The glass age
THE GLASS AGE WHERE GLASS BENDS AND GLASS BOUNCES THE MODERN WORLD RUNS ON GLASS, A MATERIAL THAT HAS BECOME ESSENTIAL TO HUMANITY. BY JAY BENNETT PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOPHER PAYNE ON A BRISK MARCH AFTERNOON, Kazuhiko Akiba and a colleague stood in the courtyard of the Chiba Kogaku glass factory in Japan, ready to unveil their latest creation. A forklift wheeled out a large clay pot about the size of a hot tub and set it down before them. Dressed in the company’s sky blue uniforms, the men put ...
Read post
I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away
WIRED FAST FORWARD I Tested a Next-Gen AI Assistant. It Will Blow You Away WIRED experimented with a new form of voice assistant that can browse the web and perform tasks online. Siri, Alexa, and other virtual helpers could soon be much more powerful. The most famous virtual valets around today—Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant—are a lot less impressive than the latest AI-powered chatbots like ChatGPT or Google Bard. When the fruits of the recent generative AI boom get properly integrated in...
Read post
WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE COMPUTERS
WE’VE FORGOTTEN HOW TO USE COMPUTERS The mouse is sorely missed. By Ian Bogosh JANUARY 24, 2024 Once upon a time, long before smartphones or even laptops were ubiquitous, the computer mouse was new, and it was thrilling. The 1984 Macintosh wasn’t the first machine to come with one, but it was the first to popularize the gizmo for ordinary people. Proper use of the mouse was not intuitive. Many people had a hard time moving and clicking at the same time, and “double-clicking” was a skill one had...
Read post
EMAIL SEARCH IS A COMEDY OF ERRORS
EMAIL SEARCH IS A COMEDY OF ERRORS My flight receipt is in there somewhere, right? DECEMBER 13, 2023 Before a flight, I get a Pavlovian stress reaction—not from the prospect of hurtling at 30,000 feet in a concrete tube, but from my email inbox. Airline tickets sometimes get lost in an email abyss, requiring a few stressful minutes of frenzied searching when it’s time to check in. “I can’t find my confirmation for this flight in my email but I know I bought it 😭,” goes one tweet. “Gmail search...
Read post
The quantum mind
The quantum mind With anaesthetics and brain organoids, we are finally testing whether quantum effects can explain consciousness. We may have misunderstood this long-derided idea, says George Musser  Two weeks before the pandemic lockdown in March 2020, I flew to Tucson, Arizona, and knocked on the door of a suburban ranch-style house. I was there to visit Stuart Hameroff, anaesthesiologist and co-inventor, with Nobel prize-winning physicist Roger Penrose, of a radical proposal for how conscio...
Read post
Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think The most commonly prescribed medications for depression are somewhat effective — but not because they correct a “chemical imbalance.”
Antidepressants Don’t Work the Way Many People Think The most commonly prescribed medications for depression are somewhat effective — but not because they correct a “chemical imbalance.” By Dana G. Smith The New York Times Nov. 8, 2022 Over the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, rates of depression and anxiety soared, and many Americans turned to antidepressant medication to help them cope. Even before the emergence of Covid, 1 in 8 American adults was taking an antidepressant drug. According...
Read post
Buk's rules, sort of, not really.
I stole this from some website, in honour of the dead scoundrel. 1. Give yourself time to mature as a writer. “Well, I’m 34 now. If I don’t make it by the time I’m 60, I’m just going to give myself 10 more years.” 2. Let your creativity find whatever outlet it needs. “Now print my occasionals out by hand and point them up with drawings (like any other madman). Sometimes I just throw the stories away and hang the drawings up in the bathroom (sometimes on the roller).” 3. Treat the submiss...
