By Rachael Rettner In recent years, we've been bombarded with studies about the hormone oxytocin — researchers have demonstrated it increases trust and helps aid in social bonding. It has even garnered a reputation as the "love hormone." But what good is it for? Despite all these findings, the hormone's medical use remains limited to obstetrics — it is used to induce labor and aid in breastfeeding. But researchers are now trying to apply these findings, and are investigating oxytocin as a treatment for psychiatric illnesses. They say its unique ability to adjust our wiring could remedy symptoms of schizophrenia, post-traumatic stress disorder(PTSD) and anxiety, and improve social abilities among those with autism. A number of oxytocin studies have even reached the stage of clinical trials — which test the effectiveness and safety of a substance before it can become an approved drug — with promising findings. "The idea of augmenting … the way we connect to and with each other, would just be so helpful for so many people," said Dr. Kai MacDonald, an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied oxytocin as a treatment for schizophrenia. However, the results so far, while hopeful, have not been "earthshaking," MacDonald said. There are hurdles to such research. Because oxytocin is a large molecule, it doesn't cross from the bloodstream into the brain very easily. It is also rapidly degraded in both the stomach and the blood. MyHealthNewsDaily Copyright © 2010.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 14741 - Posted: 12.06.2010

David Stock It's a cold London evening, and I've arranged to meet a friend. We're ostensibly heading to the cinema, but exactly where, or to see what, neither of us yet know. After wandering the back streets of Ladbroke Grove, guided on our way by polite yet impersonal men in white coats, we arrive at a grandiose and eerie mansion. We're robed in standard-issue medical gowns and ushered inside to collect our "prescriptions" of alcoholic or non-alcoholic medicine, then left to shuffle aimlessly down non-descript whitewashed corridors, afraid to make eye contact with any of the two hundred or so other "residents". By this point you'd be forgiven for thinking that New Scientist has finally noted my erratic behaviour and put word to my psychiatrist, and for a moment I might have agreed. Locked inside the walls of what purports to be The Oregon State Hospital, I am experiencing what it might be like to be detained for psychiatric assessment. This is Secret Cinema, an environment in which to experience film rather than just watch it. The film is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, of course. My initial anxiety subsides and I begin to enjoy the madness of my surroundings. "Spiders...do you see the spiders?" one inmate asks. "No," I reply. "They're like communists, everywhere," he says, pointing. When I ask what he means he responds: "I'm tired." At every turn I am met with fresh strangeness, from maniacal goose heads, to a choir of angelic voices, urns of the cremated or an impromptu yoga therapy session. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14726 - Posted: 12.02.2010

By JR Minkel Could some cases of schizophrenia boil down to something as simple as vitamin D deficiency? The idea was first put forth more than a decade ago by schizophrenia researcher John McGrath of the University of Queensland in Australia. The circumstantial evidence fit: people born in winter or spring or at high latitudes are at slightly increased risk of developing schizophrenia, and vitamin D deficiency is also more common in winter months and at high latitudes because of lack of sunlight. It may be that a deficit of vitamin D leaves expecting mothers more vulnerable to illnesses such as influenza, which could in turn sensitize the maturing brain to stress-related damage later in life. [For more on how prenatal infections can lead to mental illness, see “Infected with Insanity,” by Melinda Wenner; Scientific American Mind, April/May 2008.] Now McGrath and his colleagues have put the hypothesis to the test. They analyzed blood samples taken from 424 Danish newborns who went on to develop schizophrenia as well as an equal number of babies who never acquired the disease. In each sample, they measured the amount of the chemical 25OHD, which the body converts into vitamin D. The researchers found that infants who had low levels of 25OHD in their blood—and therefore mothers who were deficient in vitamin D while they were pregnant—were at a higher risk of developing schizophrenia when they grew up. The result, published in the September issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, could be especially interesting for communities of black immigrants living in northern countries. Researchers have found a striking increase in schizo­phrenia risk for the children of dark-skinned migrants living at high latitudes—a finding neatly explained if vitamin D plays a role, because dark skin blocks ultraviolet B radiation, the component of sunlight necessary for the body to synthesize vitamin D. © 2010 Scientific American

