You mark my words. The big strong soldiers inside will, in time, become all pale and weedy. And the batteries will go flat and then the little pale soldiers will crawl out and the enemy - who feared them - will start laughing and crush them with their boots.
Yes, but I didn't think that "already in generic use" was a protection against someone getting a trademark over there in the US. I'm remembering the case of a US company tradmarking the name "Ugg Boots", which had been in generic use for 50 years. So, just because no-one else has bothered to trademark it doesn't seem to make a difference.
(I'm not agreeing that this is right - I thought it was wrong that someone could trademark something as generic as "Ugg Boots" - but I thought that was how the law worked there is the US).
Given that in my field (psychology) the absolute dominant opinion is that depression is a serious illness which: causes major loss of social and occupational function, is one of the leading contributors to the global burden of disease, and is the leading cause of suicide (World health Organisation http://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/definition/en/, APA: http://www.apa.org/topics/topicdepress.html), any suggestion that depression might have a "bright side" is bound to be challenged.
Bypassing the Slashdot summary (which appears to have been written by the authors of the Scientific American Article that the link takes you to - or at least it uses their exact words), and ignoring the Scientific American Article, which was written by the authors of a paper to promote their own paper - I went to the article (The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analysing complex problems" 2009, Psychological Review, 116, 620-654).
The authors' main point seems to be that if a person has a complex problem that needs to be solved, then withdrawing from social contact, ruminating on your problems, taking no pleasure in anything (i.e. focusing exclusively on your problems) and so on (the symptoms of depression) make sense because the chance of solving a problem will be higher. And, since depressed people have a cognitive style which cause them to be better at focusing on the micro-detail of problems ("ruminating"), depression has an adaptive function - it helps us solve problems.
It's certainly true that depressed people are very good ruminators, although this is generally described in negative terms as a "faulty cognitive style" because depressed people ruminate on problems that either (a) have no real existence outside of their heads or (b) exist but would be solved (or accepted) by most people without the person becoming disabled. Hence we hear stories of people who commit suicide for odd-seeming reasons (someone insulted them on facebook).
So, I'm thinking that the authors are over-extrapolating a slight superiority in a particular problem-solving skill to a conclusion that "Depression [is] an adaptation for analyzing complex problems". I'm thinking that depression is to problem solving what cytokine storm is to a healthy immune response.
After a while almost any voluntary organisation runs the risk of becomming a collection of personality disorders. People who actually care about their small amount of power dig in, over-identify with the organisation, come to believe they "are" the organisation and percieve new-comers and open discussion as a threat to the organisation itself (not just a threat to their personal power). Of course, reasonable, flexible people leave because they can always find something else to do with their spare time.
I'm not saying this is how it is in this case (I don't know much about it). But it's a phenomenon that every voluntary organisation, political party, lobby group etc needs to protect itself from.
If someone can put on a little show that gets my brain to release endorphins and stop the pain, I don't see a problem with paying for that performance, whether it's a nurse's "beside manner" or a shaman's ritual
I have never heard of a homeopath advertising their service by saying: "Scientific studies show that our treatments work at placebo level!" or "Homeopathy works by tricking your brain into releasing endorphins!" I wouldn't have a problem if they did that - then people could decide if placebo was worth paying for or not. Except, it wouldn't work if people knew it was placebo. So homeopaths need to keep reinforcing the belief that it's got something more in it than water. It's unethical.
I didn't mean to imply (although I probably can rightly be accused of implying) that the diagnositc criteria for NPD and APD were the same. I was making a very general statement about a prime, in-practice difference between two related conditions. What you have listed from the DSM-IVTR as the criteria for APD are the inferences about the person's personality which the clinician makes from applying the standard diagnostic questions. So, yes, if the clinician's assessment is that the person has 3 or more of these traits then they are diagnosed with APD. How often, in practice, have you concluded that a person has APD where they haven't been involved in criminal behaviour (detected or not)? If the answer is "more than never", then how are you judging them to have reached criteria 1, 2, 4, 6 or 7? And how many times has someone with APD NOT met the NPD criteria for 1, 5, 6, 7 & 9?
There's another method available apart from correlation - dissociation. If psychopathy is linked to a particular brain area then researchers will be looking at patients who have damage to that part of the brain. And if they were not psychopathic before their car accident/stroke/tumor, but they were afterwards, then this is dissociation, rather than correlation. Double dissociation is even better - couple the "everybody with an injury to that area of the brain is a psychopath", with "show me nobody psychopathic has a healthy brain at that site".
"Psychopath" was a term introduced in 1888 by German Psychiatrist Koch. It just meant someone with a psychopathology (i.e. a mental illness not otherwise named - a very broad category.
