depression
terrasig | July 17, 2009Please accept my apologies in advance for taking another edition of The Friday Fermentable to bring you a sober (pun intended) story about alcoholic beverages. The heat, beginning training for a half-marathon, and other stuff have my personal alcohol consumption at nil so I don't have any recent wine or beer finds to share with you, Dear Reader.
Moreover, there have been some prominent stories as of late relating to alcohol and substance abuse such as the pharmacology and toxicology of Michael Jackson's death (which we've discussed here, here, and here) and the prevalence of alcoholism in…
purepedantry | June 24, 2009I wanted to draw attention to a new paper in JAMA recently because it reveals a lot about how conditional most of the statements we make in behavioral genetics are. Every time you hear a news article that says, "Gene for depression found," I want you to think about this case.
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Risch et al. performed a meta-analysis on 14 studies that were looking at Serotonin Transporter (5-HTTLPR) genotype and number of stressful life events. These two factors were related to the subsequent risk for developing clinical depression. Their analysis found -- contrary to a very well known study,…
ddobbs | June 17, 2009Big psych news of the day is that a big JAMA study debunked the "depression gene" -- that is, this big new study (by Risch et alia, in JAMA, today) found that, contrary to a famous earlier big study (Caspi et alia, in Science, 2003), the short ("bad") form of a particular gene called 5-HTT does NOT make a person more vulnerable to depression. Or, to flip it:: Caspi 2003 had found that having a short version of 5-HTT, which affects processing of serotonin, put someone at more risk of depression if they experienced (as adults) repeated stressful life events. Risch 2009, crunching data from a…
razib | June 17, 2009Common problem with loci presumed to have psychological or behavioral effects, Report on Gene for Depression Is Now Faulted:
The original finding, published in 2003, created a sensation among scientists and the public because it offered the first specific, plausible explanation of why some people bounce back after a stressful life event while others plunge into lasting despair.
The new report, by several of the most prominent researchers in the field, does not imply that interactions between genes and life experience are trivial; they are almost certainly fundamental, experts agree.
...
Since…
bioephemera | May 30, 2009In the June Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Wolf Shenk has a long, moving article about what may be the longitudinal study of all longitudinal studies - the Harvard Study of Adult Development (Grant Study), begun in 1937. Its creator Arlie Beck planned to track 268 "healthy, well-adjusted" men from their sophomore year at Harvard through careers, marriage, families, retirement and eventually death - and somehow, from this glut of longitudinal data, to glean the secrets of "successful living."
But the portrait Shenk paints is as full of pathos as it is of success.
Delving into the case files, now…
gregladen | May 3, 2009Lithium has long been used as a psychotherapeutic drug, and treatment with lithium demonstrably reduces incidence of suicide. Lithium also occurs naturally in groundwater to varying degrees. This study explores the relative amount of Lithium in groundwater and suicide in 18 municipalities in Oita prefecture, Japan over a period running from 2002 to 2006. There are two principle findings:
1) There is a negative correlation between standardized (adjusted) suicide rates and the amount of lithium in the water; and
2) It does not take much lithium to produce this effect.
The study reports…
razib | May 2, 2009Calculated Risk has a great chart showing GDP fluctuations which puts into perspective just how big a downtown the Great Depression represented, and how it compares to the current one. For the population ~30 and under the current downswing is already 3 times more extreme from the peak than any recession they have memory of. In fact, we're already approaching the biggest downswing since World War II and the recession will certainly be the longest as well. On the other hand, we're as far from the commonly accepted definition of a Depression of a 10% decline in GDP as the 1991 one recession was…
ddobbs | April 29, 2009Amid my flu frenzy I missed Vaughn Bell's excellent consideration of CIA psychology through the declassified memos:
I've been reading the recently released CIA memos on the interrogation of 'war on terror' detainees. The memos make clear that the psychological impact of the process is the most important aim of interrogation, from the moment the detainee is captured through the various phases of interrogation.
Although disturbing, they're interesting for what they reveal about the CIA's psychologists and their approach to interrogation.
As Vaughn notes,
A couple of the memos note that the…
gregladen | April 17, 2009... there is no way to turn way from it, but we are often poorly prepared to deal with it, especially when it involves teenagers. Face it: adults like it when teenagers finally learn to hide some of their emotions. Maturity = knowing how to leave other people out of your bad shit. We reward this behavior and we model it by building and maintaining a Barbified and Kenified culture. But every now and then a kid goes too far for their own good and, not to shock you or anything, but the morgue is not the appropriate place to have "that conversation" about life.
I've been lucky. I was never…
razib | April 7, 2009A Tale of Two Depressions:
Conclusion:
To summarise: the world is currently undergoing an economic shock every bit as big as the Great Depression shock of 1929-30. Looking just at the US leads one to overlook how alarming the current situation is even in comparison with 1929-30.
