- Manic Spending Puts Bipolar Patients at Risk for Financial Woes
Many bipolar people already live in a boom-or-bust financial cycle, independent of the current economy. Spending sprees, after all, are common during manic periods. However, mania can be triggered by stress, which is naturally higher during an economic crisis like the one Americans are facing now.
- Why do the mentally ill die younger?
One of the most common contributors to early death among mentally ill patients, for instance, is smoking. While about 22% of the general population smokes, more than 75% of people with severe mental illness are tobacco-dependent. According to Glover, a study conducted by NASMHPD after the publication of its mortality study found that 44% of all cigarettes in the United States are consumed by people with psychiatric histories. “I used to run state hospitals, and we’d use cigarettes as reinforcement — ‘You did good; you get a cigarette,’” he says. “When people didn’t do well, we took away their tobacco privileges. We were part of the problem.” The agency is now working to make state mental hospitals smoke-free by 2011.
- Is our happiness preordained
Bates and his Edinburgh colleagues drew their conclusions after looking at survey data of 973 pairs of adult twins. They found that, on average, a pair of identical twins shared more personality traits than a pair of non-identical twins. And when asked how happy they were, the identical twin pairs responded much more similarly than other twins, suggesting that both happiness and personality have a strong genetic component. The study, published in Psychological Science, went one step further: it suggested that personality and happiness do not merely coexist, but that in fact innate personality traits cause happiness. Twins who had similar scores in key traits — extroversion, calmness and conscientiousness, for example — had similar happiness scores; once those traits were accounted for, however, the similarity in twins’ happiness scores disappeared.
- Laugh and the World Laughs with You: Happy’s Contagion
The merriment of one person, the researchers found, can ripple out and cause happiness in people up to three degrees away. So if you’re happy, you increase the chance of joy in your close friend by 25%; a friend of that friend enjoys a 10% increased chance. And that friend’s friend has a 5.6% higher chance
- How Depression Harms Your Heart
the findings suggest that depression contributes to heart disease indirectly — by fostering unhealthy behaviors like smoking — rather than directly. Certain biological factors linked with depression, such as inflammation and the levels of brain chemicals like serotonin, may play some role in heart health, researchers say, but the new study found that the factors that most increased heart disease risk in depressed people were the ones you might expect: lack of exercise and smoking.
Just came across this while i was doing Google blog searches for stuff that i might be able to use
for China Film Journal. This is a UK magazine and as it’s kinda late i was
just doing a perfunctory scan of the posts and came across a review, which you see above, of the new Harmony Korine movie
Mister Lonely and from the concept and from the review it seems really effin awesome…wish i could see it or get my hands on a copy.
perhaps i will make that my mission tomorrow, if the gods are kind and its somehow already on a torrent somewhere and there are endless numbers of
seeders out there.
But it’s also the experimental stuff that excites me, the thought that there are still people doing creative stuff
that goes far outside the mainstream. and i think there is some kind of emotional succor derived from learning about the
sometimes tumultuous (or at least minimally boring) life of the troubled artist Korine–I, for whatever reason, derive a certain
inspiration and strength from them. It’s not shadenfreude–that could never really be a source of strength (it’d be at most a temporary
anodyne) it’s that i really admire what these people are doing and sympathize with their struggles.
ok this is getting into major cheese land.
MOre later, if i find more good stuff in that magazine (which i am sure i will).
“Collected Screenplays” (Harmony Korine)
Technorati Tags: harmony korine , experimental
This report from Business Week
this is an excerpt from the above report
The lowest rate of depression, 4.3 percent, occurred in the job category that covers engineers, architects and surveyors.
Government officials tracked depression within 21 major occupational categories. They combined data from 2004 through 2006 to estimate episodes of depression within the past year. That information came from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, which registers lifetime and past-year depression bouts.
Depression leads to $30 billion to $44 billion in lost productivity annually, said the report from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. The report was available Saturday on the agency’s Web site at http://oas.samhsa.gov
30-44 billion bucks? Dang. Guess it’s not just my problem. That’s like Bill Gates’ personal fortune disappearing over the course of year. Really, how would we manage?
Technorati Tags: depression, work, productivity, social work, professional, professions, career, jobs, labor, health, mental health, public health, occupational,
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From <a href=”http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/Loneliness-Is-a-Molecule-UCLA-8214.aspx“〉UCLA.edu</a>:
It is already known that a person’s social environment can affect his or her health, with those who are socially isolated — that is, lonely — suffering from higher mortality than people who are not.
Now, in the first study of its kind, published in the current issue of the journal Genome Biology, UCLA researchers have identified a distinct pattern of gene expression in immune cells from people who experience chronically high levels of loneliness. The findings suggest that feelings of social isolation are linked to alterations in the activity of genes that drive inflammation, the first response of the immune system. The study provides a molecular framework for understanding why social factors are linked to an increased risk of heart disease, viral infections and cancer.