It's meaning was dramatically narrowed in 1928 when the psychologist Partridge redefined it to mean people who were anti-social, egocentric, manipulative etc. In 1930, Partridge further proposed that it be replaced with the term "sociopathy". He later proposed that that the two terms could be used to disctinguih between people who had a genetic disorder (psychopath) or an environmentally produced disorder (sociopath).
(From: The psychopath By Hugues Hervé, John C. Yuille).
The terms aren't used diagnostically, at least not where I am. In my neck of the woods, it's "narcisistic personality disorder" for those who have no criminal activity and "antisocial personality disorder" for those who do. Which I find very much a 19th Century way of looking at it - a diagnosis based on a moral distinction.
Doctors are notoriously bad a dealing with psychopathology, which is why so many people end up on meds. And you are unlikely to see a psychiatrist unless you are (a) very ill or (b) rich (c) have some f'ing fabulous health cover.
But that doesn't make psychological research invalid ("bullshit" as you put it). It's great research - and even if it ends up being wrong or party wrong, it's another small step.
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
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.
Twitter is a fad - and like all fads I loved it for a little while. There was one time I thought it worked great - there was a small explosion followed by a fire about 2 suburbs away (I could see the big smpoke-cloud from my work window). I tweeted to find out what building it was exactly. So did a number of other people. And then someone who was in a building nearer to the fire gave details. All of this happened in 10 mins, and before the radio was giving any information other than what I knew. As it turned out the twitter eye-witness information was accurate, too.
When I go onto twitter and read "OK, gonna take a crap behind this hear dumpster" or "Falling asleep in the arms of the one I love" or "Looking at the clouds" or whatever, I think: "No you're not, you're on a computer typing shit into twitter". And then I begin to channel the angry german kid again.
People are probably better at predicting the horror that is to come, which adds a dimension to their suffering that maybe kittens don't have?
Mind you, it's easy to understand the motives for killing people...
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMV) is under review, which is why this has popped up - it's someone lobbying for a disorder to be included. There's criticism, of course. In 1952, it had 66 disorders, by 1994 it had 400, and lordy lordy knows how many this edition will end up with. Which leads to the "we are pathologising everything" debate.
I have my own dream. Personally, I research boredom and my chances of getting grant money would be much higher if the chronically & severely bored weren't just outliers from the average (i.e. really bored people), but were, in fact, mentally ill. This would benefit them because (at long last) they would have a real illness which could be treated, recognised legally by insurance companies and get researched. Some neurotransmitters are associated with fatigue, lethergy and boredom, so a drug that blocks, increases or inhibits this would be available tout suit.
Of course the truth is that some people get really bored really easily. I suspect this is true of bitterness as well.
OK, I'm ignorant and confused about the whole thing. So - when I read it - they have injected a new gene into an embryo and that genetic code was then passed on to the embryo's offspring(?) OK, so maybe (one day) we can do that to humans as well. So there's (a) a the usual ehtical arguments about whether animal experimentation is ethically justified via it's possible benifits to humans, (b) the usual ethical arguments about whether genetic modification of humans above and beyond using your good sense in chosing a mate is a good or bad thing. I'm clear on that. But my confusion is - how does modifying offspring to produce a heritable (is that the word?) thinggy have a potential health benefit? I'm missing something obvious here I know - but I just can't get it.
I also grew up biking and exploring on foot, but I have a very deficit sense of direction - it's all down to the hippocampus.
It's kind of like singing - almost anyone can improve through practice, but if you are truly atonal nothing will help. If, on the other hand you are a born natural, you won't need the lessons.
I'm arguing for SOD as largely inate, because I get so sick of people telling me that it's a matter of practice or attention. If you ain't got it, you ain't go it.
700kms isn't far enough away for this Brisbane girl. Especially when you think of all of those bananas and other fruits which are trucked south in a matter of hours. And due to the weather everything "tropical" is creeping south - including Ross River Virus and Fire Ants. It's not just the thought of a man-sized spider that's freaking me (and yes, I hear they grow THAT big), but the impact on all of our local (non-deadly) spiders.
Mind you, dead poodles and frightened golfers would be the silver lining.
Meh. In Australia, well-off people own cars AND live in the areas which have good, efficient public transport. Poor people live in the back of nowhere miles from that single bus stop where a bus has never been seen.
There's a good paper on "Car ownership and Social Exclusion in Australia". http://civil.eng.monash.edu.au/its/caitrhome/prevcaitrproceedings/caitr2007/johnson_caitr2007.pdf
As you'd expect, those who can afford cars mostly buy them. Poor people can't afford, but are often forced buy, cars or they can't get to work. "In Australia, lack of access to private or public transport was found (following having a criminal record) to be the second highest barrier to social and economic participation in a study of job seekers facing multiple barriers to employment".
