Hearing voices: Social context influences psychosis

Reblogged from NeuWriteSD.org:

“People are always selling the idea that people with mental illness are suffering. I think madness can be an escape. If things are not so good, you maybe want to imagine something better.”

These are the words of John Nash, Jr., the Nobel Laureate who inspired the book and the movie A Beautiful Mind and who suffered from schizophrenia, including paranoid delusions of grandeur during which he felt he could intercept secret messages with important content instructing him on how to rescue the planet.

How individuals experiencing psychotic symptoms come to interpret such messages is a fascinating question. In a recent academic talk, Stanford psychological anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann addressed this question by arguing persuasively for the influence of culture on the symptomatology of psychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia (for a great recap of a similar talk by Luhrmann, see this blog post from PLoS). Strikingly, she claims, positive psychotic symptoms, in particular hearing voices, manifest differently in different cultures. 

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Lithium: Wonder Drug? Part I

Reblogged from my post on NeuWriteSD.org:

I’m so happy ’cause today
I’ve found my friends
They’re in my head

What comes to mind when you hear the word lithium? A drug used to manage life-threatening mood disorders? A potentially deadly toxin? A chemical found in trace amounts in many compounds in nature? (Or maybe just the Nirvana song?)

Any of these answers would be felicitous. A recent New York Times Sunday Review piece by psychiatrist Dr. Anna Fels touted the potential benefits of the naturally-occurring element, atomic number 3 on the periodic table. Dr. Fels’ primary argument was that lithium, widely known for its use as a mood stabilizer for individuals with severe mood disorders, also has a positive effect on mood and cognition in non-clinical populations in trace amounts.

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Creativity and mood: the ups and downs of bipolar disorder

Reblogged from my post on NeuWriteSD.org:

They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
–Edgar Allen Poe [1]

If the emotions are sometimes so strong that one works without knowing one works, when sometimes the strokes come with a continuity and a coherence like words in a speech or a letter, then one must remember that it has not always been so, and that in time to come there will again be hard days, empty of inspiration.

So one must strike while the iron is hot, and put the forged bars on one side.

–Vincent Van Gogh

 “We of the craft are all crazy. Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.” These are the words of the poet Lord Byron, whom Kay Redfield Jamison quotes in her book Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament. In this book, Jamison explores the link between so-called creative “genius” and a predisposition toward mood disorders, such as depression and, in particular, bipolar disorder (also known as manic-depressive disorder).

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