Posts tagged mental illness
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness
“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.” —Salvador Dali
The romantic notion that mental illness and creativity are linked is so prominent in the public consciousness that it is rarely challenged. So before I continue, let me nip this in the bud: Mental illness is neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity.
The oft-cited studies by Kay Redfield Jamison, Nancy Andreasen, and Arnold Ludwig showing a link between mental illness and creativity have been criticized on the grounds that they involve small, highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.
To be sure, research does show that many eminent creators– particularly in the arts–had harsh early life experiences (such as social rejection, parental loss, or physical disability) and mental and emotional instability. However, this does not mean that mental illness was a contributing factor to their eminence. There are many eminent people without mental illness or harsh early life experiences, and there is very little evidence suggesting that clinical, debilitating mental illness is conducive to productivity and innovation.
What’s more, only a few of us ever reach eminence. Thankfully for the rest of us, there are different levels of creativity. James C. Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto argue that we can display creativity in many different ways, from the creativity inherent in the learning process (“mini-c”), to everyday forms of creativity (“little-c”) to professional-level expertise in any creative endeavor (“Pro-c”), to eminent creativity (“Big-C”).
Engagement in everyday forms of creativity– expressions of originality and meaningfulness in daily life– certainly do not require suffering. Quite the contrary, my colleague and friend Zorana Ivcevic Pringle found that people who engaged in everyday forms of creativity– such as making a collage, taking photographs, or publishing in a literary magazine– tended to be more open-minded, curious, persistent, positive, energetic, and intrinsically motivated by their activity. Those scoring high in everyday creativity also reported feeling a greater sense of well-being and personal growth compared to their classmates who engaged less in everyday creative behaviors. Creating can also be therapeutic for those who are already suffering. For instance, research shows that expressive writing increases immune system functioning, and the emerging field of posttraumatic growth is showing how people can turn adversity into creative growth.
So is there any germ of truth to the link between creativity and mental illness? The latest research suggests there is something to the link, but the truth is much more interesting. Let’s dive in.
The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness
In a recent report based on a 40-year study of roughly 1.2 million Swedish people, Simon Kyaga and colleagues found that with the exception of bi-polar disorder, those in scientific and artistic occupations were not more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders. So full-blown mental illness did not increase the probability of entering a creative profession (even the exception, bi-polar disorder, showed only a small effect of 8%).
What was striking, however, was that the siblings of patients with autism and the first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia nervosa were significantly overrepresented in creative professions. Could it be that the relatives inherited a watered-down version of the mental illness conducive to creativity while avoiding the aspects that are debilitating?
Research supports the notion that psychologically healthy biological relatives of people with schizophrenia have unusually creative jobs and hobbies and tend to show higher levels of schizotypal personality traits compared to the general population. Note that schizotypy is not schizophrenia. Schizotypy consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.
Schizotypal traits can be broken down into two types. “Positive” schizotypy includes unusual perceptual experiences, thin mental boundaries between self and other, impulsive nonconformity, and magical beliefs. “Negative” schizotypal traits include cognitive disorganization and physical and social anhedonia (difficulty experiencing pleasure from social interactions and activities that are enjoyable for most people). Daniel Nettle found that people with schizotypy typically resemble schizophrenia patients much more along the positive schizotypal dimensions (such as unusual experiences) compared to the negative schizotypal dimensions (such as lack of affect and volition).
This has important implications for creativity. Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham found that the unusual experiences and impulsive nonconformity dimensions of schizotypy, but not the cognitive disorganization dimension, were significantly related to self-ratings of creativity, a creative personality (measured by a checklist of adjectives such as “confident,” “individualistic,” “insightful,” “wide interests,” “original,” “reflective,” “resourceful,” “unconventional,” and “sexy”), and everyday creative achievement among thirty-four activities (“written a short story,” “produced your own website,” “composed a piece of music,” and so forth).
Recent neuroscience findings support the link between schizotypy and creative cognition. Hikaru Takeuchi and colleagues investigated the functional brain characteristics of participants while they engaged in a difficult working memory task. Importantly, none of their subjects had a history of neurological or psychiatric illness, and all had intact working memory abilities. Participants were asked to display their creativity in a number of ways: generating unique ways of using typical objects, imagining desirable functions in ordinary objects and imagining the consequences of “unimaginable things” happening.
