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Tag Archives: Psychology
An 81-year-old brain doctor’s 7 ‘hard rules’ for keeping your memory ‘sharp as a whip’
Like any other part of your body, your brain needs daily exercise. Neglecting your brain health can make you vulnerable to degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia.
As a neuroscientist, I’ve spent decades guiding patients with memory problems through brain-enhancing habits and exercises — many of which I practice, too.
Here are seven brain rules I follow to keep my memory sharp as a whip at 81 years old:
1. Choose fiction when you can.
You can learn a lot from non-fiction works, but they are often organized in ways that allow you to skip around based on personal interests and previous familiarity with the subject.
Fiction, on the other hand, requires you to exercise your memory, as you proceed from beginning to end and retain a variety of details, characters and plots.
Incidentally, I’ve noticed over my years as a neuropsychiatrist that people with early dementia, as one of the first signs of the encroaching illness, often stop reading novels.
2. Never leave an art museum without testing your memory.
“Western Motel” by Edward Hopper 1957. Oil on canvas, 30 1/4 x 50 1/8 inches (77.8 x 128.3 cm). Located in the Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, USA. (Photo by VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images)
Fine Art | Getty
My favorite painting to do visualization exercises with is Edward Hopper’s “Western Motel,” which depicts a woman sitting in a sunlit motel bedroom.
Start by intently studying the details until you can see them in your mind’s eye. Then describe the painting while looking away from it.
Illustration: Olivia de Recat for CNBC Make It
Did you include the tiny clock on the bedside table? The gooseneck lamp? The piece of clothing on the chair at the lower right of the painting? Can you recall the colors and the composition of the room?
You can do this with any piece of art to boost your memory.
3. Keep naps under 90 minutes.
Naps lasting anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour and a half, between 1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m., have been shown to increase later recall for information encoded prior to the nap.
Several studies have also found that naps can compensate for poor sleep at night. If you struggle with insomnia, a mid-afternoon nap can boost memory performance.
Over the years, I’ve trained myself to nap for exactly half an hour. Some people I know have learned to nap for only 15 minutes, and then wake up refreshed and reinvigorated.
4. No party is complete without brain games.
My favorite activity is “20 Questions,” where one person (the questioner) leaves the room and the remaining players select a person, place or thing. The questioner can ask up to 20 questions to guess what the group decided.
Success depends on the questioner’s ability to keep clearly in mind all of the answers and mentally eliminating possible choices on the basis of the answers.
Bridge and chess are also great for exercising your memory: In order to do well, you have to evaluate previous games, while also considering the future consequences of your decisions in the past and present.
5. Eat brain foods.
Dr. Uma Naidoo, a nutritional psychiatrist at Harvard Medical School, has a great acronym for a BRAIN FOODS:
- B: Berries and beans
- R: Rainbow colors of fruits and vegetables
- A: Antioxidants
- I: Include lean proteins and plant-based proteins
- N: Nuts
- F: Fiber-rich foods and fermented foods
- O: Oils
- O: Omega-rich foods
- D: Dairy
- S: Spices
And good news for chocoholics (like me): A 2020 study found that cocoa flavonoids, the ingredients in dark chocolate, can enhance episodic memory in healthy young adults.
6. Use images for hard-to-remember things.
My wife’s dog, Leah, is a Schipperke (pronounced “SKIP-er-kee”). It is a distinctive name, but I’d have the hardest time remembering it. So to finally be able to answer “What kind of breed is that?” at the dog park, I formed the image of a small sailboat (small dog) with a burly skipper holding a huge key.
Get in the habit of converting anything which you find hard to remember into a wild, bizarre or otherwise attention grabbing image.
7. Don’t sit on the couch all day.
One recent study of 82,872 volunteers found that participants 80 years or older who engaged in moderate to high level of physical activity were at lower risk for dementia, compared with inactive adults aged 50 to 69 years.
Even just a shift from sedentary non-activity (prolonged sitting, a “never walk when you can drive” attitude), to active movement (standing, climbing stairs, walking a mile daily) made a difference.
Housework has also been linked to higher attention and memory scores and better sensory and motor function in older adults.
Dr. Richard Restak, MD, is a neuroscientist and author of 20 books on the human brain, including “The Complete Guide to Memory: The Science of Strengthening Your Mind” and “Think Smart: A Neuroscientist’s Prescription for Improving Your Brain’s Performance.” Currently, he is the Clinical Professor of Neurology at George Washington Hospital University School of Medicine and Health Sciences. In 1992, Dr. Restak was a recipient of The Chicago Neurosurgical Center’s “Decade Of The Brain Award.”
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MIT neuroscientist shares 4 things she never does to avoid ‘brain fog and forgetfulness’
The alarm goes off. You get dressed, grab your coffee, and head to work. But by lunchtime, you start to feel disorganized. You reread emails because you lack focus and mental clarity.
There’s nothing worse than brain fog. In addition to stress and lack of sleep, it can be caused by the immune system creating an inflammatory response in the brain. This can lead to symptoms like poor concentration and memory, or difficulty making decisions.
As a neuroscientist, I study the causes of brain fog and forgetfulness. To avoid them, here are four things I never do:
1. I never let my body get tense for too long.
Even if you think you’re relaxed, your body may be physically tense (e.g., stiff neck, back or shoulder pain). This can be a result of stress from things like unfinished tasks or looming deadlines.
