Batman Returns: How Culture Shapes Muddle Into Madness
Neuron Culture blogger David Dobbs takes another look at the causes of tragedies like the one in Aurora.
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Growing Up on Zoloft – Talking Drugs, Depression, and Identity With Katherine Sharpe
The new book “Coming of Age on Zoloft” explores the running debate about overmedication for depression and what it means to come of age — and of identity — while on these meds. Neuron Culture blogger David Dobbs interviews the author, Katherine Sharpe.
Continue reading →What is Mental Illness? A Peek Through the Murk
This guest post — a book review of Richard J. McNally’s What is Mental Illness — is by Jason Goldman, a University of Southern California graduate student in developmental psychology who blogs on behavior and psychology at The Thoughtful Animal. Goldman is also the psychology and neuroscience editor at ResearchBlogging.org and edited the science-writing anthology Open Lab 2010. When most […]
Continue reading →Neuron Culture’s Best of Year
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 →Aglitter in the Net
Recent favorites, notables, and retweets: Down on the Body Farm: Inside the Dirty World of Forensic Science A good read from the Atlantic. History of Female Madness in the APA Monitor A bit unsettling, which is probably why it’s an important reminder. . The dark side of oxytocin, much more than just a “love hormone” […]
Continue reading →Optogenetics Relieves Depression in a Mouse Trial
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 →Depression’s wiring diagram
The ever-excellent Neurocritic has an interesting post looking at “lesion studies” of depression. As he notes, he was hoping for real lesions, from people who’d had psychosurgery years ago, but had to settle for a simulation study that used MRIs from a large sample of control participants.
Continue reading →Cantú: Anatomy of a drug trial
Ever wonder what it would be like to be in a drug trial? Doubtless the experience varies. But the account offered by Austin-American Statesman commentary editor Ana Cantu is unsettling. If nothing else, it suggests that the very experience of some of these trials is far from normal reality. That’s aside from questions of the […]
Continue reading →Good parents, bad kids, and the distraction of nature-nurture
I almost didn’t address this Times story on “bad seeds,” written by a psychiatrist , but so many people asked, given my interest in child-raising and the interplay of nature and nurture and behavioral genetics, that I thought I’d say something.
… Bakermans-Kranenburg, who worked up the video intervention being described above, told me the key to improving the parenting — and thus the kids’ behavior — was getting parents to spot, in the videos the researchers took of them, the fleeting moments in which a good moment starts to turn bad, and other moments in which the parents managed to spot trouble coming and turn the moment good.
Continue reading →Glitter in the stream: evolving brains, evolving journalism, & kids and genes
As it happens, I’m working on a story (or rather, NOT working on it as I write this post) that helps partly explain why ontogeny may follow phylogeny here. … Somatosphere: Book Review: The Madness within Us: Schizophrenia as a Neuronal Process by Robert Freedman Bloggers and citizen journalists not filling gap left by media cuts, says report More transition pains.
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