The researchers found that the more creative the participant, the more they had difficulty suppressing the precuneus while engaging in an effortful working memory task. The precuneus is the area of the Default Mode Network that typically displays the highest levels of activation during rest (when a person is not focusing on an external task). The precuneus has been linked to self-consciousness, self-related mental representations, and the retrieval of personal memories. How is this conducive to creativity? According to the researchers, “Such an inability to suppress seemingly unnecessary cognitive activity may actually help creative subjects in associating two ideas represented in different networks.”
Prior research shows a similar inability to deactivate the precuneus among schizophrenic individuals and their relatives. Which raises the intriguing question: what happens if we directly compare the brains of creative people against the brains of people with schizotypy?
Enter a hot-off-the-press study by Andreas Fink and colleagues. Consistent with the earlier study, they found an association between the ability to come up with original ideas and the inability to suppress activation of the precuneus during creative thinking. As the researchers note, these findings are consistent with the idea that more creative people include more events/stimuli in their mental processes than less creative people. But crucially, they found that those scoring high in schizotypy showed a similar pattern of brain activations during creative thinking as the highly creative participants, supporting the idea that overlapping mental processes are implicated in both creativity and psychosis proneness.
It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition. In other research, they found that students with reduced latent inhibition scored higher in openness to experience, and in my own research I’ve found that reduced latent inhibition is associated with a faith in intuition.
What is latent inhibition? Latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism that we share with other animals, and it is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine. A reduced latent inhibition allows us to treat something as novel, no matter how may times we’ve seen it before and tagged it as irrelevant. Prior research shows a link between reduced latent inhibition and schizophrenia. But as Shelley Carson points out in her “Shared Vulnerability Model,” vulnerable mental processes such as reduced latent inhibition, preference for novelty, hyperconnectivity, and perseveration can interact with protective factors, such as enhanced fluid reasoning, working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, to “enlarge the range and depth of stimuli available in conscious awareness to be manipulated and combined to form novel and original ideas.”
Which brings us to the real link between creativity and mental illness.
The latest research suggests that mental illness may be most conductive to creativity indirectly, by enabling the relatives of those inflicted to open their mental flood gates but maintain the protective factors necessary to steer the chaotic, potentially creative storm.
Gene Found To Be Crucial For Formation Of Certain Brain Circuitry
Using a powerful gene-hunting technique for the first time in mammalian brain cells, researchers at Johns Hopkins report they have identified a gene involved in building the circuitry that relays signals through the brain. The gene is a likely player in the aging process in the brain, the researchers say. Additionally, in demonstrating the usefulness of the new method, the discovery paves the way for faster progress toward identifying genes involved in complex mental illnesses such as autism and schizophrenia — as well as potential drugs for such conditions. A summary of the study appears in the Dec. 12 issue of Cell Reports.
(Image: A mouse neuron with synapses shown: Red dots mark excitatory synapses, while green dots mark so-called inhibitory synapses. Credit: Kamal Sharma/Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine)
“We have been looking for a way to sift through large numbers of genes at the same time to see whether they affect processes we’re interested in,” says Richard Huganir, Ph.D., director of the Johns Hopkins University Solomon H. Snyder Department of Neuroscience and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator, who led the study. “By adapting an automated process to neurons, we were able to go through 800 genes to find one needed for forming synapses — connections — among those cells.”
Although automated gene-sifting techniques have been used in other areas of biology, Huganir notes, many neuroscience studies instead build on existing knowledge to form a hypothesis about an individual gene’s role in the brain. Traditionally, researchers then disable or “knock out” the gene in lab-grown cells or animals to test their hypothesis, a time-consuming and laborious process.
In this study, Huganir’s group worked to test many genes all at once using plastic plates with dozens of small wells. A robot was used to add precise allotments of cells and nutrients to each well, along with molecules designed to knock out one of the cells’ genes — a different one for each well.
“The big challenge was getting the neurons, which are very sensitive, to function under these automated conditions,” says Kamal Sharma, Ph.D., a research associate in Huganir’s group. The team used a trial-and-error approach, adjusting how often the nutrient solution was changed and adding a washing step, and eventually coaxed the cells to thrive in the wells. In addition, Sharma says, they fine-tuned an automated microscope used to take pictures of the circuitry that had formed in the wells and calculated the numbers of synapses formed among the cells.
