Clipmarks | Aribeth's 'psychiatry' clips

A Spiritual Psychiatry: Challenge or Heresy?

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 17:34:39 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: 64.233.183.104

Let us hope for the advent of a psychiatry which places the psychic

crisis in a wider context, that of man in search of himself, a potentiality

inherent in all of life’s expressions. Psychiatry will then be able to fully inhabit

its function, that of an awakener of consciousness and an artisan of peace.

It is in becoming fully sensitive that the psychiatrist will be able, most

appropriately, to use the recommended treatments, all the while knowing that

the real cure is not to be found in a pill, but in the one who takes it.

psychiatrist and

patient are not so very different from the

student of wisdom who seeks fulfilment in an integrated life and in the

awareness of joy without cause.

losely bound friends, who

spend some time together and contribute to each other’s happiness: that of

being heard for the patient in need of love, and that of being respected for the

psychiatrist in need of recognition. When sensitivity and power unite, love

becomes a force of conviction and transformation.

Tags: psychiatry

Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 09:56:46 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.universityreviewsonline.com

Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs

Whether you work in the field of mental health or are simply interested in the subject, keeping abreast of the news, opinions and commentary within the online blogging community can be overwhelming. There are literally thousands of blogs that focus on mental health, running the gamut both in terms of focus as well as in quality.

Although it was difficult to narrow thousands of noteworthy resources down to the top 100, below is a categorized list of what we feel are the most popular, informative and/or unique mental health and psychology blogs on the Web

General Psychology

Cognitive Psychology

Forensic Psychology

Psychiatry

Neuroscience

Addiction

Anxiety

Austism

Bipolar Disorder

Depression

While any list of this kind is subject to oversights and omissions, it is our hope that with these top 100 sites you will find an excellent resource from which to educate yourself on mental health and psychology issues.

Tags: mental health, psychology, psychiatry

"Mad, Bad and Sad"

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 12:04:54 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: If male doctors conspired to define madness, responding to behaviors that flouted the social conventions of their culture, female patients, in the attempt to understand themselves and their context, and maybe even to create or bolster identity, colluded with those same doctors to satisfy the changing definitions of madness. “Often enough,” Appignanesi notes, “extreme expressions of the culture’s malaise, symptoms and disorders mirrored the time’s order.”

While “Mad, Bad and Sad” echoes and enlarges upon Elaine Showalter’s book “The Female Malady: Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980,” Showalter’s perspective is more exclusively feminist, arguing that psychiatry as practiced on women is a history of their subjugation and control by men. But as Appignanesi makes clear, women have had no little role in creating and fulfilling the definitions of their madness.<<

"Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present" by Lisa Appignanesi.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Diagnosis: Female

One of the consistently fascinating and disturbing aspects of “Mad, Bad and Sad: Women and the Mind Doctors” is Lisa Appignanesi’s assiduous tracking of the modishness of what might be mistaken for a sui generis discipline.

It seems that as soon as society relinquished witchcraft as the crime for which to punish an overtly liberated woman, it settled on madness as the reason to incarcerate her.

“Patients could well find themselves the victims of a doctor’s prejudice about what kind of behavior constituted sanity: this could all too easily work against women who didn’t conform to the time’s norms of sexual behavior or living habits.”

That diagnoses conceived by male doctors would be subject to men’s changeable views of women — romantic, patronizing, idealistic, misogynistic: the choices are limited only by the imagination — comes as no surprise; it’s the meticulous and exhaustive account of these theories offered in “Mad, Bad and Sad” that is sobering.

Tags: psychiatry, feminism, books, review

Possible Link Between Suicide and Earth’s Magnetic Field

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 02:25:50 GMT

clipped by: skwirlinator
clipper's remarks: Awesome Picture!

Clip Source: www.redorbit.com

Possible Link Between Suicide and Earth’s Magnetic Field

A Russian scientist has looked in to a possible link between geomagnetism and human health, suggesting their may be a relation to the number of suicides during certain seasonal peaks in the Earth’s geomagnetic field.

A review of suicide rates and their relation to magnetic storms in South Africa have also been published in Psychiatric circles.

High Periods of geomagnetic activity caused by large solar flares, known as geomagnetic storms, have been linked to clinical depression.

A study published in The British Journal of Psychiatry suggested a 36.2% increase in the number of men admitted into hospital for depression two weeks after geomagnetic storms.

Rycroft believes the correlation between geomagnetism and suicide justifies more research.

Tags: magnetic, suicide, pic, earth, sun, magnetosphere

Myths of Mental Illness: chemicals or people?

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 19:38:46 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation by Charles Barber

Excellent interview with author, difficult to do justice in clip. Part of the growing critique of the myth that mental distress is solely a matter of chemical imbalance, 'hardwiring', genetics etc. Relocates the human in culture and ideology rather than identifying a biological misfunctioning atom.

