Robert Whitaker on the causes of mental illness.

Levine: So mental illness disability rates have doubled since 1987 and increased six-fold since 1955. And at the same time, psychiatric drug use greatly increased in the 1950s and 1960s, then skyrocketed after 1988 when Prozac hit the market, so now antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs alone gross more than $25 billion annually in the U.S. But as you know, correlation isn’t causation. What makes you feel that the increase in psychiatric drug use is a big part of the reason for the increase in mental illness?

Whitaker: The rise in the disability rate due to mental illness is simply the starting point for the book. The disability numbers don’t prove anything, but, given that this astonishing increase has occurred in lockstep with our society’s increased use of psychiatric medications, the numbers do raise an obvious question. Could our drug-based paradigm of care, for some unforeseen reason, be fueling the increase in disability rates? And in order to investigate that question, you need to look at two things. First, do psychiatric medications alter the long-term course of mental disorders for the better, or for the worse? Do they increase the likelihood that a person will be able to function well over the long-term, or do they increase the likelihood that a person will end up on disability? Second, is it possible that a person with a mild disorder may have a bad reaction to an initial drug, and that puts the person onto a path that can lead to long-term disability. For instance, a person with a mild bout of depression may have a manic reaction to an antidepressant, and then is diagnosed with bipolar disorder and put on a cocktail of medications. Does that happen with any frequency? Could that be an iatrogenic [physician-caused illness] pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability rates?

So that’s the starting point for the book. What I then did was look at what the scientific literature — a literature that now extends over 50 years — has to say about those questions. And the literature is remarkably consistent in the story it tells. Although psychiatric medications may be effective over the short term, they increase the likelihood that a person will become chronically ill over the long term. I was startled to see this picture emerge over and over again as I traced the long-term outcomes literature for schizophrenia, anxiety, depression, and bipolar illness. In addition, the scientific literature shows that many patients treated for a milder problem will worsen in response to a drug– say have a manic episode after taking an antidepressant — and that can lead to a new and more severe diagnosis like bipolar disorder. That is a well-documented iatrogenic pathway that is helping to fuel the increase in the disability numbers.

Now there may be various cultural factors contributing to the increase in the number of disabled mentally ill in our society. But the outcomes literature — and this really is a tragic story — clearly shows that our drug-based paradigm of care is a primary cause.

“Transocean Deepwater Horizon Oil Rig Explosion Shows New Risks”

Got it. From the article:

The investigation will focus on human error and mechanical malfunction, says Mr. Pinon, adding that such advanced rigs “need a lot of tender loving care to operate.”

“We’ve had hurricanes and fires on the rigs, but I can’t remember that we ever had this type of explosion and definitely not on this type of rig,” Plaquemines Parish president, Billy Nungesser, told the New York Times.

While hurricanes often batter oil rigs, explosions and fires are rare. In 1988, the Piper Alpha offshore rig exploded, killing 167 people. And in 2001, the Petrobas 36 platform off Brazil’s coast also exploded, killing 11 workers.

“Rigs are some of the safest places to be … which is what makes the explosion on the oil rig in the Gulf all the more unexpected and means it was likely one that happened very fast,” reports CNN’s Ali Velshi, who was once evacuated from an oil rig.

[The findings] highlight a specific ecological role for whales in the oceans “other than their charisma”, he says.

Story here.

Sounds a lot like Fred Hoyle here:

Alien life, he will suggest, is almost certain to exist in many other parts of the universe: not just in planets, but perhaps in the centre of stars or even floating in interplanetary space.

Nice work if you can get it. Hoyle could never get any recognition for similar ideas, but coming from Hawking of course they are oh so respectable.

Use this to calculate the number of chickens you’d need to bring to the doctor in the GOP’s new Chickens for Checkups barter economy health care plan.

…Here’s Atrios the economist on the barter economy and why we don’t have one:

All joking aside, there’s a reason we no longer have a barter economy. It’s tremendously inefficient. Transactions require a “mutual coincidence of wants,” meaning I have to have something you actually want to have in exchange for my heart surgery. Many goods are highly indivisible - can’t trade half a live chicken - making precise pricing difficult.

This guy goes off in a hell of a riff about what the culture of the counter-cultural movement has become.

