56 Matching Annotations
  1. Feb 2023
    1. The prefrontal leukotomy procedure developed by Moniz and Lima was modified in 1936 by American neurologists Walter J. Freeman II and James W. Watts. Freeman preferred the use of the term lobotomy and therefore renamed the procedure “prefrontal lobotomy.” The American team soon developed the Freeman-Watts standard lobotomy, which laid out an exact protocol for how a leukotome (in this case, a spatula) was to be inserted and manipulated during the surgery. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Subscribe Now lobotomyThe use of lobotomy in the United States was resisted and criticized heavily by American neurosurgeons. However, because Freeman managed to promote the success of the surgery through the media, lobotomy became touted as a miracle procedure, capturing the attention of the public and leading to an overwhelming demand for the operation. In 1945 Freeman streamlined the procedure, replacing it with transorbital lobotomy, in which a picklike instrument was forced through the back of the eye sockets to pierce the thin bone that separates the eye sockets from the frontal lobes. The pick’s point was then inserted into the frontal lobe and used to sever connections in the brain (presumably between the prefrontal cortex and thalamus). In 1946 Freeman performed this procedure for the first time on a patient, who was subdued prior to the operation with electroshock treatment.The transorbital lobotomy procedure, which Freeman performed very quickly, sometimes in less than 10 minutes, was used on many patients with relatively minor mental disorders that Freeman believed did not warrant traditional lobotomy surgery, in which the skull itself was opened. A large proportion of such lobotomized patients exhibited reduced tension or agitation, but many also showed other effects, such as apathy, passivity, lack of initiative, poor ability to concentrate, and a generally decreased depth and intensity of their emotional response to life. Some died as a result of the procedure. However, those effects were not widely reported in the 1940s, and at that time the long-term effects were largely unknown. Because the procedure met with seemingly widespread success, Moniz was awarded the 1949 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine (along with Swiss physiologist Walter Rudolf Hess). Lobotomies were performed on a wide scale during the 1940s; Freeman himself performed or supervised more than 3,500 lobotomies by the late 1960s. The practice gradually fell out of favour beginning in the mid-1950s, when antipsychotics, antidepressants, and other medications that were much more effective in treating and alleviating the distress of mentally disturbed patients came into use. Today lobotomy is rarely performed; however, shock therapy and psychosurgery (the surgical removal of specific regions of the brain) occasionally are used to treat patients whose symptoms have resisted all other treatments.

      Walter Freeman's barbaric obsession and fervent practice of the miracle cure for mental illness that is the "transorbital lobotomy"

  2. Mar 2022
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  13. Sep 2020
    1. numerous non-human species suffer from psychiatric symptoms. Birds obsess; horses on occasion get pathologically compulsive; dolphins and whales—especially those in captivity—self-mutilate. And that thing when your dog woefully watches you pull out of the driveway from the window—that might be DSM-certified separation anxiety. "Every animal with a mind has the capacity to lose hold of it from time to time" wrote science historian and author Dr. Laurel Braitman in "Animal Madness

      Animals can have psychiatric issues as well.

      Examples include:

      • Dolphins that self-mutilate when in captivity
      • Horses that can get pathologically compulsive
      • Brides that obsess
  14. Aug 2020
    1. When a former psychiatric patient killed two people on the streets of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and then sued the psychiatrist who had treated him for failing to prevent the murders, the mental health world dismissed the suit as frivolous. But when a jury agreed with the killer and awarded him $500,000 in damages, bewilderment was the order of the day (1). Can it be true, psychiatrists asked, that murder pays—as long as you can blame your psychiatrist for your deed?

      This is the case where it was initially ruled that the psychiatrist was the proximate cause for the patient, Williamson, to commit murder. Subsequent higher courts overturned this decision.

  15. Jul 2020
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  17. Dec 2019
    1. After diagnosis, 40 percent of cancer patients report developing significant distress that can include serious worry, panic attacks, depression, and PTSD, or posttraumatic stress disorder

