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Secrets of Schizophrenia and Depression "Unlocked"
Oracle Goddess writes "According to the US National Institute for Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland, scientists have discovered a remarkable similarity between the genetic faults behind both schizophrenia and manic depression in a breakthrough that is expected to open the way to new treatments for two of the most common mental illnesses, affecting millions of people. Previously schizophrenia and depression were assumed to be two separate conditions, but the new research shows for the first time that both have a common genetic basis that leads people to develop one or the other of the two illnesses."
i'd like to thank Steve Ballmer for making himself available for this important breakthrough.
No it isn't, you moron. These people are lying. They're all lying.
But we're all better now.
I know, I know, that's dissociative identity disorder, but you still laughed. Maybe.
But then I realized the cable was blue, so I only gave it one star. I hate blue.
It's an Orientation.
Get with the program.
BadAnalogyGuy (945258) is a scientologist.
If he contacts you about a free personality test, firmly refuse him.
This could be very bad for the tin foil hat industry.
"Achievement unlocked: Secrets of Schizophrenia and Depression!"
There, fixed it.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
More articles like this one, please.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
... it is not the 'depression' you may be lead to believe.
Statistical correlation. You know, like the link between tooth-brushing and intravenous drug abuse.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
That would be CLINICAL depression. As in, the type caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain; as opposed to the type caused by your wife leaving you.
I know this is Slashdot and all, but that is rather the point of TFA. In fact, for a change, it does a reasonably good job.
Recommended.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
When I on lithium (~15 years ago) I found my creative spark had gone. Sure, the window of emotion had narrowed considerably, but the super-fast mental edge was lost. That made me even more depressed when the time came. Spoke with my doc, dropped all the meds (but can get lithium if I become Superman again)
If you can harness it, manic depression is wonderful thing.
Posted non-anonymously because it's not embarrassing or a big stigma.
Trolling is a art,
The summary seems to confuse being depressive with being bipolar (i.e., manic-depressive). Clinical depression is a common problem, and is generally treatable to some extent with drug and cognitive therapy. Last I checked, bipolar was much less common and a lot less treatable.
So, it isn't going to lead to new treatments for two common problems. It may well lead to new treatments for two problems, one of which is distinctly less common. Those who are clinically depressed but not bipolar may well not benefit at all.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
With three comments, this article has already been tagged with "nutjobs".
Grow up. Chances are you know someone who has (or will develop) one of these conditions to some degree, even if you don't know it (which is likely if you are that much of a jackass, they probably wouldn't tell you).
I don't normally do angry rants, but sometimes I'm surprised by the juvenile and compassionless attitudes of some people on /.
Paul Leader
The title is a bit misleading. There is a big difference between Depression and Bipolar/Manic-Depressive disorders.
Just becasue they are complex doesn't mean the information can't be found.
Just becasue something is unknown doesn't mean it's unknowable.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Anything that sheds new light onto Schizophrenia and related disorders is very welcome. It's heart breaking to watch someone close to you go through Schizophrenia symptoms. It's not the funny Hollywood version of split personalities. People suffering the disorder believe they are incredibly important (on a world scale), that they're on a special mission, they're related to Jesus, that others are coming to commit harm. Most of all, they can't tell you who sent them on the 'mission' or why. They sometimes turn on friends and accuse them of literally giving the disease. The paranoia accompanying the illness can reach critical levels. Saddest of all, a person with Schizophrenia does not believe they have a problem. They believe everyone else is either wrong, out to get them, or 'just doesn't understand.' Getting a sufferer to realise anything is wrong, let alone getting them to accept medical treatment is a real trial.
Indeed, the disease is no longer called "manic depression". It's "bipolar disorder" now. And BTW, schitzophrenia is not multiple personalities, that one is called "disassociative identity disorder". Schitzophrenics experience delusions, like changing their memories of a movie or TV show into memories of their own life experience; or hallucinations, like hearing voices in their heads telling them what a terrible person they are.
Depression is a completely different disease and often leads to suicide and usually leads to drug or alcohol abuse, although the metal health industry usually blames the substance abuse for the depression that started before the substance abuse did.
