NYCOM Psychiatry Club

It was time to bite the bullet.

Analysis depends on organization.

Todo tiene su proprio lugar. (My grandfather)

I had to evolve from the "pile" filing system. While I will be the first to tell you that I only lose things after I've organized them, to tell you the truth my internal schematic of where everything is in my house had long since reached capacity. I simply didn't know what I had, until, *sniff*, I threw it away.

So I turned a big pile of crap into a neat stack of A4 manilla envelopes, according to the method developed by Noguchi Yukio, economist. Unfortunately the original is in print and in Japanese, which, also unfortunately, I can not read. (yet. Someday...*sigh*.) Fortunately, there is an Anglophone translator-type (name of William Lise) who made a neat little webpage about it.

So far, it's pretty good. It's a little weird to be making envelopes for your passport, checkbooks, test scores, etc. But when I consider where they were previously (e.g. ye ole pile o' detritus), this is certainly an improvement. An interesting thing is that its pretty flexible--you can create an envelope for anything that you consider worth the effort. I made one for my rough drafts of my personal statements (dozens so far), another one for pictures to put into an album, and another for "Mental Status Exam study materials". I forsee whipping this out after my osteopathic internship to whip myself back into shape psychiatrically. (Hmm that sounds funny. I'll just let it hang there for awhile.)

Give it a shot. BTW, buy the envelopes in bulk from Staples or something, not raiding every pharmacy in a 5-block radius. Do as I say, not as I do.

Well, after about a year hiatus from blogging, I'm back. I may switch to a new blog, as I'm not really associated with the NYCOM Psych Club anymore. Maybe it's time to get reassociated. I'll give it a shot and call our previous faculty advisor, Dr. Goldblatt. It'd be a good excuse to talk to him anyway--he was a lifeline to psychiatry while I was in the psychological wasteland that is medical school.

Anyway, to cap off my new blooging (Ha! I meant "blogging"--shows you how long I've been gone) effort, an article about the recent activities of Martin Seligman(the "learned helplessness" prof from University of Pennsylvania), and a newish initiative to quantify happiness or wellbeing for British types. (Britishers (or people from Brit-land) hate happiness and would rather drink pints and pound the stuffing out of each other at soccer football matches than hold hands and chant Kum-ba-ya with us "schmaltzy" colonials.)

Some juicy tidbits:

...we think of happiness as a trivial pursuit for the Oprah generation, a Shangri-La perpetuated by self-help gurus.

Ha ha! Ha. Sob.

So what makes people happy?

One thing makes a striking difference. When two American psychologists studied hundreds of students and focused on the top 10% "very happy" people, they found they spent the least time alone and the most time socialising. Psychologists know that increasing the number of social contacts a miserable person has is the best way of cheering them up. When Jean-Paul Sartre wrote "hell is other people", the arch-pessimist of existentialist angst was wrong.

One thing about the "learned helplessness" study that you blithly and sagaciously talked about but probably never read:

[Seligman] reflected that one in three subjects — rats, dogs or people — never became "helpless", no matter how many shocks or problems beset them.

Fine, you say. Show me the skience! Fine, I say:

the inhibited toddlers showed greater activity on the brain's right side; activation of the lively toddlers' brains was on the left. Happiness and sadness are lopsided.

(Infarcts to key areas of the left-sided brain lead to various degrees of aphasia, but I haven't noticed people with right-sided lesions being happier. I guess I wasn't looking.

I could keep quoting, but it'd end up being the entire article, which is quite good. Go read it.

Welcome to Death - the last taboo

for those with a morbid curiosity.

Mwahahahaha.

Article: Hypnosis really changes your mind�| New Scientist

"Hypnosis significantly affects the activity in a part of the brain responsible for detecting and responding to errors, says John Gruzelier, a psychologist at Imperial College in London. Using functional brain imaging, he also found that hypnosis affects an area that controls higher level executive functions.

“This explains why, under hypnosis, people can do outrageous things that ordinarily they wouldn’t dream of doing,” says Gruzelier, who presented his study at the British Association for the Advancement of Science Festival in Exeter, UK.

The finding is one of the first to indicate a biological mechanism underpinning the experience of hypnosis. Gruzelier hopes it will also benefit emerging research showing, for example, that hypnosis can help cancer patients deal with painful treatments."

BW Online | August 24, 2001 | Getting Things Done

A good first chapter for a book about ending procrastination.

Taken entirely from www.schizophrenia.com:

1. Maternal infections during pregnancy are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia. Recent studies have indicated that children who born to mothers who suffer from flu, viruses and other infections during the pregnancy are at significantly increased risk of schizophrenia. A recent research study announced in April 2004 by Columbia University identified that approximately 14% of schizophrenia cases seem to have been caused by influenza during pregnancy.

The study indicated that Flu during the first trimester of pregnancy increased risk of developing schizophrenia in the child by approx. 700%, while flu during the third trimester increased schizophrenia risk for the child by 300%.

"This is the first time that this association has been shown using" blood tests that confirmed influenza infection during pregnancy, lead author Dr. Alan S. Brown, from Columbia University in New York, told Reuters Health. "It provides what I think is the strongest evidence to date linking (prenatal) influenza exposure with schizophrenia."

The findings reinforce recommendations that women of childbearing age be vaccinated against influenza, Brown continued. However, because the mechanism underlying the schizophrenia connection is unknown, "we may not want to give the vaccine during pregnancy," he said. Until more is known, "it's possible that vaccination (during pregnancy) could have a harmful effect."

Supporting Research (a sample):

• 
  
Flu During Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia (News, April'04)
• Flu During Pregnancy Triples Risk of Schizophrenia for child (News)
• Study links moms' herpes to schizophrenia in offspring (News)
• Prenatal exposure to influenza as a risk factor for adult schizophrenia. (Research)
• Immune activation during pregnancy in rats leads to a postpubertal emergence of disrupted latent inhibition, dopaminergic hyperfunction, and altered limbic morphology in the offspring: a novel neurodevelopmental model of schizophrenia. (Research)
• Exposure to prenatal infections, genetics and the risk of systematic and periodic catatonia
• In utero infection and adult schizophrenia (Research)
• Maternal infection: window on neuroimmune interactions in fetal brain development and mental illness. (Research)
• Maternal infections and subsequent psychosis among offspring (Research)
• Prenatal teratogens and the development of adult schizophrenia (Research)

Helpful for rotations. Start now!
The Seattle Times: Health: How to rise and shine when you're nocturnal by nature

via Boing Boing