A snippet:

What I’m getting instead is the sense that we’ve hyped ourselves for a letdown, that what passes for the latter-day counterculture has traded its prankster roots for something resembling, umm, a culture, a culture complete with ritual, status, fashion, and prophecy.  The definition of counterculture accepted into the official lexicon generally has something to do with an oppositional culture rejecting the dominant culture.  Etymologically, however (and historically, for progenitors of the term are known to have said as much), counterculture means exactly what it states — the opposite of culture, all culture.  Despite McKenna’s ominous admonition that “culture is not your friend,” it’s unlikely that culture is necessarily your foe.  It’s just that, fundamentally, culture is an illusion of security, predictability, identity, and order, and is therefore inherently false.  Culture is useful, of course, and a constant human compulsion, but culture is an inevitable narrowing into a fixed perspective.  Counterculture, then, is the opposite of any such reduction of reality — Mayan or otherwise — from anything other than unbounded creative potential.  Counterculture, in other words, is the reveling chaos of relentless novelty that exists outside our social constructions, and as soon as we pretend to know what’s happening, it ceases to be counterculture and immediately becomes culture.

Dude’s name is Samuel A. Culvert and he’s also a PhD in clinical psychology. His 2008 WSJ article ”Get Rid of the Performance Review” caused some waves and so he wrote a book with a cheeky website.

This other guy, Frank Nikols, wrote an article in 1997 for Corporate University Review (pp.54-59) called “Don’t Redesign Your Company’s Performance Appraisal System, Scrap it.” Here’s his follow-up paper “Now What? What to do after you scrap the performance appraisal system” (pdf file).

I guess this heretical idea has been around a while. There’s a footnote in the Nikols’ pdf file for a “classic” article from the Harvard Business Review, Douglas Macgregor’s “An Uneasy Look at Performance Appraisals”, from 1957.

Here’s a fun bit from from Culver’s cheeky website:

I’ll never forget Oct 20th, 2008. That’s when the Wall Street Journal printed my exposé of performance reviews. It was a high-visibility article – and the response was electric. The article was the top-viewed piece on the Journal’s online site for days, produced a thousand letters to the editor, a heated debate on the site (with plenty of name-calling), was referenced on more than another hundred websites, generated scores of requests to reprint the article in its entirety and provoked a large number of requests for radio and TV interviews. View it for yourself. Overnight I became a rock star.

I also couldn’t have designed a better experiment to gauge how people feel about performance reviews. It was as if I had enlisted a giant focus group on a topic that everyone feels strongly about and few see much to gain by speaking up. More than 80 percent were supportive – and many of them reacted as if the article had been therapeutic, giving voice to the anger and fear they had long felt.

I sympathize. It was a wow moment for me.

…Here’s another book in the same vein…”Abolishing Performance Appraisals” by Tom Coens and Mary Jenkins, 2000.

…and some Stanford professor saying the same thing. Here’s a successful model:

To Deming’s point, there is one organization I work with — a high tech firm with about 250 employees — that eliminated formal reviews except when people are being considered for a promotion or when they are having serious performance problems and are placed “on plan” (i.e., where the choice is either shape up or be fired). They have about ten different levels in the organization, and everyone at the same level gets the same pay and same sized bonus.  And they have been emphasizing more frequent and lower stakes feedback instead. 

Saw this linked on kos: endurance athelete needs to go crazy in order to win.

Yet Robic does not excel on physical talent alone. He is not always the fastest competitor (he often makes up ground by sleeping 90 minutes or less a day), nor does he possess any towering physiological gift. On rare occasions when he permits himself to be tested in a laboratory, his ability to produce power and transport oxygen ranks on a par with those of many other ultra-endurance athletes. He wins for the most fundamental of reasons: he refuses to stop.

In a consideration of Robic, three facts are clear: he is nearly indefatigable, he is occasionally nuts, and the first two facts are somehow connected. The question is, How? Does he lose sanity because he pushes himself too far, or does he push himself too far because he loses sanity? Robic is the latest and perhaps most intriguing embodiment of the old questions: What happens when the human body is pushed to the limits of its endurance? Where does the breaking point lie? And what happens when you cross the line?

As linked to in this grab-bag post at the great orange satan Daily Kos, this is a strongly worded plea from an athiest for everyone to just get off his back. Money quote:

You know what would be really great? If all the fantastic (and they are fantastic) liberal/left Christians would spend five minutes a day writing angry letters to the Christian right wing about how unchristian they are instead of complaining to atheists about how much bad press you all are getting from the overt bad actions of your co-religionists.

