Mental Illness

Shots – Health News : NPR

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How COVID-19 Attacks The Brain And May, In Severe Cases, Cause Lasting Damage : Shots – Health News : NPR

Many patients who are hospitalized for COVI-19 are discharged with symptoms such as those associated with a brain injury. These include "forgetfulness that impairs their ability to function," de Erausquin says. "They complain about trouble with organizing their tasks, and that entails things such as being able to prepare a meal."

But COVI-19 also appears to produce many other brain-related symptoms ranging from seizures to psychosis, a team reports in the Jan. 5 issue of the journal Alzheimer's & ementia. The team, which included de Erausquin, says severe COVI-19 may even increase a person's risk of developing Alzheimer's disease.

COVID is such bad news, especially for the more unlucky. Hopefully though soon the vaccine will be widespread, and we will be getting back to the process of normality.

When the Body Attacks the Mind

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When the Body Attacks the Mind

Many of these disorders are treatable with aggressive immunotherapy. “It’s a breakthrough,” Heather Van Mater, a pediatric rheumatologist at Duke who has cared for Sasha, told me. She and her colleagues treat people who, just 10 years ago, might have been given up for lost and locked away. “We can make them better,” Van Mater said. “It’s unbelievably rewarding.”

While each of these autoimmune conditions is rare, the field of autoimmune neurology is expanding, and may force a reexamination of mental illness generally. Some scientists now wonder whether small subsets of depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder may be somehow linked to problems in the immune system.

Bromism – Wikipedia

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Bromism – Wikipedia

High levels of bromide chronically impair the membrane of neurons, which progressively impairs neuronal transmission, leading to toxicity, known as bromism. Bromide has an elimination half-life of 9 to 12 days, which can lead to excessive accumulation. Doses of 0.5 to 1 gram per day of bromide can lead to bromism. Historically, the therapeutic dose of bromide is about 3 to 5 grams of bromide, thus explaining why chronic toxicity (bromism) was once so common. While significant and sometimes serious disturbances occur to neurologic, psychiatric, dermatological, and gastrointestinal functions, death is rare from bromism.

Bromism is caused by a neurotoxic effect on the brain which results in somnolence, psychosis, seizures and delirium. Bromism has also been caused by excessive soda consumption, due to the presence of brominated vegetable oil, leading to headache, fatigue, ataxia, memory loss, and eventually inability to walk in one case.

A Mad World

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A Mad World

As a psychiatrist, I see this as the biggest challenge facing psychiatry today. A large part of the population – perhaps even the majority – might benefit from some form of mental health care, but too many fear that modern psychiatry is on a mission to pathologise normal individuals with some dystopian plan fuelled by the greed of the pharmaceutical industry, all in order to put the populace on mind-numbing medications. Debates about psychiatric overdiagnosis have amplified in the wake of the 2013 release of the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), the so-called ‘bible of psychiatry’, with some particularly vocal critics coming from within the profession.

It’s true that the scope of psychiatry has greatly expanded over the past century. A hundred years ago, the profession had a near-exclusive focus on the custodial care of severely ill asylum patients. Now, psychiatric practice includes the office-based management of the ‘worried well’. The advent of psychotherapy, starting with the arrival of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis at the turn of the 20th century, drove the shift. The ability to treat less severe forms of psychopathology – such as anxiety and so-called adjustment disorders related to life stressors – with the talking cure has had profound effects on mental health care in the United States.

The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments – POLITICO Magazine

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The Secret History of Fort Detrick, the CIA’s Base for Mind Control Experiments – POLITICO Magazine

In 1954, a prison doctor in Kentucky isolated seven black inmates and fed them “double, triple and quadruple” doses of LSD for 77 days straight. No one knows what became of the victims. They may have died without knowing they were part of the CIA’s highly secretive program to develop ways to control minds—a program based out of a little-known Army base with a dark past, Fort Detrick.

Suburban sprawl has engulfed Fort Detrick, an Army base 50 miles from Washington in the Maryland town of Frederick. Seventy-six years ago, however, when the Army selected Detrick as the place to develop its super-secret plans to wage germ warfare, the area around the base looked much different. In fact, it was chosen for its isolation. That’s because Detrick, still thriving today as the Army’s principal base for biological research and now encompassing nearly 600 buildings on 13,000 acres, was for years the nerve center of the CIA’s hidden chemical and mind control empire.