psychiatry
neurophilosophy | January 15, 2008
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 same name, contains old footage of Freeman performing the procedure, and features an interview with Howard Dully, who was lobotomized at the age of 12 (and whose memoir was published last year).
Freeman fiercely advocated - and popularized - the lobotomy. He travelled across the U.S. in his "lobotomobile", teaching others how to…
j7uy5 | January 14, 2008
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">
alt="Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research"
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png"
height="50" width="80">Sounds
too good to be true. Perhaps it is. For one,
there is only one
published case. For another, it has to be injected near the
spine in order to have
this effect. The arthritis medication,
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a602013.html"
rel="tag">etanercept (
href="http://enbrel.com/" rel="tag">Enbrel®)
has been shown, in at least one case, to result in…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…
sb admin | December 28, 2007Brain Candy, a film by Toronto's sketch comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, is a satirical take on drug development. A scientist creates an antidepressant (Gleemonex) that evokes the happiest memory of the consumer, recreating that joy in the present. Gleemonex becomes a big success, until it all goes horribly wrong... a very funny film.
Here's a holiday-related clip in which the first test subject takes the drug. We see the capsule enter her system after she swallows it, then the drug reaches her brain and takes effect. Her happiest memory is a Christmas visit from her son and his family. "…
j7uy5 | December 23, 2007Roche
Molecular Diagnostics offers a test that can determine which
type of genes a person has for enzymes that metabolize antidepressant
medication. The test costs $ 300 to $400, and can be ordered
by healthcare professionals, or by consumers.
The idea is that it might be possible to predict which medications
might be better for a particular patient. That has appeal,
because many people have to try more than one medication in the quest
to find one that is both tolerable and effective.
If a person metabolizes a drug much more rapidly than most
people, then that person might need a higher…
omnibrain | December 16, 2007I always joke around that I would make the worst therapist since my 'therapy' would consist of something like this:
Surprisingly (well maybe not that surprisingly since the internet appeared) this method seems to be practiced somewhere seriously. The Kadir-Buxton Method involves:
making a fist of both hands, and striking both ears of the patient at exactly the same time and pressure with the soft part of the inner hand which is where the thumb joins the hand.
So let me get this straight... I hit someone hard in the head and it cures things like: Manic depression, eating disorders,…
sb admin | December 13, 2007 December 13 is my birthday! Yippee, you say, how old am I? Old enough to not say... I will shamelessly mention the Amazon wish list linked from my contact page, and remind you that Omni Brain has a tip jar in the sidebar (shared with Steve). But I'm not desperate for anything and there are plenty of deserving charities who need your money (I recommend UNIFEM). I'm thankful they are helping people in a more direct way than I can.
Anyway. I'm celebrating aging with a new tattoo, and am very excited about it! I've been interested in intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs…
j7uy5 | December 12, 2007 I haven't gotten
back to
the "selection of antidepressants" series. Mostly that is
because, alphabetically, the next one is supposed to be citalopram.
While
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citalopram">citalopram
(Celexa™)
is a perfectly fine antidepressant, it is kind of boring.
So to spice things up a little bit, I'm going to jump ahead to
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desvenlafaxine" rel="tag">desvenlafaxine.
This is a drug that is in development by
href="http://www.wyeth.com/" rel="tag">Wyeth.
They plan to market it with the brand name,
href="http://www.wyeth…
j7uy5 | December 8, 2007
This case was
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/357/23/2411">written
up in the NEJM,
and made freely accessible. The image on the top left shows a
brain scan taken three years earlier than the one on the top right.
The other images show the cells in the tumor.
It is a meningothelial meningioma, World Health Organization grade I.
You may ask, how is it that we happen to have available
before-and-after views of the same brain. That is not usually
the case. But this was an unusual case: the patient had
undergone sex-change treatment, and was receiving high-dose…
j7uy5 | December 5, 2007From an
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/20/AR2007112001777.html">article
in the Washington Post:
Afterward, she stayed strong. She wasn't
going to make the classic victim's mistake of blaming herself for
provoking the attack.