So when I notice that my body is tense, I immediately do an exercise called “box breathing”:
- Inhale through your nose as you slowly count to four seconds.
- Hold your breath for a count of four seconds.
- Exhale through your nose, releasing all the air from your lungs, as you slowly count to four seconds.
- Hold your breath for a count of four seconds.
- Repeat for at least four rounds.
Box breathing is a simple way to help calm your brain. Studies also show that it can reduce levels of cortisol, which is the chemical produced when the body is under stress.
2. I never use screens one hour before bedtime.
As tempting as it might be to scroll through Instagram or watch TV before bedtime, these activities can be too stimulating for the brain.
Instead, I try to read a book before turning out the lights. If that doesn’t help me sleep, I do a “relaxation body scan,” squeezing and releasing muscles — starting at my toes and all the way up to my head.
Ideally, we need about eight hours of sleep a night. More than that can lead to a depressed mood, and less than that doesn’t give the brain enough time to rest and reset.
3. I never load up on glucose.
If your gut isn’t healthy, your brainpower can falter, too. I strengthen my gut-brain axis by maintaining a diet rich in hydrating foods, healthy fats and digestible protein.
Most important of all, I try to avoid sugar. Your brain uses glucose (sugar) as fuel, but refined carbohydrates like high fructose corn syrup found in sodas are not good sources of fuel. Your brain gets a burst of too much glucose, then too little.
This can lead to irritability, tiredness, mental confusion, and impaired judgment.
I also eat foods rich in magnesium — whole grains, leafy greens, dried beans and legumes — to help regulate my mood and sleep cycle. And I make sure to have my last caffeinated drink of the day before 10:00 a.m.
4. I never go a day without meditating.
I meditate for at least 12 minutes a day.
Doing this at nighttime can help mitigate brain fog the next day:
- Remove all distractions from your room.
- Sit or lie down in a comfortable position.
- Take deep breaths.
- Quietly observe your thoughts.
- Whatever thoughts come, simply acknowledge them return your focus to your breathing.
If you don’t like to meditate, you can do a mindful activity such as cooking or taking a quiet walk.
I also recommend coming up with a mantra that you can say in the morning, like: “Brain fog is a state of mind. I will go to bed early tonight and be fine tomorrow.”
By articulating your goals to yourself out loud, you can start to be more intentional about changing your habits. And through that repetition, your brain and body will start to follow suit.
Dr. Tara Swart Bieber is a neuroscientist, medical doctor and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan. She is the author of “The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain,” and hosts the podcast Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara. She works with leaders to help them achieve mental resilience and peak brain performance, improving their ability to manage stress, regulate emotions and retain information. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
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New RSV vaccines may soon put an end to rough seasons
CNN
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It’s shaping up to be a severe season for respiratory syncytial virus infections – one of the worst some doctors say they can remember. But even as babies struggling to breathe fill hospital beds across the United States, there may be a light ahead: After decades of disappointment, four new RSV vaccines may be nearing review by the US Food and Drug Administration, and more than a dozen others are in testing.
There’s also hope around a promising long-acting injection designed to be given right after birth to protect infants from the virus for as long as six months. In a recent clinical trial, the antibody shot was 75% effective at heading off RSV infections that required medical attention.
Experts say the therapies look so promising, they could end bad RSV seasons as we know them.
And the relief could come soon: Dr. Ashish Jha, who leads the White House Covid-19 Response Task Force, told CNN that he’s “hopeful” there will be an RSV vaccine by next fall.
Charlotte Brown jumped at the chance to enroll her own son, a squawky, active 10-month-old named James, in one of the vaccine trials this summer.
“As soon as he qualified, we were like ‘absolutely, we are in,’ ” Brown said.
Babies have to be at least 6 months old to enter the trial, which is testing a vaccine developed at the National Institutes of Health – the result of decades of scientific research.
Brown is a pediatrician who cares for hospitalized children at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville, and she sees the ravages of RSV firsthand. A recent patient was in the back of her mind when she was signing up James for the study.
“I took care of a baby who was only a few months older than him and had had nine days of fever and was just absolutely pitiful and puny,” she said. Brown said his family felt helpless. “And I was like, ‘this is why we’re doing it. This single patient is why we’re doing this.’ “
Even before this year’s surge, RSV was the leading cause of infant hospitalizations in the US. The virus infects the lower lungs, where it causes a hacking cough and may lead to severe complications like pneumonia and inflammation of the tiny airways in the lungs called bronchiolitis.
Worldwide, RSV causes about 33 million infections in children under the age of 5 and hospitalizes 3.6 million annually. Nearly a quarter-million young children die each year from complications of their infections.
RSV also preys on seniors, leading to an estimated 159,000 hospitalizations and about 10,000 deaths a year in adults 65 and over, a burden roughly on par with influenza.
Despite this heavy toll, doctors haven’t had any new tools to head off RSV for more than two decades. The last therapy approved was in 1998. The monoclonal antibody, Synagis, is given monthly during RSV season to protect preemies and other high-risk babies.
The hunt for an effective way to protect against RSV stalled for decades after two children died in a disastrous vaccine trial in the 1960s.
That study tested a vaccine made with an RSV virus that had been chemically treated to render it inert and mixed with an ingredient called alum, to wake up the immune system and help it respond.
