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Category: Neuroscience
Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought...
Posted by Mo at 12:52 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of schizophrenic patients, as well as by some 15% of patients with...
Posted by Mo at 6:20 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
In 1965, Senator Robert Kennedy visited several "institutions for the mentally retarded" in New York State. His descriptions of the conditions he found there, which were published widely in the media, shocked the American public and angered those in charge...
Posted by Mo at 4:15 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
This week's issue of Time has a cover story called America's Medicated Army, about the increasing use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.The article quotes figures from a recent report by the Army's...
Posted by Mo at 1:17 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the first to scientifically investigate the properties and effects of cocaine,...
Posted by Mo at 9:25 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: History of neuroscience
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the...
Posted by Mo at 5:48 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A lengthy article in last weekend's Washington Post Magazine discusses the work of Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) who has almost completed the first phase of a clinical study into the use of...
Posted by Mo at 2:36 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Art
The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late...
Posted by Mo at 12:36 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Psychiatry
In an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times, Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, argues that shy kids are not mentally ill, and that they shouldn't be given medication. The piece brought to mind this critique of the...
Posted by Mo at 3:47 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Neuroscience
A study by a team of German researchers shows that the brains of paedophiles respond differently to those of healthy controls to erotic images. Martin Walter, of the Department of Psychiatry at Otto-von-Guricke University in Magdeburg, and his colleagues used...
Posted by Mo at 9:27 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
PZ Myers 11.08.2009
PZ Myers 11.08.2009
Tim Lambert 11.08.2009
Orac 11.08.2009
Orac 11.06.2009
