Slashdot Mirror
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."
No it isn't, you moron. These people are lying. They're all lying.
This could be very bad for the tin foil hat industry.
"Achievement unlocked: Secrets of Schizophrenia and Depression!"
... 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
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
The title is a bit misleading. There is a big difference between Depression and Bipolar/Manic-Depressive disorders.
You're glib. You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do.
That was your angry rant? Man, you need some practice~
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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
I was until I shot myself in the head after destroying the nations credit system.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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!
No, that would be elation.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I just wish the summary were better. The title and summary use Depression and Manic Depression interchangeably, which is just dead wrong.
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
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.
He would probably give an angrier rant if not for the meds.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Despite the drug company propaganda, there's no objective test to distinguish the two. In general the levels of neurotransmitters in a patient's brain aren't measured anyway... and even if they were, there's no available way to tell if the levels were what they were because of some physical issue, or if they're that way because your wife left you.
However, TFA is talking about bipolar disorder, which is not the same as clinical depression.
... 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!
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.