You meet a lot of crazy people in bars. One guy I saw in a bar said "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy".
Free Martian Whores!
Similarity of some symptoms, medication that is effective for both conditions, a history of one or other condition in a person's ancestry...
Awesome. I have saidf for a while that will be the killer app for future devices. uilt in achievments, as well as achievements that can be added.
Achievement unlocked! you ahve walked 1,000,000 steps.
Achievement unlocked! You have run a 10 minute mile! next achievement, 8 minute mile.
You have listened to your 10000 th minute of music.
And so on.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
In order to treat these conditions, ECT is the tool of choice these days. It has its own detractors (me inclusive) for I do not see how inducing a seizure helps an individual.
Worst of all you could lose all your memory. There was a story of a lady who did not remember anything about her clothes and wondered who had put "foreign" clothes in her closet. In another case, a former doctor could not remember who the hell he was after the procedure. Scary indeed.
Just to put this in perspective, this is not a gene, but just a region of a chromosome. And the association with any particular locus is weak, so it doesn't look like it is strong enough for diagnosis or prenatal testing. Even when the gene is identified, going from a gene to a treatment tends to be very difficult. We've know of genes for Huntington's Disease and Alzheimer's Disease for years, and while this has inspired a lot of promising research, so far this knowledge has not yet resulting any major improvements with respect to treatment or prevention.
Moreover, finding that the same genes are involved does not necessarily mean that the diseases are the same, because genes can be "broken" in multiple ways.
The idea that there is a relationship between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is not actually new, as there are some people who exhibit characteristics of both disorders, and some people diagnosed with one respond to drugs that are commonly used to treat the other. So this basically adds a bit more evidence to a long-standing suspicion.
I hope this brings things closer to a more reliable form of treatment. I grew up with three (yes, 3) women with schizophrenia, and the drugs only muted the symptoms. I (amazingly) don't have the disease myself. My mom and grandma, who I lived with the first ten years of my life, had noticeable symptoms...I'd get told to do things that didn't make sense to me. I'm a rather geeky and analytical girl, and it is very frustrating when the adults in your life tell you things that *make no sense*, and there's nobody around *without* the disease to talk to. They tried to "protect" me from the "ghosts" on one hand, so I'm sure they cared for me in their own way, but on the other hand my mom would attack my grandma because my grandma (who was a heavy smoker and had issues with her lungs) was "talking under her breath". (She wasn't.) Pretty terrifying to see when you're five years old. I wasn't allowed to go to friends' birthday parties if they were in a certain town that, some hundred years ago, had been the former county seat, because apparantly folks from that town were still pissed off at our town and would try to hurt me (this is the paranoia part of paranoid schizophrenia showing). I wasn't allowed to wear the color red, eat strawberries, or get ice cream from the ice cream man truck. My mom would randomly become enraged at my friends dads simply since they were male, so I'd be cut off from friends randomly. My aunt had less noticeable symptoms, but the disease made her a target for an abusive husband, and of course I was exposed to that when I went to live with them as an 8th grader (my mom went back into the mental hospital, and my grandma had died when I was 10). I finally ran away at 16 and went into the state ward system, which was much, much better since I could make decisions for myself, instead of having to obey people who made no sense.
Schizophrenia sucks. It sucks for the person having it, since you can't hold down a job, and it sucks for the family that has to put up with it.
poor impulse control, disinhibition, lack of concern for others, overly aggressive emphasis on one's own pleasure
this is the mental condition known as "internet troll"
familiarize yourself with the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders entry for this particular disorder, and show some sensitivity to those affected
your anger doesn't help in the care and treatment of the mentally altered. more compassion next time please for these poor suffering souls. thank you
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Anybody who has had long association with a manic-depressive already knew this. I'm related to one. The first time, he went completely manic. Didn't sleep for a week, etc. The last time he went around the bend, he DIDN'T go manic-depressive. He went paranoid schizophrenic. I can't believe any competent clinician hadn't already noticed that the same patient can easily exhibit symptoms of both, even at the same time. Given that both are caused by imbalances in brain chemistry, and given that the same patient can be both, how big of a leap is it to notice that they're really just different manifestations of the same problem?
