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Anxiety Disorders Discoverable by Blood Test
Tomer Yaffe writes to tell us that researchers at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem have discovered a technique to diagnose anxiety disorders with a simple blood test. From the article: "The researchers hope that the anxiety blood test will soon make its way into hospitals and E.R. rooms and give doctors and psychiatrists a quick and precise tool for examining, and eventually treating, these disorders." The team has also set their sights on depression, hoping for a similar technique to detect these types of disorders as well.
then they'd be really screwed..
Stop squirming away from the needle! We need to run this test on you!
As a psych student planning on specializing in anxiety/depression, this is great news. A blood test would make it a lot easier for people to acknowledge that they have an anxiety disorder. Currently one of the greatest challenges a psychologist faces in these disorders is getting the patient to see that they really do have one and it is impacting them negatively.
. . . in that case the test would be fairly conclusive.
Because that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we want to do with people with anxiety disorder: suck out their blood. That couldn't *possibly* make anyone... anxious, or worried. Nope. Not a chance of that.
Perfect for screening potential employees as well!
My only worry about this is that some people might just be feeling shitty, and wouldn't want to submit to a blood test. What if a person says they're anxious/depressed, but the blood test says otherwise? What do doctors believe?
In any event, it'd probably be better if doctors got to work on making some antidepressants with less overt side effects before they learn to diagnose it...I mean I've just started taking Prozac, and already I'm getting headaches, and the leaflet with the pills has a whole lot more side effects to watch out for.
By summer it was all gone...now shesmovedon. --
While I'm not a doctor, a lot of the most anxious people I know are heavy consumers of caffeine. They're the sort of people who drink three cups in the morning, followed by a Coke while at work, and then another cup of coffee and a chocolate bar snack on the way home, followed by a couple of cups of tea with dinner. And then they can't sleep, so they need to repeat the cycle again the next day, for years on end.
The was one fellow I worked with, Trent, who was in that cycle, and was always very anxious and irritable. He eventually decided to just cut out caffeine completely. So he started drinking fruit juices instead of coffee, water instead of Coke. He stopped eating chocolate. And soon after dropping caffeine from his diet he found he was able to concentrate more, was far more efficient at work, and was a whole lot less anxious.
So perhaps a good way to eliminate some forms of anxiousness is to stop consuming caffeine.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Many people who are reluctant to undergo this examination are left untreated and can continue to suffer for many years.
So, if people are reluctant to undergo examination by a doctor what makes the researches believe that they will appreciate being stuck w/a needle and then have to sit around and wait out their results?
I doubt these kind of issues can be singled out by a blood test. I'm sure they are finding some subset of those with an anxiety issue, but they will overlook others with similar issues because "it didn't show up on the test."
The last thing we need are doctors relying even *more* upon tests rather than listening to their patients.
Especially easy to spot during this blood test is the anxiety of needles.... http://www.needlephobia.co.uk/
The surest sign of intelligent life in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us. -- Calvin & Hobbes
What if I get panic attacks at the site of needles or blood?
In that case you can either give them an anxiolytic (anti-anxiety agent such as alprazolam [Xanax]), or "put them under"--although I would expect that in all but the strongest cases a benzodiazepine would work well enough.
This has really got to suck if one has test anxiety.
.. that they missed this years igNobles.
I was hoping that they would release it for research purposes. For example, if I had the money, I would love to finance a study to see how effective relaxation techniques (TM, Yoga, other breathing exercises, exercise...) are in reducing anxiety. With these blood tests, you'd have an objective measure instead of some questionaire to test for anxiety.
Also, this would be great for testing the efficacy of anti-anxiety drugs such as Paxil.
Evil people don't think they're evil. - George Lucas, Making of Ep III
Who needs tests when we have Tom Cruise to tell us that it's all in our imagination and we just need exercise to chase those blues away!
"The team has also set their sights on depression, hoping for a similar technique to detect these types of disorders as well."
NaCl present in blood, it must be depression
For those of you not in the know, Obsessive-Compulsive disorder is an anxiety disorder.
I read TFA.
The problem I see with this kind of testing is the cases where the diagnosed individual refuses treatment. The stigma against being labeled as "crazy" is still crushingly huge, and this is a signifigant reason why many people who suffer from emotional disorders refuse to seek treatment. They see it as a sign of weakness, of "not being able to handle things themselves."
So I forsee and fear individuals getting stuck with a (mandatory) needle then being told, "You are anxious", and "You must submit to treatment". The world knows no shortage of elitist M.D.s who hate the notion of a patient not obeying their very learned whim. Why not use the police to force these people into treatment? Perhaps I'm just being paranoid.
Or maybe I'm just anxious...
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
I disagree. While I feel that recovery should be placed upon the patient, it is important to let them know that they are not responsible for causing the disorder. My significant other was extremely bothered and felt that she was a failure for having an anxiety disorder, but I remind her that "(She) isn't responsible for having the disorder, but she is responsible for her recovery."
In all seriousness, that _is_ a potential source of bias in studies of psychiatric conditions. There definitely is a skewing away from patients with symptoms (anxiety, paranoia) that make them reluctant to consent to blood draws or DNA collection.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Interesting to see that they found a correlation between acetylcholine / acetylcholinesterase and anxiety disorders. It goes to show that the physical symptoms aren't just "in your head". Those two chemicals regulate the nervous system. You'll see that most nerve agents, such as VX, are acetylcholinesterase inhibitors.
I would like to see someone take this new information and conduct another study of the people suffering from Gulf War syndrome - both with physical weakness and mental / anxiety problems. I bet they would discover that many of them were either exposed to a nerve agent or an antidote on some level. It's sad that so many veterans are suffering and our government has made no real effort to help them.
An anxiety disorder about other people knowing your anxieties. I guess that explains why you post as an AC
If they won't let you take their blood for the test, they've got a disorder!
Anxiety Blood Test results to be tracked with RFID. IBM corporation swears there's nothing to be anxious about...
Note: I'm no a fan of PC (politically-correct) diversity, but do see value in variety to maximize total economic performance across a range of conditions and fields of endeavor.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Well, to some degree they can be responsible.
And in my studied opinion, THAT is the most prevalent misconception in the field. Knowing their is a biological component to their illness helps patients realize it's not just them, they aren't just crazy or imagining it, and helps them work on it from a much stronger position.
This is SO educational! -- Kintaro Oe
Until now they typically diagnose by asking you some questions ("do you have thoughts of suicide? do you sleep ok?" etc.). If you're having a bad day or have your shit-colored glasses on for some other reason, it will color your responses.
And then they try you on some anti-depressant and ask you the same questions 2 months later to see if it's working. If it's not working, they switch to another medication, rinse and repeat.
This is seriously lame, and in the case of depression, might easily cause you to give up. A blood test would go a long way toward addressing this -- especially if it gives any clues about which medications are more likely to work.
As somebody in the medical field (or soon to be), are you a proponent of using drugs to treat anxiety? I've heard reports that some of the drugs frequently have awful side effects, and can become very addicting and very difficult to ease off of. There have even been consumer lawsuits against various pharmas, if I'm not mistaken.
That said, if such a test were used to identify those suffering from such illnesses, would you as a clinician prescribe such drugs, or would you focus on alternative therapies?
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Currently one of the greatest challenges a psychologist faces in these disorders is getting the patient to see that they really do have one and it is impacting them negatively.
Yes, convincing a patient that they need to pay you all that money must be rather difficult. Yet the Noble Health Practicioner(TM) plunges forward!
I can't help but be terribly cynical and bitter after many wasted hours in the offices of ineffective psychologists (not to mention those shitty drug-dealing quacks -- psychiatrists!). Admitting you have a problem is only the first step. Finding a psychologist who is worth a damn is quite a bit more difficult, and no one, especially not a hungry-for-your-money psychologist, will help you find the one that works for you. You have to do it on your own, when you are at your weakest. It sucks, but that's life.
I don't make the rules. I just make fun of them.
Say it isn't so... surely suicide bombers and general unrest, military police, guns, bombs, and other daily lifestyle activities in the holy city are not prone to create anxiety disorders!
Geez, in a Jeruselem hospital, you only have to take blood from anyone that happens to be there in the waiting room and I bet you find an anxiety disorder... bet that was hard to test out?
Just my thoughts...
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Yes, but it just as strongly provides a cop-out mechanism with which the patient may absolve herself of her responsibility to recover. Besides, the science of measuring changes in brain and blood chemistry, then these changes for mood swings concurrent with the change, is shaky at best. It will be a long time before humans fully understand neuro- and bio-chemistry and how they relate to the psyche, and until that day I am more than happy to keep my patients in the dark about it.
There was a point, counterpoint and then a reaffirmation of the first point and nobody said the other one was stupid? Is today OPPOSITE DAY!?
Do you make a distinction between depression with an organic cause and depression of the "I dont know how to be happy" type? (is that even a legit distinction?)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
Since there is only 1 person working in the entire field of psychiatric research, obviously all research on new anti-anxiety meds was stopped while these experiments were being conducted.
