Friday is FUNday!!!
Is this song inspiring? Uplifiting? Offensive? Awesome?
Maria Bamford is a pretty funny lady. You can find some of her other videos (like the Maria Bamford show, which is a fictionalized account of her life following a nervous breakdown) at superdeluxe.com
liz | 9:24 AM | Uncategorized
Addiction Isn’t A Brain Disease, Congress
Sally Satel and Scott Lilienfeld wrote an op-ed in Slate about Sen. Joe Biden’s bill — the “Recognizing Addiction as a Disease Act of 2007. They argue:
Characterizing addiction as a brain disease misappropriates language more properly used to describe conditions such as multiple sclerosis or schizophrenia—afflictions that are neither brought on by sufferers themselves nor modifiable by their desire to be well. Also, the brain disease rhetoric is fatalistic, implying that users can never fully free themselves of their drug or alcohol problems. Finally, and most important, it threatens to obscure the vast role personal agency plays in perpetuating the cycle of use and relapse to drugs and alcohol.
I don’t think it’s false to say that personal agency is at the heart of whether or not someone gets treatment and stays on course, but that doesn’t mean alcoholism and addiction aren’t diseases. There is personal agency involved in getting treatment for most mental health issues. Plus, if you count a “brain disease” to be a physical condition, like a chemical imbalance, than addiction would definitely fit in the category (the desire to have another drink, take another pill, etc, comes from that chemical imbalance.)
Where do you guys weigh in on this?
Addiciton Isn’t A Brain Disease, Congress
-AK
liz | 5:22 PM | Uncategorized
Urp!
Hi everyone — it’s me, Liz, just checking in. I see that Herb and Alison Hymes have gotten into a provocative discussion about ECT, which is good. But Iet’s unpack this a little bit more when I get back. I want it to be known that I respect and support MindFreedom. And I don’t generally share Herb’s views related to ECT, i.e., that me and my friends, as he calls them, are too focused on negativity on the subject. It’s not about being positive or negative — it’s about telling the truth. Herb owns stock in Cyberonics, by the way, which doesn’t mean he’s not telling the truth, but that he’d be reluctant to say something was wrong if it was. So that’s why he’s always positive, and why I always seem negative.
In other vacation-destroying news, the Washington Post did a puff piece about ECT this week, quoting, drum roll please …. Harold Sackheim and Max Fink!
Anyway, I’m trying to sit back and have fun, and Alli is doing a great job, isn’t she? I appreciate that. Yay Alli!
See you on Monday!
liz | 4:26 PM | Uncategorized
Photo of the Day: Things That Are Probably Not True
Signs in Selfridges in Birmingham
[photo by MarkHillary]
liz | 1:33 PM | Uncategorized
Biggest ever campaign to combat mental illness stigma (in the UK)
From Psychminded.uk.co:
The biggest ever campaign in England aiming to combat the stigma of mental illness has been launched.
The Big Lottery Fund is pumping £16m into a campaign which will include anti-stigma television advertisements. Comic Relief is providing £2m.
The campaign, entitled Moving People, will be run by the charities Mental Health Media, Mind and Rethink together with the Institute of Psychiatry. The campaign aims to reach 30 million people across England.
Campaigners say people with mental health problems are one of the most excluded groups in society, and the announcement of the campaign come on the heels of Department of Health research published this month which claimed there has been an increase in prejudice over the last ten years.
The survey found, for example, there has been a drop in people who believe those with mental health problems should have the same right to a job as anyone else, In 2003 it was 68%, but this year it was 65%.
The survey also reported that over the last four years there has been a 17% increase in people saying those with mental health problems are “prone to violence”. This year it was 34%. In 2003 it was 29%.
The department of health research suggests young people are those most prejudiced towards people with mental health problems. Younger people are less likely to agree that “we need to adopt a far more tolerant attitude towards people with mental illness in our society”. Only 79% of 16-34 year olds agree with this statement, compared to 87% of 35-54 year olds and 86% of over 55s.
Comic Relief, if I remember correctly, is the organization they talked about in the UK version of the Office on that day that people wore their clothes inside-out for donations and put on red noses. Their fundraising drives seem to be popular office events.
I wish we had a program like that in the U.S. First of all, it’s a really important message, one that absolutely needs a large campaign here in the states. Secondly, I’d like to see put-together looking office workers in funny hats.
Biggest ever campaign to combat mental illness stigma
liz | 10:03 AM | Uncategorized
RIP: Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist
From Michael A. Kaufman of the New York Times:
Albert Ellis, whose innovative straight-talk approach to psychotherapy made him one of the most influential and provocative figures in modern psychology, died yesterday at his home above the institute he founded in Manhattan. He was 93.
The cause, after extended illness, was kidney and heart failure, said a friend and spokeswoman, Gayle Rosellini.
Dr. Ellis (he had a doctorate but not a medical degree) called his approach rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T. Developed in the 1950s, it challenged the deliberate, slow-moving methodology of Sigmund Freud, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment at the time.
Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. “Neurosis,” he said, was “just a high-class word for whining.”
“The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you to feel better,” he said in a 2004 article in The New York Times. “But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”
Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist, Dies
liz | 4:20 PM | Uncategorized
Cute Fix: “New Kids on the Block”
Normally I don’t think goats are adorable, but these goats are definitely adorable.
