mental health
lborkowski | August 27, 2010Scicurious at Neurotic Physiology is publishing a bunch of "Back to Basics" posts that are well worth a read, and I found her series on depression particularly interesting. In Depression: Part 1, Scicurious explains why we should care about this disease:
Right now, depression is thought to occur in 21% of women and 13% of men worldwide, with 18 million people affected in the US (this is according to the lecture I had in 2006 on it, though other people say it's 8-17% of the total population). It's a big deal for research, depression is second leading cause of disability, and antidepressants…
lborkowski | August 3, 2010BP's well in the Gulf of Mexico has been capped and may soon be "killed" for good, but fixing the widespread damage from the disaster will take years. The National Center for Disaster Preparedness at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health has has released a report (supported by the Children's Health Fund) based on a survey of 1,200 residents of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi. Their findings give a sense of how widespread the spill's impacts are on physical, mental, and financial health:
Over one-third of parents reported that their children had experienced either physical…
egrossman | June 18, 2010By Elizabeth Grossman
"This is the one thing that could destroy our culture and I don't want to see it happen," says Grand Isle, Louisiana resident Karen Hopkins, wiping at tears she's clearly fighting. Hopkins, a Louisiana native and long-time resident of Grand Isle, runs the office at Dean Blanchard Seafood. Blanchard typically buys 13 to 15 million pounds of Gulf Coast shrimp annually. Hopkins' house sits across from what should be a busy loading area for Dean Blanchard Seafood and no more than ten yards from a pier where boats that should be gearing up for a night out shrimping are coming…
lborkowski | June 17, 2010It's appropriate for BP to dedicate $20 billion to an escrow fund for oil-spill claims, and I hope the fund's independent administration will allow for quick payment of claims. Nicholas Beaudrot points out that the fund's structure means BP has an incentive to resolve claims quickly - in contrast to the 20 years that it took ExxonMobil to pay claims related to the Valdez oil spill.
Though the process of compensating financial losses will be complicated, it's far easier to quantify lost income than to tally the costs to Gulf residents' mental health. The New York Times' Mireya Navarro focuses…
grrlscientist | May 29, 2010tags: Former NYC Mayor Giuliani, Ferrets, and Freedom, politics, NYC, NYC Life, social observation, pets, ferrets, humor, funny, satire, offbeat, streaming video
Here's another set of videos for today's Silly Saturday. These videos take a closer look at the battle between former NYC Mayor, Rudy Giuliani, and the ferrets (and ferret owners) of NYC after he banned them as pets. Shortly before 911, Giuliani was awarded the dubious title of "most hated Mayor in the United States," although I am not sure it was due to his position on ferrets as pets.
In 1999, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani hosted a…
grrlscientist | May 17, 2010tags: The Free Hugs Campaign in Finland, Helsinki, free hugs, silly, humor, funny, offbeat, weird, life, Finland, Helsinki, streaming video
The Finnish winter is long, dark and difficult for many people. So a group of Helsinki residents started a free hugs campaign to cheer people up. A group calling themselves, "FreeHugs Finland" had been promoting for this day on the internet and over 30 huggers showed up! During a couple of hours over 1000 people in Helsinki got a hug and one woman told me it saved her day! [Music: "Lonely" by Unity]
This video was taken in Helsinki, Finland on 2 December…
revere | May 8, 2010I don't write about mental health here, but not because I don't think it is of public health importance. It may be one of the most consequential and expensive maladies we have. It's not because I don't know anyone whose life it has touched. I know many. And it isn't because it is without intellectual interest. It may be one of the most difficult, entangled and ambiguous topics in public health. It is mainly because of lack of expertise on my part coupled with my attention being directed elsewhere. You can't write about everything and can't get up to speed on everything. Life is too short. But…
revere | April 28, 2010Self medicating for mood disorders is well known. It is often quite harmful, with the chief culprits being ethyl alcohol and nicotine. But there are others. One that comes up often is chocolate as an antidote to feelings of depression. Not everyone who eats chocolate is depressed, of course. Probably most of us who do it do it because we like chocolate. When I was in elementary school I used to eat a lot of Hershey bars after school. They cam in six-packs and one memorable day I found two whole packs and one pack with a single bar missing. I ate all 17 in one sitting. Two hours later I ate…
grrlscientist | April 9, 2010tags: Stouffer's, frozen microwave meals, single-serving meals, suicide prevention tips, humor, funny, satire, fucking hilarious, Onion News Network, ONN, streaming video
Stouffer's, the company that manufactures frozen microwavable meals, now includes suicide prevention tips on all single-serving dinners whether you enjoy eating your veal parmigiana or beef stroganoff alone.
grrlscientist | April 8, 2010tags: evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, molecular ecology, personality, novelty seeking, exploratory behavior, dopamine receptor, dopamine receptor D4 gene, DRD4 gene polymorphism, ornithology, birds, Great Tit, Parus major, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, peer-reviewed paper
Bold or cautious? Individuals with a particular gene variant are very curious --
but only in some populations.