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 14687 - Posted: 11.17.2010

Helen Thomson, biomedical news editor, San Diego When told I was being sent to the world's biggest neuroscience conference, I knew I would meet a lot of interesting people, but a five-time Oscar nominee wasn't what I was expecting. Yet here I am in San Diego at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting listening to Glenn Close - famous for her roles as scheming aristocrat in Dangerous Liaisons and psychotic stalker in Fatal Attraction - call for science and society to work together to change the stigmas attached to mental illness. Close is well-known for having had a successful acting career. "I'm still pissed off that I had to chuck Robert Redford out of my apartment," she tells us. Yet today she defines herself not as an actress but as a series of numbers. It is her genome sequence that takes pride of place on the big screen this morning - a picture she says clearly shows she is "fabulous, sexy, and divinely complex". The real reason Close is opening this year's conference is down to her family ties to mental disease. Her sister and nephew suffer from biopolar and schizoaffective disorder respectively, which encouraged Close to launch BringChange2Mind, a not-for-profit organisation which helps to provide information about mental illness. A highlight of her speech was an interlude by nephew Calen Pick who spoke of trying to "get into the real world" while struggling with his disorder. "At my lowest point I knew I was Jesus and the psychological examinations I was taking were just a test to see if I was God or the devil," he says. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14664 - Posted: 11.15.2010

by Douglas Fox Steven and David Elmore were born identical twins, but their first days in this world could not have been more different. David came home from the hospital after a week. Steven, born four minutes later, stayed behind in the ICU. For a month he hovered near death in an incubator, wracked with fever from what doctors called a dangerous viral infection. Even after Steven recovered, he lagged behind his twin. He lay awake but rarely cried. When his mother smiled at him, he stared back with blank eyes rather than mirroring her smiles as David did. And for several years after the boys began walking, it was Steven who often lost his balance, falling against tables or smashing his lip. Those early differences might have faded into distant memory, but they gained new significance in light of the twins’ subsequent lives. By the time Steven entered grade school, it appeared that he had hit his stride. The twins seemed to have equalized into the genetic carbon copies that they were: They wore the same shoulder-length, sandy-blond hair. They were both B+ students. They played basketball with the same friends. Steven Elmore had seemingly overcome his rough start. But then, at the age of 17, he began hearing voices. The voices called from passing cars as Steven drove to work. They ridiculed his failure to find a girlfriend. Rolling up the car windows and blasting the radio did nothing to silence them. Other voices pursued Steven at home. Three voices called through the windows of his house: two angry men and one woman who begged the men to stop arguing. Another voice thrummed out of the stereo speakers, giving a running commentary on the songs of Steely Dan or Led Zeppelin, which Steven played at night after work. His nerves frayed and he broke down. Within weeks his outbursts landed him in a psychiatric hospital, where doctors determined he had schizophrenia. © 2010, Kalmbach Publishing Co.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14651 - Posted: 11.11.2010

Some people hear voices that are the products only of processes in their brains. These hallucinations can lead to persistent delusions that someone is plotting against them or urging them to harm others. When a person acts on those delusions, headline-grabbing tragedy can ensue, usually involving someone close to the protagonist. Violence is not a symptom of schizophrenia — only a tiny proportion of sufferers with the condition are homicidal. Yet these incidents dominate the media coverage of the disease. The reality of schizophrenia is much more complex. Hallucinations are one of several symptoms, others of which — cognitive dysfunction, loss of motivation and of social engagement — are much less amenable to medication, and are often more damaging to the ability of those with schizophrenia to function. In recent years it has been increasingly appreciated that this collection of symptoms, which typically first fully manifest in early adulthood, represents a late stage of the illness, and that the illness itself may perhaps turn out to be a collection of syndromes, rather than a single condition. Motivated by the undue stigma and by the recent advances reported in our own pages and elsewhere, Nature this week examines the state of our understanding of schizophrenia, and how researchers can hope to make progress in an entangled landscape of innate and environmental influences. The image on this issue's cover and in the logo that links the associated content is a piece of art by a schizophrenia sufferers. It is one of many compiled by NARSAD, a US charity based in New York that spends significant public donations on psychiatric health research. The image reflects a world of confusion and distorted reality — but not a 'split personality', which is a mythical symptom of the condition, and leads to a misleading metaphorical use of the word 'schizophrenic' that those involved with the condition perpetually seek to eradicate. © 2010 Nature Publishing Group

