to treatment
NYTIMESDid You Just Forget, or Is It Something More Serious?
Memory lapses that disrupt daily living or cause a person to withdraw from family are more serious than absent-mindedness or confusing names, experts said.
narrativeSecret Life of an Autistic Stripper
I've always had trouble reading social cues, but in the strip club, where rules and roles are crystal clear, I finally learned to connect.
SAGEPUBTobacco and psychosis
In this issue of the journal, McGrath and associates examined whether age at first tobacco use was associated with diagnosed non-affective psychosis, hallucinations or delusion-like experiences among 3752 individuals born at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, between 1981 and 1984 (McGrath et al., 2015). They found that those who commenced tobacco use aged 15 years or younger were significantly more like to have non-affective psychosis, delusion-like experiences and hallucinations.
statnewsPhysicians aren’t ‘burning out.’ They’re suffering from moral injury
Physicians on the front lines of health care today are sometimes described as going to battle. It’s an apt metaphor. Physicians, like combat soldiers, often face a profound and unrecognized threat to their well-being: moral injury.
NATIONALGEOGRAPHICHow Jetlag Disrupts The Ticks of Your Microbial Clock
Your genome is the same right now as it was yesterday, last week, last year, or the day you were born. But your microbiomes—the combined genes of all the trillions of microbes that share your body—have shifted since the sun came up this morning. And they will change again before the next sunrise.
GuardianWhy what we think we know about schizophrenia is wrong
When novelist and former mental health nurse Nathan Filer met a patient who wouldn’t take his pills, it started him on a journey into the complex and contradictory world of schizophrenia
BRAINPICKINGSMental Health, Free Will, and Your Microbiome
“We are legion, each and every one of us. Always a ‘we’ and never a ‘me.’” // Even when we are alone, we are never alone. We exist in symbiosis — a wonderful term that refers to different organisms living together. // All zoology is really ecology. We cannot fully understand the lives of animals without understanding our microbes and our symbioses with them. And we cannot fully appreciate our own microbiome without appreciating how those of our fellow species enrich and influence their lives. We need to zoom out to the entire animal kingdom, while zooming in to see the hidden ecosystems that exist in every creature.
COLLECTORSWEEKLYAbandoned Suitcases Reveal Private Lives of Insane Asylum Patients
If you were committed to a psychiatric institution, unsure if you’d ever return to the life you knew before, what would you take with you? That sobering question hovers like an apparition over each of the Willard Asylum suitcases.
WikipediaStendhal syndrome
A psychosomatic disorder that causes rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations when an individual is exposed to an experience of great personal significance, particularly viewing art.
NPRCan Mental Illness Be Prevented In The Womb?
Researchers are exploring changes in prenatal nutrition to lower risks for future mental disorders. The work is preliminary, but there is ample precedent for maternal diet affecting children's health.
NEWYORKERDo Our Bones Influence Our Minds?
The only tangible truth: each thing influences everything in every conceivable way. (Or... actually, let's not limit it to the conceivable.) // In the mid-nineteen-nineties, a young French geneticist and physician named Gerard Karsenty became curious about a mysterious protein, called osteocalcin, that is found at high concentrations in the skeleton. He worked with mice that had been engineered to lack the substance, expecting to find problems with their bones. But their skeletons appeared essentially normal, he says, a result that left him “deeply depressed.”
NYTIMESThe Americanization of Mental Illness
"For more than a generation now, we in the West have aggressively spread our modern knowledge of mental illness around the world. We have done this in the name of science, believing that our approaches reveal the biological basis of psychic suffering and dispel prescientific myths and harmful stigma. There is now good evidence to suggest that in the process of teaching the rest of the world to think like us, we’ve been exporting our Western “symptom repertoire” as well. That is, we’ve been changing not only the treatments but also the expression of mental illness in other cultures. Indeed, a handful of mental-health disorders — depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and anorexia among them — now appear to be spreading across cultures with the speed of contagious diseases. These symptom clusters are becoming the lingua franca of human suffering, replacing indigenous forms of mental illness."