It was tested at clinical trial sites in the US between 1966 and 1968.
At first, everything looked good. The vaccine was tested in animals, who tolerated it well, and then given to children, who also appeared to respond well.
“Unfortunately, that fall, when RSV season started, many of the children that were vaccinated required hospitalization and got more severe RSV disease than what would have normally occurred,” said Steven Varga, a professor of microbiology and immunology at the University of Iowa, who has been studying RSV for more than 20 years and is developing a nanoparticle vaccine against the virus.
A study published on the trial found that 80% of the vaccinated children who caught RSV later required hospitalization, compared with only 5% of the children who got a placebo. Two of the babies who had participated in the trial died.
The outcomes of the trial were a seismic shock to vaccine science. Efforts to develop new vaccines and treatments against RSV halted as researchers tried to untangle what went so wrong.
“The original vaccine studies were so devastatingly bad. They didn’t understand immunology well in those days, so everybody said ‘oh no, this ain’t gonna work.’ And it really was like it stopped things cold for 30, 40 years,” said Dr. Aaron Glatt, an infectious disease specialist at Mount Sinai South Nassau in New York.
Regulators re-evaluated the guardrails around clinical trials, putting new safety measures into place.
“It is in fact, in many ways, why we have some of the things that we have in place today to monitor vaccine safety,” Varga said.
Researchers at the clinical trial sites didn’t communicate with each other, Varga said, and so the US Food and Drug Administration put the publicly accessible Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System into place. Now, when an adverse event is reported at one clinical trial site, other sites are notified.
Another problem turned out to be how the vaccine was made.
Proteins are three-dimensional structures. They are made of chains of building blocks called amino acids that fold into complex shapes, and their shapes determine how they work.
In the failed RSV vaccine trial, the chemical the researchers used to deactivate the virus denatured its proteins – essentially flattening them.
“Now you have a long sheet of acids but no more beautiful shapes,” said Ulla Buchholz, chief of the RNA Viruses Section at the National Institutes of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“Everything that the immune system needs to form neutralizing antibodies that can block and block attachment and entry of this virus to the cell had been destroyed in that vaccine,” said Buchholz, who designed the RSV vaccine for toddlers that’s being tested at Vanderbilt and other US sites.
In the 1960s trial, the kids still made antibodies to the flattened viral proteins, but they were distorted. When the actual virus came along, these antibodies didn’t work as intended. Not only did they fail to recognize or block the virus, they triggered a powerful misdirected immune response that made the children much sicker, a phenomenon called antibody-dependent enhancement of disease.
The investigators hadn’t spotted the enhancement in animal studies, Varga says, because the vaccinated animals weren’t later challenged with the live virus.
“So of course, we require now extensive animal testing of new vaccines before they’re ever put into humans, again, for that very reason of making sure that there aren’t early signs that a vaccine will be problematic,” Varga said.
About 10 years ago, a team of researchers at the NIH – some of the same investigators who developed the first Covid-19 vaccines – reported what would turn out to be a pivotal advance.
They had isolated the structure of the virus’s F-protein, the site that lets it dock onto human cells. Normally, the F-protein flips back and forth, changing shapes after it attaches to a cell. The NIH researchers figured out to how freeze the F-protein into the shape it takes before it fuses with a cell.
This protein, when locked into place, allows the immune system to recognize the virus in the form it’s in when it first enters the body – and develop strong antibodies against it.
“The companies coming forward now, for the most part, are taking advantage of that discovery,” said Dr. Phil Dormitzer, a senior vice president of vaccine development at GlaxoSmithKline. “And now we have this new generation of vaccine candidates that perform far better than the old generation.”
The first vaccines up for FDA review will be given to adults: seniors and pregnant woman. Vaccination in pregnancy is meant to ultimately protect newborns – a group particularly vulnerable to the virus – via antibodies that cross the placenta.
Vaccines for children are a bit farther behind in development but moving through the pipeline, too.
Four companies have RSV vaccines for adults in the final phases of human trials: Pfizer and GSK are testing vaccines for pregnant women as well as seniors. Janssen and Bavarian Nordic are developing shots for seniors.
Pfizer and GSK use protein subunit vaccines, a more traditional kind of vaccine technology. Two other companies build on innovations made during the pandemic: Janssen – the vaccine division of Johnson & Johnson – relies on an adenoviral vector, the same kind of system that’s used in its Covid-19 vaccine, and Moderna has a vaccine for RSV in Phase 2 trials that uses mRNA technology.
So far, early results shared by some companies are promising. Janssen, Pfizer and GSK each appear effective at preventing infections in adults for the first RSV season after the vaccine.
In an August news release, Annaliesa Anderson, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer of Vaccine Research and Development, said she was “delighted” with the results. The company plans to submit its data to the FDA for approval this fall.
GSK has also wrapped up its Phase 3 trial for seniors. It recently presented the results at a medical conference, but full data hasn’t been peer reviewed or published in a medical journal. Early results show that this vaccine is 83% effective at preventing disease in the lower lungs of adults 60 and older. It appears to be even more protective – 94% – for severe RSV disease in those over 70 and those with underlying medical conditions.
“We are very pleased with these results,” Dormitzer told CNN. He said the company was moving “with all due haste” to get its results to the FDA for review.