Read post
The secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier
The secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier: on the counter-offensive As troops blitz through Russian lines, they see the trauma of occupation and the relief at freedom A Ukrainian soldier stands in the clearing of a forest holding his RPG weapon Sep 6th 2023 This is the third part of a diary written by a Ukrainian paratrooper. When war broke out in 2022, he was a civilian. He volunteered to fight and, after cursory training, found himself on the front lines, in charge of a platoon of equally unpre...
Read post
Psychotherapy Integration: An Assimilative, Psychodynamic Approach
Psychotherapy Integration: An Assimilative, Psychodynamic Approach Cross posted from here. George Stricker Jerold R. Gold Original citation: Stricker, G., & Gold, J.R. (1996). Psychotherapy integration: An assimilative, psychodynamic approach. Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 3, 47-58. Abstract Psychotherapy integration is an approach to treatment that goes beyond any single theory or set of techniques. The history of the psychotherapy integration movement is described, along...
Read post
Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness
Can A.I. Treat Mental Illness? New computer systems aim to peer inside our heads—and to help us fix what they find there. By Dhruv Khullar February 27, 2023 There aren’t enough therapists to go around—but there are plenty of smartphones. In the nineteen-sixties, Joseph Weizenbaum, a computer scientist at M.I.T., created a computer program called Eliza. It was designed to simulate Rogerian therapy, in which the patient directs the conversation and the therapist often repeats her language back t...
Read post
Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis
Behind the Scenes, McKinsey Guided Companies at the Center of the Opioid Crisis The consulting firm offered clients “in-depth experience in narcotics,” from poppy fields to pills more powerful than Purdue’s OxyContin. By Chris Hamby and Michael Forsythe The reporters pored over a trove of more than 100,000 documents to investigate McKinsey’s unknown work for opioid makers. June 29, 2022 14 MIN READ In patches of rural Appalachia and the Rust Belt, the health authorities were sounding alarms ...
Read post
Refining the psychiatric syndrome of anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor encephalitis
Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Volume 138, Issue 5 p. 401-408 Review Refining the psychiatric syndrome of anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor encephalitis N. Warren, D. Siskind, C. O'Gorman First published: 10 July 2018 Abstract Objective To review the psychiatric symptoms of anti-N-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA) receptor encephalitis, in an attempt to differentiate the presentation from a primary psychiatric disorder. Method A systematic literature review of PubMed and EMBASE of all published c...
Read post
The Atlantic IDEAS The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended
IDEAS The Second Elizabethan Age Has Ended For seven decades, Elizabeth II gave Britain a constant, even as her kingdom was transformed. SEPTEMBER 08, 2022 Suzanne Plunkett / WPA Pool / Getty The first Elizabethan era ended on March 24, 1603, when 69-year-old Queen Elizabeth I died in her sleep at Richmond Palace. “This morning, about three o’clock, her Majesty departed from this life, mildly like a lamb, easily like a ripe apple from the tree,” the lawyer John Manningham wrote in his diary. E...
Read post
The Atlantic BOOKS Where Our Sense of Self Comes From
BOOKS Where Our Sense of Self Comes From How did a group of rebellious German playwrights, poets, and writers in the late 18th century revolutionize the way we think of ourselves and the world? Katie Martin / The Atlantic; Getty SEPTEMBER 11, 2022, 9:36 AM ET We accept as self-evident that each of us is free to think and form our own opinions, that we have autonomous selves. Western societies and institutions are founded on this spirit of individual freedom and self-determination. But it is be...
Read post
The Atlantic SCIENCE Starting a Revolution Isn’t Enough CRISPR is changing the world—but it can do more
SCIENCE Starting a Revolution Isn’t Enough CRISPR is changing the world—but it can do more. Erik Carter / The Atlantic SEPTEMBER 12, 2022, 8 AM ET Two years ago, I was working on my laptop in an airport lounge in Newark, New Jersey, when I glanced up and saw a couple walking with their two boys. The younger boy slowly made his way on crutches, displaying the telltale signs of a hereditary disease called muscular dystrophy. Generally manifesting in childhood, the disease steadily robs those who ...