He's much better now, though he still prefers his own flights of fancy to reality. But at least he's capable of distinguishing the two again. After over a decade of on-again off-again lunacy, he's finally decided to take his meds regularly, and he, his therapist, and his mother have found an effective dosage (of Depacote, for the morbidly curious. The stuff works very well, IF, and I repeat IF the dosage is precisely correct. Too little does nothing. Too much ruins the patient's ability to stay awake, let alone function.) It is perhaps telling that regardless of whether he was manic, depressive, paranoid, or schizophrenic, his therapist wanted him to use Depacote. Practitioners already know that the same drug can treat a patient with any of those symptoms.
So, at the risk of repeating myself... duh?
Slashdot won't be helped until the secrets of Aspergers Syndrome are "Unlocked"
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has it's limits" - Albert Einstein
... how would they determine how they are related in the first place? Especially given the complexity of these issues in their relation to the central nervous system.
Same way they diagnose people. They guess.
Psychiatry is the only industry where someone can present the same affect to 10 shrinks and get 10 different diagnoses. Trust me on this.
...and no, no Dianetics, e-meters, or Xenu for me, thanks for asking.
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
Interesting.
Back before psychopharmaceuticals, schizophrenia and depression were thought to be very similar or even the same thing. It was only once we had Thorazine (first antipsychotic) and then later tricyclics (first antidepressents) that in the clinical settings schizophrenia and depression began to be sorted much more distinctly, essentially based on the kinds of patients that got better with antipsychotics versus those that got better with antidepressants.
It's pretty common for diagnostic definitions to align with successful treatment methadologies, since "what will help" is the fundamental answer that diagnosis hopes to lead to.
Sounds like we're now getting back to the perspective of a half-century ago.
My video compression blog
Yeah but hillbillies want to be called 'Sons of the Soil', but it's never going to happen....
I'm not sure where you're going with that one... Sure, in general usage a language is defined by the whims of the people who speak it. But when it's technical jargon - in this case medical jargon - the technical definition, as opposed to "what everyone calls it" is rather important! I've had friends who call a CRT monitor "the computer", yet my CRT is still unable to function without the part that the geeks refer to as "the computer". Sometimes the commonly used phrase can be technically wrong and therefore misleading, despite the fact that it's popular.
There's also a wider point at stake here: in general, we reserve the right to change the generally accepted meaning of words in the English language (presumably ditto for most other living languages) according to what most people understand them to mean. This typically does not happen in the same way within technical disciplines; physicists draw a distinction between "speed" and "velocity" and show no signs of changing. Usually what terms the techies appropriate to mean something very specific does not affect the rest of us - there's not much point in me labouring the distinction between monitor and computer with my friends, since the misunderstanding doesn't really hurt anyone. This is not the case for medical terminology, where the name of the disease tends to become a label for the sufferers in discussion, as well as a convenient way for a sufferer to explain their condition to an interested third party. The names of diseases have specific technical meanings to a Doctor but are often also used in everyday conversation between people explaining their health situation.
Doctors aren't going to alter the names of diseases just because common usage often confuses a couple of them - it's technical jargon and there's no sense creating confusion in the medical community by changing that around. So it's up to the rest of us: do we want to stick the wrong label on an ill person because it's a generally accepted misunderstanding, or do we attempt to clarify the differences between disorders, knowing that a greater understanding and better use of the terminology is the only way the confusion will ever be resolved.
I'm sticking with the latter approach since it raises public awareness of important issues, even though I know there will always be people who remain confused about the distinction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm going to agree here, please change the slashdot headline and summary to reference Bipolar Disorder instead of Manic Depression and Depression. I'm not going to go on a holy war about calling it Manic Depression, that's at least acceptable, but please DO NOT refer to it as it is in the summary, purely as Depression. When people say Depression (without the manic qualifier), they usually mean Major Depressive Disorder or Dysthymia, totally separate illnesses from Bipolar Disorder. It is mainly for this reason that the old Manic Depression term was dropped, because it made people perceive them as two separate parts of the same entity. There has NOT been found in this article a link between Major Depressive Disorder and Schizophrenia, but between Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia. If someone could, please change this to suit. Also, for more proof this is the right way to go, note that the first article linked does not, surveyed via Ctrl+f, reference Depression once.