I noticed in the report that it might be different in the US because in Australia the richer you are the nearer you tend to live to the the centre of the city, which is also where the lush jobs and the good public transport are. Poverty, bad jobs and bad public transport go with outlying suburbs. I get the picture in the US that the well-off prefer to live in the suburbs and that good jobs are more decentralised?
Speaking in broad generalisations of course.
"The difference is that any other kind of medicine has to work _better_ than the placebo effect, though". Absolutely. People are paying a fortune for something they believe is more than placebo when is just water and mumbo jumbo.
Slashdot Mirror
You mark my words. The big strong soldiers inside will, in time, become all pale and weedy. And the batteries will go flat and then the little pale soldiers will crawl out and the enemy - who feared them - will start laughing and crush them with their boots.
I'm not even putting my exoskeleton on - I'm staying on the couch, hooking up my brain and getting it to walk around without me in it.
I disagree.
Yes, but I didn't think that "already in generic use" was a protection against someone getting a trademark over there in the US. I'm remembering the case of a US company tradmarking the name "Ugg Boots", which had been in generic use for 50 years. So, just because no-one else has bothered to trademark it doesn't seem to make a difference. (I'm not agreeing that this is right - I thought it was wrong that someone could trademark something as generic as "Ugg Boots" - but I thought that was how the law worked there is the US).
Bypassing the Slashdot summary (which appears to have been written by the authors of the Scientific American Article that the link takes you to - or at least it uses their exact words), and ignoring the Scientific American Article, which was written by the authors of a paper to promote their own paper - I went to the article (The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analysing complex problems" 2009, Psychological Review, 116, 620-654).
The authors' main point seems to be that if a person has a complex problem that needs to be solved, then withdrawing from social contact, ruminating on your problems, taking no pleasure in anything (i.e. focusing exclusively on your problems) and so on (the symptoms of depression) make sense because the chance of solving a problem will be higher. And, since depressed people have a cognitive style which cause them to be better at focusing on the micro-detail of problems ("ruminating"), depression has an adaptive function - it helps us solve problems.
It's certainly true that depressed people are very good ruminators, although this is generally described in negative terms as a "faulty cognitive style" because depressed people ruminate on problems that either (a) have no real existence outside of their heads or (b) exist but would be solved (or accepted) by most people without the person becoming disabled. Hence we hear stories of people who commit suicide for odd-seeming reasons (someone insulted them on facebook).
So, I'm thinking that the authors are over-extrapolating a slight superiority in a particular problem-solving skill to a conclusion that "Depression [is] an adaptation for analyzing complex problems". I'm thinking that depression is to problem solving what cytokine storm is to a healthy immune response.
I'm not saying this is how it is in this case (I don't know much about it). But it's a phenomenon that every voluntary organisation, political party, lobby group etc needs to protect itself from.
I have never heard of a homeopath advertising their service by saying: "Scientific studies show that our treatments work at placebo level!" or "Homeopathy works by tricking your brain into releasing endorphins!" I wouldn't have a problem if they did that - then people could decide if placebo was worth paying for or not. Except, it wouldn't work if people knew it was placebo. So homeopaths need to keep reinforcing the belief that it's got something more in it than water. It's unethical.
I didn't mean to imply (although I probably can rightly be accused of implying) that the diagnositc criteria for NPD and APD were the same. I was making a very general statement about a prime, in-practice difference between two related conditions. What you have listed from the DSM-IVTR as the criteria for APD are the inferences about the person's personality which the clinician makes from applying the standard diagnostic questions. So, yes, if the clinician's assessment is that the person has 3 or more of these traits then they are diagnosed with APD. How often, in practice, have you concluded that a person has APD where they haven't been involved in criminal behaviour (detected or not)? If the answer is "more than never", then how are you judging them to have reached criteria 1, 2, 4, 6 or 7? And how many times has someone with APD NOT met the NPD criteria for 1, 5, 6, 7 & 9?
There's another method available apart from correlation - dissociation. If psychopathy is linked to a particular brain area then researchers will be looking at patients who have damage to that part of the brain. And if they were not psychopathic before their car accident/stroke/tumor, but they were afterwards, then this is dissociation, rather than correlation. Double dissociation is even better - couple the "everybody with an injury to that area of the brain is a psychopath", with "show me nobody psychopathic has a healthy brain at that site".
It's meaning was dramatically narrowed in 1928 when the psychologist Partridge redefined it to mean people who were anti-social, egocentric, manipulative etc. In 1930, Partridge further proposed that it be replaced with the term "sociopathy". He later proposed that that the two terms could be used to disctinguih between people who had a genetic disorder (psychopath) or an environmentally produced disorder (sociopath).
(From: The psychopath By Hugues Hervé, John C. Yuille).
The terms aren't used diagnostically, at least not where I am. In my neck of the woods, it's "narcisistic personality disorder" for those who have no criminal activity and "antisocial personality disorder" for those who do. Which I find very much a 19th Century way of looking at it - a diagnosis based on a moral distinction.