Indeed, very often anxiety is caused by excessive caffeine consumption. While it isn't obsessive-compulsive disorder by any means, caffeine-induced anxiety can very well be considered an anxiety disorder.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
It depends on the patient. In my opinion, benzodiazepines should NOT be used for long term treatment (anything longer than 2 weeks or so). What I've observed to be most effective is beginning an SSRI (or in some cases SNRI), and if needed using a benzodiazepine to control the symptoms/side effects until the S(S/N)RI has stablized. Then Cognitive Behavioral Therapy while the patient is on the anti-depressants, and then slowly taking them off of the antidepressants.
My opinion is neither well informed or professional. If the cause of a persons illness (mental or otherwise) is chemical or physical, then why wouldn't you want to help them deal with the real problem effectively? I understand that people need to be responsible in helping themselves. If anyone is supposed to make an effort at fixing a problem they need to be as informed as possible about the nature of the problem.
I realize some people would use the knowledge that they have a chemical/physical disorder as a crutch to avoid trying to get better. I think this is where the job of their psychologist/psychiatrist/therapist really comes into play.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Generalized Anxiety Disorder.
I wish this test had been around when I blew my top a few times and ended up in the emergency room. Each visit resulted in a different hypothesis on what was wrong with me, from dehydration to renault's syndrome.
The shit is scary enough when you have no idea what is wrong with you. For most anxiety sufferers, the first half dozen of earthquake sized panic attacks are almost always assumed to be physical problems. I believe I had brain cancer, lung cancer, intestinal cancer, heart problems, etc. Had I been shown a test result that read anxiety, I would have saved a lot of additional anxiety worrying about whether or not my ticker was going to go at any given moment.
Good news.
I won't claim expertise in clinical psychology, but from everything I have seen, psychological disorders are varied, with causes ranging from factors controllable by the patient to severe stress caused by family, job, or other social factors to environmental factors. In some cases then it may be important for the patient to assume responsibility, but in others there is likely not much he or she can do, at least not without chemical assistance. In any case, in disorders where it is hard to get the patient to realize that he or she even has the disorder, a blood test could be an important tool.
Isn't it a fact that for many disorders, including anxiety, depression, and schizophrenia, drug treatment has proven to be far more effective than psychotherapy?
By the way, are you really a professional psychologist? Care to explain why a psychologist would be posting garbage like this?
There has been, for a long time, a barrier, a kind of mental wall, even in well-informed people, about the notion that some psychological manifestations are actually neurological, that is, somatic in nature. Many thought that anti-depressants exist, but think they are just used by people that could just as well be treated a la Dr. Phil (I have nothing against Dr. Phil, on the contrary, love him). Tom Cruise is a sad case in point.
Well, if this tests becomes widespread, the notion that anxiety and depression can be, indeed, neurological phenomena, will estabilish itself once and for all even in the average person's mind. And it's about freaking time; people with such conditions have been victims of of prejudice and missunderstanding for way, way too long.
Sigged!
Prozac has changed things but there is this pervasive idea that mood is completely under ones control and that all one needs is determination to snap out of any mood and become the most successful happy person in the world. Happy people tell depressed people naively, "Why don't you just snap out of it?". The problem is is that you can't simulate another persons brain chemistry. You can't even simulate your own brain chemistry from mood to mood. Ever walk by two people yelling and screaming at each other and start thinking, "What's up with them?". Have you ever been those two people yelling and screaming at some point in your life? When we're happy we couldn't imagine how we were sad. When we're sad we couldn't imagine how we could have been happy.
When we eliminate something that wastes the lives of 13% of the population, and if you've ever known someone with an anxiety disorder you'll know how much of their life they waste, won't that improve the human condition more than just about anything else? What's better, is these fixes to mental health improve things throughout society, letting people avoid destructive compulsions and reach their full potential.
Anxiety disorders are typically "ruled in" after doing all sorts of tests first to look for other serious medical issues that may cause similar symptoms. Having an MRI's and seeing a neurologist, visiting an E.N.T., and visiting a cardiologist can often be the path taken before a Dr. rules in an anxiety disorder (unless of course it's totally obvious, which it isn't a lot of the time).
Can you provide more information regarding that study? Namely, how it was funded. Brazil does have somewhat of an industry producing cocoa. They're also amongst the largest (if not the largest) exporters of coffee. So I'm naturally weary of studies promoting the use of caffeine from a nation that depends significantly on the economic potential of caffeine.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I would also like to mention that I would never trust a psychologist that posts thing like this on slashdot. Troll.
"Prefiero morir de pie que vivir siempre arrodillado!"
Many people (like Tom Cruise) consider psychology to be a pseudoscience. However, if we can come up with definitive tests with concrete results in order to diagnose patients with mental illnesses, it makes psychology that much more closely resemble the rest of the world of medicine. This will (hopefully) make people realize that there is a real science behind it.
I know that if my son was diagnosed with ADD, I would feel much more comfortable having him treated with ritalin or whatever if the doctor had a blood test (or something more concrete than "He's all fidgety in class") to back it up.
This actually reminds me a bit of the home headache test.
Wife: "Oh, God, I'm in agony!"
Husband (holding strip): "Honey, you don't have a headache."
Wife: "Oh, thank God!"
But this Rottweiler not only is snarling and frothing at the mouth; it also went to Harvard.
In my studied opinion it is far better for the chemical/physical causes of mental illness to be hidden safely away from the ...
Besides having difficulties in recognizing simple cause-consequence relations in a complex world I sincerely wonder how you in your studies came to the conclusion that disregulations on the "material" side may be rated as a "cause".
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
I just don't have the attention span for that kind of commitment. Anyways, time to go find something else to post about...
I know I've stolen this from numerous comedians ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
"Fixing" the person is like walpapering a house with collapsed foundations. It'll make the problem invisible... for a while. But unless you fix the foundations, the house will still fall down. Likewise, fixing the foundations alone may prevent further damage, but the inside of the house will still look a wreck.
The job of ANYONE in (or around) mental health is to correct all of the aspects of the mental health problem they are dealing with. A partial solution can be worse than no solution at all, especially if you keep telling the patient that it's all the patient's fault/responsibility.
Establishing a cause, like faulty genes, allows the patient to remedy the underlying problem. Most genetic or biological problems are solvable with the right regemen, but unless you identify those underlying issues, you will NEVER identify the regemen that needs to be followed. And the patient will suffer the consequences of your inaction by deteriorating further. However, such treatment will only ever stabilize a condition. It won't cure it. Curing DOES require the patient to take responsibility for their actions, for their lives and for getting better.
To ask them to take that responsibility whilst their brain is chemically or electically up the spout, though, is about as intelligent as telling the skydiver whose parachute has failed that all they need do is flap their arms faster. Hardware failure requires a hardware solution. Software failure (in this case, the mind of the person) requires a software solution. NEVER assume that hardware will fix faulty software, or software will ever compensate for defective hardware.
Remedy the fault, NOT the fault's owner.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
nt
Disclosure: I'm stupid
As someone who has experienced and recovered from a psychosomatic disorder (in my case what I thought was "repetitive strain injury"), I tend to agree that sometimes its better that patient doesn't know about physical evidence. The mind is clever enough to create painful symptoms where it knows there are structural abnormalities, even though those structural abnormalities don't cause pain. Read "The Mindbody Prescription" by John Sarno if you're interested in what I'm talking about here (or Google "sarno tms" or check out this document)
In this case, I don't really know much about the discovery, so maybe it doesn't apply, but this is what worries me: ok, so anxiety disorders can be detected in the bloodstream. But what is the cause? It can still be something that is purely psychological and something that could potentially be fixed through psychological approaches. Maybe the evidence in the bloodstream is the result of anxiety disorders, but the anxiety disorder itself is still psychological. The mind is capable of making changes to the body in pretty incredible ways (I've experienced this first hand), this isn't really too surprising.
What worries me about this is that this will give people the concept that there is something actually physically/chemically wrong with them that they were born with that they can't fix. They will start to think it is a chronic problem that won't go away, and they just have to live with it, which just leads to using medicine to alleviate the symptoms, rather that going after cause. Maybe it actually is something physically/chemically wrong (an idea I'm very skeptical about after my own experiences), but I'd imagine there is significant number of people who have experienced anxiety who don't have any such physically/chemically problems.
Interesting discovery nonetheless, but interpretting what it actually means is probably more interesting.
Did they walk around with vials of blood to see what would happen? I could just imagine someone walking near a hospital and the blood disappearing under a nearby rock, or getting all bubbly if a [PC|hot chick|fast car] was nearby.
Damien
This is 100% correct. I suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder mixed in with anxiety and there is an inherent component of the "disorder" that would keep you from getting help in the first place. Some number of people with true paranoia or strong enough anxiety would not want to contact anyone for help in the first place. As avoidance, being worried about the interaction, denying any actual problem, etc.
/. back up for Tor!)
Then when you get to taking blood or DNA collection... Jesus. I have enough worries just thinking about medical records, anything written down about me that has the potential to be used against me, especially considering the sorry state of any type of security and the ability of others to gain access to that information through various means.
The paranoid definitely are a group that rarely seeks out "help", this is clear from the DSM and other sources (very few PPD individuals seek treatment compared to other "disorders"), and I can testify first hand that the idea of blood being collected from me, or submitting myself to urine tests or the like certainly is something I would avoid.