Clip Source: www.alternet.org

Author Charles Barber discusses Americans' unrealistic notions about happiness. We've medicalized a lot of life issues that aren't mental illnesses.

Mental illnesses were thought of as the product of chemical imbalances, or that you're genetically programmed a certain way. Those concepts have completely entered the culture, and you can't pick up a publication without some latest genetic explanation of, for instance, schizophrenia.

This can be very dangerous to think of in such simple terms. In psychiatry in particular, it sets up this division of a house divided against itself: genes versus environment, psychotherapy versus drugs, or nature versus nurture. The sophisticated thinkers understand that these things work together in an infinite dance.

the way the studies are reported, it's all hard wired and chemical imbalance-related. These things are just cartoons of the science. There is no clear chemical imbalance for any mental illness.

Tags: mental illness

Shyness Gene Teased Out

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 09:30:35 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: If further research links RGS2 variations to anxiety disorders, the gene may make a good treatment target, Smoller's team writes in the Archives of General Psychiatry.<<

Clip Source: www.webmd.com

Shyness Gene Teased Out

Variations in RGS2 Gene Linked to Shyness in Kids, Introversion in Adults

March 3, 2008 -- Scientists have spotted a gene linked to shyness in children and introversion in adults.

Variations in that gene may also make social anxiety disorder and other anxiety disorders more likely, but more work is needed to confirm that possibility.

The gene is called RGS2. Certain variations in that gene stood out in a new study of kids' shyness and adult introversion.

The researchers conducted three experiments.

The study doesn't mean that the RGS2 gene makes people shy or introverted. And the study wasn't about diagnosing anxiety disorders. Shyness and introversion aren't anxiety disorders.

But shyness and introversion are risk factors for anxiety disorders, especially social anxiety disorder, note the researchers, who included Jordan Smoller, MD, ScD, of Massachusetts General Hospital's psychiatry department.

Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 19:00:11 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: The reason has to do with the way drugs are tested and approved. To get F.D.A. approval, a drug has to beat a placebo in two randomized clinical trials that typically involve a few hundred subjects who are treated for relatively short periods, usually 4 to 12 weeks.So drugs are approved based on short-term studies for what turns out to be long-term — often lifelong — use in the world of clinical practice.

What do I say to a depressed patient who is doing well after five years on such a drug but can’t stop without a depressive relapse and who wants reassurance that the drug has no long-term adverse effects?I usually say that we have no evidence that the drug poses a risk with long-term use; and since the risk of untreated depression is much greater than the hypothetical risk of the drug, it makes sense to stay on it.

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Who Are We? Coming of Age on Antidepressants

April 15, 2008

“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”

At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.

But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.

Her experience is far from unique.

Since

1980

Prozac and Zoloft

the most widely prescribed drugs

depression in young people is a very serious problem

suicide is the third-leading cause of death in adolescents

By contrast, the risk of antidepressant treatment is small.

Still, what do we know about the effects of, say, 15 to 20 years of antidepressant drug treatment that begins in adolescence or childhood? Not enough.

Tags: depression, psychiatry, drugs, adolescence, medical

Toxic Psychiatry

Mon, 07 Apr 2008 18:02:08 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Useful website for work of psychiatrist Dr Breggin. Up to date.
WARNING!
When trying to withdraw from many psychiatric drugs, patients can develop serious and even life-threatening emotional and physical reactions. In short, it is dangerous not only to start taking psychiatric drugs but also can be hazardous to stop taking them. Therefore, withdrawal from psychiatric drugs should be done under clinical supervision. Principles of psychiatric medication withdrawal are discussed in Dr. Peter Breggin's book, Brain Disabling Treatments in Psychiatry: Drugs, Electroshock and the Psychopharaceutical Complex (Springer, NY, 2008).

Clip Source: www.breggin.com

Peter Breggin, M.D. began the full time private practice of psychiatry in 1968. Dr. Peter Breggin has been informing the professions, media and the public about the potential dangers of drugs, electroshock, psychosurgery, involuntary treatment, and the biological theories of psychiatry for over three decades. Since 1964 Dr. Peter Breggin has been publishing peer-reviewed articles and medical books in his subspecialty of clinical psychopharmacology. He is the author of dozens of scientific articles and more than 20 professional books, many dealing with psychiatric medication, the FDA and drug approval process, the evaluation of clinical trials, and standards of care in psychiatry and related fields.

Selected Scientific Papers by Peter Breggin, M.D.

SSRI - InducedViolence, Suicide& Abnormal Behavior

NEW

Review of Stimulant Side Effects by Dr. Peter Breggin

NEW

Benzodiazepines:
Adverse Effects and Withdrawal

Neuroleptics
"Antipsychotic" drugs

Tags: breggin, psychopharmacology, toxic psychiatry

The Rorschach Test

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 11:38:28 GMT

clipped by: Aribeth
clipper's remarks: and the Presidential Rorschach Test...