Read post
The Atlantic IDEAS ‘The Cure for Burnout Is Not Self-Care’
IDEAS ‘The Cure for Burnout Is Not Self-Care’ Amelia Nagoski discusses quiet quitting. SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 Tyler Comrie / The Atlantic; Getty SEPTEMBER 13, 2022 About the author: Caroline Mimbs Nyce is a staff writer at The Atlantic. The first thing you need to know about quiet quitting is that it’s not actually quitting. Instead, the quitter keeps their job and chooses to do only the bare minimum rather than go above and beyond. The second thing you need to know is that the term is brand-new, s...
Read post
Wired BOOKS: What Do We Really Know About Mental Illness? 
What Do We Really Know About Mental Illness?  Rachel Aviv’s unflinching and personal new book, Strangers to Ourselves, rejects pat answers in favor of penetrating questions. WHEN RACHEL AVIV was six years old, she stopped eating. Shortly after, she was hospitalized with anorexia. Her doctors were flummoxed. They’d never seen a child so young develop the eating disorder, yet there she was. Was it a response to her parents’ divorce? Diet culture? Innate asceticism? The episode remained mysterious...
Read post
GLOBE THEATRE REVIEWS: 1939
THEATRE REVIEWS In Stratford Festival’s 1939, Shakespeare oppresses and liberates students at a residential school Title: 1939 Written by: Jani Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan Director: Jani Lauzon Actors: Richard Comeau, Sarah Dodd, Wahsonti:io Kirby, Tara Sky Company: Stratford Festival Venue: Studio Theatre City: Stratford, Ont. Year: Runs to Oct. 29, 2022 COVID-19 measures: Reduced-capacity performances available William Shakespeare’s continued pre-eminence in this culture (and so many others ar...
Read post
Fundamentals of Psychiatry for Health Care Professionals pp 85–119
Psychotic Disorders 31 August 2022 Abstract: Psychotic symptoms are a cross-sectional dimension that competes with multiple diagnostic categories and not necessarily identify schizophrenia; all cases of schizophrenia represent a psychotic disorder but not vice versa, as psychotic symptoms are a necessary but not a sufficient condition. Specific criteria are needed to diagnose schizophrenia which is characterized not only by the presence of persisting positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms b...
Read post
Indigenous people, trauma, and suicide prevention
Statistics Indigenous people make up 4.9% of the population in Canada: over 1.6 million (Statistics Canada, 2018).Suicide and self-inflicted injuries are the leading causes of death for First Nations youth and adults up to 44 years of age (Public Health Agency of Canada, 2016).For First Nations, the suicide rate is three times the national average. For Métis, the suicide rate is twice the national average and for Inuit, the suicide rate is nine times the national rate (Kumar & Tjepkema, 201...
Read post
People With Diabetes Are More Vulnerable to Heart Disease. How to Reduce the Risk
ELAINE K. HOWLEY - Time If you’ve been diagnosed with diabetes, know that you’ve got plenty of company. The American Diabetes Association (ADA) reports that in 2019, the most recent year for which data is available, 37.3 million adults in the U.S.—about 11.3% of the population—had the chronic condition, and that number continues to grow. Type 1 diabetes develops when the body isn’t able to produce insulin, and Type 2 occurs when the body doesn’t use insulin correctly. Type 2 is the most common ...
Read post
Worst backslide in global vaccinations ‘in a generation,’ U.N. says
Worst backslide in global vaccinations ‘in a generation,’ U.N. says The coronavirus pandemic coincided with the worst backslide in global vaccination coverage in a generation, according to new data from the United Nations. This came despite a historic effort to develop and distribute billions of coronavirus vaccines during the pandemic. The new data, released late Thursday by UNICEF and the World Health Organization, showed that average global childhood coverage for vaccines developed for 11 ke...