(open
This really isn't surprising, IMO. It's already possible (and incredibly simple) to test for sugar level trends (ie not just the current blood sugar level), stress levels (long term), heavy metal levels, parasites, and any number of other things through very simple wet slide and dry smear microscope tests. I'm guessing they just found the pattern that indicates anxiety.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
As an ex-student of psychology I see where your coming from, BUT disagree on principled grounds. I do not think that lying or concealing aspects of ones condition is ethical, EVER. Sure, some preparation and ground work might be needed before revealing the aspects of ones condition is full is a good idea, but this knowledge should ALWAYS be bestowd on one, since one does, in fact, OWN ones condition, it is a part of their being, and thus they should be entitled to know. If one purposely conceals facts about a person from them, you are putting yourself in a contrived state of "godhood" above them, you are more important than them, as related to their being. In a way you are dehumanizing or objectifying them. While your stance has bigger practical benefits, it is an ethical problem. Ethics should always come above and first, and solutions must be shaped around your principles.
Yes, the problem/solution should and is on the patients shoulders. And a genetic cause can be a crutch to those who know nothing of the mutability of genetics in real life. It is then YOUR responsibility to show this, and present them with the full truth of their situation. Anything else is disingenuous.
If you can't tell, I fled psychology for philosophy because of the inherent errors involved in modern psychology that most take as given.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
I'm just going to go out on a limb here and say it's probably because life threatening symptoms haven't presented themselves, and that's why they don't know they have it.
I disagree with your disagreement. My SO didn't believe that anxiety disorders were "real" until she was diagnosed with OCD by a psychiatrist (after multiple doctor visits and lots of office visit fees). Once she read a few books about OCD, she realized that it wasn't "just the way she is" that makes her nitpick and yell at her husband about a decoration being 0.25" out-of-place. A blood test that could reveal these things would be a very interesting topic.
However, I would be very curious about the accuracy of such things, especially considering that anxiety disorders can be overcome. After reading the literature around OCD, I learned that researchers at UCLA (among others) has shown the areas of the brain in PET scans before and after treatment of OCD. The post-treatment scans look normal. Would that mean that such a blood test would return a negative result for a post-treatment OCD patient?
I pity the foo that isn't metasyntactic
As someone with extreme anxiety and depression, successfully treated with standard medications of today, if this test were to come back and say I didn't have one or either, would that have pushed me over the edge of insanity?
Is this really adding to the value of anxiety treatment?
In theory, there are neurochemical abnormalities behind all the above conditions. Which is probably true (at least for most people with these labels), but which is almost never verified in clinical practice. What they do now is "rule out" alternative non-psychiatric conditions, and then when they're stumped, they label it psychiatric. Which I guess works most of the time — but every once in a while you get somebody diagnosed with "depression" when they actually suffer from carbon monoxide poisoning, or some other toxicity the primary physician forgot to check for.
(A side note about terminology: to most people "depression" means, "extremely sad". But to psychiatrists, "depression" means "depressed mental function". The two kind of go together, but "clinical depression" is not a fancy way of saying "you need to cheer up." And of course "depressed mental function" is a symptom of a lot of conditions!)
I once knew a psychiatrist who thought that every diagnosis of "depression" should be verified with a PET scan. Fiendishly expensive, but nothing compared to the huge costs of antidepressant prescriptions and talk therapy. But the idea is unlikely to catch on. Indeed a lot of "depression" doesn't even get a proper psychiatric diagnosis. Instead some internist whose HMO only lets him have 15 minutes per patient says, "Well, you say you don't feel good, but I can't find anything wrong with you. Maybe you're depressed? Let's try some Zoloft and see how you do." Having a simple chemical test would make things a tad more rigorous.
It would also help mental illness get proper insurance coverage. Insurance companies don't like covering it, because it doesn't fit in their bureaucratic model. A simple, inexpensive test would make a lot of difference there.
OT: Is this where I say "I for one welcome our new finger-pricking overlords"? :)
Yeah, it pretty much is, except that the "finger-pricking overlords" have about as much overlord-powers as the underpant gnomes.
Sigged!
You failed to read the definition of "anxiety disorder" that I so courteously provided to you. Note:
"Any of various disorders in which anxiety is either the primary disturbance or is the result of confronting a feared situation or object; they include obsessive-compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder."
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
As someone who suffers from Avoidant Personality Disorder, this is good news. A lot of psychologists argue about the very existence of AvPD! Can you imagine suffering from a disease and getting treatment from somebody who doesn't even believe your disease is real? I hope technologies like this will help advance social disorders to a higher level on the psych radar. I personally believe social disorders are some of the worst and misdiagnosed ailments in human history. They affect your entire outlook and can destroy a life. Any advancement to get rid of social disorder is good.
"A diplomat is a man who always remembers a woman's birthday but never remembers her age." -Robert Frost
only the anxious people will think "oh my god! i've got to get tested" and go and voluntarily get poked for a test. ;)
zero false positives.
Of course caffeine isn't always the cause of all anxiety. That isn't what was suggested. But as you pointed out, it did have a severe impact on your existing nervousness and jitter.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
What if someone indeed has the markers in their blood, but because they grew up in a healthy environment, learned how to successfully manage their outbursts? Data cannot correctly determine who a person is nor how they will react. I can see this being a good "prevention" technique, otherwise, there are tons of psuedo doctors called shrinks that would love to keep their jobs..
Jimi Spier
www.jimispier.com - My tunes
There's actually a great significance to this. When you can diagnose something by a blood test, people think of it as a medical problem. Most people still don't think of psychiatry as a medical field, and think of psychiatric problems as indivisible from a person's identity. This will be a huge step towards helping people recognize the medical nature of treating psychiatric problems, and remove the stigma of seeking treatment. Anxiety disorders tend to exhibit positive feedback, so catching and treating them early, before they're so severe that friends and family are hauling you in for treatment, is critical.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
Yes, but you're fighting the symptoms instead of solving the cause of these problems.
Until we learn what is really making us depressed, no amount of MDMA will make us truely happy.
If the problem is emotion and brain chemistry. Why live? What's the point of living your life void of emotion in some padded white room? To be safe and secure and emotionless until you die?
I'd personally rather sleep for an eternity. Or at least as long as everyone continues to believe everything is hunkey dorey.
Look, who wouldn't feel frustrated and depressed being told repeatedly that humanity's future is uncertain, their children's future is uncertain, their own future is uncertain. And everyone expect more of them at work, at home, friends, family, etc. Eventually someone is going to snap. Sucks for them, but that was their choice.
If you suggest we take drugs, might I suggest we give everyone the freedom to take whatever drugs they enjoy? Let's all be blissfully ignorant and party. I got some black lights and good tunes...
Either that or let's get to the heart of the problem. Its not like we don't have 500 psych books available as links off of www.google.com. If we really wanted to do something about this we could. But we don't. Its just not profitable to solve problems, when its more profitable to patch them.
Actually, "Blood phobias" often result in syncope if the stimulus is not removed, so putting them under is not necessary. Unfortunately, passing out in the hospital is a Bad Thing as it may lead to admission. And Xanax doesn't help -- at least not for me -- for Blood Phobia.
I am not a crackpot.
Yes, but being able to establish a definite cause and a definite solution is the best way to start recovery. Just because there's a bloodtest to indicate you have an anxiety disorder doesn't mean that you're stuck taking medications for it for the rest of your life. In fact, the vast majority of actual cases indicate otherwise, with 90% of patients undergoing cognitive behavioral therapy showing positive results. Anxiety disorders are among the most treatable mental disorders, and having a test to identify them shouldn't change that.
Quite often people are diagnosed with general anxiety disorder and are treated with benzos or schedule 5 drugs like BuSpar when in fact they do not have GAD, their root disorder is depression, a common symptom of which is anxiety. When this is the case, the anxiety can be successfully treated with antidepressants and not necessarily addictive benzos.
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Like so many other "discoverable" attributes, this could easily backfire. If an employer/insurer is ever in such a position to perform a blood test of any kind, there's not a whole lot sitting between your sample, and them acquiring a lot of extra information about you.
The bad part of this is the possibility for another health insurance category and rate hike for those of us who are having stressed-out days.
I disagree. I don't think that Anxiety is labelled a "bad" thing, but an undesirable thing. The people I know with anxiety disorders go get help not because they think they are sinners or cursed or "sick," but because they are experiencing something over which they seem to have no control, and they don't like it. It's getting in the way of the life they want to live. So they go get help.
To address the delusion example you gave, that sounds really simplistic to me. I have a hard time believing that "delusional" should include religion. Not even religions that aren't mine! :) Why not? because the people who 'suffer' from the 'delusion' feel good about it, and they still live a full, rich, and happy life. This belief, or systematic bias, doesn't get in the way of anything.
I would think that any definition of disorder or "illness" would have to include something about how it iterferes with life. It's like my eyes. There's nothing that makes my eyes bad, or ill, or evil, or anything else, I just don't see well, and no amount of squinting will control it. My eyes are just that way, and they have been for a long, long time. But they get in the way of the life I want to lead, so I have them dealt with through glasses to reduce the bad effect they have on my life. Can't we compare this with other disorders? Maybe it's the way we are, and there's nothing wrong with it until it gets in the way.
