Category: mental-illness

Nitrate-Cured Meats Like Jerky Linked to Hospitalization for Mania | Inverse

Eating lots of hot dogs and beef jerky is perhaps not the wisest choice for physical health, but until recently, doing so seemed fine as far as mental health was concerned. But a new paper, released Wednesday in Molecular Psychiatry, has raised concerns about the connection between eating nitrated dry-cured meats and mania. One author of the study, Johns Hopkins pediatrics professor Dr. Robert Yolken, is here to set the record straight.

In the study, Yolken and his colleagues conducted a ten-year analysis of health and nutrition data on 1,101 people with and without psychiatric disorders, including mania, bipolar depression, major depression, and schizophrenia. The analysis showed that a history of eating nitrated dry-cured meat is linked to an increased likelihood of being hospitalized for mania — a complex and poorly understood characteristic feature of bipolar disorder. The link only applied to people hospitalized for manic episodes in particular — not bipolar disorder in general — and no causal relationship has been established. The researchers hypothesize that the underlying cause of the connection is the the consumption of nitrites and nitrates.

Nitrate-Cured Meats Like Jerky Linked to Hospitalization for Mania | Inverse

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist. It is Tony Schwartz who wrote “The Art of the Deal” and spent many hours with Trump over a year and a half. He was on “AM Joy” today and said that if Trump had the power of a true dictator he would be as murderous as Kim.

He said Trump is a mix of paranoia, grandiosity, and cruelty.

He said, “his cruelty is a way of punishing people who he thinks are his enemies.” He went on to say that the things Trump said about Kim demonstrate that Trump has no conscience.

Schwartz emphasized that Trump has no empathy, no heart, and no soul. He said that he grew up with a deep inner emptiness.

“Trump isn’t in the business of empathy, he’s in the business of Trump.”

Schwartz is not a trained mental health professional. However, as a layperson, he has an excellent understanding of psychopathology. He doesn’t make a precise psychiatric diagnosis beyond saying Trump is acting out a severe personality disorder marked by dangerous & pathological narcissism, grandiosity, and paranoia.

The person who knows and understands Trump the best isn’t a psychologist: + 300 excellent comments

The Genetics of Schizophrenia – The New Yorker

That schizophrenia runs in families was evident even to the person who first defined the illness. In 1911, Eugen Bleuler, a Swiss-German psychiatrist, published a book describing a series of cases of men and women, typically in their teens and early twenties, whose thoughts had begun to tangle and degenerate. “In this malady, the associations lose their continuity,” Bleuler wrote. “The threads between thoughts are torn.” Psychotic visions and paranoid thoughts flashed out of nowhere. Some patients “feel themselves weak, their spirit escapes, they will never survive the day. There is a growth in their heads. Their bones have turned liquid; their hearts have turned into stone. . . . The patient’s wife must not use eggs in cooking, otherwise he will grow feathers.” His patients were often trapped between flickering emotional states, unable to choose between two radically opposed visions, Bleuler noted. “You devil, you angel, you devil, you angel,” one woman said to her lover.

Bleuler tried to find an explanation for the mysterious symptoms, but there was only one seemingly common element: schizophrenic patients tended to have first-degree relatives who were also schizophrenic. He had no tools to understand the mechanism behind the heredity. The word “gene” had been coined just two years before Bleuler published his book. The notion that a mental illness could be carried across generations by unitary, indivisible factors—corpuscles of information threading through families—would have struck most of Bleuler’s contemporaries as mad in its own right. Still, Bleuler was astonishingly prescient about the complex nature of inheritance. “If one is looking for ‘the heredity,’ one can nearly always find it,” he wrote. “We will not be able to do anything about it even later on, unless the single factor of heredity can be broken down into many hereditary factors along specific lines.”


The Genetics of Schizophrenia – The New Yorker

To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome

We start with the case of a woman who experienced unbearable tragedy. In 1899, this Parisian bride, Madame M., had her first child. Shockingly, the child was abducted and substituted with a different infant, who soon died. She then had twin girls. One grew into healthy adulthood, while the other, again, was abducted, once more replaced with a different, dying infant. She then had twin boys. One was abducted, while the other was fatally poisoned.

Madame M. searched for her abducted babies; apparently, she was not the only victim of this nightmarish trauma, as she often heard the cries of large groups of abducted children rising from the cellars of Paris.

As if all this pain was not enough, Madame M.’s sole surviving child was abducted and replaced with an imposter of identical appearance. And soon the same fate befell Madame M.’s husband. The poor woman spent days searching for her abducted loved ones, attempting to free groups of other abducted children from hiding places, and starting the paperwork to divorce the man who had replaced her husband.

 

Nautilus

You Will Not Believe The Outrageous Ways Big Pharma Has Bribed Doctors To Shill Drugs

At the 2010 meeting of a psychiatric association in New Orleans, a psychiatrist from the East coast shared her anger with me about the recent clamp down on Pharma financial perks to doctors. “They used to wine us and dine us. An SSRI maker flew my entire office to a Caribbean island…but now nothing,” she lamented.