Read post
The BA.5 Wave Is What COVID Normal Looks Like
The BA.5 Wave Is What COVID Normal Looks Like The endless churn of variants may not stop anytime soon, unless we do something about it. JULY 14, 2022 After two-plus years of erupting into distinguishable peaks, the American coronavirus-case curve has a new topography: a long, never-ending plateau. Waves are now so frequent that they’re colliding and uplifting like tectonic plates, the valleys between them filling with virological rubble. With cases quite high and still drastically undercounted...
Read post
Book review: The Crooked Heart of W. H. Auden
In his great elegy for the psychologist Sigmund Freud, W. H. Auden wrote that Freud was “no more a person / Now but a whole climate of opinion.” The 20th century saw a fair number of writers and thinkers whose life and works seemed to follow the great narrative of their time and who, in turn, seemed to shape the age through which they lived. Among poets writing in English, however, we can say this only of W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, and Auden himself. To read Auden’s Complete Works therefore is no...
Read post
Enriching uranium is the key factor in how quickly Iran could produce a nuclear weapon – here’s where it stands today
The Conversation Iran’s nuclear program is a major topic in President Joe Biden’s meetings this week with leaders in the Middle East. The most challenging part of producing nuclear weapons is making the material that fuels them, and Iran is known to have produced uranium that is near-weapons grade. The Conversation asked Brandeis University professor Gary Samore, who worked on nuclear arms control and nonproliferation in the U.S. government for over 20 years, to explain why uranium enrichment ...
Read post
Russia-Ukraine war update: what we know on day 142 of the invasion
Russian missiles strike Ukrainian city of Vinnytsia, killing 23 including three children; 45 nations pledge to coordinate evidence of war crimes in Ukraine See all our Russia-Ukraine war coverage 00:56 UTC Friday, 15 July 2022 At least 23 people, including three children, were killed and up to 66 others wounded after Russian missiles struck civilian buildings and a cultural centre in the city of Vinnytsia, in central Ukraine. The attack on Vinnytsia, far from the war’s front lines, occurred mid-...
Read post
Where Are Genitals Represented in the Brain?
Where Are Genitals Represented in the Brain? The homunculus of textbook fame still does not take into account the relevant locations in the cerebral cortex that process touch for the sex organs PARACELSUS, THE GERMAN-SWISS PHYSICIAN and alchemist, asserted in the 16th century that he knew how to create a “little man”—or homunculus—by placing human semen in a sealed vessel packed with horse manure that was then nurtured with blood to gestate. The recipe was no more useful than the ones for turnin...
Read post
THE NEW AGE OF FUSION
THE NEW AGE OF FUSION FOR DECADES, THE TECHNOLOGY TO DEVELOP CLEAN, SAFE FUSION POWER HAS REMAINED TANTALISINGLY OUT OF REACH. NOW, THOUGH, A NEW BREED OF START-UPS COULD HAVE CRACKED IT AT LAST. WILL WE FINALLY BE ABLE TO WAVE GOODBYE TO FOSSIL FUELS? Flick through any collection of popular science magazines from the last 50 years and the chances are that you will encounter a feature about nuclear fusion. Nuclear fusion is the process of joining lightweight atoms together to release energy; ...
Read post
Canadians are delusional captives to a broken health care system
Canadians are delusional captives to a broken health care system Canadians are delusional captives to a broken health care system. We cling to the status quo with grim complacency, comforting ourselves with the notion that it could be worse. We could wait 18 hours in a hospital emergency room and then be charged for seeing the on-call resident. We could wait nine months to see a specialist and then have to fork over a substantial co-pay. We could languish in a hospital hallway for days, waiting...
Read post
The Pandemic Fueled a Superbug Surge. Can Medicine Recover?
WIRED As Covid swept ICUs, doctors prescribed antibiotics to ward off secondary infections. Now bacteria have evolved resistance—but hospitals are fighting back. The desperate need to save the lives of Covid patients during the pandemic’s first waves, coupled with shortages of hospital personnel and protective equipment, drove a shocking reversal in progress against deadly superbugs, according to a new analysis by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The report, released July 12,...