Eyes may not be a good example, because eyesight is not a behavior. Let's look at addicions maybe. If someone is addicted to porn or drugs, there are multiple reasons for this behavior, but people aren't going to get help until they realize that it is getting in the way of the life they want to lead. When they realize that, they can get help or really watch their behavior, and they can stop the addictive, self-destructive behavior.
With ADHD or ADD in children it would be similar, except that it is up to the parents and teachers to be responsible enough to look at the direction in which the child is going and take steps to ensure the kid gets the help he needs.
You can probably tell that I am not a psychologist or anything of the sort, but I think these are still good points. I would appreciate any enlightenment you could give me on this. Am I understanding you correctly? As I reread our posts, I think I have gotten a little outside what you were talking about. Still, I would like to know what you think.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Actually I think they were refering to needle phobias. My girlfriend has one.
It's nothing to do with *what* is being injected/taken out. It is the sight of the syringe or needle. She cannot watch anyone else having one done without feeling sick and used to be unable to even look at a photo of a syringe on its own.
As far as having an injection, such as for a vaccination she gets hysterical and loses control. In the past several people have had to pin her down while she has the injection.
I have always thought the extra trauma of this probably just makes matters worse. Giving her a temporary anesthetic which lasts only a minute or so would be far nicer.
You should know that posting as an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot is not truly anonymous. A hacker with sufficient skills can discover your real login name, email address, and IP address. In some cases, these malicious villains can even find out where you live, break into your hosue, and hide under your bed while brandishing sharp objects.
Then when you go to sleep.... BAM!
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Brain chemistry is to mental illness as metabolism is to obesity. There are methods to dealing with each and medication is typically only good as a short term solution for most people.
More on point, you cannot sell me a medically induced personality. Perhaps I like my destructive compulsions and the fact that I am only realizing a fraction of my full potential. Perhaps society is what causes the problem in the first place - all this focus on productivity and playing well with others. Either our way or we'll force feed you these fucking drugs and make you "normal". I'd like to say a word for keeping it a bit crazy and putting more waste back into life - best days of my life were the "wasted" ones.
I'd rather more of us waste more life than those 13% start gulping pills - modern day lobotomies - and reaching their "full potentional", whatever that means.
Well, the tests must measure the presence or absence of some chemical in the blood. And the brain operates via chemical processes. It's possible that when the brain is suffering from OCD, it produces different chemicals (maybe as a waste process) than one that does not have OCD. It would be kind of like monitoring the exaust of a car. If you have excessive CO compared to normal, you find something's not optimal, even though the car functions.
(full disclosure: my daughter and me are both on medication for mood disorders)
I hate to be flippant, but it also gives a very large kick in the ass to Tom Cruise and those who feel like he does. While your S.O. was facing her demons, she was actively being encouraged by others who feel that abnormal brain chemistry is some kind of myth.
This test, and the others to follow, are a scientific necessity. Tom Cruise will be forced to shut his mouth and your patients, and S.O., will come to understand that if the tests come up bad, they should seek help... just like people who's screenings show high blood cholestorol.
TW
I have no problems with anxiety, but I DO have problems concentrating, and I don't drink caffeine at all. No coffee, and very, very rarely do I have a Dr. Pepper. Hardly ever any chocolate, either.
I am just wondering if you have experimented with this or not, and what was the outcome.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
(By the way, I am just joking.)
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
Seriously, every one of these "tests" will be used in the future by potential employers to screen job applicants. They won't be stopped, as if our government for the forseeable future will ever pass a law controlling what tests HR departments administer. The Supreme Court is being stacked with Federalist Society judges who will shut down attempts to circumsribe the freedom of corporations to hire and fire.
The hell of it is, along with just about every other test, including lie detectors and personality analyses (holy Dianetics, Batman) the test for these disorders are not failsafe. Hell, they might not work at all, or the eager beaver purveyors of these tests are misrepresenting what they are testing. Lie detectors are widely used, tho scientists have called them horsecrap for a half century. Drug tests have false positives, a monkey could walk around personality tests, and background checks rely on shadowy security companies who don't exactly keep their information current or accurate.
Another "test" that tests for, what, exactly? Some marker that current hypotheses deduce may or may not indicate anxiety disorder. But, like all the other tests, long after they are discredited, we have to march over to the testing lab if we want to get a job.
Anyone hear about fMRI's? Ah, the ultimate. Mind reading via MRI's! Oh, I can't wait for that crap to take off.
Follow the money. These tests are going to make screening companies billions of dollars. Whether or not they actually test anything in the real world is irrelevant.
And Americans will whistle and go along, because they have no imagination, no sense of their own history, no sense of what it means to be a free people. As if business is the only activity of mankind that deserves civil liberties.
Right on! This course of treatment (or rather several courses) has helped me greatly. Cognitive therapy works!! Of course handing a patient a Prozac perscription and a copy of "Feeling Good" is all some health plans will cover. It takes time and the help of a talented person to really make changes in your life.
I wish you well in your studies and your practice.
This is 100% correct. I suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder mixed in with anxiety and there is an inherent component of the "disorder" that would keep you from getting help in the first place. Some number of people with true paranoia or strong enough anxiety would not want to contact anyone for help in the first place.
Yeah. I recently entered therapy for SAD (or 'social phobia'), OCD, and apparently depression, and in particular the anxiety (and to a lesser degree the depression) is what kept me from getting treatment years ago. It's hard to get help when you have a phobia about rejection, authority figures, strangers, public places, et cetera. I imagine it works similarly for other disorders.
>A partial solution can be worse than no solution at all, especially if you keep telling the patient that it's all the patient's fault/responsibility.
Who the hell does this? Im so sick of these ill-informed attacks on psychology a la Tom Cruise.
When a person is diagnosed with, say, generalized anxiety disorder (something many anti-social types may have) the last thing that is done is some blame game. Figuring out a treatment schedule is what's done. And no, its not some big "$200 per hour" scam, its Behavioral Cognitive therapy and perhaps medication to treat short term symptoms. Believing in conspiracy theories, marginizing treatment, and pissing on doctors in general only hurts patients who hear all this and then never bother seeking treatment. "See a head shrinker? Not me, I'm not some loon," is heard all too often. Meanwhile, millions suffer in silence and friends and loved ones can't figure out what's wrong with someone they care about, but who can't manage to hold down a job, finish school, etc.
I hate to break it to you, but depending on the causes of the disorder stuff like "talk" therapy and CBT actually work (CBT clocking in at 90% success rate) and have helped millions of people.
Lastly, ff you have issues with what doctors' charge, then that's a political issue on whether governments should be subsidizing or socializing medicine. Or a commercial issue on whether your insurance is actually serving you or not.
This may be true of the people that strike you as being anxious, but it is unlikely that these people have anxiety disorders. As someone with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, I can tell you that to an individual who suffers with anxiety, it is absolutely paramount (and a huge source of stress) that, apart from perhaps close friends and family, absolutely no one knows about it. The majority of anxiety sufferers are incredibly anxious that someone will discover that they are anxious (with good reason - try to explain to someone that you're just having a panic attack when you're in the midst of a panic attack and your limbs are seized up and jerking and your heart is racing at an insane pace), and hence, they often come across in public as very cool and collected despite the fact that underneath the surface, their minds are racing with anxious thoughts. People tell me that I'm seemingly one of the most mellow and relaxed people that they know. I'm one of the few anxiety sufferers I know that isn't shy about disclosing my anxiety (as it minimizes it to simply announce it before it causes problems), and everyone is absolutely amazed to hear that I have an anxiety disorder, and people who don't know me well are quite skeptical of that fact (despite the fact that even with extensive daily relaxation exercises, benzodiazepines, and 5-HTP, my quality of life is still significantly less than the average person).
Oh, so YOU are the one responsible for the millions of people with easily treatable psychiatric conditions who do not seek professional help. YOU are the one telling them that their problems with loving and working are an integral part of their identity, reinforcing their belief that they will never be normal, that they are fundamentally defective. YOU are the one hiding the well-understood biological factors, leaving patients with nothing more than murky definitions full of weak intensifiers and DSM criteria including phrases like "five or more of the following", making them question whether they have a condition that's understood well enough to be treated.
Your studied opinion can go fuck itself.
There's no failure quite as dissatisfying as a complete and total solution to the wrong problem.
"Establishing a cause, like faulty genes, allows the patient to remedy the underlying problem."
You have, at last count, around 30 thousand genes. You have 10^15 synapses. Looking to genes, rather than environment, in trying to correct and shape behavior, is just like going to the pew every Sunday to fix the problem. You're just exchanging one all-powerful creator for another.
Hooray for someone who understands the concept. =)
"What do you think?" "I think 'What, do you think?!'"
It's from Hebrew University.
Blood test: compare DNA sample to that of a Jewish mother.
If there's a relationship, then the testee has an anxiety disorder.
Disclaimer: I'm Jewish.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
..Your anxiety is provoked by a fear of needles or blood?
How convenient that a "simple blood test" has been found to test for such subjective mental states as anxiety disorders and depression. The President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health "recommends" psychological testing for all Americans, and wants to ensure by law that every school-age child has been offered such an exam.
History time and again records governments continually abusing the power accorded by such sweeping initiatives, interpreted as mandates by sycophantic minions. Why should modern government be any different?