THEVERGEGut feelings: the future of psychiatry may be inside your stomach
Her parents were running out of hope. Their teenage daughter, Mary, had been diagnosed with a severe case of obsessive–compulsive disorder (OCD), as well as ADHD. They had dragged her to clinics around the country in an effort to thwart the scary, intrusive thoughts and the repetitive behaviors that Mary felt compelled to perform. Even a litany of psychotropic medications didn’t make much difference. It seemed like nothing could stop the relentless nature of Mary’s disorder.
tandfonlineThe “Truman Show” delusion: Psychosis in the global village
Mr D. was working on a reality television show when he was hospitalised after causing a public disturbance. While working on the production of the show, he came to believe that he was the one who was actually being broadcast: ‘‘I thought I was a secret contestant on a reality show. I thought I was being filmed. I was convinced I was a contestant and later the TV show would reveal me.’’ He believed his thoughts were being controlled by a film crew paid for by his family. During the 2 weeks prior to admission, he experienced decreased sleep, pressured speech, irritability, paranoia, and hyperreligiosity. The patient carried a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and had had two previous hospitalisations for manic episodes.
NatureTime to talk about why so many postgrads have poor mental health
An outpouring on Twitter highlights the acute pressures on young scientists.
PRI.ORGOur unique 'microbial aura' travels with us wherever we go
Almost weekly, it seems, scientists confirm the importance and influence of the microbiome, the collection of bacteria and other microbes that live inside and on…
WikipediaGaslighting
Gaslighting is a form of manipulation that seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, hoping to make them question their own memory, perception, and sanity.
The GuardianPsychiatrists under fire in mental health battle
British Psychological Society to launch attack on rival profession, casting doubt on biomedical model of mental illness
PLOSONEMediating Role of Activity Level in the Depressive Realism Effect
Several classic studies have concluded that the accuracy of identifying uncontrollable situations depends heavily on depressive mood. Nondepressed participants tend to exhibit an optimistic illusion of control, whereas depressed participants tend to better detect a lack of control. Recently, we suggested that the different activity levels (measured as the probability of responding during a contingency learning task) exhibited by depressed and nondepressed individuals is partly responsible for this effect.
NewYorkerHow Reality TV Changed the Nature of Delusions
In 2012, a psychiatrist named Joel Gold published a paper in the journal Cognitive Neuropsychiatry describing a trend he had noticed among his patients. In the course of the preceding decade, he had seen a number of young men who believed that they were being watched—that, in fact, their entire lives were being recorded by, and orchestrated for, hidden cameras that followed them at all times. A few of the patients compared their situation to “The Truman Show,” a 1998 movie starring Jim Carrey as a man who discovers that he’s living in an elaborately produced TV program.
WiredIn India, high-pressure exams are creating a student suicide crisis
From across India, thousands of students travel to the northern city of Kota to receive private coaching in the hopes of being accepted into one of the country's top technical colleges. And for some, the pressure to succeed is overwhelming
AeonA culture of hyper-reality made paranoid delusions true
Schizophrenics used to see demons and spirits. Now they talk about actors and hidden cameras – and make a lot of sense
digest.bpsHave we overestimated the effectiveness of psychotherapy?
Most people who undertake psychotherapy seem to benefit from it. How do we know? Arguably, the most important evidence comes from meta-analyses that combine the results from many – sometimes hundreds – of randomly controlled trials. Based on this, it’s been estimated that psychotherapy is effective for about 80 per cent of people (meanwhile, between five to 10 per cent of clients may suffer adverse effects).
frontiersinLeg exercise is critical to brain and nervous system health
Groundbreaking research shows that neurological health depends as much on signals sent by the body’s large, leg muscles to the brain as it does on directives from the brain to the muscles. Published in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the study fundamentally alters brain and nervous system medicine — giving doctors new clues as to why patients with motor neuron disease, multiple sclerosis, spinal muscular atrophy and other neurological diseases often rapidly decline when their movement becomes limited.
TruthHawkHow Web Forums Make Neuroticism Viral
Web forums are full of neurotics. They breed neuroticism and make it go viral. Learn how and why this happens.
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