Read post
globe - Employers should protect workers from moral injury
Employers should protect workers from moral injury COVID-19 may or may not be becoming endemic, but a shortage of health care workers seems to be reaching that stage. In Canada, the United States and around the world, workers are quitting, frequently referencing that they are exhausted and burnt out from jobs that ask them to cope with an unrealistic workload. “Burnout” is actually being referenced by workers in a multitude of industries as they either resign or think hard about doing so, and t...
Read post
Editorial - Argumenta ad passiones: Canada debates access thresholds to MAiD by Udo Schuklenk
Argumenta ad passiones: Canada debates access thresholds to MAiD Udo Schuklenk Canada's parliament is reviewing its medical assistance in dying (MAiD) legislation. This is because there were some issues left to be addressed in the future when the country initially decriminalized MAiD. It is also conducting a global review because more than 5 years have passed since MAiD became legal in Canada and it is time to review how things are going elsewhere. The purpose of this Editorial is not to go into...
Read post
The Conversation: When health care goes wrong: It’s time for transparency in patient safety
The COVID-19 crisis has both divided and galvanized Canadians on health care. While the last three years have presented new challenges to health-care systems across the country, the pandemic has also exacerbated existing challenges, most notably the high levels of errors and mistreatment documented in Canadian health care. According to a 2019 report from the Canadian Patient Safety Institute, Canada was already facing a public health crisis prior to the pandemic: a crisis of patient safety. As...
Read post
A systematic review on the association between inflammatory genes and cognitive decline in non-demented elderly individuals
A systematic review on the association between inflammatory genes and cognitive decline in non-demented elderly individualsDavid StaceyLiliana G.CiobanuBernhard T.BauneAvailable online 11 December 2015AbstractCognitive impairment, or decline, is not only a feature of Alzheimer׳s disease and other forms of dementia but also normal ageing. Abundant evidence from epidemiological studies points towards perturbed inflammatory mechanisms in aged individuals, though the cause–effect nature of this appa...
Read post
Why are depressed patients inflamed? A reflection on 20 years of research on depression, glucocorticoid resistance and inflammation
Why are depressed patients inflamed? A reflection on 20 years of research on depression, glucocorticoid resistance and inflammation European Neuropsychopharmacology, 2022. Carmine M. Pariante Abstract Studies over the last 20 years have demonstrated that increased inflammation and hyperactivity of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis are two of the most consistent biological findings in major depression and are often associated: but the molecular and clinical mechanisms underlying ...
Read post
Globe EDITORIALS Canada: The land where any plan to build more housing risks being studied to death
Four years ago, the City of Vancouver, the governments of Canada and British Columbia and the regional transit authority were ready to build a $2.8-billion subway along Broadway, just south of Vancouver’s downtown. The two higher levels of government would pick up most of the tab; the city promised to transform zoning along the subway’s route. Land on and near Broadway, most of which was low-rise, would become “a focal point for higher density housing,” according to the so-called supportive poli...
Read post
Maclean’s feature: COTTAGE INDUSTRY
COTTAGE INDUSTRY Surging prices, bidding wars, blind offers—the search for seasonal real estate has become a battlefield. Tales from 10 of Canada’s hottest vacation towns. BY ALEX CYR, NICHOLE JANKOWSKI, JACOB RUTKA, KATIE UNDERWOOD, ANDREA YU AND DAVE ZARUM Canadians call their vacation homes by many different names—cottages, chalets, cabins, camps. But they all share one thing, and that’s the promise of escape. In the last few years, however, the silent grandeur of dockside mornings and suns...