[photo by Bernie Led]
liz | 1:11 PM | Uncategorized
Faster-Acting Antidepressants Closer to Becoming a Reality
I’m pretty sure the kids in high school called ketamine “special K” and that they’d “get stuck” on it, but apparently the drug can be useful in treating depression. Or rather, has useful aspects; it works quickly. Unfortunately, it also gives you hallucinations and is a highly controlled substance. Anyway, the press release, from the NIH:
Faster-Acting Antidepressants Closer to Becoming a Reality
Experimental medication ketamine relieves depression in just hours; points to targets for new medications
A new study has revealed more about how the medication ketamine, when used experimentally for depression, relieves symptoms of the disorder in hours instead of the weeks or months it takes for current antidepressants to work. While ketamine itself probably won’t come into use as an antidepressant because of its side effects, the new finding moves scientists considerably closer to understanding how to develop faster-acting antidepressant medications — among the priorities of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Ketamine blocks a receptor called NMDA on brain cells, an earlier NIMH study in humans had shown, but the new study in mice shows that this is an intermediate step. It turns out that blocking NMDA increases the activity of another receptor, AMPA, and that this boost in AMPA is crucial for ketamine’s rapid antidepressant actions. The study was reported online in Biological Psychiatry on July 23, by NIMH researchers Husseini K. Manji, MD, Guang Chen, MD, PhD, Carlos Zarate, MD, and colleagues.
“Our research is showing us how to develop medications that get at the biological roots of depression. This new finding is a major step toward learning how to improve treatment for the millions of Americans with this debilitating disorder; toward eliminating the weeks of suffering and uncertainty they have to endure while they wait for their medications to work,” said NIH Director Elias Zerhouni, M.D.
Almost 15 million American adults have a depressive disorder. During the long wait to begin feeling the effects of conventional medications, patients may worsen, raising the risk of suicide for some. Depressive disorders also affect children and adolescents.
By aiming new medications at more direct molecular targets, such as NMDA or AMPA, scientists may be able to bypass some of the steps through which current antidepressants indirectly exert their effects — a roundabout route that accounts for the long time it takes for patients to begin feeling better with the conventional medications.
While ketamine appears to achieve this, it is an unlikely candidate to become a new treatment for depression, because of the side effects it can cause in humans, including hallucinations. It is approved as an anesthetic by the Food and Drug Administration at much higher doses than those given in the study, but its use is limited because it may cause hallucinations during recovery from anesthesia.
Both NMDA and AMPA are receptors for the neurotransmitter glutamate, one of the chemical messengers that enable brain cells to communicate with each other. The glutamate system has been implicated in depression recently, leading to efforts to unravel its molecular machinery in search of abnormalities and of better targets for antidepressant medications.
This focus on the glutamate system is a departure from the thinking that led to currently available antidepressants, which are thought to relieve depression through a lengthy trickle-down process of biochemical reactions that affect the circuitry underlying depression.
The fact that NMDA and AMPA receptors are part of the glutamate system and that targeting them directly led to such rapid, sustained relief of depression-like behaviors in this study — and that a single dose of ketamine did the same in humans in the earlier study — suggests that they are probably the key targets for antidepressant medications.
“In any other illness of depression’s magnitude, patients aren’t expected to just accept that their treatments won’t start helping them for weeks or months. The value of our research on compounds like ketamine is that it tells us where to look for more precise targets for new kinds of medications that can close the gap,” said NIMH Director Thomas R. Insel, MD. “We’re making tremendous progress.”
To conduct the new study, researchers induced depression-like behaviors in mice; for example, the mice gave up after being forced to engage in hopeless tasks, such as prolonged swimming. A dose of ketamine reversed the depression-like behaviors for at least two weeks.
When the researchers gave the mice a substance that blocks the AMPA receptor beforehand, ketamine was not able to reverse the depression-like behaviors. The boost in AMPA thus appears to be a necessary ingredient for ketamine’s antidepressant effects.
In a related experiment, the scientists used two different compounds instead of ketamine to try to block just one part of the NMDA receptor, an even more precise target. These other compounds also reduced depressive behaviors, suggesting that it may be feasible to develop other fast-acting antidepressants without ketamine’s side effects.
“Today’s antidepressant medications eventually end up doing the same thing, but they go about it the long way around, with a lot of biochemical steps that take time. Now we’ve shown what the key targets are and that we can get at them rapidly,” said Zarate. “Ketamine probably can’t become the medication of choice, but this research is leading to some very real possibilities for a whole new generation of antidepressant medications.”
Faster-Acting Antidepressants Closer to Becoming a Reality
liz | 10:27 AM | Uncategorized
Angry Veterans File Lawsuit
The AP’s Hope Yen reports on a group of Iraq veterans suing te Department of Veterans Affairs:
Suing on behalf of hundreds of thousands of veterans, it charges that the VA has failed to provide prompt disability benefits, to add staff to reduce wait times for medical care and to boost services for post-traumatic stress disorder.
The lawsuit also accuses the VA of deliberately cheating some veterans by working with the Pentagon to misclassify claims as preexisting personality disorders to avoid paying benefits. The VA and Pentagon have generally denied such charges.
There have been a lot of stories in the past few months about the military and the VA mishandling, mistreating or otherwise messing up on health care, particularly mental health issues. My little brother just joined the Army, and while health care during the initial stages seems to be pretty good (I feel like the kid has spent most of his time in a dentist’s chair) I’m terrified of what will happen when his tour is over. Here’s hoping that these vets get the help they need and that the lawsuits encourage the VA to improve (and hopefully expand) their services.
Story from The Detroit Free Press
[photo by soldiersmediacenter]
liz | 3:27 PM | Uncategorized
Video of the Day: Life Affirmation or Pyramid Scheme?
This whole “The Secret” and “Law of Attraction” thing is starting to creep me out. There’s a lot of harm that can me done by telling people all they need to do is think positively to have positive results. But also, anything that needs to resort to insurance-commercial-meets-public-access-television-meets-powerpoint-
presentation can’t be that helpful.
No single image is particularly offensive or disturbing (except, maybe, the one of the credit card that says “convenience,” but when you stick them all together…
liz | 12:24 PM | Uncategorized
