Dr. X's Free Associations

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Here's an article about sleep paralysis. I experienced it for the first time when I was age 18 and, until about 15 years ago, experienced it frequently. It's very unpleasant to say the least, but fortunately no hallucinations. Just the paralysis.

Freddie Gray suffered from lead poisoning.

Report condemns APA for collusion with CIA torture program.

Can social media analysis yield tipping points of activity that predict rioting?

Why is tardive dyskenesia permanent? Answer: we don't know.

Begin addiction treatment in the ER.

Boys with older are sister less competitive on average. Girls with older sister are more competitive. Additional permutations.

Surging: Andrew Sullivan, Race and IQ

My stats have rocketed over the past two days, largely owing to a series of old posts that are getting a great deal of attention. Rather than posting several links, I'll just repost the series here.

Post 1: Is Non-racial IQ Research Being Strangled?

Andrew Sullivan complains that it is:

It's been strangled by p.c. egalitarianism. The reason is the resilience of racial differences in IQ in the data, perhaps most definitively proven by UC Berkeley psychologist Arthur Jensen [...}

The right response to unsettling data is to probe, experiment and attempt to disprove them - not to run away in racial panic. But the deeper problem is that the racial aspects of IQ have prevented non-racial research into intelligence, and how best to encourage, study and understand it.

In support of his thesis, Sullivan cites a blog post by Anneli Rufus: IQ Blackout: Why Did Studying Intelligence Become Taboo? In her post, Rufus quotes UCLA post-doc researcher, Dennis Garlick. Garlick has some major publications under his belt. It doesn't seem to me that there is a professional blackout being imposed on his work, which, by the way, looks quite interesting.

Ketamine and Nitrous Oxide For Depression

Retriever emailed an interesting article about pros, cons, hopes and doubts associated with the increasing use of ketamine (the party drug Special K) in the treatment of depression. You can find that article here.

Promising research findings have led to off-label prescription of ketamine for depression and clinics that provide extremely expensive infusion therapy for those who have not found help with other treatments. Lots of caveats, but I'm glad that another option may be opening up for those who find nothing else that helps.

Societal Effects on Schizophrenia or Sampling Problems?

Boston Globe:

Surprising new research on schizophrenia suggests, however, that people with mental illness may have stronger, stranger ties to their societies than we commonly assume. In a new article in the British Journal of Psychiatry, Stanford anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann explains that for schizophrenics experiencing auditory hallucinations, the cultures they live in shape the voices they hear in their minds. Most psychiatric research is conducted by scientists. Luhrmann argues, though, that the same psychiatric condition can express itself differently in different cultures, which is where anthropologists come in. For this study, she interviewed adults with schizophrenia who live in three different places: Chennai, India, Accra, Ghana, and San Mateo, California. She asked each person to describe his or her auditory hallucinations—how many voices they heard, what the voices said, where they felt the voices were coming from.

I wonder how they insured that they were really sampling comparable populations in these three places? I can't find a free version of the article online, but I'm a bit doubtful. Maybe people who have more persecutory hallucinations in Accra and Channai are dealt with in ways that kept them out of the study samples. As deficient as much of our treatment of psychotic disorders in the US is for so many people, consider what treatment could consist of for a person afflicted in Ghana. Perhaps those afflicted with more paranoid and persecutory hallucinations wind up in those settings.

Mind you, this isn't to dismiss the potential significance of the findings. If the differences they found reflect real differences in the broader populations of persons with schizophrenia, the implications are quite important and consistent with those who argue that we could be more helpful to patients experiencing auditory hallucinations by including innovative non-pharmacological therapies. I posted something on this subject a couple of years ago and, looking that post up, I see that I linked at that time to another article by Tanya Luhrmann, which is also worth a look.

By the time I was in graduate school, psychiatry had for the most part adopted a medication and minimalist supportive therapy approach, though my psychologist education still included introduction to non-pharm therapeutic approaches. Does anyone still read Ping-Nie Pao? The problem with non-pharm therapies that went beyond caseworker support was that they were lengthy and costly at a time when the insurance industry was rapidly moving toward a fast-and-cheap model.

Recently, Illinois passed legislation to put prescription pads in the hands of psychologists, so I imagine that will only lessen the interest in non-pharm, therapeutic intervention, at least among young psychologists around here who will no doubt gravitate toward more profitable prescription practice.