Clip Source: www.uihealthcare.com

The Rorschach Test

Hermann Rorschach (1884-1922) was a Swiss Psychiatrist who is best known for devising the inkblot test that bears his name. He studied art as a secondary-school student earning the nickname Kleck, meaning "inkblot," because of his interest in sketching. Rorschach considered following his father in an art career, but was drawn to psychiatry, taking a deep interest in the then new field of psychoanalysis.

By 1918 he had started to experiment with the interpretation of inkblots by showing 15 accidental inkblots to patients and asking them, "What might this be?" The Rorschach test is based on the human tendency to project interpretations and feelings onto ambiguous stimuli. Rorschach held that a person's perceptual responses to inkblots could serve as clues to basic personality tendencies.

ignored at first

never experienced its success

died

before he could properly test and evaluate his invention

Artwork based on Rorschach inkblots and Jung mandala

Clip Source: www.thenation.com

Tags: personality tests, psychology, psychiatry

Paranoid

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:24:18 GMT

clipped by: dakotayii
clipper's remarks: Professor Peter Kinderman, a Liverpool University psychologist and member of the British Psychological Society, said: "This is a valuable and useful tool.

"It helps us to understand more about paranoia and I can see it could have a role to play in assessment and therapy."

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

King's College London has developed a programme simulating a journey where a person interacts with other travellers.

A third of the 200 people studied had paranoid thoughts, with those anxious and worried most likely to do so, the British Journal of Psychiatry said.

During the four-minute ride the volunteers walked around a carriage filled with "virtual" passengers who behaved like real people.

The "avatars" - computer-generated characters - breathed, looked around, and sometimes met the gaze of the participants.

A pre-assessment showed that those who were anxious, worried, pessimistic, or had low self-esteem, were most likely to feel paranoid.

One participant who experienced paranoid thoughts told the scientists: "There's something dodgy about one guy. Like he was about to do something - assault someone, plant a bomb, say something not nice to me, be aggressive."

Another said: "There was a guy spooking me out - tried to get away from him."

Tags: science

Treating SSRI-resistant depression

Wed, 26 Mar 2008 08:09:09 GMT

clipped by: tabsey
clipper's remarks: Interesting

Clip Source: www.eurekalert.org

Philadelphia, PA, March 25, 2008 – When your antidepressant medication does not work, should you switch to a different medication from the same class or should you try an antidepressant medication that has a different mechanism of action" This is the question asked by researchers in a new report scheduled for publication in Biological Psychiatry on April 1st.

Papakostas and colleagues compared two strategies for treating symptoms of major depressive disorder that do not respond to treatment with a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressant: either switching to a second SSRI or to a non-SSRI antidepressant. Some common SSRI antidepressants are fluoxetine (Prozac), citalopram (Celexa) and sertraline (Zoloft), while examples of a few common non-SSRI antidepressants are venlafaxine (Effexor) and buproprion (Wellbutrin, Zyban). The authors combined 4 studies comparing these two types of treatment strategies and performed a meta-analysis on the pooled data.

Tags: medical, research

Depression can be Good for You

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 09:01:57 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: There is serious depression that needs help. There are poverty, abuse, bad circumstance that need addressing. But for most of us, a bit of depression, the article suggests, is a catalyst for refelction, change and growth

Clip Source: news.bbc.co.uk

A leading psychiatrist says that depression is not a human defect at all, but a defence mechanism that in its mild and moderate forms can force a healthy reassessment of personal circumstances.

Dr Paul Keedwell, an expert on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, argues all people are vulnerable to depression in the face of stress to varying degrees, and always have been.

The fact it has survived so long - and not been eradicated by evolution - indicates it has helped the human race become stronger.

"Psychological unease can generate creative work and the rebirth after depression brings a new love affair with life."

Aristotle believed depression to be of great value because of the insights it could bring. There is also an increased empathy in people who have or have had depression, he says, because they become more attuned to other people's suffering.

Tags: depression

"Madness: from the Inside

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 08:52:02 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.confusion.discover-your-mind.co.uk

The ideas on this site focus on the difficulties and sorrows of personal evolution

I give a description of the common forms of madness (or psychosis), along with explanations of their psychological origins. I treat madness as forms of confusion and mental disorder, and not as mental illness. Hence I do not consider biological or physiological possibilities.

I also explore some psycho-somatic disorders, as lesser forms of confusion, and some standard ways of changing a person's basic belief systems through the process of abreaction.

My views of mental disorder are the product of many years of intense psycho- analysis, when I explored the confusions and immaturities at the base of my ego, or personality. My ideas are new, and were created by the empirical analysis of my personal sorrows.

My views have little correspondence to conventional psychiatric ideologies. I describe mental confusion from the inside ; psychiatry describes it from the outside.

Discover Your Mind

Tags: madness, schizophrenia, abreaction, psychosus