The team screened 800 genes in this way and found big differences in the well of cells with a gene called LRP6 knocked out. LRP6 had previously been identified as a player in a biochemical chain of events known as the Wnt pathway, which controls a range of processes in the brain. Interestingly, Sharma says, the team found that LRP6 was only found on a specific kind of synapse known as an excitatory synapse, suggesting that it enables the Wnt pathway to tailor its effects to just one synapse type.
“Changes in excitatory synapses are associated with aging, and changes in the Wnt pathway in later life may accelerate aging in general. However, we do not know what changes take place in the synaptic landscape of the aging brain. Our findings raise intriguing questions: Is the Wnt pathway changing that landscape, and if so, how?” says Sharma. “We’re interested in learning more about what other proteins LRP6 interacts with, as well as how it acts in different types of brain cells at different developmental stages of circuit development and refinement.”
Another likely outcome of the study is wider use of the gene-sifting technique, he says, to explore the genetics of complex mental illnesses. The automated method could also be used to easily test the effects on brain cells of a range of molecules and see which might be drug candidates.
Study Finds No Link Between Hallucinogens And Mental Problems
How risky are psychedelic drugs to mental health? Not nearly as much as you might have imagined.
People who had taken LSD, psilocybin (the brain-bending chemical in magic mushrooms) or mescaline at any time in their lives were no more likely than those who hadn’t to wind up in mental health treatment or to have symptoms of mental illness, according to an analysis by some Norwegian researchers.
And there was some evidence that people who had taken the drugs at some point were less likely to have had recent mental health treatment.
"There seems to be no evidence of overall negative impact — and even some hints of benefit — associated with the use of psychedelics," says , a psychologist in the psychiatry department at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.
Johnson wasn’t involved in the study but had read the work, which was by PLOS ONE. In separate human experiments, Johnson and his colleagues at Hopkins have given psilocybin to cancer patients under carefully controlled conditions to help them cope with anxiety and depression.
The latest study comes from researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who analyzed data from the , sponsored by the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration. Previously, the Norwegian researchers looked back at old data on and concluded that it wasn’t a bad idea at all.
In this study, the researchers looked at survey data collected from more than 130,000 randomly selected Americans between 2001 and 2004. Nearly 22,000, or about 13 percent, said they had taken hallucinogenic drugs at some point. About aged 21-64 have tried psychedelics.
"The lack of association between the use of psychedelics and indicators of mental health problems in this large population survey is consistent with clinical studies in which LSD or other psychedelics have been ," the researchers wrote.
This study has limitations. It’s possible that healthier people are more likely to take psychedelics than those already struggling with mental illness, for instance. The study also didn’t take the dose of drugs into account. The researchers also didn’t have any information about family history of mental illness, which could be an important factor.
"The design of our study does not allow conclusions about causality," Teri S. Krebs, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Shots. "However, there is a lack of evidence that psychedelics cause lasting mental health problems."
While the findings are broadly reassuring about the safety of hallucinogenic drugs, they don’t guarantee a good trip. “This should not be taken to state that there are never individual cases of harm. We know that there are,” Johnson says. “It’s a question of how frequent they are and under what circumstances they happen.”
5 Disorders Share Genetic Risk Factors, Study Finds
The psychiatric illnesses seem very different — schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, autism, major depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Yet they share several genetic glitches that can nudge the brain along a path to mental illness, researchers report. Which disease, if any, develops is thought to depend on other genetic or environmental factors.
Their study, published online Wednesday in the Lancet, was based on an examination of genetic data from more than 60,000 people worldwide. Its authors say it is the largest genetic study yet of psychiatric disorders. The findings strengthen an emerging view of mental illness that aims to make diagnoses based on the genetic aberrations underlying diseases instead of on the disease symptoms.
Two of the aberrations discovered in the new study were in genes used in a major signaling system in the brain, giving clues to processes that might go awry and suggestions of how to treat the diseases.
“What we identified here is probably just the tip of an iceberg,” said Dr. Jordan Smoller, lead author of the paper and a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital. “As these studies grow we expect to find additional genes that might overlap.”
The new study does not mean that the of psychiatric disorders are simple. Researchers say there seem to be hundreds of genes involved and the gene variations discovered in the new study confer only a small risk of psychiatric disease.
Steven McCarroll, director of genetics for the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research at the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., said it was significant that the researchers had found common genetic factors that pointed to a specific signaling system.
“It is very important that these were not just random hits on the dartboard of the genome,” said Dr. McCarroll, who was not involved in the new study.