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14650 - Posted: 11.11.2010

By Natasha Allen In the 2001 movie, "A Beautiful Mind," mathematician and Nobel Prizewinner John Nash struggled with the debilitating mental disorder schizophrenia for years before being properly diagnosed and treated. For many individuals and families coping with this disease, early intervention is critical. A new blood-based test may help with that effort. The test, called VeriPsych, looks for biomarkers of schizophrenia in a person's blood, and is the first such diagnostic test meant to assist psychiatrists in confirming the diagnosis of recent-onset schizophrenia, researchers say. VeriPsych measures biomarkers, which are proteins or snippets of genetic material found in the bloodstream, that may be an indication of a condition or disease. Scientists have found 51 of these molecules associated with schizophrenia. "There are many people that believe that schizophrenia is a systemic disease," said study researcher Dr. Michael Spain, chief medical officer at Rules-Based Medicine, the company that makes the test and funded the study. "It is just that its greatest manifestations are in the brain." To make a diagnosis, the biomarker profile of a suspected schizophrenia patient is compared with that of a patient with the disease. MyHealthNewsDaily Copyright © 2010.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14562 - Posted: 10.16.2010

Many mentally handicapped Danes, including children, were lobotomized between 1947 and 1983, and many died from the operation, a historian behind a soon-to-be-published book on the topic told Danish media Thursday. "Doctors did not count on curing them completely, but wanted to pacify them, perhaps to better their condition," Jesper Vaczy Kragh told the Christian daily Kristelig Dagbladet. "The results of such operations generally were not good, and some 7.6 percent did not survive," said the medical historian, behind a book on lobotomies set to be published in October. "What happened with people with mental handicaps is worse than what happened with psychiatric patients," he said, referring to many operations performed on children as young as six years of age, even though their brains were not yet completely developed. Official figures show that between 1947 and 1983, when conducting lobotomies was outlawed in Denmark, around 4,500 Danes had the operation. But it was previously unknown that many mentally handicapped people were subjected to the procedure. Kragh estimates more than 300 mentally handicapped people were operated on during that period at Copenhagen's University Hospital and at a municipal hospital in Aarhus, Denmark's second largest city. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 14491 - Posted: 09.25.2010

Antipsychotic drugs taken by thousands in the UK raise the risk of dangerous blood clots, scientists believe. The latest research, published in the British Medical Journal, provides the strongest evidence yet of a link. People given antipsychotics in the past two years had a third greater risk of clots like deep vein thrombosis (DVT). The Nottingham University study looking at 25,000 cases found the risk was even higher for the newer "atypical" antipsychotics. Antipsychotic drugs are usually given to patients with conditions such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but are sometimes used to ease persistent nausea and vertigo or to calm agitated dementia patients. Higher stroke risk Some scientists had already spotted a higher risk of clots in people taking antipsychotics, but the new study, which looked at more than 25,500 cases, appears to confirm this. Almost 16,000 of the people in the study suffered a DVT and just over 9,000 suffered a clot on the lung, called a pulmonary embolism. BBC © MMX

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14487 - Posted: 09.23.2010

Characterized by paranoia, anxiety, hallucinations and delusions, schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder, a related condition, are complicated mental illnesses that make it difficult for one to determine the difference between reality and pretend. While there are medications and therapies that can help, the effects of this condition are often far- reaching. Here, seven men and women speak about living with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14460 - Posted: 09.16.2010