Read post
Toronto Star: Ontario family doctors in a ‘tricky situation’ when it comes to mask mandates
Sun Jun 12 22:44:39 EDT 2022 Family physician Dr. Nili Kaplan-Myth said her clinic in Ottawa will continue requiring most patients to wear masks, even though the provincial masking mandate expired this weekend. Ontario’s mask requirements for high-risk settings, including doctor’s offices and hospitals, expired on Saturday. Yet, some Toronto hospitals are still keeping mask mandates. The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) is the regulatory body that grants doctors licenses in O...
Read post
WIRED: Want to Understand Delusions? Listen to the People Who Have Them
MENTAL HEALTH Want to Understand Delusions? Listen to the People Who Have Them A small group of schizophrenia researchers thinks that personal narratives can tell us what test scores and brain scans can’t. For the first decades of Sohee Park’s career in schizophrenia research, she rarely stopped to consider what life was like for her research subjects. Now a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University, Park made a name for herself by studying working memory—the quick, scratch-pad-like memo...
Read post
We must make it easier to both live and die with dignity, but denying MAiD to those living in poverty is not the answer
ANDRÉ PICARD June 6, 2022 OPINION We must make it easier to both live and die with dignity, but denying MAiD to those living in poverty is not the answer Back in April, the CTV News program W5 ran a wonderful documentary entitled Death Wish, about medical assistance in dying (MAiD) and its evolution since being legalized in Canada in 2016. Reporter Avis Favaro focused on Vancouver Island, the “assisted death capital of Canada,” presenting a poignant look at how patients choose MAiD, and featuri...
Read post
New Yorker: THE SURREAL CASE OF A C.I.A. HACKER’S REVENGE
A hot-headed coder is accused of exposing the agency’s hacking arsenal. Did he betray his country because he was pissed off at his colleagues? Nestled west of Washington, D.C., amid the bland northern Virginia suburbs, are generic-looking office parks that hide secret government installations in plain sight. Employees in civilian dress get out of their cars, clutching their Starbucks, and disappear into the buildings. To the casual observer, they resemble anonymous corporate drones. In fact, the...
Read post
Opinion | The ‘Open Secret’ on Getting a Safe Abortion Before Roe v. Wade - The New York Times
The ‘Open Secret’ on Getting a Safe Abortion Before Roe v. Wade June 4, 2022 By Sally L. Satel Dr. Satel is a visiting professor of psychiatry at Columbia and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. If the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, will psychiatrists resume their pre-Roe role as arbiters of abortion access? The law once compelled psychiatrists and pregnant women to perform dishonest rituals to get abortions. Will psychiatrists once again need to be complicit post-Roe? ...
Read post
Inside the corporate dash to buy up dentists’ offices, veterinary clinics and pharmacies
Inside the corporate dash to buy up dentists’ offices, veterinary clinics and pharmacies Fuelled by international private equity funds, consolidating firms have been on a tear in health-professional fields, buying up practices in fields such as veterinary medicine, dental care, optometry and pharmacies and assembling them into chains Jordyn Hewer had a plan: Go to veterinary school, get a decade of experience under his belt and then buy his own practice. The first two steps went off without a h...
Read post
Astronauts face mental and emotional challenges for deep space travel. Scientists are working on solutions
Astronauts face mental and emotional challenges for deep space travel. Scientists are working on solutions Updated 12:29 PM EDT June 4, 2022 Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Astronauts have been venturing intospace for 61 years to unlock the human potential for exploration. But the floating freedom offered by a lack of gravity also presents a number of limits when it comes to the huma...
Read post
The Conversation: What is monkeypox? A microbiologist explains what’s known about this smallpox cousin
On May 18, 2022, Massachusetts health officials and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention confirmed a single case of monkeypox in a patient who had recently traveled to Canada. Cases have also been reported in the United Kingdom and Europe. Monkeypox isn’t a new disease. The first confirmed human case was in 1970, when the virus was isolated from a child suspected of having smallpox in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Monkeypox is unlikely to cause another pandemic, but with COVI...