A Few More Thoughts on ADHD

I'm on my own tonight, so I stopped at a Starbucks for an iced tea and to add a few thoughts to the blog. I could do this at home, but I have no reason to hurry home tonight. During my return from CE day in the NW burbs, I even stopped to take a few photos of McDonald's Store #1. I made a slight detour to get there, but I'd long planned to swing by it and snap a few shots if I ever had reason to pass that way again. I've seen it many times, but not since the 1990s, well before mobile digital and long before I carried a camera everywhere. I'll upload a photo or two tonight or tomorrow.

An Alarming Story

Michael Luo and Mike McIntire:

Last April, workers at Middlesex Hospital in Connecticut called the police to report that a psychiatric patient named Mark Russo had threatened to shoot his mother if officers tried to take the 18 rifles and shotguns he kept at her house. Mr. Russo, who was off his medication for paranoid schizophrenia, also talked about the recent elementary school massacre in Newtown and told a nurse that he “could take a chair and kill you or bash your head in between the eyes,” court records show.

The police seized the firearms, as well as seven high-capacity magazines, but Mr. Russo, 55, was eventually allowed to return to the trailer in Middletown where he lives alone. In an interview there recently, he denied that he had schizophrenia but said he was taking his medication now — though only “the smallest dose,” because he is forced to. His hospitalization, he explained, stemmed from a misunderstanding: Seeking a message from God on whether to dissociate himself from his family, he had stabbed a basketball and waited for it to reinflate itself. When it did, he told relatives they would not be seeing him again, prompting them to call the police.

As for his guns, Mr. Russo is scheduled to get them back in the spring, as mandated by Connecticut law.

More at the NY Times

I'm curious to know who, if anyone, would argue for the return of his guns. The NRA? Advocates for the mentally ill?

Epigentic Inheritence

The Atlantic:

Epigenetic research is a hot-button topic at the moment, generating a lot of attention in both scientific studies and the media. Epigenetics is the ability of genes to be influenced by our experiences, altering our genetic make-up in real time. By changing the chemical signals that course through your brain and body, you can actually turn genes on or off, a process that can then influence your future actions. Thus, in some ways, epigenetics can be thought of as the bridge between nature and nurture—your behavior and environment affecting your biology, and vice versa. [...]

[And it] appears that these epigenetic changes not only affect our own behaviors, but that they can also be passed down to future generations.

Between Eccentricity and...

Roland Atkinson:

Like [psychologist David] Weeks (p. 137), we have found that the dividing line is not clear-cut, that is, between functional eccentrics and those who have a (history of ) mental disorder. Some of our artists demonstrate both. Their quirks not withstanding, settled, contented eccentrics should not be labeled as mentally ill in the absence of current distress or dysfunction.

Mental disorders purported to cause or accompany eccentricity in at least some instances include cyclothymic and bipolar disorders, Asperger’s disorder, schizotypal and schizoid personality dis-orders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and schizophrenia. Weeks did not report on mood disorders in his subjects.

Nancy Andreasen, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, has shown a strong association between mood disorders and creative writing ability (“The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius,” New York: Dana Press, 2005). In one of her studies, 24 of 30 professional writers (80%) had mood disorders; none were schizophrenic. (Andreasen was not studying eccentricity, but this striking link between creativity and mood disorder is pertinent.)

That's disgusting... and so wrong!

I've written before about the psycho-immune function of disgust and the generalization of disgust reactions to the moral realm. The immunological function of disgust certainly makes intuitive sense when you consider some commonplace objects of disgust, for example, bodily fluids and excretions, rotting and decaying things, certain stinky things, glistening, leaky, blobulous innards or perhaps clams before the first time you tried them. We are turned off by things that appear to have a higher probability of spreading dangerous contagions.

Soda Consumption Linked To Poor Attention And Bad Behavior

Jeremy Dean:

The US researchers found that children who drank more soda were more likely to be aggressive, to have attention problems, to get into fights and to destroy other people’s belongings (Suglia et al., 2013).

This backs up findings in adolescents that have linked drinking more soda to self-harm, aggression, depression and even suicidal thoughts (Lien et al., 2006; Solnick & Hemenway, 2013).