The real questions are: Who determines what is to be considered a mental illness? Which authorities control who is tested for mental illness and how? What will be done to the mentally ill under the aegis of treatment? Who stands to profit from it all?
The Columbia University TeenScreen Program is the pilot program mentioned in the report as the model program to administer such a CBT test. Their pilot test is already being given to kids in at least 27 states, in at least 69 schools.
At the Teenscreen website, under the "Setting The Record Straight About TeenScreen" page, the group argues that the language in the President's New Freedom Commission on Mental Health, couched in terms of "universal screening" does not mean "mandatory screening."
Yes, Teenscreen does not advocate forced psychological testing at their website. However, Teenscreen can only vouchsafe for itself.
Teenscreen may indeed be an organization of integrity; the question is not how are the recommendations of the President's Commission being tested, but what will be the future of the initiative advocated!
Governments do not have a good track record being trusted to endorse and administer psychological testing of the citizenry. More than plaintive appeals as to Teenscreen's integrity are needed to dispell the fact that governments in both the distant and recent past have used official definitions of "mental health" as a means to control, imprison and torture citizens. The more wide-spread such programs become, the more likely they will be used nefariously. American forms of eugenics are alive and well.
Teenscreen cannot speak for the aims of government, nor for what government does with the information once it is collected by organizations such as Teenscreen. Presumeably such information will be subject to government review.
With the acknowledged surveillance of all network communications by Navy operations it is doubtful that client-professional privilege could be maintained, even if private organizations were to retain some semblance of separation between their testing of individuals in public settings and the government's pervasive snooping.
For more, see: www.inforwars.net
He's right you know. I knew a guy that posted Anonymous Coward on slashdot. Ten years later, *BAM* herpes.
Has it occurred to anyone that people have anxiety for a valid reason?
What if taking the pill will simply mask the underlying cause?
In other words, what if people are anxious because the world really is messed up, as a result of us people being messed up (too greedy, too hateful, etc.)? Then taking this "medicine" will allow people to ignore this and go on collecting more pleasures. Thus, a slave can be made to forget his miseries, but should the "medicine" ever stop, the slave is SCREWED. And if the slave is bad, there is always the thread of withholding the medicine. Remind you of anything?
I am an endocrinologist. I see and treat persons with hormonal disorders that can often be diagnosed with measurement of hormones in the peripheral bloodstream. I have long told patients that psychiatric disorders have a biologic basis, but cannot be assessed with a simple measurement of substances that show up in the systemic circulation. I would be skeptical that events (ie measurable substances) beyond the CNS Blood-Brain barrier would show up with sufficient sensitivity and specificity to diagnose a condition that takes psychiatric specialists to assess. I think the most promising means of assessing CNS neurochemistry may be specialized imaging studies like PET scanning of metabolic activity of different regions of the brain. Psychiatry is where endocrinology was 50 years ago. Until we improve means of measuring the biologic basis of psychiatric disorders, I would be hesitant to make ER-based decisions on management based upon a peripheral blood test result.
Oh good grief! The brain and body are intimately linked, in one whole general mish-mash. Pure mentalists are just as bad as pure physiologists. What part of gestalt do you not understand?
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
The needle is the test!
Here is a link to the scientific article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences which may be more informative. Abstract: Anxiety involves complex, incompletely understood interactions of genomic, environmental, and experience-derived factors, and is currently being measured by psychological criteria. Here, we report previously nonperceived interrelationships between expression variations and nucleotide polymorphisms of the chromosome 7q21-22 acetylcholinesterase-paraoxonase 1 (ACHE-PON1) locus with the trait- and state-anxiety measures of 461 healthy subjects from the Health, Risk Factors, Exercise Training, and Genetics Family Study. The AChE protein controls the termination of the stress-enhanced acetylcholine signaling, whereas the PON protein displays peroxidase-like activity, thus protecting blood proteins from oxidative stress damages. Serum AChE and PON enzyme activities were both found to be affected by demographic parameters, and showed inverse, reciprocal associations with anxiety measures. Moreover, the transient scores of state anxiety and the susceptibility score of trait anxiety both appeared to be linked to enzyme activities. This finding supported the notion of corresponding gene expression relationships. Parallel polymorphisms in the ACHE and PON1 genes displayed apparent associations with both trait- and state-anxiety scores. Our findings indicate that a significant source of anxiety feelings involves inherited and acquired parameters of acetylcholine regulation that can be readily quantified, which can help explaining part of the human variance for state and trait anxiety.
http://www.LinuxMedNews.com Revolutionizing Medical Education and Practice.
being vulgar does not equate with professional aptitute nor lack thereof (well, except maybe for sailors and porn stars). sounds like frothy walrus is a typical male ... or lesbian.
You can be an atheist and still not want to succumb to some weird cross-over sheep disease -- AC
(Apologies for the AC but I'd already moderated on this thread when I saw your comments)
Ultimately, you get to decide how to manage your patients, and if they're comfortable with your approach, so be it. From my standpoint though, this is patronizing and if I ever found that my doctor was intentionally obscuring information to protect me, I'd walk out the door and would never come back. Actually, over the past 15 or so years, I have left two doctors over trust issues but for different cause (they weren't obscuring information; they were just BSing and they admitted it when I called them on it). Anyway, not faith building experiences. I assume you don't tell your patients that this is your modus operandi up front? I have a hard time imagining them trusting you afterwords.
Anyway, I agree that neurochemistry is in its infancy, and I also agree that science often gets over sold, to the detriment of the credulous. No harm in teaching patients due skepticism. But that's a separate issue, apart intentionally deceiving one's patients for their supposed good.
From my view as a psychologist...
b lood-test-for-anxiety-does-this-help-anyone/
This research/test is:
1. Not something scientifically-accepted yet.
2. Is not less expensive.
3. Is not more accurate.
4. Does not take less time.
5. Involves more professionals, a needle and blood draw, and likely more inconvenience for the client/patient in most circumstances.
I don't see the benefits, sorry.
Read my full analysis and comments here:
http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2005/10/10/
> (By the way, I am just joking.)
Of course, if you were really out to get him, that's what you'd want him to think eh?
Ian Ameline
The big difference between Scientology's theories and Pastafarianism's is that anybody can make up stuff about the Flying Spaghetti Monster out of whole cloth, but only El-Ron and a few of his successors are Allowed to make up Official Scientology Stuff unless they want Bad Things to happen to them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
As somebody with General Anxiety Disorder I'm a firm proponent of using drugs to treat anxiety. I've found both Buspar and the occasional Xanax very helpful. Neither is the only solution, but both have been very useful in showing me how my life could be different, giving me incentive to do the rest of the work. I aim to taper off both eventually.
A note to my fellow programmers and sysadmins: in retrospect, I think there's a much higher incidence of GAD in our ranks than in the general population. Why? Because being over-anxious helps us to be hyper-responsible about the details, but the in-control-of-your-own-world aspect of computers provides a safe, predictable environment that is very soothing.
If you have a hard time relaxing, if you tend towards obsessiveness, if you are a pack rat, if you are known to snap at people, and if you are hyper-responsible in some things but sometimes freak out and utterly avoid others, it's worth talking to somebody about GAD. All of that was true about me, and all of those things are better now. A month-long trial of Buspar was like a light coming on: Aha! This is how other people are!
In the two years since, here are the non-medication things I do to help:
All this has changed my life greatly for the better.
all the tests are coming back stating the patients are hypochondriacs.
- Researchers are closing in on alleles that directly cause migraine, a disorder that is a kissing cousin of bipolar disorder and associated fluctuating affective disorders. I predict that genetic causes will be found for this spectrum of disorders, and that specific drugs will follow. (I have a personal interest here. For most of my life I had migraine with the mood disturbances that commonly accompany it, but with minimal to no headache. Finally at the age of 30 I started seeing flashing lights and an ophthalmologist diagnosed me properly. I was not, in fact, lazy, depressed, or a hypochondriac. I suspect there are many others on the epilepsy/migraine/bipolar spectrum in this same boat. We need objective tests and good drugs.)
- Twin studies have shown that much mental illness (esp. schizophrenia) can be caused by heritable biochemical factors.
- Research has shown that numerous parasites reprogram the minds of their hosts, and it frequently takes the form of spectacular and suicidal behavior. Due to lack of volunteers this has not been clearly demonstrated in humans, but it is a virtual certainty that humans are affected. (For further reading look up the common mammalian parasite toxoplasma gondii.)
- The PANDAS (pediatric autoimmune neuropsychiatric disorders associated with streptococcus) hypothesis, that strep infections can trigger production of autoantibodies against important CNS proteins, is supported by very suggestive evidence. Even if it doesn't pan out, it would be shocking if there were no diseases of this type, with bizarre yet highly-stereotyped symptoms.
Many mental disorders are no more under conscious control than migraine is. It wasn't cognitive-behavioral therapy or a fad for personal responsibility that emptied the insane asylums. It was chlorpromazine and the serotonergic drugs, which were discovered by accident and not by psychiatry."The patient should understand that their problem stems from within themselves, not from generations of malignant genes."