Image: Henk Dikkers.
Research suggests that personality variations are heritable in humans and other animal species, and there are many hypotheses as to why differences in personality…
omnibrain | March 3, 2010I have lots of work to do, including my preliminary dissertation defense tomorrow, but I'm justifying a nap because of this:
If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don't roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour's nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter.
Now if I fail I can blame science!
grrlscientist | February 13, 2010tags: Mormonism, religion, cults, mind control, magic underwear, moron, offbeat, beliefs, insanity, education, streaming video
In some denominations of the Latter Day Saint cult, the temple garment (also referred to as "garments", or "Mormon underwear") is worn beneath the clothing of those who have taken part in the Endowment ceremony. Mormon underwear are worn both day and night and are required for any previously endowed adult to enter a church temple.The undergarments are viewed as a symbolic reminder of the sacred covenants made in temple ceremonies, and are viewed as an either symbolic…
edyong | November 30, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world's school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ADHD are hyperactive and easily distracted; they are also forgetful and find it difficult to control their own impulses.
While some evidence has suggested that ADHD brains develop in fundamentally different ways to typical ones, other results have argued that they are just the result of a delay in the…
grrlscientist | September 19, 2009tags: religion, violence, mental illness, fundamentalism, Mitchell and Webb, streaming video
This video is a Godless Comedy created by That Mitchell and Webb Look about the myth of Abraham and Isaac .. if an American did this today, he'd be placed in a mental institution for hearing voices that command him to murder his own son. Charming.
grrlscientist | September 2, 2009tags: canada, health care, human rights, streaming video
This video consists of a series of interviews with real Canadians. They discuss the realities of their single payer health care system, and are offended by the American right wing's insulting it.
This video made me deeply angry: in America, health care is obviously not a human right. In America, people like me -- whose health, credit rating, ability to find employment and financial future have been severely compromised due to a lack of health care -- deserve our situations, right? After all, things like this don't happen to real…
grrlscientist | August 30, 2009tags: religion, violence, mental illness, fundamentalism, MtlRedAtheist, streaming video
This is the first in a series of videos that address some of the violent, absurd and atrocious Bible stories being taught to children in Sunday School around the world today. This video discusses how Abraham almost murdered his son because he heard god telling him to do so. And people wonder why fundamentalists of all Abrahamic religions are so violent?
This story is about Abraham and Isaac. In the Bible, God wanted to test Abraham's faith by commanding him to murder his son as a sacrifice. Abraham was…
edyong | August 10, 2009People infected with the bird flu virus - influenza A subtype H5N1 - go through the usual symptoms of fever, aching muscles and cough. The virus is so virulent that 60% of infected humans have died. But according to a study in mice, the infection could also take a more inconspicuous toll on the brain, causing the sorts of damage that could increase the risk of diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's many years after the virus has been cleared.
The link between influenza and Parkinson's disease is hardly old but certainly controversial. Previous studies have found no traces of flu genetic…
grrlscientist | June 2, 2009tags: Post-Traumatic Embitterment Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Adaptation disorder, stress reaction, Adjustment disorder, Negative life events, psychology, behavior, psychiatry, peer-reviewed paper
[larger view]
In this economy, nearly everyone has experienced unemployment, bankruptcy, foreclosure, divorce, or some combination thereof. But roughly 1-2% of these people become so stressed out by these losses that "they can barely function other than to ruminate about their circumstances," according to Dr. Michael Linden, the German psychiatrist who described and named Post-…
razib | April 26, 2009Thankfully. Familial Resemblance of Borderline Personality Disorder Features: Genetic or Cultural Transmission?:
Borderline personality disorder is a severe personality disorder for which genetic research has been limited to family studies and classical twin studies. These studies indicate that genetic effects explain 35 to 45% of the variance in borderline personality disorder and borderline personality features. However, effects of non-additive (dominance) genetic factors, non-random mating and cultural transmission have generally not been explored. In the present study an extended twin-…
grrlscientist | April 23, 2009tags: The Soloist, homelessness, mental illness, movie trailer, film, true story, streaming video
Wow, now this is a movie that I must see! I heard an interview with the author of the book on which this film was based, LATimes reporter, Steve Lopez. He meets a mentally ill homeless man playing Beethoven on a violin with only two strings, and, recognizing his talent, writes a story about him. Lopez's readers send him musical instruments to give to this homeless man, who was a musical prodigy as a child. The resulting friendship transforms both men's lives in this inspirational true story [3:…