by Timothy McDonald, Babies born with low vitamin D levels are twice as likely to develop schizophrenia later in life, researchers from the Queensland Brain Institute have found. But the researchers say the good news from the study is that it suggests it may be possible to prevent schizophrenia. John McGrath from the Queensland Brain Institute says there have been suggestions for some time that there may be a link between sunlight, vitamin D and brain development. He says it is increasingly clear children with low vitamin D levels are more likely to develop schizophrenia. "For the babies who had very low vitamin D, their risk was about twice as high as those babies who had optimal vitamin D," said McGrath. "But the amazing thing was that the study that was based in Denmark, where low vitamin D is quite common, we found that if vitamin D is linked to schizophrenia our statistics suggest that it could explain about 40 percent of all schizophrenias. That's a much bigger effect than we're used to seeing in schizophrenia research." While the simplest way to get enough vitamin D is to spend more time in the sun, it remains unclear whether there are fewer cases of schizophrenia in a country like Australia which sees a lot more sunlight. "We don't have high-quality data on that, but some statistics suggest we do have slightly lower incidences and prevalence of schizophrenia," said McGrath. © 2010 Discovery Communications, LLC.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14434 - Posted: 09.09.2010

People with a severe mental illness are no more likely to be violent than anyone else - unless they abuse drugs or alcohol, a study has suggested. The relationship between bipolar disorder and violence largely came down to substance abuse, researchers said.. The study compared the behaviour of people with the disorder with their siblings and the wider population. One of the authors said it was probably more dangerous to walk past a pub at night than a mental health hospital. The study, led by Oxford University's Department of Psychiatry, examined the lives and behaviour of 3,700 people in Sweden who had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, commonly known as manic depression. The disorder leads to sudden and unpredictable mood swings which are more severe than the normal ups and downs of life. The team, led by consultant forensic psychiatrist Dr Seena Fazel, wanted to examine the public perception that there is a link between the disorder and violent crime. They did this by comparing the experiences of the patients with some 4,000 siblings of people with bipolar disorder - and a further group of 37,000 people selected from the general population. (C)BBC

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14431 - Posted: 09.07.2010

By Emily Anthes Three weeks after beginning his freshman year of college, 18-year-old David started behaving strangely. He made an impromptu trip from his New Hampshire school to his home in Revere, arriving at 3 a.m. His mother immediately noticed that something was wrong. “David was acting weird,’’ says Norma, 51, who asked that she and her son be identified by first names only. “He was spacing out, he was very disheveled, saying things that weren’t making sense at all. He cried a lot. He was listening to one CD on repeat. I kept asking what went through his mind, but he wouldn’t answer.’’ Doctors determined that David could be in the early stages of a psychotic episode and referred him to Massachusetts General Hospital. There, the First-Episode and Early Psychosis Program is designed to prevent small psychotic episodes from turning into big problems, such as schizophrenia. It’s tricky to identify the warning signs of mental health problems — there’s no blood test, for instance, that can signal coming distress. But experts are increasingly watchful for children and teens who are displaying subtle signs that their brains might be in trouble. Traditionally, attention has focused on chronic disease. But “once people have had five hospitalizations the train has sort of left the station,’’ says Dr. Oliver Freudenreich, a psychiatrist who directs the MGH program. “Catching the illness as early as possible means that you probably have an illness that is not as severe, [for which] interventions work better.’’ © 2010 NY Times Co

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14422 - Posted: 09.06.2010

By DUFF WILSON OPELOUSAS, La. — At 18 months, Kyle Warren started taking a daily antipsychotic drug on the orders of a pediatrician trying to quell the boy’s severe temper tantrums. Thus began a troubled toddler’s journey from one doctor to another, from one diagnosis to another, involving even more drugs. Autism, bipolar disorder, hyperactivity, insomnia, oppositional defiant disorder. The boy’s daily pill regimen multiplied: the antipsychotic Risperdal, the antidepressant Prozac, two sleeping medicines and one for attention-deficit disorder. All by the time he was 3. He was sedated, drooling and overweight from the side effects of the antipsychotic medicine. Although his mother, Brandy Warren, had been at her “wit’s end” when she resorted to the drug treatment, she began to worry about Kyle’s altered personality. “All I had was a medicated little boy,” Ms. Warren said. “I didn’t have my son. It’s like, you’d look into his eyes and you would just see just blankness.” Today, 6-year-old Kyle is in his fourth week of first grade, scoring high marks on his first tests. He is rambunctious and much thinner. Weaned off the drugs through a program affiliated with Tulane University that is aimed at helping low-income families whose children have mental health problems, Kyle now laughs easily and teases his family. Ms. Warren and Kyle’s new doctors point to his remarkable progress — and a more common diagnosis for children of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder — as proof that he should have never been prescribed such powerful drugs in the first place. Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 14421 - Posted: 09.03.2010