I smell job insecurity. This is the same nonsenical garbage that kept us in the dark about ulcers. Say Goodbye to the Miss Cleo-type diagnoses of, "Why yes, they're caused by your stressful life. You need to stop feeling so anxious all the time. It stems from your childhood oedipus complex", and Hello to actual SCIENCE, "Why yes, it is caused by some bacteria in your stomach causing the overproduction of stomach acid. Take this pill and go away... No, I don't care about your childhood."
Forgive me for stating the obvious, but _all_ drugs have side effects.
Also anti-anxiety medication is easy to become psychologically addicted to. Anything that takes the pain away is something people can often be reluctant to stop using.
I'm a perfectionist but I'm trying to cut back.
" and until that day I am more than happy to keep my patients in the dark about it."
It is already "that day" for ulcers, and it is beginning to be "that day" for anxiety. I'd like to see just how open-minded you are when confronted with the simple fact that our minds are governed by some magical spiritual force that we can never understand. The reality is that we are who we are because of the types and amounts of chemicals present, and how they interact in our bodies. Saying that "it is because of your childhood" is just as nonsensical as saying "it isn't your fault, it's the chemicals". The only acceptable response is just "it's the chemicals." And whether the patient does something about or not, chemicals are never a cop-out, because they make you who you are.
I have never been to a doctor about my symptoms, but I am genuinely curious about whether or not I have the symptoms of something like General Anxiety Disorder, or if its just from the way I was raised and the tendencies my parents had, which I find myself having as well.
/. feel for what I describe.
A lot of the...we'll call them symptoms for now, that I have noticed about myself are the following. (Once again, I don't want to claim this as an excuse...just wondering sort of if there is help for such a thing, or if I just need to 'suck it up')
A little back history is that my parents are absolutely horridly irresponsible. THey're horrid with money, meetin obligations, making promises they never intend to fulfill, etc.
Now I think that there issues have created issues of my own:
I tend to freak out if a situation is something that I can't control, or able to control other peoples actions. (i.e. people not doing what *I* consider to be the right thing in a situation, regardless if it is correct or not. An example of this is, as dumb as it may be, I will smoke on the front porch of my apartment (4 apartments share an open, but common area), and when its just me, I don't have a problem with it, but when someone else is out there with me, and they sit on the stoop, I get anxiety because I am worried about a neighbor coming out and getting pissed off because we're smoking the area out.)
I worry endlessly about bills, obligations to meet that I know are on the horizon (taxes, car tags, going to a doctor or dentist), so in knowing that they're coming, I will just ignore them completely. Which, of course, just goes to increase my anxiety that much more and cause me to spiral myself into a bit of a depression.
If I don't have something immediate to worry about, I always seem to find something. Usually this always involves money.
I will do my best to keep appearances. Its very important to me for people to think that I havemy shit together, even when I absolutely feel the complete opposite.
Basically, my conclusion to all of this is that I was just brought up in an environment where things that are normal to other people (responsibilty, confronting issues as they come) wasn't there, so I have taken on those qualities as well. I do my best to not have them, since they effected me ALOT as a child, but they still seem to creep into my life, despite my best efforts.
I won't take any responses as being straight from a doctor, but just want to get the
(My apologies for this rambling)
Parent is a troll.
I remember my first time doing Coke. Man what a buzz! All my cool buddies were doing it. Pretty soon I was trying coffee, staying up late configuring my new install. I quickly moved right on up to Bawlz with a Red Bull chaser for those late night frag fests. Now, I can't even pee without shaking it all over the place. And let me be the first to say, I pee a lot, cause this stuff goes through you like...water.
Don't use the Troll mod just because you disagree with me.
I have Social Anxiety Disorder as well, but I'm finding getting help here in Australia pretty difficult. Our government is fairly miserable when it comes to mental health services.
I guess I need to hurry up, graduate, and get a good job so I can afford the huge sums of money for a psychologist...
I've lived with it for 8 years, what's a few more?
Learn more about paranoids -- follow them around. ;)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
One of many possibilities is hypoglycemia.
Here's how it works for some people. Blood sugar drops. The control circuity tries various things to raise it again.
Sometimes, when nothing less drastic works, the control circuitry will ask for epinephrine. If blood sugar levels remain too low, it will ask for more. Lather, rinse, repeat, until someone who had no objective reason for a fight-or-flight response is experiencing the heart-pounding and trembling of mortal terror.
Don't jump to conclusions without medical advice, though. You don't get computer security advice from your doctor, so don't take medical advice from me.
I actually signed up for a Needle Therapy study for the UW Dental School. I figured I was freaked out about injections in te mouth enough to be agood subject, yet not so bad that I wouldn't show up for any of the tests.
Needless (sorry) to say, the first few visits were pretty horrific, watching people have injections etc then habong to talk about it. But the surprising thing was when I was shown how bendy the actual needle is, when I actually flexed it against my finger and saw how bendy this thing really was, my fears evaporated. Simple as that.
Turns out I was one of those people who is afraid it would snap off in my gum, but once I realized that was a very small propability my fears went away.
Being taught how to breathe slowly and not think about the injection also helped, as well as asking the Dentist to make sure the gel is left on the gum for a full minute or two to take away the initial pinprick feeling.
Well, from your comment above, there is a reason you are a pharmacy tech and not a doctor....
And mostly clueless.
Medications are useful when prescribed properly. And no amount of therapy will help severe depression. Granted, getting the proper medication and dosing can be difficult. And if you think medication is costly, it is often cheap compared to therapy....
"And I absolutely doubt the abilities of a doctor who speaks to a patient for only an hour a week then gives a few pills."
That, btw, would be excellent medical care. Hell, an hour a month would be good...
Of course, I wouldn't want to get any medication from any pharmacy you work in. I have severe doubts about your abilities from your lack of knowledge about competent medical care....
Some migraineurs can discover things that trigger the runaway pain process and avoid them (he writes while sitting in a dark room, wearing sunglasses, with his monitor's refresh rate set to 103 Hz). However, they still have a lower threshold than normal people, and spending your life "thinking on eggshells" is less than fun. I think it is reasonable to use a drug to dial down the brain's sensitivity-dependent-sensitivity.
Would it work to numb the area where the needle was going to go and then blindfold them or something? I just hope that the abense of a positive diagnosis from bloodwork doesn't lead to people who need help being denied it, i.e. insurance companies denying converage for psychiatric help just because a person's blood tests came out negative. :-(
Even the bacteria itself is interesting, because the coating it has to protect itself from the vicious environment of the stomach is sufficient to make antibiotics on their own useless. To attack the bacteria, you must first attack the bacteria's protection.
In the treatments used, the antibiotic is often combined with the highly toxic metal bismuth. The bismuth will somehow weaken the defenses of the bacteria sufficiently to allow the antibiotic to be effective. Neither one, on its own, will have any beneficial effect.
There are some rare forms of stomach cancer that can result from heliobacteria and the resultant ulcers. Treating the bacteria won't eliminate the cancer. Eliminating the cancer but leaving the bacteria will just allow it to return, in time. You have to eliminate both to guarantee a complete cure.
In all these cases, the cause is relatively simple and so is the cure. But equally, in all these cases, the cause is not a single, unique thing and neither is the cure. Why, then, should we expect anything else to be any simpler?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe he doesn't understand...all of it! Hehe.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I also have a phobia of needles, though not as bad (I have gotten immunizations without going physically nuts, but it's extremely stressful). If your girlfriend's is anything like mine, a local anesthetic won't help a bit. It's not the pain that bothers me (most injections don't even hurt that much...), it's the thought of the needle piercing my skin and injecting crap into me (or sucking crap out) that just freaks me out. Can't stand 'em...
Only anxiety now is from the law.
Someone hates these cans.
What is it these days with all of the pseudo-psychobabble crap about people 'owning' their problems?
/yelling.
I think that there is a lot of potential for abuse and misuse of a test like this, despite the fact that in many cases it could be very useful. What about the people who test positive for having an anxiety disorder but that disorder isn't the main cause of their distress?
As (another) psych student, specialising in counselling, anxiety and mood disorders, I feel that it is a huge trap for psychologists to believe that they have all the answers and know more about their clients than the clients do, regardless of the fact that the clients have been living with themselves all their lives.
It is extremely important for professional psychologists to actually LISTEN and pay attention to what the CLIENTS concerns are, rather than simply doing a test and putting a label on them.
Here's a surprising fact: LABELS ARE NOT ALWAYS USEFUL!
Recognition of an anxiety disorder can sometimes make clients worse rather than better, depending on the disorder, particularly if they cannot recognise it without a conclusive test.
Working in the field of anxiety disorders, the biggest issue that I've heard from people with various anxiety disorders (OCD, GAD etc) has been that psychologists and psychiatrists don't actually LISTEN to them, that they are too intent on labelling people rather than helping them.
I hope for your sake that you do not become one of these.
You have no idea what you're talking about.
Psychologists in many countries including my own are quite capable and permitted legally to diagnose people with mental illnesses. Not only that, there is an increasing push for psychologists to be able to prescribe psychotrophic drugs.
As well as that, I take offense at the way your comment belittles psychologists. "Treat the worried well". Yes, so we do, but there's a lot more to it than that. I'd love to see you do the same after completing an honors degree, followed by a phd. 6-10 years is a common amount of time for people to be at university before being able to be registered psychologists. Sorry for the flame.