“We’re confident enough that we’ve started manufacturing the actual commercial launch materials. So we have the bulk vaccine actually in the refrigerator, ready to supply when we are licensed,” he said.
Even as the company applies for licensure, GSK’s trial will continue for two more RSV seasons. Half the group getting the vaccine will be followed with no additional shots, while the other group will get annual boosters. The aim is to see which approach is most protective to guide future vaccination strategies.
Janssen’s vaccine for older adults appears to be about 70% to 80% effective in clinical trials so far, the company announced in December.
In a study on Pfizer’s vaccine for pregnant women published in the New England Journal of Medicine this year, the company reported that the mothers enrolled in the study made antibodies to the vaccine and that these antibodies crossed the placenta and were detected in umbilical cord blood just after birth.
The vaccines for pregnant women are meant to get newborns through their first RSV season. But not all newborns will benefit from those. Most maternal antibodies are passed to baby in the third trimester, so preemies may not be protected, even if mom gets the vaccine.
For vulnerable infants and those whose mothers decline to be vaccinated, Dr. Helen Chu, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, says the long-acting antibody shot for newborns, called nirsevimab, should cover them for the first six months of life. She expects it to be a “game-changer.”
That shot, which has been developed by AstraZeneca, was recently recommended for approval in the European Union. It has not yet been approved in the United States.
The field is so close to a new approval that public health officials say they’ve been asked to study up on the data.
Chu, who is also a member of an RSV study group of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, a panel that advises the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on its vaccine recommendations, says her group has started to evaluate the new vaccines – a sign that an FDA review is just around the corner.
No companies have yet announced that process is underway. FDA reviews can take several months, and then there are typically discussions and votes by FDA and CDC advisory groups before vaccines are made available.
“We’ve been working on this for several months now to start reviewing the data,” Chu said. “So I think this is imminent.”
Watching this year’s RSV season unfold, Brown, the pediatrician who enrolled her son in the vaccine trial for toddlers, says progress can’t come fast enough.
“The hospital is surging. We’re not drowning the way some states are. I mean, Connecticut, South Carolina, North Carolina, they’re really drowning. But our numbers are huge, and our services are so busy,” she says.
Brown says her son is mostly healthy. He doesn’t have any of the risks for severe RSV she sees with some of her patients, so she was happy to have a way to help others.
And while it’s far too early to say whether the vaccine James is helping to test will prove to be effective, the trial was unblinded last week, and Brown learned that her son was in the group that got the active vaccine, not the placebo
He has done well through this heavy season of illness, she says. The NIH-sponsored study they participated in is scheduled to be completed next year.
The vaccine, which is made with a live but very weak version of virus, is given through a couple of squirts up the nose, so there are no needles. The hardest part for squirmy James, she said, was being held still.
“If we can do anything to move science forward and help another child, like, sorry, James. You had to have your blood drawn, but it absolutely was worth it.”
Using sound to take the terror out of nightmares
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CNN
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Heart pounding, I sit bolt upright in bed, flushed, sweaty and utterly panicked. My brain has snatched me from a nightmare — a dream so alarming I wake up.
I’ve only had one or two such night terrors, but for people suffering from trauma, post-traumatic stress disorder, depression or anxiety, frightening dreams may come night after night, ruining their sleep and ultimately their health.
Visions from nightmares can also creep like dark shadows into the light of the next day, disrupting a person’s ability to focus and think. Mood plummets, and anxiety rises. Days may be filled with an intense fear of falling asleep and trigger yet another terrifying dream.
Such symptoms can lead to a diagnosis of nightmare disorder, a sleep condition that affects about 4% of adults, according to the American Academy of Sleep Medicine.
Treatment can include stress reduction, counseling, gradual desensitization and medications, but the gold standard is imagery rehearsal therapy, a form of cognitive behavioral training that teaches people to reimagine their nightmares with positive endings. Still, not everyone with nightmare disorder responds to the treatment, experts say.
Now a new study has added a twist — playing a sound the person’s memory has associated with a more positive outcome during REM (rapid eye movement) or the dream stage of sleep. The result was a fourfold reduction in nightmares over the basic therapy alone.
“As far as I know, this is the first clinical and therapeutic study that uses target memory activation to accelerate and enhance therapy,” said lead author Dr. Lampros Perogamvros, a psychiatrist at the Sleep Laboratory of the Geneva University Hospitals and the University of Geneva.
“This is a promising development. It does appear that adding a well-timed sound during REM sleep augments the effect of image rehearsal therapy … which is a standard and perhaps one of the most effective non-pharmacologic therapies at this time,” said Dr. Timothy Morgenthaler, lead author of the most recent American Academy of Sleep Medicine guidelines on nightmares.
“The result should be replicated,” said Morgenthaler, who was not involved in the study. “But I was a bit excited at this new possibility.”
Imagery rehearsal therapy has four basic steps that can be taught in one day, experts say. First, people are asked to write down every detail of their nightmare. Next, each person rewrites the nightmare with a positive arch, making sure that it ends with a pleasant or empowering solution or resolution.
Now the practice begins. The reworked dream must be rehearsed five to 20 minutes each day until it’s woven into the memory circuits of the brain. Once that is in place, it’s time to put it into action by rehearsing the new dream just before bed.