She was right. Before news organizations and the 2010 Physician Financial Transparency Reports (also called the Sunshine Act, part of the Affordable Care Act) reported the outrageous amount of money Pharma was giving doctors to prescribe its new, brand-name drugs, there was almost no limit to what was spent to encourage prescribing.

At another medical conference I attended, soon after, when it was suggested that doctors not accept free meals from Pharma reps because of indebtedness, a doctor asked in all earnestness “but what do we do for lunch?”

He was right. Doctors seldom have to go hungry at lunchtime when Pharma reps are around. Not only do reps reliably bring lunch and free drug samples, until fairly recently they wielded thousand-dollar budgets to send doctors on trips to resorts, golf vacations and to sought after sports events. No wonder the docs saw them.

NCNP.org

The Man Who Tried to Redeem the World with Logic

Walter Pitts was used to being bullied. He’d been born into a tough family in Prohibition-era Detroit, where his father, a boiler-maker, had no trouble raising his fists to get his way. The neighborhood boys weren’t much better. One afternoon in 1935, they chased him through the streets until he ducked into the local library to hide. The library was familiar ground, where he had taught himself Greek, Latin, logic, and mathematics—better than home, where his father insisted he drop out of school and go to work. Outside, the world was messy. Inside, it all made sense.

Nautil.us

Treating Mental Illness in New York, From All Angles

As too many people know only too well, mental health is a world of unmet needs and untold suffering. Society’s ability to identify and treat emotional ailments and addiction is painfully inadequate. Families, left to themselves, struggle and fail. They often lack the resources to confront problems or don’t try: two things in plentiful supply are ignorance and denial.

Into this void, bearing a multiagency “road map” with a kitchen-sink approach, has stepped Mayor Bill de Blasio. In an emotional news conference on Monday, he unveiled a citywide initiative, called “ThriveNYC,” to tackle mental illness and addiction.

NYTimes

What the Hell Is Wrong With America? 7 Myths That Prop Up Mass Shooting Culture

When is America going to wake up and realize that as long as we as a society allow easy access to guns, we are complicit in mass killings?

Tragedies like the Umpqua Community College carnage are not inevitable facts of life in America.They are a consequence of a society that doesn’t want to take a hard look at the roots and causes of violence, and understands that you don’t make deadly force widely and readily available to human beings.

Another gun-wielding young guy has left a trail of death, mayhem, injuries and maimed lives in a murderous spree, this time at a rural community college. The unfolding media coverage has featured residents of Roseburg, Ore., saying they didn’t think that could happen there. Others have replied that violence in America is just like violence anywhere else. Pro-gun advocates say the tragedy could have been stopped if students were armed. (Some were nearby but said they didn’t want to intervene because they feared getting shot by SWAT teams.) On the political front, almost everyone has expressed sympathy for victims but predicted that, yet again, Congress will not act to end easy access to guns.

These reactions reveal what is deeply wrong with America, from myths about where violence occurs to ignoring the ways in which traumatized people act out. Let’s start with the myths that perpetuate the cycle of gun violence:

AlterNet

Rikers: Where Mental Illness Meets Brutality in Jail

After being arrested on a misdemeanor charge following a family dispute last year, Jose Bautista was unable to post $250 bail and ended up in a jail cell on Rikers Island.

A few days later, he tore his underwear, looped it around his neck and tried to hang himself from the cell’s highest bar. Four correction officers rushed in and cut him down. But instead of notifying medical personnel, they handcuffed Mr. Bautista, forced him to lie face down on the cell floor and began punching him with such force, according to New York City investigators, that he suffered a perforated bowel and needed emergency surgery.

NYTimes

Robin Williams was one of many comics battling depression

Note: I usually avoid TEDtalks because they tend to be peppered with over-generalizations and oversimplifications presented as facts. [They also have the feel of a public confession with the inevitable “feel good” bonding.] In Breel’s talk, he makes two inaccurate statements:

1. “Real depression is being sad when everything in your life is going right.” That excludes every case in which a person is depressed because they have, or had, stress and trauma. A common reason a person can become depressed is when s/he feels little control over what happens to him or her or over their lives. Which is why a person may become depressed not just when faced with a major loss or severe abuse but also when promoted (with new responsibilities) or when experiencing success that draws a lot of public attention.

2. “Depression isn’t chicken pox. It’s not something you beat and it’s gone forever.” Not true. There are individuals who may be depressed just once or a few times and never again.

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Comics are peddlers of fun, truth and taboo, but more often than not, they’re an introspective bunch, too. They hawk their jokes in places with names such as the Laugh Factory or the Comedy Cellar — hardly the sort of venues where one goes to hear banter suited to a therapy session. And yet, for the past three years, the Laugh Factory has provided both: Once they’re done with a set, comedians can see an in-house psychologist.

Washington Post