But that doesn't make psychological research invalid ("bullshit" as you put it). It's great research - and even if it ends up being wrong or party wrong, it's another small step.
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.
Twitter is a fad - and like all fads I loved it for a little while. There was one time I thought it worked great - there was a small explosion followed by a fire about 2 suburbs away (I could see the big smpoke-cloud from my work window). I tweeted to find out what building it was exactly. So did a number of other people. And then someone who was in a building nearer to the fire gave details. All of this happened in 10 mins, and before the radio was giving any information other than what I knew. As it turned out the twitter eye-witness information was accurate, too.
When I go onto twitter and read "OK, gonna take a crap behind this hear dumpster" or "Falling asleep in the arms of the one I love" or "Looking at the clouds" or whatever, I think: "No you're not, you're on a computer typing shit into twitter". And then I begin to channel the angry german kid again.
People are probably better at predicting the horror that is to come, which adds a dimension to their suffering that maybe kittens don't have? Mind you, it's easy to understand the motives for killing people ...
Done. And, we'll sort out some "free" "gaming therapy" for you via medical insurance.
I was right - I was missing something obvious.
SIX choobs ae spesh an WAN bootle ae bucky? Bum.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSMV) is under review, which is why this has popped up - it's someone lobbying for a disorder to be included. There's criticism, of course. In 1952, it had 66 disorders, by 1994 it had 400, and lordy lordy knows how many this edition will end up with. Which leads to the "we are pathologising everything" debate. I have my own dream. Personally, I research boredom and my chances of getting grant money would be much higher if the chronically & severely bored weren't just outliers from the average (i.e. really bored people), but were, in fact, mentally ill. This would benefit them because (at long last) they would have a real illness which could be treated, recognised legally by insurance companies and get researched. Some neurotransmitters are associated with fatigue, lethergy and boredom, so a drug that blocks, increases or inhibits this would be available tout suit. Of course the truth is that some people get really bored really easily. I suspect this is true of bitterness as well.
OK, I'm ignorant and confused about the whole thing. So - when I read it - they have injected a new gene into an embryo and that genetic code was then passed on to the embryo's offspring(?) OK, so maybe (one day) we can do that to humans as well. So there's (a) a the usual ehtical arguments about whether animal experimentation is ethically justified via it's possible benifits to humans, (b) the usual ethical arguments about whether genetic modification of humans above and beyond using your good sense in chosing a mate is a good or bad thing. I'm clear on that. But my confusion is - how does modifying offspring to produce a heritable (is that the word?) thinggy have a potential health benefit? I'm missing something obvious here I know - but I just can't get it.
I also grew up biking and exploring on foot, but I have a very deficit sense of direction - it's all down to the hippocampus. It's kind of like singing - almost anyone can improve through practice, but if you are truly atonal nothing will help. If, on the other hand you are a born natural, you won't need the lessons. I'm arguing for SOD as largely inate, because I get so sick of people telling me that it's a matter of practice or attention. If you ain't got it, you ain't go it.
700kms isn't far enough away for this Brisbane girl. Especially when you think of all of those bananas and other fruits which are trucked south in a matter of hours. And due to the weather everything "tropical" is creeping south - including Ross River Virus and Fire Ants. It's not just the thought of a man-sized spider that's freaking me (and yes, I hear they grow THAT big), but the impact on all of our local (non-deadly) spiders. Mind you, dead poodles and frightened golfers would be the silver lining.
Meh. In Australia, well-off people own cars AND live in the areas which have good, efficient public transport. Poor people live in the back of nowhere miles from that single bus stop where a bus has never been seen. There's a good paper on "Car ownership and Social Exclusion in Australia". http://civil.eng.monash.edu.au/its/caitrhome/prevcaitrproceedings/caitr2007/johnson_caitr2007.pdf As you'd expect, those who can afford cars mostly buy them. Poor people can't afford, but are often forced buy, cars or they can't get to work. "In Australia, lack of access to private or public transport was found (following having a criminal record) to be the second highest barrier to social and economic participation in a study of job seekers facing multiple barriers to employment". I noticed in the report that it might be different in the US because in Australia the richer you are the nearer you tend to live to the the centre of the city, which is also where the lush jobs and the good public transport are. Poverty, bad jobs and bad public transport go with outlying suburbs. I get the picture in the US that the well-off prefer to live in the suburbs and that good jobs are more decentralised? Speaking in broad generalisations of course.
"The difference is that any other kind of medicine has to work _better_ than the placebo effect, though". Absolutely. People are paying a fortune for something they believe is more than placebo when is just water and mumbo jumbo.
BTW - my above answer is based on the assumption that he has no money to spend on getting this done.