In the new study, published Thursday in the journal Current Biology, researchers added a twist to the therapy. Eighteen people with nightmare disorder heard a neutral sound — a piano cord — while they reinvented their nightmares in more positive ways. A control group of 18 people who also had nightmare disorder heard no additional sound, while they reworked their dreams.
All 36 people were given a headband called an actimeter to wear at night for two weeks. In addition to monitoring the stages of sleep, the device delivered sound in a way that would not wake the sleeper — via bone conduction.
“One of the significant things about this study’s intervention is the use of relatively new technology that can more accurately time the stimulus to true REM sleep,” said Morgenthaler, a professor of medicine at Mayo Clinic School of Medicine.
“Most wearable devices do not accurately measure actual REM sleep,” he added. “Of course, further study might find that the timing is not that critical — but that remains to be determined.”
The sound was delivered to both groups every 10 seconds during the dream stage of sleep over a two-week period. In this case, “imagery rehearsal therapy worked for all of the participants, including the control group,” Perogamvros said.
“But in the experimental group, where the sound was positively associated, the decrease was significantly bigger — they had nearly four times fewer nightmares,” he added.
Imagery rehearsal therapy also lessened overall distress, measures of mood and sleep quality in both groups, but nightmare reduction happened faster in the experimental group and persisted at a three-month follow-up, Perogamvros said. In addition, members of the group who heard the sound reported more joyful dream experiences during their dreams than those in the control group.
Additional research is needed to verify these results and expand upon the concept, but Perogamvros said he hoped the technique might lead to breakthroughs for the about 30% of patients who are unresponsive to imagery rehearsal therapy, also called IRT.
“The ideas underpinning the hypothesis that targeted memory reactivation might boost the effects of IRT have merit,” Morgenthaler said, “and this elegant test of that hypothesis strengthens that theory.”
‘Woke’ anti-stigma efforts are only making mental health worse
“It is time to end all forms of stigma and discrimination against people with mental health conditions,” editorialized the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet earlier this month, in a special issue on the topic.
In truth, efforts to avoid stigma and discrimination against mentally ill people have been going on in the criminal justice system for decades. Consider the following cases: In 2021, New York police officers arrested 19-year-old Franklin Mesa who suffers from schizophrenia, after he punched somebody in the face, twice. Mesa went free. Also in 2021, Martial Simon, a mentally ill homeless man, was released after serving a four year term for armed robbery. Then in March of this year, a judge in Washington state released John Cody Hart from a local jail despite the appeal of the local prosecutor, who said, “the Community does not need somebody suffering from untreated mental illness out committing unprovoked serious violent offenses.”
But in each of the above cases, what happened next challenges The Lancet’s contention that stigma and discrimination are “worse than the condition itself.” In July, Mesa allegedly stabbed to death Nathaniel Rivers, 35, in front of his wife. In January, Simon pushed Michelle Go, 40, onto the subway tracks, killing her instantly. And earlier this month, Hart shot two innkeepers at point-blank range after they confronted him stealing from other guests.
The murders by these mentally ill people undermine the central contention of The Lancet that stigma and discrimination against the mentally ill are “worse than the condition itself.” Few would argue that the condition is worse than murder.
Without question, people who have mental illnesses merit our empathy. Severe mental illness is disabling, preventing people from engaging in regular work or family life. But, according to the Journal of the American Medical Association, the mentally ill also have “a significantly increased probability of having a history of violence.” Those who use drugs are the most dangerous. Hart, for instance, was a transient Army veteran who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and a marijuana use disorder after pressing his thumbs so hard into a man’s eyes that he likely blinded him for life.
While The Lancet report may encourage compassion, the research on this subject is clear. “We have to try to prevent the unpredicted,” notes Jeffrey W. Swanson, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University. Or, as JAMA researchers wrote, “review of this data demonstrates that the link between mental illness and violence is clearly relevant…this link should not be understated or ignored.”
Yet that’s precisely what The Lancet did. Why? Because The Lancet is, in a word, woke. And The Lancet is not alone.
Indeed, the publication is just following in the footsteps of radical left groups like the ACLU, which decades ago fought for laws to severely restrict the ability of family members and police to require the mentally ill to get treatment. Instead of reforming psychiatric hospitals, the Left shut them down. Instead of helping family members access much-needed medical care, the ACLU has fought to let psychotic people become homeless on the street where they are a danger to themselves and others.
“I remember begging one of the hospitals, ‘Let him stay,’” Simon’s sister told The Post earlier this year, “because once he’s out, he didn’t want to take medication, and it was the medication that kept him going.”
Today, it’s psychiatrists who are stigmatized. “I experience stigma every day as a psychiatrist,” said one in 2016. “There’s no anti-cardiology movement that’s trying to stamp out cardiology. And there’s no anti-oncology movement that’s trying to ban cancer treatment. But there’s a very violent anti-psychiatry movement that claims there’s no such thing as mental illness and wants to eliminate psychiatry.”
Still, it’s not like the anti-psychiatry movement liberated “people with lived experience of mental health conditions,” in the politically correct language of The Lancet. It just moved them into jails and prisons. Consider the consequences for Mesa, Simon, and Hart. All will likely end up in prison or a hospital for the criminally insane — most likely for the rest of their lives.