Having previously established that lonely people suffer from higher mortality than people who are not lonely, researchers are now trying to determine whether that risk is a result of reduced social resources, such as physical or economic assistance, or is due to the biological impact of social isolation on the functioning of the human body.
“What this study shows is that the biological impact of social isolation reaches down into some of our most basic internal processes — the activity of our genes,” said Steve Cole, an associate professor of medicine in the division of hematology and oncology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and a member of the Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology.
“We found that changes in immune cell gene expression were specifically linked to the subjective experience of social distance,” said Cole, who is also a member of UCLA’s
Cole and colleagues at UCLA and the
“Leukocyte (white blood cell) gene expression appears to be remodelled in chronically lonely individuals,” Cole said.
Genes overexpressed in lonely individuals included many involved in immune system activation and inflammation. But interestingly, several other key gene sets were underexpressed, including those involved in antiviral responses and antibody production.
“These findings provide molecular targets for our efforts to block the adverse health effects of social isolation,” said Cole.
“We found that what counts at the level of gene expression is not how many people you know, it’s how many you feel really close to over time,” he added.
In the future, Cole said, the transcriptional fingerprint the researchers have identified might become useful as a biomarker to monitor interventions designed to reduce the impact of loneliness on health.
All I can say is that I’m highly fucked. Well, at least now I know why that persistent cough won’t go away. Because I’m lonellllllyyyyyyyyyy! (caterwauled in the Kim Jong-Il voice….)
Technorati Tags: loneliness, isolation, society, illness, genes, biology, psychology, UCLA, study, health, public health, cancer, heart disease
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Original link is here
J Cole
Correspondence to:
J Cole
Clinical Neurophysiology, Poole Hospital, Longfleet Road, Poole, BH15 2JB, UK; jonathan@colefamily.org.uk
Wittgenstein, despite being considered an analytical philosopher, has been quoted extensively by neurologists like Oliver Sacks. This paper explores how Wittgenstein, despite suggesting that science was antithetical to philosophy, made observations relevant to cognitive neuroscience.
His work on the inner and the outer, the relation between language and sensation or perception, and on the embodied nature of emotion and its communication, is important for an understanding of neurological impairment beyond our experience. In some of his enigmatic short writing his insights are pertinent to patients’ experience, say of pain, Capgras’ Syndrome and spinal cord injury. He also made observations on movement sense, will and action.
He did not engage in empirical science, nor obtain data in any conventional sense. But his genius was not confined to abstract philosophy. His powers of observation and introspection led him to explore lived experience in new ways, some of which are only now being approached empirically. The method of science, he once wrote, leads philosophy into complete darkness. Had he lived today, one hopes that even he might have changed his mind.
Technorati Tags: wittgenstein, philosophy, neurology, phenomenology, cognitive, science, emotion, development, life, experience, introspection, history
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This is from the personal page of a U Mich professor, Randolph Nesse, MD.
Effects of Antidepressants on Major Life Choices
Do antidepressants make it more
likely that people in difficult life circumstances will just accept the
situation, or do they make it more likely that people will get the confidence
and initiative to make major changes or leave?� Given the widespread use of antidepressants for people in life
crises, we really need to know.� One
design would be to randomly assign abused depressed spouses to therapy plus
antidepressant or therapy plus placebo.�
I predict that those on medication will be more likely to make major
life changes.� But I may be
wrong.�
Technorati Tags: depression, antidepressants, prozac, happiness, unhappiness, mental health, mental disease, disease, life, choices, personality, fate
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Brain Injury Said to Affect Moral Choices
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: March 22, 2007
Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to kill or harm another person if doing so would save others’ lives.
The findings are the most direct evidence that humans’ native revulsion to hurting others relies on a part of neural anatomy, one that evolved before the higher brain regions responsible for analysis and planning.
The researchers emphasize that the study was small and that the moral decisions were hypothetical; the results cannot predict how people with or without brain injuries will act in real life-or-death situations. Yet the findings, appearing online yesterday, in the journal Nature, confirm the central role of the damaged region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is thought to give rise to social emotions, like compassion.
Interestingly, in this light, submission (and by extension depression) is not complete loss, and still affords the individual some degree of control of the situation. “However, control varies greatly according to the rank of an animal….[and] subordinates are generally more tense and defensive than dominant animals. They show reduced explorative behavior and social confidence [and] have higher levels of stress hormones . . .” (p. 37).
