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Under Suspicion: The Painkiller Ziconotide Could Increase Suicidal Ideation


EurekAlert
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:45 UTC
Image
© marinebiotech.org
Experts recommend more precise diagnosis and closer medical surveillance

This release is available in German.

The active agent ziconotide, the synthetic toxin of the cone snail (Conus magus), was acclaimed a safe alternative to morphine when it was introduced six years ago. Now it is increasingly suspected of causing patients to commit suicide. Researchers working under the auspices of Prof. Christoph Maier (Director of the Pain Clinic Bergmannsheil at the Ruhr University in Bochum) presume that ziconotide not only suppresses the transmission of pain stimuli, but also deteriorates the frame of mind and could simultaneously reduce anxiety and impulse control. These mechanisms could promote suicidal tendencies in vulnerable patients. The research scientists thus advise careful diagnosis and monitoring of the psychic condition of patients treated with ziconotide. They have published their findings in the Medical Journal Pain.
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Attention

Survey: Kids Spend Over 35 Hours a Week Watching TV


Medguru.com
Sun, 21 Nov 2010 18:13 UTC
Image
© medguru.com
While there is no right amount of TV watching time for children, spending 35 hours or more a week in front of the tube can elevate their risk of obesity, aggression, and violent behavior, claims a new study.

A recent survey conducted by the Associated Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ASSOCHAM) has revealed that children between the ages of six and 17 spend over 35 hours a week in front of the TV, which is more time than they spend in any other activity except sleeping
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Sheeple

Stuffed with Poisons, Stressed to the Max: Nearly 1 in 5 Americans Had Mental Illness in 2009


CNBC
Thu, 18 Nov 2010 12:13 UTC
pill head
© Bryan Christie Design
More than 45 million Americans, or 20 percent of U.S. adults, had some form of mental illness last year, and 11 million had a serious illness, U.S. government researchers reported on Thursday. Young adults aged 18 to 25 had the highest level of mental illness at 30 percent, while those aged 50 and older had the lowest, with 13.7 percent, said the report by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration or SAMHSA.

The rate, slightly higher than last year's 19.5 percent figure, reflected increasing depression, especially among the unemployed, SAMHSA, part of the National Institutes of Health, said.

"Too many Americans are not getting the help they need and opportunities to prevent and intervene early are being missed," Pamela Hyde, SAMHSA's administrator, said in a statement.

"The consequences for individuals, families and communities can be devastating. If left untreated mental illnesses can result in disability, substance abuse, suicides, lost productivity, and family discord."

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Whistle

Relationship Boomerang: Why It's Hard to Get Rid of a Psychopath

Claudia Moscovici
Psychopathy Awareness
Sat, 13 Nov 2010 20:06 UTC
Boomerang
© unknown
Relationships with a psychopath are usually like a boomerang. Even after you toss him as far away as possible, he may still swing back into your life. Years after they break up with a psychopath, women commonly report that they're still cyber-stalked or somehow harassed by him, or that he's still testing the waters to see if he can worm his way back into their lives. So the question is: Why is it so hard to get rid of a psychopath?

Psychopaths are hoarders of women, even those they tired of and tossed aside. They break up easily with their partners, of course. Psychopaths throw away old relationships with as little emotion or regret as normal people toss away their old shoes. But they rarely completely disappear from the radar, even years after the relationship with them is over. As they're pursuing their newest flames, psychopaths continue to keep tabs on their former girlfriends, sink their claws deeper into the current ones, put a few more women, which are on their way out, on the back-burner as they slowly simmer, wondering what they did to lose their attention and love. Hoarders accumulate junk; psychopaths accumulate broken relationships. Since possessing women (and men) reminds psychopaths of their dominance, the more ex-partners, current partners and potential future partners they can juggle, the more powerful they feel.
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Magnify

Study Finds The Mind is a Frequent, But Not Happy, Wanderer


PhysOrg
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Harvard University
Harvard psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth (right) and Daniel T. Gilbert (left) used a special "track your happiness" iPhone app to gather research. The results: We spend at least half our time thinking about something other than our immediate surroundings, and most of this daydreaming doesn't make us happy.
People spend 46.9 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing, and this mind-wandering typically makes them unhappy. So says a study that used an iPhone web app to gather 250,000 data points on subjects' thoughts, feelings, and actions as they went about their lives.

The research, by psychologists Matthew A. Killingsworth and Daniel T. Gilbert of Harvard University, is described this week in the journal Science.

"A human mind is a wandering mind, and a wandering mind is an unhappy mind," Killingsworth and Gilbert write. "The ability to think about what is not happening is a cognitive achievement that comes at an emotional cost."

Unlike other animals, humans spend a lot of time thinking about what isn't going on around them: contemplating events that happened in the past, might happen in the future, or may never happen at all. Indeed, mind-wandering appears to be the human brain's default mode of operation.
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Magnify

Sleep Makes Your Memories Stronger


PhysOrg
Fri, 12 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© Getty Images
As humans, we spend about a third of our lives asleep. So there must be a point to it, right? Scientists have found that sleep helps consolidate memories, fixing them in the brain so we can retrieve them later.