By MATTHEW PERRONE WASHINGTON — Andrew White returned from a nine-month tour in Iraq beset with signs of post-traumatic stress disorder: insomnia, nightmares, constant restlessness. Doctors tried to ease his symptoms using three psychiatric drugs, including a potent anti-psychotic called Seroquel. Thousands of soldiers suffering from PTSD have received the same medication over the last nine years, helping to make Seroquel one of the Veteran Affairs Department's top drug expenditures and the No. 5 best-selling drug in the nation. Several soldiers and veterans have died while taking the pills, raising concerns among some military families that the government is not being up front about the drug's risks. They want Congress to investigate. In White's case, the nightmares persisted. So doctors recommended progressively larger doses of Seroquel. At one point, the 23-year-old Marine corporal was prescribed more than 1,600 milligrams per day — more than double the maximum dose recommended for schizophrenia patients. A short time later, White died in his sleep. "He was told if he had trouble sleeping he could take another (Seroquel) pill," said his father, Stan White, a retired high school principal. An investigation by the Veterans Affairs Department concluded that White died from a rare drug interaction. He was also taking an antidepressant and an anti-anxiety pill, as well as a painkiller for which he did not have a prescription. Inspectors concluded he received the "standard of care" for his condition. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 14: Biological Rhythms, Sleep, and Dreaming; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 10: Biological Rhythms and Sleep; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14412 - Posted: 08.31.2010

Neuroscientists have long used EEGs to try to understand the brain.Neuroscientists have long used EEGs to try to understand the brain. (Str Old/Reuters) Psychiatrists and engineers have teamed up to help predict how people with schizophrenia will respond to a medication that can produce serious side-effects. Psychiatrists say clozapine is an effective treatment for chronic medication-resistant schizophrenia, but it can produce side-effects such as seizures, cardiac arrhythmias or bone marrow suppression and blood problems that require weekly to monthly blood tests to monitor. Now researchers at McMaster University in Hamilton have used machine learning to "train" a computer to predict whether a patient will respond to the drug based on the brainwave patterns and responses recorded on an EEG device readily available at hospitals and laboratories. "Now what we can do is predict beforehand whether the person is going to respond, so we only expose the patient to the risk if there's a very good chance the treatment will be effective," said study author James Reilly, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at McMaster. Reilly and his psychiatrist and engineering colleagues at the university were able to correctly predict whether 23 middle-aged people diagnosed with schizophrenia would respond to the drug with an accuracy of about 89 per cent, according to the study published in the current online issue of the journal Clinical Neurophysiology. © CBC 2010

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 14334 - Posted: 08.07.2010

by Andy Coghlan NASAL sprays containing the hormone oxytocin, nicknamed the "cuddle chemical" because it helps mothers bond with their babies, have helped people with schizophrenia. Although the 15 participants used the sprays for three weeks only, most reported measurable improvements in their symptoms in this the first trial to test oxytocin in schizophrenia. "It's proof of concept that there's therapeutic potential here," says David Feifel at the University of California in San Diego, head of the team running the trial. Each participant received oxytocin or a placebo for three weeks, then the opposite treatment for three weeks with a week break in between. On the basis of two standard tests for schizophrenia, taken before and after each block of treatment, participants averaged improvements of around 8 per cent when taking the oxytocin compared with the placebo (Biological Psychiatry, DOI: 10.1016/j.biopsych.2010.04.039). The effects didn't kick in until the final week, suggesting that it takes a while for the hormone to begin acting. "Standard antipsychotic drugs increase their efficacy several weeks later too, so oxytocin fits that profile," says Feifel. Feifel thinks that oxytocin is dampening down the excessive production of the neurotransmitter dopamine, which can trigger schizophrenic symptoms such as hallucinations. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 5: Hormones and the Brain
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 8: Hormones and Sex
Link ID: 14268 - Posted: 07.17.2010