So, you'd rather have uninformed patients who smile and take their medicine? It's exactly this sort of "the patient doesn't need to know this" attitude that makes me want to scream at doctors.
It took me over 2.5 years to find a cocktail of psych meds that began to mitigate my condition without worsening it. The only reason it took THAT SHORT a period of time is because I was knowledgeable about what different psych meds did. The major shifts in my treatment plan came about because I pushed for them based on two things: (1) what the medications did and what side effects they could cause, and (2) what was different about my state of mind on any given med. I will grant you that (1) a psychiatrist would know more than 99.9% of his patients about psych meds (and damn well SHOULD), but he can never know enough about (2) to make a sure determination of the effects of a medication.
There are a number of peer-support groups on the web (such as psycho-babble) where patients can discuss with people in the same boat what they can expect from medications and what combinations have worked for others. I've learned more from groups like these than I have from doctors since most doctors I've interacted with around these issues seem to know little more than what drug monographs distributed by their manufacturers have to say about a medication.
Keeping patients uninformed is just a recipe for needless suffering.
Go for a long, peaceful walk
Focus on something else other than any pains or thoughts in your body/mind
Watch some tv (comedy is preferred)
Focus on a surrounding sound and listen to it
Think of a good, relaxing song in your head
Read a book
Use diaphragm breathing techniques
Deprogramme your thoughts
Lower the stress/workload in your life
Listen to some muscle stretching/relaxation tapes
Confront your fears
Use thought blocking techniques I'm sorry to plug my site and all, but due to my panic disorder which I used to have, I started writing my own website to help others out there. One more thing - antidepressants are HOPELESS! Infact ANY medication given to you is only going to suppress the problem - not SOLVE it! Isn't what we slashdotters are - problem solvers? I even have some breathing techniques too - a panic attack is caused when TOO many thoughts occur at once when your response to a situation ends up freezing your thoughts - the "incorrect" breathing method of mainly using your chest versus your diaphragm to breathe causes oxygen loss, and then you end up hyperventilating. To stop a panic/anxiety attack, just breathe in deeply with your nose for 5 seconds WITH YOUR diaphragm, hold for 5, then breathe out for 5 with your mouth. Here's my site http://www.psychopanic.com/
http://www.psychopanic.com
Derivative work: Lie detectors?
This is 100% correct. I suffer from Paranoid Personality Disorder mixed in with anxiety and there is an inherent component of the "disorder" that would keep you from getting help in the first place. Some number of people with true paranoia or strong enough anxiety would not want to contact anyone for help in the first place. As avoidance, being worried about the interaction, denying any actual problem, etc.
I'm in the same boat as you =/, taking Seroquel for Paranoid Schizophrenia...you're absolutely right about the disease making the patient even more reluctant to seek help because they're so afraid of the consequences. Really a terrible illness.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky
This makes a lot of sense. Benzos act on the GABA neurostransmitter system. GABA is kind of like a global gain control on the brain, and so, with long term use it's like going around with the volume control on your whole experiential aparatus turned down permanently. People with anxiety disorders have problems with the regulation of their arousal levels, and so if they're going around with the gain on their brain turned down, this exacerbates their problems with the control of their arousal levels and can lead to panic disorder, which is much worse than anxiety disorder.
Not that I've ever tried benzos myself. I will in about a fortnight, due to day surgery (benzo prescription is an elective decision... ).
That's as an ex psychologist by the way.
You'd also want to continue the CBT, or at least have a few followup appointments for CBT after the patient is off the S(N|S)RIs as well.
"...we should just trust our president in every decision that he makes and we should just support that." B.Spears 2003
The problem is that after two weeks of sweet benzo bliss, most anxiety sufferers are not exactly keen to give up their new found elixir. I am amazed at how few Doctors realise what they might be setting people up for when they hand over that first Valium/Xanax/etc script.
This is AC... Dude, I have every idea what I'm talking about. Yeah, psychologists can rx in NM and LA. That was a mistake, and it doesn't look like it's going anywhere else. In fact, most other states voted against it. Psychologists aren't trained to prescribe... if you want to do that... goto med school! The bottom line is that psychologists aren't trained to deal with real organic problems, so go back to treated your bored housewives. and continue calling yourself "dr. whatever" even though you aren't.
Note that the test data was from 461 U.S. citizens. I imagine the researchers had difficulty finding people in Jersualem that aren't anxious.
You see, learning about your body means being able to contract and RELAX your muscles. You've learned 'doing' but not 'not doing'. when you relax your muscles, you are relaxed. It's as simple as that.
Poor posture at a computer all day causes tenseness, what a revelation.
Sure, neuro-chem and all that. The question is, how did it get like that? Why is it still like that?
Bodies aren't static as much as medical science and the population at large would like to believe. Your body reacts to the kind of inputs that you expose it to, and to what you choose to pay attention to in life. YOur body/mind is the culmination of every choice you've made in your life as well as every choice that you have refused to make up until this point.
Here's a big tip. Every decision you are faced with takes energy. If you don't make those decisions all your energy is sapped up by them. You want to fix yourself, get off your ass and make your decisions.
Absolutely nobody in the world can make those decisions for you which is why drugs don't cure..
You see, for the most part, those who seek help don't want to do it themselves. They want answers from the outside, such is the way of western civ.
They feel they aren't being helped because, really, nobody can help them. If your approach to interacting with reality isn't working, you're the one that has to change it.
Probably be more effective to prescribe bliss and ANY communication of the problem to ANYONE.
Psych's are rarely more effective than a good friend who knows you well.
I used to have bad migraines, flashing lights with intense pain, pain with flickering lights and low refresh rates, intense pain with bright sun light, etc...
Then i figured out that i was tensing my head in all the wrong places and using my eyes incorrectly. Now i don't need glasses anymore, flickering not a bother anymore (note, hows your depth perception) and not only can i go into full sun without sunglasses or staring at the ground, i can actually stare at the sun now(low uv times). Which was actually part of my 'cure'.
I'm not being condescending, it's just true.
We perceive the world around us through ourselves, you need to get rid of your arrogance and narcissism.
Fallacy of genus. I'm a yogi. I also have a specialization in psych. I used to have more diseases than you could count on your hands. Migraines, vision problems, anxiety, panic disorders, arthritis, blood diseases, etc... I'm fine now.
Do you do western yoga? Or yoga?
There are set stages for yoga. You learn a muscle by learning how to tense it. Then you learn to relax it. Then you learn to relax the fascia surrounding it. Then from there you step back and become the observer in all situations where that muscle/fascia gets tense, are there emotional/mental aspects to it. Ashtanga is good for loose people, but hatha is better for tense people. Once the body is flexible then comes meditation to change your data gathering/analzying routines.
Yoga is not about physical routines or proper posture. Yoga is about learning to be yourself so that everything you do is an expression of yourself. It's not about holding yourself straight, or 'trying' to get into a posture. When we relax enough to be ourselves our body is straight. The more advanced you are the less physical movement/effort is needed to achieve any pose.
Specific techniques are hard to describe, but there are tools you can use. The most important being your hands and the other being your mind. Close your eyes and touch your body. Your hands can find every source of tension in your body. Find a source, learn how to move it by experimenting with different motions, is it 'connected' to something else? (e.g. lift your arm up and your shoulder moves) It's important to be able to isolate muscle movements. Where is the tension, origin/insertion? Is the muscle tense in only one location, or multiple locations throughout the muscle mass? What feelings get stirred up when you touch the tenseness? Does it tense up more? What happens when you relax it.
You see, all you need is your hands to gather data, your mind to analyze and learn from it, and your desire to explore and understand yourself.
I do realize that specific examples can help and will provide any if you want them.
I've experienced it from the other side: bizarre perceived symptoms that turned out to have a real cause. Random aches and pains, indigestion and cramping, mood changes, general feeling of illness, and so forth. (Naturally resulting in an impressive medical diagnostic work-up.) The doctors nearly had me convinced it was somatization, but luckily I started seeing flashing lights and an ophthalmologist helped me figure out it was migraine with minimal headache.
Incidentally, Dr. John Sarno (of the book I mentioned) lists migraines as among one of the symptoms that can be cured using the approach he describes. In fact, IIRC, he even experienced migraines himself and cured them using the technique. The approach in a nutshell is to find the psychological causes. You basically have to dig up supressed/repressed emotions. Though for my case, just knowing that my problems had a psychologically cause was enough for me to get better (I never went to see a psychologist or anything like that).
The tricky part is that the physical symptoms are real, they not just perceived. For example, in the case of wrist pain, the brain has enough control over the body to cause mild oxygen deprivation to the wrist, resulting in wrist pain.
There's more to it (many pieces to the puzzle), and that document I link to has a better explanation (though more geared towards wrist pain).
I've actually been able to link all kinds of problems I've had in the past to psychological reasons. I've had wrist, elbow, pain, neck, knee pain, TMJ (jaw clenching), allergies, stomach problems. All of that has disappeared after I addressed the psychological causes.
Furthermore, even if you manage to force someone to do something against his anxiety (by putting a gun to his head) or against his phobia you HAVE NOT TREATED THE ANXIETY or PHOBIA. Even if the person appears to do what you want him to, he won't be able to function if you withdraw your external pressure. Many of these people are very miserable with their illness and are unable to live a normal life. Do you think they "prefer" living this way?