Now, new research is showing that sleep also seems to reorganize memories, picking out the emotional details and reconfiguring the memories to help you produce new and creative ideas, according to the authors of an article in Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

"Sleep is making memories stronger," says Jessica D. Payne of the University of Notre Dame, who cowrote the review with Elizabeth A. Kensinger of Boston College. "It also seems to be doing something which I think is so much more interesting, and that is reorganizing and restructuring memories."

Payne and Kensinger study what happens to memories during sleep, and they have found that a person tends to hang on to the most emotional part of a memory. For example, if someone is shown a scene with an emotional object, such as a wrecked car, in the foreground, they're more likely to remember the emotional object than, say, the palm trees in the background - particularly if they're tested after a night of sleep. They have also measured brain activity during sleep and found that regions of the brain involved with emotion and memory consolidation are active.
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Magnify

Dance Moves Can Reveal Your Personality

Richard Gray
The Telegraph, UK
Sun, 14 Nov 2010 01:00 UTC
Image
© Corbis
Scientists have claimed that the way a person gyrates in time to music can betray secrets of their character
The way you dance can reveal information about your personality, scientists have found.

It is where many couples first set eyes on one another - and now research suggests that the dancefloor is the perfect place to gauge a prospective partner's personality.

Scientists have claimed that the way a person gyrates in time to music can betray secrets of their character.

Using personality tests, the researchers assessed volunteeers into one of five "types".

They then observed how each members of each group danced to different kinds of music.
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Info

Daydreaming and Unhappiness

Karen Hopkin
Scientific American
Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:00 UTC
Image
© khrawling/Flickr
People reported being happiest when engaged in what they were doing versus allowing their minds to wander.

Ah, daydreaming. Is there anything more pleasant than sitting back and letting your thoughts drift? Well, yes: not letting your thoughts drift, for one. Because according to a study published in the journal Science, people are least happy when their minds wander. [M. Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, "A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind"]

Humans, to a degree unmatched by other animals, are capable of thinking about things outside the here and now - something that happened yesterday, or something they hope will happen tomorrow. It's that sort of itinerant intellect that allows us to plan and to learn. But at what cost?

Psychologists at Harvard used an iPhone app to find out. At random times throughout the day, the program asked some 2,200 participants what they were doing, what they were thinking about and how they felt. Turns out that people spend nearly half their waking hours thinking about something other than what they're doing. And that whether and where their thoughts tend to stray is a better predictor of their feelings than what they're actually up to. The scientists conclude that a wandering mind is an unhappy mind.
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People

Transgender Bender: Surgery to Woman, Then Man Again

Susan Donaldson James
ABC
Wed, 10 Nov 2010 15:18 UTC
David had all the things society equates with success -- a career as an IT consultant, two homes, cars paid for with cash , a wife and 12-year-old son he loved.



But he was hiding a secret.

"For all intents and purposes we were perfect, but many of us know from a young age that something is different, odd, we had been miscast in life," said Donna Rose, who used to be David.

"I wanted the life I had built, but I wanted me to be in it, rather than the person portrayed to the rest of the world," said Rose, now 51 and living as a transgender woman in Harrisburg, Pa.

But just before she was to have sex reassignment surgery in 1999, Rose panicked and returned to her life as a man.

For her, it was temporary, but others who are transgender find the challenge of switching genders too great. Often, they discover they have sacrificed careers and loved ones, and face a society that unfairly views them as freaks.

Just this week, British millionaire Charles Kane, who had lived as the glamorous interior designer Samantha Kane for 17 years, revealed he was marrying again as a man.

Born Sam Hashimi, he was a divorced father of two when he spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on his first sex change operation in 1987.

But he later said it was a "mistake," and five years ago he spent thousands more on three operations to restore his male genitals.
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People

The Biology Behind the Milk of Human Kindness


New York Times
Tue, 23 Nov 2010 09:55 UTC
Image
© Serge Bloch

As the festival of mandatory gratitude looms into view, allow me to offer a few suggestions on what, exactly, you should be thankful for.

Be thankful that, on at least one occasion, your mother did not fend off your father with a pair of nunchucks, but instead allowed enough contact to facilitate your happy conception. Be thankful that when you go to buy a pale, poultrylike entity, the grocery clerk will accept your credit card in good faith and even return it with a heroic garble of your last name. Be grateful for the empathetic employee working the United Airlines ticket counter the day after Thanksgiving, who understands why you must leave town today, this very minute, lest someone pull out the family nunchucks.

Above all, be thankful for your brain's supply of oxytocin, the small, celebrated peptide hormone that, by the looks of it, helps lubricate our every prosocial exchange, the thousands of acts of kindness, kind-of kindness and not-as-nakedly-venal-as-I-could-have-been kindness that make human society possible. Scientists have long known that the hormone plays essential physiological roles during birth and lactation, and animal studies have shown that oxytocin can influence behavior too, prompting voles to cuddle up with their mates, for example, or to clean and comfort their pups. Now a raft of new research in humans suggests that oxytocin underlies the twin emotional pillars of civilized life, our capacity to feel empathy and trust.
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