In another chapter, the other co-editor, Sloman, perceptively notes that “The evolutionary theorist faces the challenge of having to explain why mood disorders, which are often maladaptive for the individual, have not been weeded out by natural selection and, moreover, continue to have a high prevalence” (p. 47). He goes on to show how the involuntary defeat strategy (IDS, as he abbreviates it), which was evolved for adaptive purposes, can become maladaptive for an individual human in today’s world.
When it works properly, IDS limits the level of aggression that might occur between individuals, signals “no threat” to opponents and “don’t intervene” to cohorts, and puts the subordinated person in a “giving up” frame of mind. The IDS fails to accomplish these goals, however, when the defeated individual cannot effectively escape the conflict situation. When this happens, the result is often learned helplessness followed by chronic, self-reinforcing, and thereby pathological depression. Depressed people often seem to resort prematurely to an IDS, even when the conflict is simply imagined or expected. “Premature triggering of the IDS may be attributed to a history of having autocratic and punitive parents, physical abuse, or sexual abuse” (p. 58).
My comments: certainly they got the phenomenology of depression right in their description of the subordinate. Sometimes i wince reading stuff like this knowing that so much of is true for me. But you know recently, after hitting what felt like rock bottom, I realized that I wasn’t ready to give up yet. There is one thing that makes me different from a lot of other depressed or cyclothymic or hypomanic or whatever people–I can be, at times, a helluva lot smarter. I read more, faster, and assimilate more information, much of it technical, than the run of the mill depressive. And i know what i am battling. There is still some elan vital left in me, and that’s what’s fighting back. Depression is a kind of resignation to a particular status, and that’s a good way of describing what i felt. Rank: I am supposed to have it. I went to good schools. I got good grades. I don’t do drugs. Imagine if i had gone to PRinceton, and ended up hobnobbing with the power elite, or at least living in Brooklyn with a half decent job. I would be someone. But I am no one. Routinely rejected for work, for opportunities, and perhaps that’s my fault, but still it feels like I’ve been rejected by society. And the thing is there is this feeling of being wronged–some people are just losers. But I felt like i could have been a contender, as Marlon Brando said in “On the Waterfront” (great flick by the way, and i just bought a copy in shanghai, good quality, but fuzzy looking on the tv).
THe greek concept of arete: excellence and virtue (but not in the moral or christian sense). Those who are bearers of higher values. But that’s not what this society–be it SHanghai or the US or wherever really–is about. I don’t feel like i should have to be begging for money and support and what not, but that’s what is happening. I am fighting for the leftover scraps of society’s resources. And i could have been a doctor, and i could have been a scientist, and i could have been a film director, but i’m not. Just an oversight on my part when choosing majors? And now it’s fucked up my life. But that’s the way things go. There is either amor fati or else just resignation and self-pity.
Things well up in you, things ferment and bubble. I am sick and tired of being who i am, what i am. I’m ready to fight back, again. Maybe to take my place in the alpha sun or maybe just to throw off the shackles of the mental habits ingrained in us subordinates. But i feel something coming back up, and i think it’s good. It makes you feel almost invulnerable in a way, this feeling that permeates you–because you’ve already hit bottom, so everything you do after that you can chalk up as an expression of your will to live, will to power, whatever. You can chalk up the defeats as small setbacks on the way to a larger victory, You are willing to fight the good fight, again. But are you willing to enjoy the process? I’ve always had problems with that one.
I had hoped they meant Otto Rank but no they meant just plain old rank. From answers.com:
Rank theory is an evolutionary theory of depression, developed by Anthony Stevens and John Price, and proposes that depression promotes the survival of our genes. It is an adaptive response to losing status (rank) and losing confidence in your ability to regain it. The adaptive function of the depression is to change behaviour to a type of behaviour that promotes the survival of someone who has been defeated. According to Rank theory, depression was naturally selected to allow us to accept a subordinate role. The function of this depressive adaptation is to prevent the loser from suffering further defeat in a conflict. In the face of defeat, a behavioural process swings into action which causes the individual to cease competing and reduce his ambitions. This process is involuntary and results in the loss of energy, depressed mood, sleep disturbance, poor appetite, retarded movements, and loss of confidence, which are typical characteristics of depression. The outward symptoms of depression (facial expressions, constant crying, etc.) signal to others that the loser is not fit to compete, and they also discourage others from attempting to restore the loser’s rank.
This acceptance of a lower rank would serve to stabilise an ancestral human community, promoting the survival of any individual (or individual’s genes) in the community through affording protection from other human groups, retaining access to resources, and to mates. The adaptive function of accepting a lower rank is twofold: first, it ensures that the loser truly yields and does not attempt to make a comeback, and, second, the loser reassures the winner that yielding has truly taken place, so that the conflict ends, with no further damage to the loser. Social harmony is then restored.