      I feel like not these should be a more serious concern

  18. Apr 2019
    1. Being a teenager is hard; there are constant social and emotional pressures that have just been introduced into the life of a middle or high schooler, which combines with puberty to create a ticking time bomb. By looking at the constant exposure to unreasonable expectations smartphones and social media create, we can see that smartphones are leading to an increased level of depression and anxiety in teenagers, an important issue because we need to find a safe way to use smartphones for the furture generations that are growing up with them. Social media is a large part of a majority of young adults life, whether it includes Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, or some combination of these platforms, most kids have some sort of presence online. Sites like Facebook and Instagram provide friends with a snapshot of an event that happened in your life, and people tend to share the positive events online, but this creates a dangerous impact on the person scrolling.​ When teens spend hours scrolling through excluisvely happy posts, it creates an unrealistic expectation for how real life should be. Without context, teenagers often feel as if their own life is not measuring up to all of their happy friends, but real-life will never measure up to the perfect ones expressed online. Picture Picture Furthermore, social media sites create a way for teenagers to seek external validation from likes and comments, but when the reactions online are not perceived as enough it dramatically alters a young adults self-confidence. This leads to the issue of cyberbullying. There are no restrictions on what you can say online, sometimes even annonimously, so often people choose to send negative messages online. Bullying is not a new concept, but with online bullying, there is little to no escape as a smartphone can be with a teenager everywhere, and wherever the smartphone goes the bullying follows.This makes cyberbullying a very effective way to decrease a youth's mental health, in fact, cyberbullying triples the risk of suicide in adolescents, which is already the third leading cause of death for this age group.

  19. Feb 2016
    1. 200,000 autistic teenagers set to come of age in the United States ove

      Statistic used for paper

    2. The article is the 5th article I am using, therefore, I did not read all of it to use only the parts that I want. However, I did also watch the video. Because of this my summary is lapsed. Most of what I read was about Justin Canha going through a program to help him transition into regular adulthood.

    3. Opening the workplace to people with autism could harness their sometimes-unusual talents, advocates say, while decreasing costs to families and taxpayers for daytime aides and health care and housing subsidies, estimated at more than $1 million over an adult lifetime.

      Also might use this for my paper.

    4. “There’s a prevailing philosophy that certain people can never function in the community,” Ms. Stanton-Paule told skeptics. “I just don’t think that’s true.”

      Using this quote for my paper. I think

    1. This article just sums up the way of how psychopathic traits are common and in many ways useful. The way I plan to use this article for my paper is to show how people with mental illness have specialized personalities for different jobs.

    1. but only through a generalized approach, hitting the entire brain. ("Carpet-bombing," one neuroscientist calls it.) And the 50 percent success rate of antidepressant drugs suggests that they aren't hitting depression's central mechanism. The network approach, on the other hand, focuses on specific nodes, pathways and gateways that might be approached with various treatments — electrical, surgical or pharmacological. This small trial appears to confirm this model so emphatically that it's already changing the neuropsychiatric view of the brain and the direction of research.

      So, the premise of this article is summed up in this paragraph. A lady become depressed and then she gets better when they implant electrodes in her brain. So mostly, they're saying that the angle that research should be directed in isn't just neurochemistry and using drugs to treat mental illness but "covering all the bases" and look towards the brain as having many possible cures.

    2. "So we turn it on," Mayberg told me later, "and all of a sudden she says to me, 'It's very strange,' she says, 'I know you've been with me in the operating room this whole time. I know you care about me. But it's not that. I don't know what you just did. But I'm looking at you, and it's like I just feel suddenly more connected to you.' " Mayberg, stunned, signaled with her hand to the others, out of Deanna's view, to turn the stimulator off. "And they turn it off," Mayberg said, "and she goes: 'God, it's just so odd. You just went away again. I guess it wasn't really anything.'

      Wow, this part is so shock and awe. So odd for her that her depression could be turned on and off in this scenario.

    3. "These soldiers get sent away for six months, they come back and all they want to do is return to their old home. But their old home isn't there, because everybody's changed. It takes some tough rearranging sometimes."

      This makes me think about what it is like to be mentally ill and to have it change your life so drastically.

    4. We might even stop indulging the romantic notion of depression as intrinsic to one's identity.

      I think it is important to recognized that depression is a mental illness, and not just apart of identity to agree with the article.

    5. Most people think of depression as a deficit state," Mayberg says. "You're low, you're negative. But in fact, talk to a depressed person, and you have this bizarre combination of numbness and what William James called 'an active anguish.' 'A sort of psychical neuralgia,'

      This is quite important for understanding depression

    6. I think it is important to recognized that depression is a mental illness, and not just apart of identity to agree with the article.

    7. (Or, using another metaphor, if the brain is an orchestra, then the neurochemical approach focuses on how well individual players listen and respond to the players adjacent to them; the network approach, like a conductor, focuses on how the orchestra's sections — strings, winds, brass, etc. — coordinate and balance volume and tone. When both are working well, you've got music.)

      Need this

    1. So this article primarily talked about the process of his exorcism. This was a shamanistic way for him to rid himself of his "demons." But what the user actually underwent was an acute depression that had already been treated and mostly recovered. This exorcism was very different but the author's opinion of the process was positive because of the contrasts between treating depression in the United States and in Africa.

    2. “Instead, they would take people one at a time into these dingy little rooms and have them sit around for an hour or so and talk about bad things that had happened to them. We had to get them to leave the country.”