By DUFF WILSON AstraZeneca “buried” unfavorable studies of its $4.4 billion blockbuster psychiatric drug Seroquel, according to internal documents released Friday in a legal dispute between the company and lawyers for thousands of people who sued the company because they said the drug caused diabetes and weight gain. In one of the documents, a 1997 e-mail message, Richard Lawrence, an AstraZeneca official, praised Lisa Arventis, the company’s Seroquel project physician at the time, for minimizing adverse findings in a “cursed” study. He wrote: “Lisa has done a great ‘smoke-and-mirrors job!’ ” Lawyers suing AstraZeneca, a British drug maker whose United States headquarters are in Delaware, said the documents show it tried to hide the diabetes link for nearly a decade. “AstraZeneca knew about the risk of weight gain and diabetes in 2000 and not only failed to warn physicians and patients but marketed in a way that represented there was no risk,” Edward F. Blizzard, a Houston-based lead lawyer on the cases, said in a conference call with reporters. Tony Jewell, an AstraZeneca spokesman, said the plaintiffs’ lawyers were trying the case in public because they recently lost their first two cases in court. Judge Anne C. Conway of Federal District Court in Orlando, Fla., dismissed them on summary judgment on Jan. 28 for lack of evidence that the drug caused diabetes in those two cases. Copyright 2009 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 12598 - Posted: 06.24.2010

Max Blake was 7 the first time he tried to kill himself. He wrote a four-page will bequeathing his toys to his friends and jumped out his ground-floor bedroom window, falling six feet into his backyard, bruised but in one piece. Children don't really know what death is, as the last page of Max's will made clear: "If I'm still alive when I have grandchildren," it began. But they know what unhappiness is and what it means to suffer. On a recent Monday afternoon, Max, now 10, was supposed to come home on the schoolbus, but a counselor summoned his mother at 2:15. When Amy Blake arrived at school, her son gave her the note that had prompted the call. "Dear Mommy & Daddy," it read, "I am really feeling sad and depressed and lousy about myself. I love you but I still feel like I want to kill myself. I am really sad but I just want help to feel happy again. The reason I feel so bad is because I can't sleep at night. And dad yells at me to just sleep at night. But, I can't control it. It is not me that does control it. I don't know what controls it, but it is not me. I really really need some help, love Max!!!!! I Love you Mommy I Love you Daddy." This is the story of a family: a mother, a father and a son. It is, in many ways, a horror story. Terrible things happen. People scream and cry and hurt each other; they say and do things that they later wish they hadn't. The source of their pain is bipolar disorder, a mental illness that results in recurring bouts of mania and depression. It is an elusive disease that no parent fully understands, that some doctors do not believe exists in children, that almost everyone stigmatizes. But this is also a love story. Good things happen. A couple sticks together, a child tries to do better, teachers and doctors and friends help out. Max Blake and his parents may not have much in common with other families. They are a family nonetheless. That is what has mattered most to Amy and Richie Blake since Oct. 31, 1997, the day their son took his first ragged breath. © 2008 Newsweek, Inc

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders; Chapter 7: Life-Span Development of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders; Chapter 13: Memory, Learning, and Development
Link ID: 11644 - Posted: 06.24.2010

By GABRIELLE GLASER IN the YouTube video, Liz Spikol is smiling and animated, the light glinting off her large hoop earrings. Deadpan, she holds up a diaper. It is not, she explains, a hygienic item for a giantess, but rather a prop to illustrate how much control people lose when they undergo electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT, as she did 12 years ago. In other videos and blog postings, Ms. Spikol, a 39-year-old writer in Philadelphia who has bipolar disorder, describes a period of psychosis so severe she jumped out of her mother’s car and ran away like a scared dog. In lectures across the country, Elyn Saks, a law professor and associate dean at the University of Southern California, recounts the florid visions she has experienced during her lifelong battle with schizophrenia — dancing ashtrays, houses that spoke to her — and hospitalizations where she was strapped down with leather restraints and force-fed medications. Like many Americans who have severe forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, Ms. Saks and Ms. Spikol are speaking candidly and publicly about their demons. Their frank talk is part of a conversation about mental illness (or as some prefer to put it, “extreme mental states”) that stretches from college campuses to community health centers, from YouTube to online forums. Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BP6e: Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 12: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 11619 - Posted: 06.24.2010