Month: February 2006

It’s hard for me to think of reasons why a scientist and doctor would be induced to perform such “experiments,” but this is part of the past psychiatric and psychological scientists need to face up to. We have done some pretty horrific things.

Brainwash victims win cash claims – Sunday Times – Times Online:

Using techniques similar to those portrayed in the celebrated novel the Manchurian Candidate, it was believed that people could be brainwashed and reprogrammed to carry out specific acts.

Cameron developed a range of depatterning “treatments” while director of the Allan Memorial Institute at McGill University.

Patients were woken from drug-induced stupors two or three times a day for multiple electric shocks. In a specially designed “sleep room” made famous by Anne Collins’s book of the same name, Cameron placed a speaker under the patient’s pillow and relayed negative messages for 16 hours a day.

Technorati Tags: abnormal psychology, Mental health, psychology

Our Abnormal Psychology course is studying eating disorders this week, so it’s timely that this comes from Mind Hacks. It reports on a study indicating women with symptoms of eating disorders are more accurate judges of their bodies (when compared with a panel of judges). Take a gander:

Mind Hacks: The ‘painful realism’ of eating disorders:

This shows a lack of a ‘self serving attribution bias’ which is a normal tendency to over-attribute positive things to ourselves and negative things to other people or situations.

A recent review of the research suggested that this bias is usually strongly present in most people. It has been suggested that this may be useful, as it might emotionally cushion us from some of life’s hardships.

People with certain forms of mental illness, particularly depression, tend not to have this bias, however, meaning they actually view the world more accurately – an effect coined ‘depressive realism’.

Jansen’s study suggests a similar ‘painful realism’ effect may be present in people with eating disorders, although it’s not clear whether this is specific to body perception, or whether it is primarily associated with emotional difficulties that often accompany conditions like anorexia.

Technorati Tags: abnormal psychology, depression, Mental health, psychology

An interesting article in Prospect Magazine examines the difficult choices psychiatrists have to make when prescribing treatments for mental disorders. (thanks to Mind Hacks for pointing this out) The thesis of the article (that fat is not beautiful) is troubling, but in any event, the rest is quite good. It’s a story of a teenager with early-onset psychosis…

Her story: ‘Beautiful madness’ by Alexander Linklater | Prospect Magazine February 2006 issue 119:

Nia had revealed little to her parents of what was really going on inside her head. But the soft-spoken psychiatrist at the local adolescent mental health centre won her confidence and she began to tell him about the trains. A railway line ran a few hundred yards past the bottom of their garden, far enough away for the family to ignore it. Nevertheless, Nia said she could hear people talking about her inside the painted steel carriages. In the clank of heavy rolling stock she could pick out snatches of conversations about her—derogatory insinuations that crept into her room through the plastic veneer of the double-glazing. She also told him that she had seen things on television. The newsreaders had begun looking at her. In the corners of their eyes she began to read signs. They were sending her messages; messages that linked up with the voices on the trains.

…

The consultant favoured Olanzapine for Nia; he had found the drug to work well in her age group despite concerns about weight gain and diabetes. Other modern choices include Quetiapine, though many clinicians think it a weaker drug, and Risperidone, which can also cause weight gain and stiffness. The older drugs like Chlorpromazine and Haloperidol were felt to be “dirtier” and to have worse side effects, including the irreversible lip-smacking and protruding tongue movements of tardive dyskinesia. Seasoned sceptics argue that not much, fundamentally, has changed since the 1950s, apart from refining the choice of side-effects. The young psychiatrist wrote Nia up for Olanzapine—10mg, the regular dose. The drug being a sedative, Nia took it at night. She began to sleep.

Not much changed for five days. Then, one morning, Nia was transformed. She left her bedroom, came to meals, had normal conversations with staff. Her face filled out with ordinary human expressions. A day later she was even laughing. A young woman, an intelligent teenager, had reappeared; the psychosis seemed to have left her.

Technorati Tags: abnormal psychology, Mental health, psychology

The Times (UK) has an article about “cutting,” the use of self-mutilation as a means of emotionally expressing things that people otherwise feel unable to express. One of the psychologists interviewed points out that it replaces fainting spells and paralysis which might have been used in Freud’s time, although I find that specious and would question such a claim.

Unkindest cut of all – Health – Times Online:

The UK has the highest incidence of self-harm in Europe, says the Mental Health Foundation and the Camelot Foundation, which are jointly conducting the UK’s first inquiry into self-harm. Early findings show that one teenager in ten self-harms by cutting their skin, burning, scalding, hitting, scratching, hair pulling or swallowing poisons. Children as young as 7 are doing it. Girls outnumber boys by seven to one, but boys’ rates of self-harm have nearly doubled since the 1980s. More than 24,000 teenagers end up in hospital in the UK each year after deliberately harming themselves.

Technorati Tags: abnormal psychology, emotion, Mental health, psychology