I don' thing t'hose words mean whad you ting dey mean.
I drank what? -- Socrates
That's an interesting correlation.
I find it easier to measure the "tooth to tattoo" ratio. Having been an EMT in a past life, I've observed that those who have more tattoos than teeth have a much higher likelihood of dying in an emergency room. Granted this is just a loose hypothesis based on my random observations. YMMV
- High Tech workers, please say NO to Union Carpenters, their Union sees fit to control our compensation.
How "they" are related? By "they" you mean bipolar and schizophrenia? Apart from looking at the co-morbidity of the two conditions, they also use data from studies looking at rates in identical twins, non-identical twins, siblings who have various degrees of genetic overlap versus the overal prevelance. Plus, in a logical, theoretical sense there is diagnostic overlap -bipolar, in a severe from can include delusions, halluncinations, highly inappropriate behaviour, loss of inhibition, sleeplessness, irritability and paranioa, as can some forms of schizophrenia. Likewise, social withdrawal, lack of affect, hyposomnia ect which can occur in the depressed phase of bipolar can also occur in some sorts of schizophrenia. This is the same as any sort of medical diagnosis - both pneumonia, the flu and asthma involve breathing difficulties, so it's not too far fetched to think that there might be some common underlying mechanisms. So that points where to look.
There's a lot more than this, of course. But epidemiology and reasoning are really the only is the only way you really can go, given that you can't ever get random assignment to conditions and can't "give" someone BP or schizo. So it's got to be correlation.
If you meant something different by "they" then I'm not sure.
I was going to RTFA but my other personality was too depressed.
NO I WASN'T!
Yes he was!
Shut up you two!
I think you ought to know I'm feeling very depressed...
Homonyms are fun!
You're driving your car, but they're riding their bikes there.
I am not a student of the Psychiatric discipline. I have learned through my experiences and reflection to manage my thoughts. I was 'diagnosed' with Schizophrenia a few years ago, and took Risperdal for about 2 1/2 years. During the first six months of the 2.5 years, my dosage increased from 0.5 mg to 4 mg. I stopped taking the medicine in October, 2008. The voices returned in about 2-4 weeks. "People with schizophrenia have reduced brain receptors for the dopamine messenger. " from: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/unlocked-the-secrets-of-schizophrenia-1727987.html I believe that this is inconsistent with 'facts' that my ex-psychiatrist told me ( although I could be remembering wrong, which just creates the need to investigate the facts that scientists have found by means that, well, I do not possess knowledge of). I thought that Schizophrenia is a result of an overproduction of dopamine, oh, oops, now I get it.\ I think the Risperdal is supposed to suppress the production of dopamine, perhaps the surplus of the messenger creates the hallucination. For me, the hallucinations are (attempting mental reconstruction to change the present state of is to past tense) my interpretation of the source of the voices. I used to think that other people's thoughts were being transmitted into my mind. I honestly believed it was, just because the 'hear-think' (that's my term for the voices) always had personal information about me, and well, I was around people that would have facts to produce the analysis (negative at first...). I used to conclude that the voices were not invoked by my volition. Well, yeah, OK, whatever, let's shoot that one down. How do I know that it isn't just my brain using the presence of the those around me, to help me realize new perceptions on past situations in order to affect my future choices in a way that I perceive will increase my self-image. Typing of self-image, maybe my mind/soul/etc is just creating a way to reflect so that my volition doesn't have to be the naysayer. With my mind operating this way, I can now respond to the critique of the voices, as if I am holding a conversation in my mind. Oh yeah, one interesting thing about hear-think is that is seems to be occurring outside of my body, in a variety of locations in space. I hear male and female voices, with classic gender roles intact, with a varying degree of acuity in expression, tone, knowledge, and insight. I think the longest phrase lasted between 1-2 minutes. Another unusual occurrence is how in sync the voices can be with my surroundings, meaning that the voices will match body language of other people, and the hear-think seems to be originating from their bodies. I think that I am just imagining an interpretation. the real struggle for me was learning not to trust the voices by using scientific method, by testing their validity against family and friends. have heart.