The work began in 2007 when a large group of researchers began investigating genetic data generated by studies in 19 countries and including 33,332 people with psychiatric illnesses and 27,888 people free of the illnesses for comparison. The researchers studied scans of people’s DNA, looking for variations in any of several million places along the long stretch of genetic material containing three billion DNA letters. The question: Did people with psychiatric illnesses tend to have a distinctive DNA pattern in any of those locations?
Researchers had already seen some clues of overlapping genetic effects in identical . One twin might have schizophrenia while the other had bipolar disorder. About six years ago, around the time the new study began, researchers had examined the genes of a few rare families in which psychiatric disorders seemed especially prevalent. They found a few unusual disruptions of chromosomes that were linked to psychiatric illnesses. But what surprised them was that while one person with the aberration might get one disorder, a relative with the same mutation got a different one.
Jonathan Sebat, chief of the Beyster Center for Molecular Genomics of Neuropsychiatric Diseases at the University of California, San Diego, and one of the discoverers of this effect, said that work on these rare genetic aberrations had opened his eyes. “Two different diagnoses can have the same genetic risk factor,” he said.
In fact, the new paper reports, distinguishing psychiatric diseases by their symptoms has long been difficult. Autism, for example, was once called childhood schizophrenia. It was not until the 1970s that autism was distinguished as a separate disorder.
But Dr. Sebat, who did not work on the new study, said that until now it was not clear whether the rare families he and others had studied were an exception or whether they were pointing to a rule about multiple disorders arising from a single genetic glitch.
“No one had systematically looked at the common variations,” in DNA, he said. “We didn’t know if this was particularly true for rare mutations or if it would be true for all genetic risk.” The new study, he said, “shows all genetic risk is of this nature.”
The new study found four DNA regions that conferred a small risk of psychiatric disorders. For two of them, it is not clear what genes are involved or what they do, Dr. Smoller said. The other two, though, involve genes that are part of channels, which are used when neurons send signals in the brain.
“The calcium channel findings suggest that perhaps — and this is a big if — treatments to affect calcium channel functioning might have effects across a range of disorders,” Dr. Smoller said.
There are drugs on the market that block calcium channels — they are used to treat — and researchers had already postulated that they might be useful for bipolar disorder even before the current findings.
One investigator, Dr. Roy Perlis of Massachusetts General Hospital, just completed a small study of a calcium channel blocker in 10 people with bipolar disorder and is about to expand it to a large randomized clinical trial. He also wants to study the drug in people with schizophrenia, in light of the new findings. He cautions, though, that people should not rush out to take a calcium channel blocker on their own.
“We need to be sure it is safe and we need to be sure it works,” Dr. Perlis said.
Today the White House announced its goal to fund Brain Research, in hopes of furthering understanding of brain disorders and degenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
Two years ago Scientific American magazine sent me to the University of Texas at Austin to borrow a human brain. They needed me to photograph a normal, adult, non-dissected brain that the university had obtained by trading a syphilitic lung with another institution. The specimen was waiting for me, but before I left they asked if I’d like to see their collection.
I walked into a storage closet filled with approximately one-hundred human brains, none of them normal, taken from patients at the Texas State Mental Hospital. The brains sat in large jars of fluid, each labeled with a date of death or autopsy, a brief description in Latin, and a case number. These case numbers corresponded to micro film held by the State Hospital detailing medical histories. But somehow, regardless of how amazing and fascinating this collection was, it had been largely untouched, and unstudied for nearly three decades.
Driving back to my studio with a brain snugly belted into the passenger seat, I quickly became obsessed with the idea of photographing the collection, preserving the already decaying brains, and corresponding the images to their medical histories. I met with my friend Alex Hannaford, a features journalist, to help me find the collection’s history dating back to the 1950s.
Over the past year while working this idea into a book, we’ve learned how heavily storied the collection is. That it was originally intended to be displayed and studied, but without funding it instead stagnated. And that the microfilm histories of each brain had been destroyed years ago.
My original vision of a photo book accompanied by medical data and a comprehensive essay turned into a story of loss and neglect. But Alex continued to pursue some scientific hope for the collection. After discussions with various neuroscientists we learned that through MRI technology and special techniques in DNA scanning there is still hope. And with the new possibilities of federal brain research funding, this collection’s secrets may yet be unlocked.
