I thought I’d heard enough about Tiger Moms, but perked up when I came across Tiger Moms and Orchid Kids, by Sam Gridley. Gridley considers how presumably harsh Tiger Mom parenting might generate success and happiness even in highly sensitive kids, the kind you’d think such treatment would crush. What kind of parenting are we talking […]
Continue reading →I resist best-of-year roundups when I see the heads — but then find I usually like reading them, and lo and behold, find it instructive to do my own. While most of my attention last year went into pitching and then beginning work on The Orchid and the Dandelion, I spent a lot of time […]
Continue reading →Not making this up: A team of researchers has used light to make a mouse’s brain run better and relieve the mouse’s mousy version of depression. (Paper — a pdf download — is here.) This is potentially pretty big. For one thing, it’s what science writer John Pavlus would call awesome. For another, it expands […]
Continue reading →The reclamation of the “depression gene” proceeds apace: In a paper titled “Looking on the Bright Side of Serotonin Transporter Gene Variation,” two researchers who helped establish the “depression risk-gene” view of depression assert quite strongly that people with the gene variant in question — the s-allele of the serotonin transporter gene, HTTLPR — possess […]
Continue reading →Maps can tell surprising stories. About a year ago, Northwestern University psychologist Joan Chiao pondered a set of global maps that confounded conventional notions of what depression is, why we get it, and how genes — the so-called “depression gene” in particular — interact with environment and culture.
Continue reading →This isn’t something we’ll figure out in a couple workshops; it’s something the industry and the broader genomics community will need to consider carefully over the next few years, even as it rapidly grows.
Continue reading →Neuroskeptic takes a sharp look at how our expanding definition of depression paralleled our expanding use of antidepressants — and perhaps led to antidepressant’s poor performance in the less severely depressed. T
Continue reading →This is a good example of how reflexive diagnoses, as PTSD has become for any combat veteran (and sometimes even prospective combat veterans — i.e., troops preparing to deploy), can do harm. They can lead you to ignore other possible causes of the symptoms on display.
Continue reading →Old brains, depressed brains, new viruses, the death of healthcare reform?
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