Notable Links and Miscellanea – March 4, 2024
Notable Links and Miscellanea – March 4, 2024
Anneli Jefferson responds to a series of commentaries in Philosophical Psychology about her book “Are Mental Disorders Brain Disorders?” (including my commentary, Mental Disorders in Entangled Brains). It’s a thoughtful response, and I am in agreement with much of it. This whole book symposium is an illustration of how Jefferson’s work has revitalized the philosophical debate on this issue. It has provided an opportunity for me to develop my own views as well. (If you missed the discussion from last week, see: Mental Disorders Both Are and Are Not Brain Diseases)
Stefan Jerotic and colleagues, in collaboration with me, conducted a survey study on mental disorder conceptualization among various professionals in Serbia, published in Community Mental Health Journal.
If you are a psychiatric clinician in Ohio (or nearby), consider attending the Ohio Psychiatric Physicians Association’s 2024 Annual Psychiatric Update, April 13–14, 2024, in Columbus. I was on the planning committee this year, and we have some excellent speakers arranged, including Nev Jones, Kathryn T. Hall, and Audrey Clare Farley. Plus, I’ll be there in person. If you are attending, come say hello.
Robert Chapman responds to Justin Garson in his post Mad Supremacy — “While challenging pathologisation is itself not a problem, and while comparisons are of course sometimes useful, this argument is distinguished by invoking a naturalised conception of bodily illness or disability as inherently deficient, to claim that mental illness is actually comparatively normal, meaningful, or so on. It is a way of saying: we are not like them, we are normal while they are not… The deeper issue is that any logic that requires throwing others under the (eugenic) bus to establish pride in our purported superiority should be rejected, at least for those of us concerned with collective liberation.” (See my earlier Q&A with Chapman here)
Hollunder et al. in Nature Neuroscience: Mapping dysfunctional circuits in the frontal cortex using deep brain stimulation — in Parkinson’s disease, dystonia, obsessive-compulsive disorder and Tourette’s syndrome.
Affected brain circuits in Parkinson’s disease (green), dystonia (yellow), Tourette’s syndrome (blue), and obsessive-compulsive disorder (red). Inset: the optimal target areas for deep brain stimulation in the basal ganglia. © Charité | Barbara Hollunder Did tail loss during evolution make organisms vulnerable to neural tube defects? Possibly. Xia et al. in Nature: “These results support the notion that the exon-skipped transcript is sufficient to induce a tail-loss phenotype. Moreover, mice expressing the exon-skipped Tbxt isoform develop neural tube defects, a condition that affects approximately 1 in 1,000 neonates in humans. Thus, tail-loss evolution may have been associated with an adaptive cost of the potential for neural tube defects, which continue to affect human health today.”
Sofia Jeppsson, Allegedly impossible experiences — “sane clinicians and scholars must open their minds to the possibility that there may be experiences that other people have, which they nevertheless cannot conceive of. I look at influential texts in which philosophers attempt to analyze and understand depersonalization and thought insertion. They go astray because they keep using their own powers of conceivability as a guide to what is or is not humanly possible to experience. Several experiences labeled inconceivable and therefore impossible by these philosophers, are experiences I have had myself.”
Psychological Medicine — 20-year neurocognitive development following a schizophrenia spectrum disorder and associations with symptom severity and functional outcomes
The personality structure of ChatGPT: “ChatGPT’s personality profiles are within the range of the human distribution, even though ChatGPT-3 scored noticeably lower in Openness.”
Ronald Pies in Psychiatric Times, Did Szasz Misunderstand Virchow’s Concept of Disease?
Szigeti, et al. in Psychological Medicine — Assessing expectancy and suggestibility in a trial of escitalopram v. psilocybin for depression — “Patients had significantly higher expectancy for psilocybin relative to escitalopram; however, expectancy for escitalopram was associated with improved therapeutic outcomes to escitalopram, expectancy for psilocybin was not predictive of response to psilocybin. Separately, we found that pre-treatment trait suggestibility was associated with therapeutic response in the psilocybin arm, but not in the escitalopram arm.”
Johannes Kleiner, Towards a structural turn in consciousness science: “Conscious experiences do not “come with” mathematical structure in any meaningful sense. Rather, mathematical spaces and mathematical structure offer a language to describe or represent conscious experiences, and just like we need definitions or conventions to apply English language terms to consciousness, we need definitions or conventions to apply structural terms. In the case of structure, the definitions and conventions take the form of methodologies that govern how to construct or use the mathematical terminology.”
It is difficult to write about the Israel-Palestine situation with fairness and moral clarity. The haunting post “Against the brave: Why you ought to be ashamed” by
is worth reading in the context of the current conflict.Nils Wendel’s post “Stop Twisting Yourself Into Knots About QTc” (
) is a deep and critical dive into the risk of torsade de pointes associated with antipsychotics. He writes, “academic and public incentives are generally aligned against writing papers titled “Why You Shouldn’t Care So Much About Prevention of Torsade de Pointes in a Hospital Setting,” in which the conclusion is “We recommend that y’all chill out a little bit, this QTc stuff isn’t a big deal in the grand-scheme of things.” It’s just not aligned with this idea that physicians are supposed to be discovering ways to do things to save more lives.” In my own small way, I wrote the y’all-need-to-chill-a-bit-about-QTc paper during my residency in the form of this letter to the editor in Psychosomatics.- in Jezebel — The Skims Nipple Bra and Margiela Merkin Are Empty Signifiers of a Sex-Starved Culture
