More on Serotonin

I just love this Clinical Psych piece: Ghosts, Goblins, and Serotonin: Boo!

Charity Girls, etc.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing in the Sandy Springs library and discovered the book Charity Girls, by Michael Lowenthal. It reminded me of a topic near and dear to my heart, wrongful civil commitment and forced treatment of people labeled mentally ill.

Charity Girls is not about wrongful civil commitment but it is about wrongful imprisonment of women. It's a true story. Here's a blurb from a review: Supported by an act of Congress, military leaders and social reformers during World War I detained and quarantined some 15,000 young women, without hearings or judicial oversight, in an effort to protect soldiers.

And from Lowenthal: "during the First World War, some 15,000 American women were incarcerated in reformatories and detention homes—often for months at a time, with no charge of a crime, no trial, no legal recourse—while they received forcible medical treatment for venereal disease."

Many of the detained women were prostitutes, but a great number of them weren't; they were "charity girls," those who "picked up" men for the sheer fun of it and for the attendant perks of nights on the town—and who, by our contemporary standards, were doing nothing illicit or even unusual. Social standards change, but I don't believe the human heart does. I couldn't stop imagining what these charity girls had felt: girls who had the very same hopes and sexual urges as we do now, but who were made, for having those urges, to feel wicked."

Huh! It's a good book and a scary one, and yes I can't help but post another picture of my dog. He keeps me going

by the mid-1990s the serotonin-deficiency theory of depression had been scientifically tested and rejected

Wow, I wake up this morning and, after walking the dog, making coffee, checking for email from the boss man, find this Rockin piece at Furious Seasons.

Finally reality is coming home to roost. SSRI's, SNRI's don't correct imbalances in your brain...but that's really the tip of the iceberg and I hope this one keeps melting.

By the way, one of many problems with psychiatrists is that psychiatry really is the easiest specialty in medicine, where the med students with the lowest grades and the weakest test scores end up. Oh and the ones that got caught working while impaired (that's high on drugs folks) back when they were real doctors.

And there's a good New York Times piece that adds more to the idea that thyroid problems may cause psychiatric symptoms.

It still concerns me that some phrinks will label someone with an abnormal thyroid as bipolar , depressed, or who knows what, and treat the abnormal thyroid levels as symptom of the purported mental illness, while some will say that the bipolar diagnosis or other psychiatric diagnosis was given incorrectly to someone who needed thyroid medicine.

Things I was wrong about

1. It's not only the good that die young - if you disagree, just wait, you'll change your mind in a few years;

2. All of the people who voted for W really do have organic brain damage, they just do;

3. Taco Salad is not a health or diet food;

4. Cats....

this list is by no means intended to be exhaustive

It's No Secret

Welcome to the 21 century where nothing is private. Your health information, not really a big secret - why have you got something to hide?

The Last Psychiatrist has an excellent piece on google and privacy and these folks, Patient Privacy Rights, are trying to do something to improve the situation.

I've thought about providing my health care providers with this form, but I'm a little chicken, I mean what if it goes in my permanent record and I get bad health care because of it. Still the form is pretty cool.

Thoughts, Questions, Concerns?

Ain't that America?

I got this first story, the story of immigrants being forcibly drugged from the ever charming Liz Spikol, and the second one from the good old New York Times. It just makes you think, at least they didn't forcibly drug the firefighters who came in from Mexico to help put out the California fires, well, I don't think they did.

Lack of Insight

Anti-science fear mongers like the Treatment Advocacy Center advocate forced medication and confinement of people labeled as having mental illnesses based on the claim that people so labeled lack insight, however, this argument is specious for numerous reasons one of which is the notorious lack of insight of clinicians who assign psychiatric labels to humans:

"Clinicians, even well-trained ones, often have excess confidence in their own perceptions, are sometimes influenced by biases and agendas that they themselves do not fully appreciate, and are frequently resistant to the base rates of dangerousness for the populations they are evaluating."

Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes by Frederick Schauer