As we begin the hunt for someone to publish my 230 images accompanied by Alex’s 14,000 word essay, the University has found new interest in the collection. They currently are planning to make MRI scans of the brains.
Malformed – A Collection of Human Brains from the Texas State Mental Hospital by Adam Voorhes
The subtle hallmarks of psychiatric illness can reveal themselves even remotely
Most people are so attuned to the nuances of social interaction that they can detect clues to mental illness while playing a strategy game with someone they have never met.
That was the finding of a team of scientists led by Read Montague, director of the Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute. The researchers discovered that healthy people and those with borderline personality disorder displayed different patterns of behavior while playing an online strategy game, so much so that when healthy players played people with borderline personality disorder, they gave up on trying to predict what their partners would do next.
For their large neuroimaging study, the scientists used a multiround social interaction game, the investor-trustee game, to study the level of strategic thinking in 195 pairs of subjects. In each pair, one player played the investor and the other the trustee. The investor chose how much money to send the trustee, and the trustee in turn decided how much to return to the investor. Profit required the cooperation of both players.
“This classic tit-for-tat game allows us to probe people’s responses to the social gestures of others,” said Montague, who also directs the Computational Psychiatry Unit, an academic center that uses computational models to understand mental disease. “It further allows us to see how people form models of one another. These insights are important for understanding a range of mental illnesses, as the ability to infer other people’s intentions is an essential component of healthy cognition.”
The scientists classified the investors according to varying levels of strategic depth of thought. The healthy subjects fell into three categories: about half simply responded to the amount the other player sent; about one-quarter built a model of their partner’s behavior; and the remaining quarter considered not just their model of their partner, but also their partner’s models of them.
Not surprisingly, the depth-of-thought style of play correlated with success, with the players who looked deeper into interactions making considerably more money than those who played at a shallow level.
When healthy subjects played people with borderline personality disorder, though, they were far less likely to exhibit depth of thought.
“People with borderline personality disorder are characterized by their unstable relationships, and when they play this game, they tend to break cooperation,” said Montague. “The healthy subjects picked up on the erratic behavior, likely without even realizing it, and far fewer played strategically.”
Notably, the functional magnetic resonance imaging of the subjects’ brains revealed that each category of player showed distinct neural correlates of learning signals associated with differing depths of thought. The scientists used hyperscanning, a technique Montague invented that enables subjects in different brain scanners to interact in real time, regardless of geography. Hyperscanning allows scientists to eavesdrop on brain activity during social exchanges in scanners, whether across the hallway or across the world.
“We’re always modeling other people, and our brains have a substantial amount of neural tissue devoted to pondering our interactions with other people,” Montague said. “This study is a start to turning neural signals into numbers – not just theory-of-mind arguments, but actual numbers. And when we can do that across thousands of people, we should start to gain insights into psychopathologies – what circuits are involved, what brain regions are engaged, and how injuries, congenital disorders, and genetic defects might play into psychiatric illness.”
Montague believes the study represents a significant contribution to the field of computational psychiatry, which seeks to bring computational clout to efforts to understand mental dysfunction. “Traditional psychiatric categories are useful yet incomplete,” said Montague, who delivered a TEDGlobal talk on the growing field of computational psychiatry last year. “Computational psychiatry enables us to redefine with a new lexicon – a mathematical one – the standard ways we think about mental illness.”
Computationally based insights may one day help psychiatry achieve better precision in diagnosis and treatment, Montague said. But until scientists have the right instruments, they cannot even begin to make those connections.
“The exquisite sensitivity that most people have to social gestures gives us a valuable opening,” Montague said. “We’re hoping to invent a tool – almost a human inkblot test – for identifying and characterizing mental disorders in which social interactions go awry.”
(Source: vtnews.vt.edu)
Either mad and bad or Jekyll and Hyde: media portrayals of schizophrenia
Stigma can take a heavy toll on people who suffer from mental illness. Being shunned, feared, devalued and discriminated against can impair recovery and deepen social isolation and distress. Many sufferers judge stigma to be more difficult to cope with than the symptoms of their illness.
Thankfully, there are grounds for hope. Australian researchers have shown that mental illness stigma, such as the unwillingness to interact with affected people, generally declined from 2003 to 2011. Some credit for this improvement must go to media campaigns by beyondblue and SANE, and to the willingness of many people to speak publicly about experiences that would once have been shamefully private.