Mo, writing at
href="http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/11/mdma_for_ptsd.php">Neurophilosophy,
commented at length upon an article about the use of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdma">MDMA (
href="http://www.erowid.org/chemicals/mdma/mdma.shtml" rel="tag">Ecstasy)
in the treatment of
href="http…
j7uy5 | December 3, 2007The Washington Post has an interesting article,
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/01/AR2007120101782.html">'A
Soldier's Officer', about an officer in Iraq who attempted
suicide and endangered other personnel. The military is
considering putting her on trial for "assault on a superior
commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping, reckless
endangerment, wrongful discharge of a firearm, communication of a
threat and two attempts of intentional self-injury without intent to
avoid service."
In this post, I will comment on the article and the case as…
neurophilosophy | November 27, 2007A 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 ecstasy as a therapeutic tool for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Ecstasy (MDMA, or 3,4-methylenedioxy-N-methylamphetamine) is a psychedelic and a stimulant which acts by inhibiting the reuptake of serotonin, and, to a lesser extent, of dopamine and noradrenaline. It is illegal in most countries (it is classified as a Class A drug in the U.K. and a…
j7uy5 | November 25, 2007
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agomelatine" rel="tag">Agomelatine
is a new chemical entity that is nearing approval for treatment of
depression. It was developed by
href="http://www.servier.co.uk/aboutus/history.asp" rel="tag">Servier
Laboratories; they have entered into an agreement with
href="http://www.novartis.com/" rel="tag">Novartis
for commercialization of the product (
href="http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/85521.php"
rel="tag">Valdoxan®).
This represents a new approach to the pharmaceutical treatment of
depression. The putative mechanism of action…
j7uy5 | November 19, 2007It is common for tension to occur in the doctor-patient
relationship occurs when the patient reports symptoms that are
distressing to the patient, but which do not seem serious to the doctor.
Each instance of this is different, so it is hard to make
generalizations. However, in the case of sleep problems,
patients
have one thing working against them. All too often, doctors
relent, or try simply to save time, by writing a prescription.
The problem is described nicely in the New York Times Magazine:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/18/magazine/18sleep-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1…
sb admin | November 19, 2007I couldn't wait for Multimedia Friday to post this video, it's just too funny.
I Am the Very Model of a Psychopharmacologist is set to Gilbert and Sullivan's classic song with animation. Created by Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of the Neurosciences Education Institute, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the University of California San Diego, author of Essential Psychopharmacology. Credentials for neuropsychopharmacological hilarity.
j7uy5 | November 17, 2007
rel="tag">Simon N. Young, PhD, the Editor-in-chief
of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience, has written an editorial: How
To
Increase Serotonin In The Human Brain Without Drugs.
In is
published in this month's edition of the Journal of
Psychiatry and Neuroscience.
The Journal is an open-access journal, so anyone can read it.
The PDF is
href="http://www.cma.ca/multimedia/staticContent/HTML/N0/l2/jpn/vol-32/issue-6/pdf/pg394.pdf">here.
I have to admit, I was both surprised and skeptical when I first saw
this. Although there are many converging lines of evidence
associating…
j7uy5 | November 14, 2007The Department of Defense appears to be making a real effort
to
determine the scope of the problem. They now have published
the results of a second screening of 88,235 returning soldiers.
In their most recent study, they acknowledge that the prior
study missed a lot. Moreover, they now worry that even the
second study is missing some. In a nice gesture, the
style="font-style: italic;">Journal of the American Medical
Association has made the results openly accessible. (The
results of the first study also are openly accessible,
href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/295/9/…
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…
sb admin | November 9, 2007The Onion News Network brings us In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough? Satire of a talk show with pundits who promote more and better spying on people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
Note: It's "people diagnosed with" (or just "people with") and not "schizophrenics" as people are more than their differences and labels. But that's not as funny, is it?
sb admin | November 8, 2007
A depiction of delusional parasitosis in Dave Kellett's webcomic Sheldon. DP, a fixed delusion in which one believes s/he is infested with bugs despite no evidence, was famously described in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Superblogger and psychologist Vaughan Bell wrote a nice article on the subject, check it out.
Thanks again, Dave, for permission to share your comic (with slightly modified layout to make it blog-friendly).