Read post
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR May 21
LETTERS TO THE EDITOR May 21: ‘The sacred cow of medicare is defended even when the system is collapsing around us.’ How would you fix Canadian health care? Plus other letters to the editor Re There’s A Problem With Social Media, But It’s Not Donald Trump (Opinion, May 14): As with much that humankind initially invents for the good of all, social media is now hijacked. Once a highway, it has become a potholed-distorted avenue paved with distrust, disinformation and disavowal. From homegrown con...
Read post
EDITORIALS With Bill 96, François Legault is trying to tiptoe out of Canada’s constitutional order
It was always assumed that, if Quebec ever left Canada, it could only happen through the front door, and only if a clear majority could be persuaded to vote “oui” to an unambiguous referendum question. Such a result being of no interest to a majority of Quebeckers, Canada needs to recognize the fact that the current government of Quebec is trying to tiptoe out the back door. It is doing so by poking ever larger holes in Canada’s constitutional order, which protects fundamental rights, and replac...
Read post
STAT: A no good, very bad week for the FDA
You’re reading the web edition of D.C. Diagnosis, STAT’s twice-weekly newsletter about the politics and policy of health and medicine. Sign up here to receive it in your inbox. Dietary supplements, really, really aren’t regulated, huh? The law governing the FDA’s oversight of dietary supplements is remarkably weak — the agency doesn’t approve supplements like traditional medicines, and it can’t even really police the claims that pepper the bottles of these products. But the law does include one ...
Read post
OPINION To fix Canadian health care, let’s try the Dutch model
Ake Blomqvist is an adjunct research professor at Carleton University and a health policy scholar at the C.D. Howe Institute, where Rosalie Wyonch is also a senior policy analyst. The pandemic has revealed the fragility of Canada’s health care system, and there is growing recognition that changes are needed to curb rising costs and promote efficiency. But in a health care financing model such as ours, change is difficult, especially with responsibility spread across various political masters. W...
Read post
A PSYCHEDELIC FOR TRAUMA
PHARMACOLOGYA PSYCHEDELIC FOR TRAUMAMDMA, recreationally known as Ecstasy or Molly, gained high marks in a clinical trial for PTSDIn the spring of 2017 I was serendipitously invited to what initially seemed to be the wrong scientific meeting. The invitation came thirdhand, and the details were murky but intriguing. I took a car to a train to a downtown hotel where I wound my way through a series of conference rooms before a sign on a door made it clear that something was terribly wrong. It said,...
Read post
Top 20 cited since 2017
1 Bidirectional associations between COVID-19 and psychiatric disorder: retrospective cohort studies of 62 354 COVID-19 cases in the USA Taquet, M., Luciano, S., Geddes, J.R., Harrison, P.J. 2021 The Lancet Psychiatry 8(2), pp. 130-140 411 Background: Adverse mental health consequences of COVID-19, including anxiety and depression, have been widely predicted but not yet accurately measured. There are a range of physical health risk factors for COVID-19, but it is not known if there are also...
Read post
The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life
The Psychopharmacology of Everyday Life Jamieson Webster November 19, 2018, 7:00 am Everyone is on drugs. I don’t mean the old-fashioned, illegal kind, but the kind made by pharmaceutical companies that come in the form of pills. As a psychoanalyst, I’ve listened to people through the screen of their daily doses; and I’ve listened to them without it. Their natural rhythms certainly change, sometimes very dramatically—I guess that’s the point, isn’t it? I have a great many questions about wha...
Read post
Ferenczi's concept of identification with the aggressor: understanding dissociative structure with interacting victim and abuser self-states
Ferenczi’s Concept of Identification with The Aggressor: Understanding Dissociative Structure with Interacting Victim and Abuser Self-States Elizabeth F Howell The American Journal of Psychoanalysis 74, 48–59 (2014) Abstract No one has described more passionately than Ferenczi the traumatic induction of dissociative trance with its resulting fragmentation of the personality. Ferenczi introduced the concept and term, identification with the aggressor in his seminal “Confusion of Tongues” pap...