From another point of view, does this mean that "healthy" people are unconstrained? If you put a gun to someone's head will he be able to run a marathon race, or win an olympic medal? If he does not, does this mean he is physically ill? All people are constrained by their bodies and their health status. As a matter of fact, it is possible for someone who has suffered a heart attack to have more endurance than a "healthy" person. Which of the two is healthier?
You also seem to believe that the attribution of "mental illness" contains a moral judgement. This is of course true to some extent. In the exact same way that one's ability to walk is automatically compared to all "normal" people (and not, say, to fishes), one's behaviour is also compared to "normal" behaviour. However, this is not the only or the most important criterion of mental illness. You also need to consider: a) whether the person is happy (someone who can't get laid and is miserable may suffer from social phobia or depression, but the Pope can be perfectly happy without getting laid) b) whether the person can succeed in his goals and adapt to some environment c) whether the person is dangerous for society. Take your example: can a deeply religious person succeed in his goals and be happy without hurting others? Probably yes. Can a person with some paranoid delusion succeed in his goals and be happy without hurting others? Most probably not.
Normally, the list of mental illnesses changes because the way we think changes faster than the way we walk or the way our hearts beat. In that way, the measure of mental illness does not depend that much on what exactly you believe or do, but how well you manage to adapt and function. This of course, does require that you comply (to some extent) with social standards. In the end, medicine does not pass moral judgement. Society does that, usually...
P.
I don't think we need a study. If a man has intercourse with a man, he was either choosing it, or he was raped. That's not genetic, so it is either a choice or a rape. Granted there might be other factors that might effect a man's decision, but it finally comes down to his choice.
As to the rest of your post, about irrational and moral, I think you make some good points. I've often thought about that. I've often wondered what kind of control the brain really exerts over the body. People with good attitudes seem to heal better and faster, no? People give up and just die from time to time. I wonder how far that goes. Still, I have to be careful not to go to far. Hmmm.
There is so much to discuss here, and I feel like I am not doing the subject justice.
I cried real tears when Li Mu Bai died.
Um, being able to immerse yourself in a computer game for hours has nothing to do with powers of concentration.
Now, being able to think about one chess move for hours - without your mind wandering, of course - would indicate concentration.
Some parents will sit their child in front of the television and remark at how their child has such an amazing attention span, since he/she can sit and watch the television for hours. What they don't understand is that engaging in an activity that constantly re-engages your attention (such as television, computer games, driving when it's difficult, etc.) doesn't require a long attention span or powers of concentration.
Perhaps you didn't really mean that long hours of DOOM and driving the motorhome implied good ability to concentrate, but it sounded like it.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
You see, the ONLY way that humans interact and perceive reality is through the use of muscles. Lack of flexibility constrains that which you can perceive and react to.
If you still can't relax doing all these things then you don't feel safe. Yes, that's right, we're biologically animals, we tense when we're in unsafe situations. Make yourself a super safe environment then. Easiest way is to hook something up to your anandamide receptors. Bliss=safety. At the same time, thc heightens sensory awareness so it would be easier to recognise/control/relax muscles. However, it heightens sensory awareness. If you don't know how to breath properly you'll discover that quickly.
So you've absolutely pressed on tense accupressure points/beauty marks and examined the resulting thoughts and emotions? Your tensness runs throughout your personality. Are you sure you are the observer? You must step outside the system to fix it. I can see the routines in your typing. LIke others you're like a tape recorder, press a certain button and out comes the same message over and over again. I don't have to know ABOUT YOU, you need to know about you. I can't ask you what's wrong with you because you don't know. Don't you see? If you had true knowledge of what is wrong with you then there wouldn't be anything wrong with you.
Answers aren't outside yourself as you seem to believe, they're inside.
Don't you see that you are the one not respecting other peoples experiences? Here i am saying i've cured myself and you're saying i don't have the proper medical qualifications for anything?
Why are you seeking medical knowledge built upon objective reality when YOU are totally subjective? Your cure is subjective.
I apologize for the misunderstanding.
I didn't mean to imply that you can't concentrate, just that your examples didn't show it.
The way you described it the second time, driving does require concentration.
I also think that your example of writing for hours at at time is a good example.
Exam 4/C again. Maybe I'll do better this time.
Yes, and the whole world is located in the United States, isn't it. Home of psychological research and really bad therapy that barely draws on the body of research. Just look at motivational interviewing as a therapy model. People still perceive psychologists as people who get other people to sit on a couch and recount their early childhood experiences, which is bullshit and the psychological equivalent of a doctor prescribing sugar pills for people with fibromyalgia.
Fact: Psychologists are as accurate at diagnosing mental disorders as an MD.
Fact: Psychotherapy is as effective as medication at treating these 'organic disorders' you're talking about - and the effects of psychotherapy tend to be longer term than medical interventions.
Fact: Any decent psychologist will have a very solid understanding of 'organic problems' as they relate to brain chemistry.
No, we don't learn this stuff with an aim to prescribe yet, but it's coming. This is something that I don't particularly like the idea of.
I have regularly sat in on lectures in my universities school of medicine, particularly lectures that I know deal with mental illness and brain issues and have found that at times the level of information that these future doctors are given is not as in depth as the information that I have learned in psychology lectures.
Always? Thats a pretty broad generalization there. I know from my own experiences and those of others that this is not always the case. I know that in the past when I had an experience with depression that I felt like quite a few people were listening to me and helping me - and my depression was quite severe - full-blown suicidal ideation etcetc. But then I was actually capable of seeking the help that I needed. I think that a lot of people who suffer from mental illnesses aren't capable of this and don't have the same extensive support network that I do.
I do agree that if your approach to interacting with reality isn't working that you need to be the one to change it, but really... the role of a psychologist shouldn't be to change peoples perceptions of themselves or reality but to help to enable the client to change for themselves.
In a decent therapy session, the client should be doing most of the work, with only the occasional suggestion or clarification from a psychologist. Maybe a psychologist might amplify an issue experienced by a client, or heighten feelings of ambiguity experienced during a decision making process.
The parent post makes an important point. Misdiagnosis in general, and psychological scapegoating in particular, is a huge problem in the modern medical industry. If you know what your problem is, you can research it and develop an understanding of the condition which is far better than what a doctor will explain to you in a hospital visit and treat yourself accordingly. Because of this, diagnosis is, arguably, the most important function of modern doctors.
And they often screw it up.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Why do you interpret peoples messages the way you do? And why do you let them affect you in a negative manner? Remember, when it comes to subjective reality, we are kings of our own domain. Nothing happens without our say so, even if that say so is far back in the past. Lots of our mechanisms for dealing with reality are developed in childhood (big suprise eh? they develop cause we don't have any).
So what makes me think you can get better? Why not? I did. I'm not anybody special, i'm just a normal everyday person. I just got fed up with the run around i got from medical proffessionals and decided to figure it out on my own. You know what? That's the way it works because nobody can know yourself better than you can.
Granted, i might have had some advantages in getting over the ptsd. You see, i used to have a mild form of autism (aspergers). The extreme focus i got from it helped in finding and matching data from seperate fields to come up with answers. But once i had the answers the aspergers did NOT help in actually implementing a plan, which is why i got rid of the aspergers :)
There's an important point that everybody needs to understand. Life is about balance. Everything lies on continuums. Stagnation is death. Practically every child that is born is capable of experiencing all that there is to experience. We freeze though. We pick spots on the continuums and stay there. Democrat/republican on slashdot are funny because both sides don't recognize that they are both wrong. Neither position is inherently wrong or right because it is a continuum.
We have to leave what we think of ourselves behind to change. We are not our frozen positions on the continuums (ego) we are beings capable of experiencing it all. When we relax all the tension from our body then we can feel our own rhythym, it pulses and flows through us. It is this rhythym that allows us not to be overwhelmed by all the discordant 'vibrations' around us.
It's unfortunate that you posted ac because there is one exercise that suprisingly helps quite a bit for ptsd. YOu see, i've gotten over it twice (different events) so i'm pretty familiar with it.
The startle response usually accompanies ptsd. When we're in danger we tense up, freeze first to assess the danger. Sometimes, we stay frozen. It is our back muscles that do most of it, picture a prairie dog. Loosen our back muscles and it gives us the flexability to confront the issue. The easiest and best stretch for all the muscles along our whole backside is forward bend. The method of doing forward bend is important. We DO NOT bend from the abdomen. We stand in a normal position feet facing forward, keeping the back in a neutral position. We DO NOT pull ourselves down. We push through the front of our feet, which pushes the bottom of the pelvis backwards, bringing the head forward. Any forward movement is just to balance the backward movement of the bottom of the pelvis. This is where our front hinge is. When we do this position through balance instead of brute strength, as lots of yoga is taught, we learn to relax our back in a safe manner. This is because the weight of our torso is counterbalanced with our center of gravity still over our feet. When we don't have our front muscles tense to bring us forward it is easier to feel the tenseness in the back muscles.
Listen, i really do know what it's like. I used to not go out for years, and the most i could deal with was one person at a time. You can contact me anytime. You don't have to blindly accept anything i say. In fact, i discourage it. I hate the appathetic acceptance attitude our society has to almost everything. It's time people start learning how to do things themselves again. Time people started to find