Category Archives: Schizophrenia, Bipolar Disorder, et alia
Alarming increase of Bipolar Disorder in Babies
The headline read “98% of Babies Manic-Depressive” The news article was headlined New York: “A new study published in The Journal of Pediatric Medicine found that a shocking 98% of all infants suffer from bipolar disorder. ‘The majority of our subjects, regardless of size, sex, or race, exhibited extreme mood swings, often crying one minute and then giggling playfully the … Continue reading
Brain Plasticity and Culture
In a recent book “Brain and Culture” (MIT Press), Dr. Bruce Wexler, a Yale psychiatrist, considers some of the many implications of brain plasticity research for cultural progressions. One special point of his book is the way that our brains specialize, through our plasticity mechanisms, to create a model of the culture (our world) into which we just happen to … Continue reading
PTSD and the Purple Heart
Several weeks ago, the Army formally responded to a recommendation from a military psychologist that soldiers suffering from PTSD be awarded a Purple Heart. “No”, they said. “It is not a wound intentionally caused by the enemy”, explained an Army spokesperson. On lots of blogs and in commentaries written about this suggestion, many soldiers weighed in with their opinion. Few … Continue reading
Drugs for children with bipolar disorder
Joseph Biederman is probably THE leading advocate for more aggressive diagnoses and more aggressive medical treatments of children with severe neuro-behavioral problems. If you track the research history of this prominent Harvard scientist and his Massachusetts General Hospital colleagues, it documents the development of a new diagnosis of the misbehaving, out-of-control child as “bipolar”, and ultimately identifies a number of … Continue reading
We know because we measure.
In his Comments, Daniel has asked a lot of questions, and I thought that I’d take a minute to answer two of them. First, after I reviewed a book (Elyn Saks, The Center Cannot Hold, Hyperion:New York, 2007) in which a schizophrenic individual provided her personal descriptions of her life with this illness, he asked how I (a scientist) could … Continue reading