Today, people with mental illness are up to 10 times more likely to be incarcerated than hospitalized. At the same time, over 120,000 mentally ill people are estimated to be living on the streets in the US. In 2012, the last time an estimate was made, 35,000 were in state hospitals, while an estimated 356,000 people with serious mental illness were in jails and state prisons at any given time.
With The Lancet report, the anti-psychiatry movement has gone from denying the fact of mental illness to denying that there is something wrong with the condition. As a result, efforts to destigmatize mental illness have actually resulted in its opposite: dehumanization, both of people with mental illness, and their victims.
In truth, societies have long stigmatized illnesses, like leprosy, for pro-social, public health and safety reasons. And mental health may be such a reason. While it is never appropriate to stigmatize people with a mental illness, we should stigmatize untreated mental illnesses, which is dangerous and destructive to the people suffering from them, and the woke medical practice of allowing it.
The same should hold in the criminal justice system. Justices should stigmatize mental illness and require recovery — or at least treatment — before allowing violent, mentally ill, and addicted people back into society. Notably, none of the judges overseeing the Mesa, Simon or Hart cases did this.
The Lancet should amend its special issue. Because stigma and discrimination can be worse than disease, it’s true. But they are never worse than murder.
2 signs your kid has OCD, according to a child psychologist
The term “OCD” is often wrongly diagnosed to someone who has a strict morning routine or keeps an organized desk.
Having OCD, or obsessive compulsive disorder, has little to do with your cleaning habits or lack of flexibility and more to do with your ability to handle unpleasant thoughts, says Irina Gorelik, a child psychologist at Williamsburg Therapy Group.
“If any of us get a thought that’s disturbing, we could potentially move on from it,” she says. “But for someone with OCD, it causes a really distressing response and so they want to do a behavior that makes the thought go away.”
Think of the disorder in two parts, Gorelik says:
- Obsession: intrusive thoughts, urges, or images, that cause distress and are unwanted
- Compulsion: the behavior that is used to reduce the level of distress brought on by the obsession
In children, it’s usually easy to diagnose, she says, because it presents in noticeable ways.
Here are two signs your child might have OCD and tips for how to support them.
2 signs your child has OCD
They need reassurance about their safety and yours
Your child might repeatedly ask you if they are going to be okay, even if they are not going to be in any obvious or immediate danger. The same goes for their loved ones.
“I’ve had patients who’ve worried that something bad might happen to their family, so the compulsion is to check in on their family repeatedly,” she says. “They might say ‘I love you’ but not in a normal way, in a way that feels like they need to say it.”
Some other symptoms to look out for include:
- A fear of germs and compulsive hand washing
- Constant worry about getting sick
- Excessive clinginess. For example, they don’t want to go to a sleepover because they think something might happen to you or them if you aren’t together
They need reassurance they haven’t hurt anyone
Just like how a child with OCD might worry about themselves or their family being hurt, they might also worry that they’ve hurt others.
Some specific symptoms might include:
- Confessing a bad thought, like a curse word or about hurting someone.
- Asking “Do you still love me?” repeatedly
I’ve had patients who’ve worried that something bad might happen to their family, so the compulsion is to check in on their family repeatedly.
Irina Gorelik
Child Psychologist
Some parents actually feed OCD anxiety
For diagnosis, Gorelik says these obsessions and compulsions are typically time-consuming. They might take up an hour or more a day.
The compulsion acts as a “band aid” over the obsession, Gorelik says. And as a parent, you might want to comfort your child.
“It might come naturally to parents to reassure your kids and say, ‘you’re not hurt. No one is hurting you,’ but that’s actually feeding the anxiety,” she says.
It would be more helpful to tell your child that being worried is normal and that you can sit with that worry and choose not to engage in a compulsion.
For example, having the thought that your parents might be in danger is obviously anxiety-producing. But, that doesn’t mean you have to call your parents every 10 minutes. Let the feeling pass.
“Learn to sit with the thoughts and tolerate the thoughts, she says.
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The Three-City Problem of Modern Life
But today there is a third city affecting the other two. Silicon Valley, this third city, is not governed primarily by reason (it is practically the mark of a great entrepreneur to not be “reasonable”), nor by the things of the soul (the dominant belief seems to be a form of materialism). It is a place, rather, governed by the creation of value. And a large component of value is utility—whether something is useful, or is at least perceived as good or beneficial.
I realize that some people in Silicon Valley think of themselves as building rationalist enterprises. Some of them might be. The city’s guiding spirit, however, is summed up by investor and podcast host Shane Parris, popular among the Silicon Valley set, when he says: “The real test of an idea isn’t whether it’s true, but whether it’s useful.” In other words, utility trumps truth or reason.
Our new century—the world from 2000 to the present day—is dominated by Silicon Valley’s technological influence. This city has produced world-changing products and services (instantaneous search results, next-day delivery of millions of products, constant connectivity to thousands of “friends”) that create and shape new desires. This new city and the new forces it has unleashed are affecting humanity more than anything Tertullian could have imagined.
And this new city is growing in power. Never before have the questions of Athens and the questions of Jerusalem been mediated to us by such a great variety of things that vie for our attention and our desires. Silicon Valley, this third city, has altered the nature of the problem that Tertullian was wrestling with. The questions of what is true and what is good for the soul are now mostly subordinated to technological progress—or, at the very least, the questions of Athens and Jerusalem are now so bound up with this progress that it’s creating confusion.