Read post
Ferenczi’s Revolutionary Therapeutic Approach
Mucci C. (2017). Ferenczi's Revolutionary Therapeutic Approach. American journal of psychoanalysis, 77(3), 239–254. doi:10.1057/s11231-017-9104-7 Ferenczi’s Revolutionary Therapeutic Approach* September 2017 What haunts are not the dead but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others. Abraham and Torok, The Shell and the Kernel Abstract Many of the revolutionary principles introduced by Ferenczi in his clinical practice have now been widely accepted especially in the field of trauma a...
Read post
Bypassing Shame and Conversion Disorder. Bota, R., Ricci, W., & Preda, A. (2010). CNS Spectrums, 15(10), 607-611. doi:10.1017/S1092852912000053
Bypassing Shame and Conversion Disorder Robert G. Bota, MD, Walter F Ricci, MD, and Adrian Preda, MD (2010). CNS Spectrums ABSTRACT We report a case of conversion disorder (partial aphonia) that was successfully treated with speech therapy. During the one year duration of this illness, the patient regained transiently (minutes) her normal speech on a few occasions, independently of concomitant pharmacological interventions. One year after recovery she developed aphonia for the second time, ...
Read post
Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health
Smartphones, social media use and youth mental health - CMAJ Elia Abi-Jaoude, Karline Treurnicht Naylor and Antonio Pignatiello CMAJ February 10, 2020 192 (6) E136-E141; DOI: https://doi.org/10.1503/cmaj.190434 KEY POINTS Evidence from a variety of cross-sectional, longitudinal and empirical studies implicate smartphone and social media use in the increase in mental distress, self-injurious behaviour and suicidality among youth; there is a dose–response relationship, and the effects appear...
Read post
A history of anxiety: from Hippocrates to DSM
Abstract This article describes the history of the nosology of anxiety disorders. Greek and Latin physicians and philosophers distinguished anxiety from other types of negative affect, and identified it as a medical disorder. Ancient Epicurean and Stoic philosophers suggested techniques to reach an anxiety-free state of mind that are reminiscent of modern cognitive psychology. Between classical antiquity and the late 19th century there was a long interval during which anxiety was not classified...
Read post
The history of generalized anxiety disorder as a diagnostic category
Marc-Antoine Crocq (2017) The history of generalized anxiety disorder as a diagnostic category, Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience, 19:2, 107-116, DOI: 10.31887/DCNS.2017.19.2/macrocq Google Wavenet text to speech Abstract From the 19th century into the 20th century, the terms used to diagnose generalized anxiety included “pantophobia” and “anxiety neurosis.” Such terms designated paroxysmal manifestations (panic attacks) as well as interparoxysmal phenomenology (the apprehensive mental state...
Read post
Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss
Calorie Restriction with or without Time-Restricted Eating in Weight Loss Abstract Background The long-term efficacy and safety of time-restricted eating for weight loss are not clear. Methods We randomly assigned 139 patients with obesity to time-restricted eating (eating only between 8:00 a.m. and 4:00 p.m.) with calorie restriction or daily calorie restriction alone. For 12 months, all the participants were instructed to follow a calorie-restricted diet that consisted of 1500 to 1800 kca...
Read post
The impact of insomnia disorder on adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder severity: A six-month follow-up study
The impact of insomnia disorder on adult attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder severity: A six-month follow-up study Google Wavenet text to speech C.Fadeuilhe, C.Daigre, L.Grau-López, V.Richarte, R.F.Palma-Álvarez, M.Corrales, B.Sáez, M.Baz, J.A.Ramos-Quiroga Highlights Insomnia disorder remission is associated with a significant ADHD severity improvement. Psychiatric ADHD comorbidity contributes to greater insomnia disorder persistence. ADHD severity, rather than ADHD presentations...
Read post