The dark cloud inside this silver lining is schizophrenia, a serious condition that impairs thinking, emotion and motivation. While Australians’ attitudes towards depression have become more accepting, the stigma of schizophrenia has remained largely unchanged.
Misusing and misunderstanding
People with schizophrenia are still perceived as dangerous and unpredictable, and these perceptions have increased in recent years. Attitudes to people with schizophrenia have also worsened in the United States at the same time as attitudes to depressed people have improved.
Just as the media can take some credit for the declining stigma of other conditions, it must take some of the blame for the continuing stigma of schizophrenia. Media portrayals commonly associate it with violence and danger.
Schizophrenia is also often misused to refer to split personality or incoherence. This Jekyll-and-Hyde misconception persists despite countless corrections. One study of Italian newspapers, for instance, found that the term was employed in this way almost three times as often it was used correctly to refer to people with the diagnosis or their illness.
But just how negative are current media depictions of schizophrenia? My students and I recently examined this question in a study that we published in the academic journal Psychosis. We located every story published in major national, state and territory online and print news media outlets in the year ending August 2012 that cited schizophrenia or schizophrenic.
We then counted how many stories misused these terms and coded how often the condition was linked to violence or presented in a stigmatising way.
Our results were striking. Almost half (47%) of stories linked schizophrenia to some form of violence, and 28% of these associated it with attempted or completed homicide. The schizophrenic person was identified as a perpetrator of violence six times more frequently than as its victim.
Schizophrenia was misused as a split metaphor in 13% of stories. And fully 46% of stories were coded as stigmatising.
It’s hardly surprising that the public’s views of the condition continue to be laced with fear and loathing if they usually find schizophrenia presented in the context of violent aggression or as a metaphor for internal contradiction.
Better ways
What can be done about all of this? For one thing, journalists and the general public need to become aware that schizophrenia doesn’t mean split personality and it bears no resemblance to caricatures of craziness. This mistaken usage should be retired not because the police say it’s offensive, but because it perpetuates a misunderstanding that hurts real people.
Journalists and editors also need to think carefully before linking schizophrenia to violent behaviour. Often the proposed link is dubious and speculative, and adds nothing important to the story. Just as violence supposedly committed by people experiencing mental illness is over-reported – producing an exaggerated sense of their dangerousness – their victimisation is often under-reported.
An equally important corrective would be to publish more stories that feature people with schizophrenia living well, present their everyday struggles and adversities or showcase promising treatments and research findings.
Coverage can be improved. Our study found that stories from broadsheet newspapers were less stigmatising than tabloid stories, and longer, more developed stories were less stigmatising than briefer ones.
This is not a matter of white-washing the news. People with schizophrenia are indeed at a somewhat increased risk of committing violent offences (and of being their victims). They can behave in challenging ways. But the media landscape that our study surveyed is so tilted towards depicting schizophrenia as dangerous that it’s seriously unbalanced.
The news media can do better and, if they do, the stigma of schizophrenia may start to erode.
Surprisingly, yes.
The modern lobotomy originated in the 1930s, when doctors realized that by severing fiber tracts connected to the frontal lobe, they could help patients overcome certain psychiatric problems, such as intractable depression and anxiety. Over the next two decades, the procedure would become simple and popular, completed by poking a sharpened tool above the eyeball. According to one study, about two thirds of patients showed improvement after surgery.
Unfortunately, not all lobotomy practition-ers were responsible, and the technique left some patients with severe side effects, including seizures, lethargy, changes in personality, and incontinence. In response, doctors refined their techniques. They replaced the lobotomy with more specialized approaches: the cingulotomy, the anterior capsulotomy, and the subcaudate tractotomy. Studies of these procedures found evidence of benefit for at least one fourth of patients suffering from problems such as OCD and depression.
Even with the risk of side effects, those in the field still say the procedures were by and large successful. “I feel that the principle behind ablative surgery was somewhat exonerated by the research findings, which showed that it worked for very specific indications,” says Konstantin Slavin, president of the American Society for Stereotactic and Functional Neurosurgery, and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
By the 1980s, lobotomies had fallen out of fashion. “In general, the entire functional neurosurgery field moved away from destruction—from ablative surgery,” Slavin says. A then-new technique called deep-brain stimulation made ablative surgery obsolete. In the procedure, a surgeon drills holes in the head and inserts electrodes into the neural tissue. When current passes through the leads, they activate or inactivate patches of the brain. “The attractive part is that we don’t destroy the tissue,” Slavin says. Doctors can also adjust treatment if a patient suffers side effects. They can turn the current down or suspend it altogether—so as to “give the brain a holiday,” as Slavin calls it.