It is hard to escape the utilitarian logic of Silicon Valley, and we lie to ourselves when we rationalize our motivations. The most interesting thing about the cryptocurrency craze was the ubiquity of “white papers”—the framing of every new product in purely rational terms, or the need to present it as a product of Athens. And then there was Dogecoin.
We’re not living in a world of pure reason or religious enchantment, but something entirely new.
Reason, religion, and the technology-driven quest to create value at any cost are now interacting in ways we scarcely understand, but which have vast influence over our everyday lives. Our two-decades-long experiment with social media has already shown the extent to which reason, or Athens, is being flooded with so much content that many have referred to it as a post-truth environment. Some social psychologists, like Jonathan Haidt, believe it’s making us crazy and undermining our democracy. Humanity is at a crossroads. We are trying to reconcile various needs—for rationality, for worship, for productivity—and the tension of this pursuit shows up in the things we create. Because the three cities are interacting, we are now living with technology-mediated religion (online church services) and technology-mediated reason (280-character Twitter debates); religiously adopted technology (bitcoin) and religiously observed reason (Covid-19 cathedrals of safety); rational religion (effective altruism) and “rational” technology (3D-printed assisted-suicide pods).
If Tertullian were alive today, I believe he would ask: “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem—and what do either have to do with Silicon Valley?” In other words, how do the domains of reason and religion relate to the domain of technological innovation and its financiers in Silicon Valley? If the Enlightenment champion Steven Pinker (a resident of Athens) walked into a bar with a Trappist monk (Jerusalem) and Elon Musk (Silicon Valley) with the goal of solving a problem, would they ever be able to arrive at a consensus?
New psychology research indicates that cleaning oneself helps alleviate the anxiety from stress-inducing events
Washing yourself can attenuate the psychological consequences of stressful events, according to new research published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The new findings provide some of the first scientific evidence that cleaning oneself is related to reductions in anxiety.
But why were scientists interested in examining the link between self-cleaning and stress? “Blame it on my probably subclinical obsessive-compulsive personality,” explained study author Spike W. S. Lee, an associate professor of management and psychology at the University of Toronto and director of the Mind and Body Lab.
“I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of cleaning behavior. Why do purification rituals exist across religions? Why do stressful situations elicit cleaning behavior in a number of non-human species? Why do we have expressions like ‘wipe the slate clean?’”
Lee and his research team recruited 1,150 adults via Prolific and had them watch a brief video clip of a terrified woman standing at the edge of a bungee jump station. The video had previously been shown to induce anxiety, tension, and uneasiness in viewers. The participants were then randomly assigned to watch a video showing how to properly wash one’s hands, a video on how to draw a circle, or a video on how to peel an egg.
Those who watched the handwashing video tended to subsequently report lower levels of anxiety compared to those who watched the two other videos. The researchers then replicated the findings in a second experiment that included 1,377 individuals recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform.
But the researchers noted that the handwashing video involved the element of self-touch. “Because touch is soothing and calming, what appeared to be cleaning effects might have been touch effects instead,” they noted. To account for this potential confound, the researchers conducted a third experiment with 465 participants in which the three videos were replaced with mental imagery tasks.
After watching the anxiety-inducing video, the participants were randomly assigned to either “imagine you are getting your arms, face, neck, and hair thoroughly cleansed with water,” “imagine you are touching your arms, face, neck, and hair to thoroughly feel yourself,” or were not instructed to imagine anything.
In line with their hypothesis, Lee and his colleagues found that anxiety levels tended to be lower among those who imagined cleaning compared to those who imagined touch and those in the control condition.
“When we engage in cleaning behavior, it involves separating residues from our body (e.g., washing dirt off your hands),” Lee told PsyPost. “This basic, physical experience of separating residues from our body can trigger a more psychological form of separation, namely, separating the residual influence of past experiences from the present (e.g., wiping the slate clean). If the past experiences were stressful, then psychologically separating them from your present would reduce your stress.”
In their fourth and final experiment, the researchers also found physiological evidence to support their hypothesis. In the experiment, 74 students at a large university in Canada went through two rounds of an anxiety-inducing task while their cardiovascular activity was recorded.
The participants were told that the researchers were interested in understanding more about physiological responses to intellectual and academic tasks. They were instructed to give a 5-minute speech explaining why they were qualified to be the team lead in a consulting firm. They spoke in front of two judges in white lab coats who “looked stern the whole time, with blank stares, no smiling, and no indication of approval.”
The participants were then randomly assigned to either actually use or simply examine an antiseptic wipe. They completed a 10-minute filler task, then either used or simply examined sanitizing gel. Afterward, participants delivered a second speech, which was designed to be slightly less stressful than the first. The judges appeared to have a more positive mood and provided some affirmative feedback.
The findings from the final experiment indicated that “cleaning behavior results in a more adaptive profile of cardiovascular reactivity,” the researchers said.
However, Lee noted that the study — like all research — includes some caveats. “While we demonstrated the phenomenon in samples with a wide age range, they are drawn from Western populations only,” he explained. “Whether the phenomenon generalizes to other cultures remains to be seen. Also, our findings invite future research to investigate what other protective effects may result from cleaning behavior in daily life.”