Ouch! This Catholic Church implosion has started to singe even athiests standing too close to it.

And this amazing piece of citizen journalism, “Anatomy of a thrilling GOP disaster“, is just political writing at its most fun to read. Money quote (last lines of piece):

This was a complete GOP disaster. It was a thrill to be part of it.

In true Gonzo style.

This quote from media analyst blog Atrios’ Eschaton is a good one:

…we live in the accountability-free era, where nobody could have predicted except those who did and were right for the wrong reasons. Those who didn’t were wrong for the right reasons and are therefore still Very Serious People in good standing.

It is intended as a sarcastic comment about how the cheerleaders of the Iraq War and the financial crisis still have jobs in many cases, and in many other cases they have actually failed upward - while those who predicted the crisis somehow still remain outsiders.

That’s how politics in science works too. For instance, Fred Hoyle’s ideas are being appropriated under different guises, while his name is still mud. He was right for the wrong reasons, but once his stuff is rebranded, it can safely be used by establishment figures who were wrong for the right reasons. And so it goes.

…a study by University of Michigan paleontologist Tomasz Baumiller and colleagues finds that sea urchins have been preying on marine animals known as crinoids for more than 200 million years and suggests that such interactions drove one type of crinoid — the sea lily — to develop the ability to escape.

“After 200 million years of being eaten by these sonsofbitches, yeah, we adapted. You’re goddamn right we did.”

Can self-loathing be far behind?

Earlier studies have shown that apes and other mammals can be aware that they do not know the answer to a test. However, Call claims that the doubt apparently revealed by his trials represents a subtle thought process not previously seen beyond humans.

New Scientist phrases it as ‘Apes found suffering self-doubt’. There’s a real existential horror to this discovery.

Some water and a spinning table was basically all that was employed to start cracking this mystery.

Still doesn’t explain why it doesn’t occur on more planets, or even Saturn’s own south pole.

Thousands of photos of students taken remotely … Classic!!

Of course to GMO-friendly New Scientist magazine, the thoughtful, lucid, data-rich folks running the pro-organic Rodale Institute are an unhinged, irrational people.

They sampled 27 exoplanets that transit their home stars from our perspective and found that 6 of the 27 orbited in a retrograde motion, opposite to its parent stars rotational direction. That’s 22% of the sampled stars. Will be interesting when they can determine stars orbit by other means other than transits.

“This is a real bomb we are dropping into the field of exoplanets,” said Geneva Observatory astronomer Amaury Triaud…

Ya, I’d say so. More so, though, a bomb-dropping in the field of planetary formation as well.

Around these parts, we are used to disagreeing with that mechanist reductionist dog Richard Dawkins. Liked him a little better as bulldog-athiest-with-a-camera-crew, but it’s still easy to dislike him on style. But whereas I’m sure the Pope won’t be arrested, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say right on dude.

I have most certainly reported on the therapeutic uses of Psilocybin, more specifically the study from Johns Hopkins University, here at GS. But to see it get positive treatment from such a mainstream news organization, well, awesome.

Despite early positive results, researchers are cognizant of overcoming the negative stereotype often conferred upon the psychedelic movement’s previous incarnation. To that end, the drugs are administered using strict safety protocols. Researchers are also hopeful that with other new age trends like yoga and meditation becoming mainstream, acceptance of psychedelic medical treatment isn’t far behind.

Well, perhaps more rational open-minded discourse from mainstream news orgs will help with that.

I see that the New York Times also has an article on this, much more in depth.

Crittercam: Sea Lion 1, Octopus 0.

The article is technically correct, but kind of misleading and reductionist in its message, which is what I have become all too used to in mainstream reporting.

“We found that in those patients who experienced the phenomenon, blood carbon-dioxide levels were significantly higher than in those who did not,” said team member Zalika Klemenc-Ketis, of the University of Maribor in Slovenia.

So they basically proved that NDE’s are linked to the brain thinking it is….near death. Bravo, guys. According to the authors of the article, they studied patients undergoing cardiac arrest. A good place to look for low CO2 levels. But as there is this hiccup in the work:

Still, not all scientists are convinced: “The one difficulty in arguing that CO2 is the cause is that in cardiac arrests, everybody has high CO2 but only 10 percent have NDEs,” said neuropsychiatrist Peter Fenwick of the Institute of Psychiatry at Kings College London.