The good news, of course, is that the policy response is very different. The question now is whether that policy response will work. For the answer, stay tuned for our next column.
Click through for some real scary charts.
ddobbs | April 7, 2009I've got a story about Helen Mayberg's work on depression circuits in the new Scientific American Mind. I first wrote about Mayberg in the Times Magazine three years ago, in an article about her experimental use of deep brain stimulation to treat depression, and I later profiled her for SciAm Mind. This new article looks at her effort to further refine the neurocircuitry associated with major depression.
Working with fellow imaging experts Heidi Johansen-Berg and Tim Behrens of the University of Oxford and others, Mayberg used DTI to produce detailed images of area 25's "tractography," the…
palmd | March 16, 2009Over at Neurotopia, Scicurious has been doing some terrific writing about depression. Mental illness is a topic I've written about many times, so I was inspired to look into the vault and see what kind of goodies I had back there. Well, since I truly loathe people who dole out dangerous medical lies, I figured it was time to dust off this little bit on Scientology and mental illness, rework them a bit, and share them with you again.
The problem
Depression, in the medical sense, is not a mood...it is a severe
disorder originating in the brain, and affecting the entire body. Major…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009This post over at Neuroskeptic reignites a debate -- if it ever really stopped -- as to the role of impaired adult neurogenesis in causing depression and the function of anti-depressants in stimulating neurogenesis to treat the disease.
This is one of those hot topics in neuroscience. If you look away for just a second the entire field changes, so I thought I would do a little update on where the field stands.
Short summary: Whether neurogenesis is at fault in the etiology of depression is still a very controversial idea among neuroscientists with mixed evidence. Many anti-depressants…
ddobbs | January 20, 2009One theory about antidepressants is that they relieve depression by encouraging neurogenesis -- the creation of new neurons. Neuroskeptic reviews a study that argues against this idea.
the neurogenesis hypothesis has problems of its own. A new paper claims to add to what seems like a growing list of counter-examples: Ageing abolishes the effects of fluoxetine on neurogenesis.
The researchers, Couillard-Despres et. al. from the University of Regensburg in Germany, found that fluoxetine (Prozac) enhances hippocampal neurogenesis in mice - as expected - but found in addition that this only…
purepedantry | May 14, 2008Well that is reassuring:
A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and becoming a parent were related to depression and anger. Graduates showed a significant decrease in depressive symptoms over the seven years. Expressed anger also declined over time after graduation, suggesting improved mental health.
The researchers also found that while home may be a haven for young people in the early years of adulthood, the longer…
ddobbs | March 12, 2008The Kirsch study published a few weeks ago has stirred much discussion of the placebo power of antidepressants (or is it the antidepressant power of placebos?); it's clear that the act of taking a pill that you expect to help you often does help you.
But can the availability of a pill meant for depression make you feel (or think of yourself as) depressed? That's the question behind another part of the drug debate, regarding whether the drug industry encourages us to medicalize ordinary experience.
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004…
ddobbs | January 17, 2008
I've written before, both here and in print, about how FDA policy and drug company practices have allowed drug makers to publish (and the FDA to base approval on) only the most flattering drug-trial results while keeping less-flattering studies in the drawer. Today a New England Journal of Medicine report shows how things change when you include the results from the drawer: The effectiveness of many SSRIs dives to near placebo-level. This despite that the companies design and conduct most of these trials in a way calculated to produce positive results.
When I wrote on this for Scientific…
sb admin | November 12, 2007There's a revolutionary mental health claim in a hot new article - Therapeutic Efficacy of Cash in the Treatment of Anxiety and Depressive Disorders: Two Case Studies (e-pub ahead of print).
The first case report involves a man who was laid off and lost his pension; after treatment with various SSRIs and sedatives with numerous side effects, the patient came into the office free of depressive symptoms. He claimed to have won the lottery, which fMRI brain scans [shown here] confirmed with evidence of a complete remission. In the second case, a single mother of four found her anxiety and…
grrlscientist | September 19, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, mental health, depression, major depressive disorder, MDD, exercise, James A. Blumenthal
Image: Lucozade Sport.
"A lot of people know from their own experience that when they exercise, they feel better," observed James A. Blumenthal, a professor of psychology at Duke University and lead author of a newly published study that examined the relationship between exercise and depression. But does this anecdote hold up when examined in a scientific study? And how much better does exercise make one feel? According to this study, exercise is as effective at reducing…
grrlscientist | September 18, 2007tags: online mental health fair, bipolar disorder, manic-depressive illness, manic depression, Revolution Health
It has come to my attention that Revolution Health is currently running an Online Mental Health Fair, with a special focus on reaching college students and their parents. College is a particularly challenging time for students struggling with depression or bipolar disorder because students' mood disorders are complicated by being away from home and family for the first time. Thus, Revolution Health's goal is both to raise awareness on college campuses and to help raise money for…