The study, “Actual Cleaning and Simulated Cleaning Attenuate Psychological and Physiological Effects of Stressful Events“, was authored by Spike W. S. Lee, Kobe Millet, Amir Grinstein, Koen H. Pauwels, Phillip R. Johnston, Alexandra E. Volkov, and Arianne J. van der Wal.
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The No. 1 vitamin to keep your brain ‘young and healthy’—and foods to eat every day
As a nutritional psychiatrist, I always make it a point to maintain a well-balanced diet. Much of that has to do with making sure I get all the right vitamins, especially because it’s essential to preventing cognitive decline.
And given that the risk of neurological diseases increases as we get older, one question I often get from my patients is: “What is the best vitamin for protecting our aging brains?”
Each of our microbiomes is like a thumbprint, so a truly effective eating plan is personalized to the unique needs of an individual. But the vitamin group I prioritize the most to keep my brain young and healthy are B vitamins.
The brain benefits of B vitamins
Depression, dementia and mental impairment are often associated with a deficiency of B vitamins, a study from the Wayne State University School of Medicine found.
“A B12 vitamin deficiency as a cause of cognitive issues is more common than we think, especially among the elderly who live alone and don’t eat properly,” says Rajaprabhakaran Rajarethinam, a psychiatrist and the lead author of the study.
There are eight different B vitamins, each with its own primary health benefits:
1. Increasing your energy.
Vitamin B1, or thiamin, is crucial for the basic function of our cells and the metabolism of nutrients for energy.
The brain is one of the most metabolically active organs in your body, which means it needs the support of thiamin to prevent the deficiencies that can lead to neurological problems down the line.
2. Breaking down medications.
Vitamin B2, or riboflavin, acts as an assistant to enzymes in our cells that carry out important reactions, such as in the body and brain.
It also helps to grow cells, produce energy and break down fats and external materials like medications.
3. Reducing inflammation.
Vitamin B3, or niacin, works with more than 400 enzymes to produce materials like cholesterol and fat needed within the body, and to convert energy for all our organ systems. Niacin is also an antioxidant, which helps reduce excess inflammation.
4. Supporting your support your overall brain health.
Vitamin B5, or pantothenic acid, is essential for making a molecular compound called coenzyme A, which helps our body’s enzymes build and break down fatty acids for energy.
It also helps our cells generate acyl carrier proteins, helping to produce necessary fats. The brain is primarily fat, so pantothenic acid is among the most important vitamins in supporting brain health.
5. Fight diseases.
Vitamin B6, or pyridoxine, is notable for its role in disease prevention because proper levels of this vitamin is associated with lower risk of a number of cancers.
Additionally, pyridoxine helps many chemical reactions in the body that support immune function and brain health.
6. Helping cells communicate better.
Vitamin B7, most commonly known as biotin, regulates cell signals for quick and efficient communication throughout the body. In the brain, it’s crucial for cellular signaling via neurotransmitters.
7. Keeping you balanced.
Vitamin B9, or folate, is a popular supplement and a key vitamin for supporting brain and neurological health, optimal neurotransmitter function, and balanced psychological health.
Another benefit is that it helps encourage cellular detoxification.
8. Helping your heart.
Vitamin B12, or cobalamin, is an essential vitamin for forming red blood cells and DNA, and supporting the development and function of the nervous system.
B12 also supports the breakdown of homocysteine, a protein that can negatively impact cardiovascular health and lead to dementia when in excess.
The best Vitamin B foods
I’m a “food-first” person, so I always encourage people to incorporate foods containing these vitamins into their meals. However, our diets are not perfect, so there may be instances where supplements may help. If that’s the, case my simple advice is to “test, not guess” — and consult with your doctor first.
The goods news is that B vitamins are among the easiest to work into your diet because foods that are rich in one B vitamin often contain many, if not all, of the B vitamins when consumed as whole foods.
Here are six vitamin B-rich foods I eat every day:
1. One egg contains a third of the recommended daily value of vitamin B7, while also containing small amounts of many of the other B vitamins.
2. Yogurt is high in both vitamin B2 and vitamin B12, as well as in natural probiotics, which support both gut health and mental health. I like plain Greek yogurt for the added protein.
3. Legumes such as black beans, chickpeas, edamame and lentils all help to boost your mood and brain health. They are an excellent source of vitamin B9, and include small amounts of vitamin B1, vitamin B2, vitamin B3, vitamin B5 and vitamin B6.
4. Salmon is naturally rich in all of the B vitamins, especially vitamin B2, vitamin B3, vitamin B6 and vitamin B12. Be mindful of the source of your seafood, and remember that frozen or canned salmon is a budget-friendly option, too.
5. Sunflower seeds are one of the best plant sources of vitamin B5. You can get 20% of the recommended daily value of this vitamin from just one ounce of seeds!
6. Leafy greens such as spinach, Swiss chard and cabbage are a great source of vitamin B9. This is the first food I suggest to patients who want to boost low mood.
Dr. Uma Naidoo is a nutritional psychiatrist, brain expert, and faculty member at Harvard Medical School. She is also the Director of Nutritional & Lifestyle Psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital and author of the best-selling book “This Is Your Brain on Food: An Indispensable Guide to the Surprising Foods that Fight Depression, Anxiety, PTSD, OCD, ADHD, and More.” Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
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