What’s more, in heart attack patients, Fenwick said, “there is no coherent cerebral activity which could support consciousness, let alone an experience with the clarity of an NDE.”

So it has been shown that some people have these experiences, and doesn’t even broach the subject of the mechanism in the brain that causes such lucid and powerful experiences.How about a follow up article on Peter Fenwick or Rick Strassman’s research? Maybe a bit too gonzo for National Geographic…..

Suggested starting point for keep-you-up-all-night reading on NDE’s. More.

Pluto could get be getting more friends in its dwarf status. Meet the Potato Plan. In this case, Pluto would actually be close to top dog in its class, being the second largest dwarf planet known. Good for you, little guy.

But scientists at the Australian National University say they’ve redefined classification rules, which means the number of dwarf planets must rise to about 50.

And here’s a tip-of-my-hat to the scientists who went against tradition and demoted Pluto.

Pluto was controversially demoted from the solar system A-list in 2006 after it was found to lack the fundamental scientific standards required to be a planet.

Yes, controversially, but accurately. If only more cherished scientific paradigms would be challenged like lonely Pluto’s status was….

Anybody’s guess on what causes this eclipse: Exploded planet? Empire’s Battlecruiser? Probably not that exciting, but cool nonetheless.

Whatever it is, it’s big. Here’s the wiki page to the star, Epsilon Aurigae.

Deam Kamen shows off a prosthetic arm he created while working with DARPA.

Handily named “Luke”, though Anakin would have been more accurate.

Pretty self explanatory article. Up until now, the only oxygen-free lifeforms were single-celled bacterium. That ante has now been upped to multi-cellular life. Sweet.

“We did not think we could find any animal living there. We are talking about extreme conditions - full of salt, with no oxygen.”

Considering the implications of creatures which can exist without oxygen, she said that greater study of animal-microbe interactions in the extreme environment of Earth’s oceans could help answer questions about the possibility of life existing on other planets with different atmospheres.

Identified via two-million-year-old fossils, a new human ancestor dubbed Australopithecus sediba may be the “key transitional species” between the apelike australopithecines—and the first Homo, or human, species, according to a new study.

Dude has this to say-

…that [Australopithecus sediba] may very well be the Rosetta stone that unlocks our understanding of the genus Homo.

New discoveries just keep barreling in. Is this earth-shattering or ho-hum? I’m not sure any more.

Previously their sounds had been considered a simple gesture of submission, but the new study has allowed researchers to identify exactly which individual hyena makes each giggle, and the circumstances in which they do so.

The assassins who killed Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh at a five-star Dubai hotel in January made one mistake: their work was too perfect. The hit team took elaborate steps to make the Hamas military commander’s cause of death appear natural. His body was found lying in bed unclothed, his pants folded neatly over a chair and a bottle of heart medicine on the nightstand beside him. There were no bruises on the corpse, and no sign of a struggle in the room. The door was even chain-locked from inside. But the scene was so immaculate that when Dubai police finally entered the room, after his wife complained she couldn’t reach him on his cell phone, “they were struck by how neat everything was,” in the words of a foreign law-enforcement official who is close to the investigation, and provided fresh details to NEWSWEEK on condition of anonymity. “It made them suspicious.”

You mean these kinds of black ops don’t just happen in the movies?

the therapeutically active components in marijuana - the cannabinoids - appear to be remarkably non-toxic to healthy cells and organs. This notable lack of toxicity is arguably because cannabinoids mimic compounds our bodies naturally produce - so-called endocannabinoids - that are pivotal for maintaining proper health and homeostasis.

In fact, in recent years scientists have discovered that the production of endocannabinoids (and their interaction with the cannabinoid receptors located throughout the body) play a key role in the regulation of proper appetite, anxiety control, blood pressure, bone mass, reproduction, and motor coordination, among other biological functions.

Just how important is this system in maintaining our health? Here’s a clue: In studies of mice genetically bred to lack a proper endocannabinoid system the most common result is premature death.

Armed with these findings, a handful of scientists have speculated that the root cause of certain disease conditions - including migraine, fibromyalgia, irritable bowel syndrome, and other functional conditions alleviated by clinical cannabis - may be an underlying endocannabinoid deficiency.

Now THAT’S scientific heresy! Whoo!

20 five-second movies and Planet F-Bomb. Plus, society confronts it’s disintegration with Kids Do Scarface, complete with backstory.