Psychedelic Drugs for Treating Mental Illness?
A headline to an article in yesterday’s edition of the journal Science caught my eye: “Can Ecstasy Treat the Agony of PTSD?”
According to the article (paid access), the compound MDMA - first synthesized in 1914 and commonly known as the recreational drug Ecstasy - is showing promise in the treatment of PTSD. This is based on a small trial involving female assault victims. Ten of the 12 patients who received MDMA combined... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - July 5, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Our Neurotransmitters - It's All About Signaling and Circuits
Let’s review what we know about neurotransmitters. First, we need to clear up a major myth:
It is tempting to conceive of neurotransmitters as complicit in some kind of a “chemical imbalance in the brain” conspiracy. Instead, it is more helpful to view them as signaling agents in our neural circuitry.
Our circuitry connects the disparate parts of the brain into a working whole. A breakdown in the... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 23, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Anosognosia: Who is Lacking the Insight?
This is an opinion piece. Please bear with me.
Perhaps you have heard the term, “anosognosia.” Dorland’s Medical Dictionary defines it as “unawareness or denial of a neurological deficit.” Apparently, many people with neurological conditions may lack an awareness of their paralysis.
Back in 2001, in the book, “I’m Not Sick, I Don’t Need Help,” Xavier Amador argued for the... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 18, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Our 100 Trillion Neural Connections: Mapping the Human Connectome
Who are we? Our genome comprises about 20,000 genes, about the same as a worm. Perhaps we are more than our genome.
This was a proposition MIT physicist and neuroscientist Sebastian Seung put to his audience in a 2010 TED Talk. Dr Seung is a leading proponent of the “connectome,” the sum of our neural connections, how the parts of our brain work together.
Does our mind, our identity, reside in our... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 16, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Quirks and Foibles - The Bipolar Question of the Week
I’m working on a novel in which my main character has a fear that a meteor or comet will crash through his office window and take out the potted plant sitting on top of his printer. Every day, before he begins work, he feels compelled to look out the window to make sure the coast is clear.
Later in the novel, he wakes up from a near-death experience in a room where he is surrounded by potted plants.
Fiction, especially... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 11, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
"Stigma" is a Timid Euphemism - Let's Get Rid of It and Start Using Real Words, Instead
Let’s get rid of the word, stigma, once and for all. Every once in a blue moon, I feel the urge to sound off. Please indulge me:
As a word, “stigma” is an insult to the outrages inflicted upon our population. Its use - even by well-meaning people - only perpetuates our status as third-class citizens. A quick history lesson:
In the US, during the first decades of the twentieth century - in the name of the... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 8, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Balance in Our Lives
Two totally unrelated TED Talks I watched in the past few days brought out loud and clear the importance of love and play and of balance in our lives.
The first talk dealt with reconciling quantum mechanics with Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The second compared the lives of Lincoln and LBJ.
Garret Lisi is a theoretical physicist who turned down various academic posts in order that he and his girlfriend could live... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 4, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
The Breath - Bipolar's Number One Killer App
Let’s talk about the breath. Of all the tools in our overall wellness toolkit, this is by far the most important. As a killer app for managing bipolar, I also rank it number one. Nothing else comes close.
So why haven’t I written about it after all these years? It turns out that breathing is our most easily overlooked activity. We simply don’t think about it. The trick is to start thinking about it, in essence to... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - March 2, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Remembering Sylvia Plath
On a bitter cold February day in London, Silvia Plath, aspiring author, left milk and bread for her two toddlers sleeping upstairs. Then she turned on the gas. She was thirty.
Ms Plath is celebrated for her 1963 novel,The Bell Jar, a fictionalized account of her own life that reads both as feminist literature and a depression memoir. She is also lauded as the author of her dark and edgy Ariel poems.
Last year, in... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 28, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
The Chemical Imbalance Myth of Depression - Here are Some Better Explanations
It is time to retire the idea that depression is caused by a “chemical imbalance of the brain.” The chemical imbalance myth creates the false impression that our brains are some form of neurotransmitter porridge that can be rendered just right with squirts of serotonin and dopamine.
Thanks to at least two decades of research, we now have a number of good working models on what tends to go wrong in the brain during a... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 28, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Pulling Out of a Tailspin - The Bipolar Question of the Week
It’s happened to all of us: Life overwhelms us. Our brains respond by running away or by shutting down. Heaven help if we’re in a public place. Heaven help if we’re at work or around loved ones. Just plain heaven help.
Living with bipolar is a daily challenge. Each day is an adventure. Sometimes, our success lulls us into a false sense of security. Then something hits us out of the blue. Something we haven’t... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 25, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Answering an Edge Question, My Take - Sleep
What questions do we need to be asking? Funny you should ask.
Each year, Edge - which bills itself as on online salon - poses one question a year to more than 150 of the deepest thinkers in the world. The list is heavy in physicists, evolutionary biologists, and cognitive psychologists. It is also well-represented in philosophers, technology writers, and social scientists. We also find the occasional novelist, historian, artist, and... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 23, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
A Bipolar President Today? The Bipolar Question of the Week
Happy President’s Day. In case you’re wondering, we have had our share of Chief Executives with bipolar. These include John Adams, Teddy Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson. Lincoln, for his lifelong struggle with crushing depression, deserves an honorable mention.
Each left an indelible mark on the US. John Adams was instrumental in founding the country. Lincoln saved it. Roosevelt used his office to save the environment and take... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 18, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
In Search of the Elusive Bipolar Genes: A New Study Sheds Interesting Light
Will scientists ever crack the bipolar gene riddle? Back in 1987, they thought they had. According to Nature, the august journal that published Watson and Crick’s ground-breaking research, bipolar “can be caused by a single gene.”
Not only that, researchers localized “a dominant gene conferring a strong predisposition to manic depressive disease to the tip of the short arm of chromosome... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 16, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
Coming Together in a Fragmented World - The Bipolar Question of the Week
The Winter Olympics has our attention. A few weeks ago, it was the Super Bowl. Later this year, it will be the World Cup. I work very hard to be a grouch and a cynic, but I can’t help but take pause when our fragmented world momentarily seems to come together.
I think this feeds our need to feel part of something greater than ourselves. JFK captured that in his inaugural address back in 1961 when he challenged us to do for our... (Source: John McManamy's SharePosts)
Source: John McManamy's SharePosts - February 11, 2014 Category: Mental Illness Authors: John McManamy Source Type: blogs
