Reading for today:
- Creativity linked to mental health — By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia. Seems to me this is indicative of the likely fact that creatives and “schizophrenics” are the same people who have had different environments shape them. All the recovered, thriving “schizophrenics” I know are highly creative. Many people do recover given the chance but in our biopsych culture the incidence of recovery goes way down with aggressive chemical treatments.
- Inmates breathe easier after meditative classes – San Jose Mercury News
- Clinical Psychologists’ Perceptions of Persons with Mental Illness | Brain Blogger — a revealing and important piece of work. As someone who used to do clinical work I know that, in general, this sort of thing is not talked about among clinicians often enough nor openly enough. Clinicians, like all people, have prejudices. Sometimes these prejudices can get in the way of a therapeutic relationship with a client. — Some psychologists have a hard time connecting with people with mental illness, especially when they have diagnoses of borderline personality disorder or schizophrenia. — Most psychologists start off by evaluating people — that’s what a diagnosis is. Diagnoses, by their very nature, look at what’s not working. Most would agree that’s a good thing — if you don’t know where the problem is, it’s hard to fix it. — On the other hand, psychologists are people. Like you and me, they have personal likes and dislikes; perhaps they are even not so different from the employer who, research has shown, often decides who to hire within the first few minutes of meeting a prospective employee.
- Psychiatric Drugs and Poor Kids — Bruce Levine — Researchers at Rutgers University and Columbia University found that children and adolescents covered by Medicaid were four times as likely as those with private insurance to receive an antipsychotic in 2004. Among those aged six to 17 years who were covered by Medicaid, 4.2 percent were prescribed at least one antipsychotic drug. In contrast, among those in this same age group who had private insurance, less than 1 percent were prescribed an antipsychotic. Nearly half of these Medicaid-covered pediatric patients receiving antipsychotic drugs had nonpsychotic diagnoses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or some other disruptive behavior disorder. In contrast, of the privately insured pediatric patients receiving antipsychotics, about one fourth were diagnosed with ADHD or some other disruptive behavior disorder.
Everything matters 