      It's so interesting because the author is implicitly drawing the comparison to the way psychologists and psychiatrists treat depression because the people in Africa see this and reject it as a treatment.

    3. And then when I had finished the Coke, they said, “Okay, now we have the final parts of the ritual. First you have to put your hands by your sides and stand very straight and very erect.” And I said, “Okay,” and then they tied me up with the intestines of the ram. In the meanwhile its body was hanging from a nearby tree, and someone was doing some butchering of it, and they took various little bits of it out. And then I had to kind of shuffle over, all tied up in intestines, which most of you probably haven’t done, but it’s hard.

      What a different culture

    1. The article overall summarizes the Williams disease and how their view of the social construct is flawed with good intentions of everyone and compares the construct to apes to make it easier to understand how the people affected with Williams do not fit in. The argument seems to be leading in the direction of how do we learn to fit these people into our society.

    2. “Williams have great interest but little competence. But what about a person who has competence but no warmth, desire or empathy? That’s a sociopath. Sociopaths have great theory of mind. But they couldn’t care less.”

      Is there an argument to be made here about whether ignorance is bliss or something along those lines?

    3. the primacy of such circuits suggests that human sociability rises from evolutionarily reinforced mechanisms — a raw yearning to connect; fearfulness — that are so basic they’re easy to undervalue.

      This is similar to what I read in the connections of the brain article about depression.

    4. Williams research and the social-brain thesis is whether our social behavior is ultimately driven more by the urge to connect or the urge to manipulate the connection.

      Might use this for a thesis

    5. In most mammals the neocortex accounts for 30 percent to 40 percent of brain volume. In the highly social primates it occupies about 50 percent to 65 percent. In humans, it’s 80 percent.

      Interesting statistic I would like to use later.

    6. According to the social-brain theory, it was this need to understand social dynamics — not the need to find food or navigate terrain — that spurred and rewarded the evolution of bigger and bigger primate brains.

      After reading all that, what they're saying is that we select friends who can understand the social construct so they can become part of the group of the whole in order to survive. I think that is what they are saying.

    7. The theory, called the Machiavellian-intelligence or social-brain theory, holds that we rise from a lineage in which both individual and group success hinge on balancing the need to work with others with the need to hold our own — or better — amid the nested groups and subgroups we are part of.

      A theory to explain why we hang out with certain people over others.

    8. The dorsal areas play a strong role in vision and space and help us recognize other peoples’ intentions; ventral areas figure heavily in language, processing sounds, facial recognition, emotion, music enjoyment and social drive. In an embryo’s first weeks, Galaburda says, patterning genes normally moderate “a sort of turf war going on between these two areas,” with each trying to expand. The results help determine our relative strengths in these areas. We see them in our S.A.T.

      This essentially is explaining what the gene deletion triggers in the brain to make children with Williams act the way that they do

    9. Here they had these great cognitive deficits. Yet they spoke with the most ardent and delightful animation and color.”

      It's a weird tradeoff to speak well about something, but to have a hard time putting together a simple puzzle.

    10. people with Williams can have trouble deepening relationships. This saddens and frustrates them. They know no strangers but can claim few friends.

      This is unfortunate.

    11. Many with Williams have so vague a concept of space, for instance, that even as adults they will fail at six-piece jigsaw puzzles, easily get lost, draw like a preschooler and struggle to replicate a simple T or X shape built with a half-dozen building blocks.
    12. They told the group of the genetic accident underlying Williams, the heart and vascular problems that eventually kill many who have it, their intense enjoyment of talk, music and story, their frustration in trying to make friends, the slights and cruelties they suffered growing up, their difficulty understanding the world. When they finished, most of the bikers were in tears.

      This sounds like a particularly odd condition. I should try to look into this more.

  20. Jan 2016
    1. number of psychopathic attributes were actually more common in business leaders than in so-called disturbed criminals—attributes such as superficial charm, egocentricity, persuasiveness, lack of empathy, independence, and focus.

      cool

    2. Psychopaths, without batting an eye, are perfectly happy to chuck the fat guy over the side.

      Yet another interesting, study.

    3. More than 70 percent of those who scored high on the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale correctly picked out the handkerchief-smuggling associate, compared with just 30 percent of the low scorers. Zeroing in on weakness may well be part of a serial killer's tool kit. But it may also come in handy at the airport.

      This is an interesting result for an interesting study.

    4. detractors

      a person who regards to certain people as little worth

    5. recalcitrance

      obstinately defiant of authority

    6. Such a profile allows those who present with these traits to do what they like when they like, completely unfazed by the social, moral or legal consequences of their actions.

      Good.