Most deep-brain stimulation is now used to treat movement disorders such as Parkinson’s Disease. The surgical treatment of patients with OCD is FDA-approved but reserved only for extreme cases. Slavin and his colleagues have been examining broader uses in an ongoing study. “Within the next five years, we hope we’ll have a definitive answer of whether or not it works.”
Mental illness associated with heavy cannabis use
People with mental illnesses are more than seven times more likely to use cannabis weekly compared to people without a mental illness, according to researchers from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) who studied U.S. data.
Cannabis is the most widely used illicit substance globally, with an estimated 203 million people reporting use. Although research has found links between cannabis use and mental illness, exact numbers and prevalence of problem cannabis use had not been investigated.
“We know that people with mental illness consume more cannabis, perhaps partially as a way to self- medicate psychiatric symptoms, but this data showed us the degree of the correlation between cannabis use, misuse, and mental illness,” said Dr. Shaul Lev-ran, Adjunct Scientist at CAMH and Head of Addiction Medicine at the Sheba Medical Center, Israel.
“Based on the number of individuals reporting weekly use, we see that people with mental illness use cannabis at high rates. This can be of concern because it could worsen the symptoms of their mental illness,” said Lev-ran, who conducted the research as a post-doctoral fellow with the Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program at CAMH.
Researchers also found that individuals with mental illness were 10 times more likely to have a cannabis use disorder.
In this new study, published in the journal Comprehensive Psychiatry, CAMH researchers analyzed data from face-to-face interviews with over 43,000 respondents over the age of 18 from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions. Using structured questionnaires, the researchers assessed cannabis use as well as various mental illnesses including depression, anxiety, drug and alcohol use disorders and personality disorders, based on criteria from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV).
Among those will mental illness reporting at least weekly cannabis use, rates of use were particularly elevated for those with bipolar disorder, personality disorders and other substance use disorders.
In total, 4.4 per cent of individuals with a mental illness in the past 12 months reported using cannabis weekly, compared to 0.6 per cent among individuals without any mental illness. Cannabis use disorders occurred among 4 per cent of those with mental illness versus 0.4 per cent among those without.
Researchers also noted that, although cannabis use is generally higher among younger people, the association between mental illness and cannabis use was pervasive across most age groups.
They emphasize the importance of screening for frequent and problem cannabis use among those with mental illness, so that targeted prevention and intervention may be employed.
IQ loss linked to Schizophrenia genes
People at greater genetic risk of schizophrenia could see a fall in IQ as they age, study shows.
Scientists at the University say IQ decline in those at risk could happen even if they do not develop schizophrenia.
The findings could lead to new research into how different genes for schizophrenia affect brain function over time. Schizophrenia - a severe mental disorder characterised by delusions and by hallucinations - is in part caused by genetic factors.
The researchers used the latest genetic analysis techniques to reach their conclusion on how thinking skills change with age.
Retaining our thinking skills as we grow older is important for living well and independently. If nature has loaded a person’s genes towards schizophrenia, then there is a slight but detectable worsening in cognitive functions between childhood and old age. -Professor Ian Deary (Director of the University of Edinburgh’s Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology)
Historical data
They compared the IQ scores of more than 1,000 people from Edinburgh.
The people were tested for general cognitive functions in 1947, aged 11, and again when they were around 70 years old.
The researchers were able to examine people’s genes and calculate each subject’s genetic likelihood of developing schizophrenia, even though none of the group had ever developed the illness.
They then compared the IQ scores of people with a high and low risk of developing schizophrenia.
Scientists found that there was no difference at age 11, but people with a greater genetic risk of schizophrenia had slightly lower IQs at age 70.
Those people who had more genes linked to schizophrenia also had a greater estimated fall in IQ over their lifetime than those at lower risk.
Cognitive impact
With further research into how these genes affect the brain, it could become possible to understand how genes linked to schizophrenia affect people’s cognitive functions as they age. -Professor Andrew McIntosh (Centre for Clinical Brain Sciences)
Schizophrenia affects around 1 per cent of the population, often in the teenage or early adult years, and is associated with problems in mental ability and memory.
The study, which was funded by the BBSRC, Age UK, and the Chief Scientist Office, is published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.