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Ancient Views and Treatments - Trephination
People in prehistoric societies apparently believed that all events around and within them resulted from the actions of magical, sometimes sinister, beings who controlled the world. In particular, they viewed the human body and mind as a battleground between external forces of good and evil. Abnormal behavior was typically interpreted as a victory by evil spirits, and the cute for such behavior was to force the demons from a victim’s body.
This supernatural view of abnormality may have begun as far back as the Stone Age. Some skulls from that period recovered in Europe and South America show evidence of an operation called trephination, in which a stone instrument, or trephine, was used to cut away a circular section of the skull. Some historians have concluded that this early operation was performed as a treatment for severe abnormal behavior – either hallucinations or melancholia. The purpose of opening the skull was to release the evil spirits that were supposedly causing the problem.
Cyclothymia
Cyclothymia is a mild form of bipolar disorder. It is characterized by mood fluctuations that shift between depressive and hypomanic phases. Cyclothymics do not experience the extremes of major depression or manic episodes.
The depressive or hypomania symptoms of cyclothymia may last for a few days to several weeks at a time, with brief intervals of normal mood in between. Personality changes are often evident to family and friends. Individuals who have a stable mood for longer than two months at a time are not likely cyclothymic. Symptoms may be mimicked by substance abuse, borderline personality disorder, or other mood disorder. A family history of depressive or bipolar disorders increases the risk.
Symptoms of Cyclothymia
Hypomanic Phase
- Excessive confidence and self-esteem
- Reduced ability to concentrate, easily distracted
- Sleep difficulties, excessive energy
- Heightened irritability
- Reduced inhibitions, may make foolish decisions
- Hypomania lasts between several days and several weeks
Depressive Phase
- Feelings of inadequacy, low self-confidence
- Difficulty falling asleep, unrestful sleep
- Fatigue, lack of energy
- Negative thinking, feelings of guilt and sadness
- Loss of interest in formerly enjoyable activities
- Depression lasting between several days and several weeks
The cycling between phases must be present for at least two years for a diagnosis (one year for teenagers). Work and family life are often negatively affected by the shifting moods.
Differences by Gender and Age
Cyclothymia, like the related bipolar disorder, affects men and women in roughly equal numbers. The disorder typically begins in the teenage or young adult years. Onset later in life is rare, and may be brought on by substance abuse or certain medications. Cyclothymia may progress to bipolar, though treatment may prevent this.
Normopathy
Psychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of normopathy to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming to social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing exactly what is expected by society. Extreme normopathy is punctuated by breaks from the norm, where normotic person cracks under the pressure of conforming and becomes violent or does something very dangerous. Many people experience mild normopathy at different times in their lives, especially when trying to fit into a new social situation, or when trying to hide behaviors they believe other people would condemn.
Positive Effects of Depression
Sadness, apathy, preoccupation. These traits come to mind when people think about depression, the world’s most frequently diagnosed mental disorder. Yet, forthcoming research in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology provides evidence that depression has a positive side-effect. According to a new study, depressed individuals perform better than their non-depressed peers in sequential decision tasks.
In their study, participants — who were healthy, clinically depressed, or recovering from depression — played a computer game in which they could earn money by hiring an applicant in a simulated job search. The game assigned each applicant a monetary value and presented applicants one-at-a-time in random order. Experiment participants faced the challenge of determining when to halt search and select the current applicant. In addition to resembling everyday decision problems, such as house shopping and dating, the task has a known optimal strategy. As reported, depressed patients approximated this optimal strategy more closely than non-depressed participants did. While healthy participants searched through relatively few candidates before selecting an applicant, depressed participants searched more thoroughly and made choices that resulted in higher payoffs.
This discovery provides the first evidence that clinical depression may carry some benefits. For decades, psychologists have debated whether depression has positive side-effects. While researchers have recognized that most symptoms of depression impede cognitive functioning, scholars such as Paul Andrews of the Virginia Institute for Psychiatric and Behavioral Genetics and Andy Thomson of the University of Virginia have proposed that depression may promote analytical reasoning and persistence — that is, qualities useful in complex tasks.
Psychopath vs. The Average Criminal
There are important distinctions between the psychopath and the average criminal:
1. The psychopath very seldom takes much advantage of what he gains and almost never works consistently toward a goal in crime or anything else, seemingly lacking purpose.
2. Criminal ends, though condemned, can usually be understood by the average man. It is not hard to understand why a criminal steals money. However, the psychopath, if he steals or defrauds, appears to do so for an obscure purpose, sometimes incomprehensibly throwing away much of value for short-term gains.
3. The criminal usually spares harm to himself as much as he can and harms others. The psychopath, although he causes sorrow and trouble for others, usually puts himself in a shameful position. His most serious damage to others is often through their concern for him and their futile efforts to help him.
4. The typical psychopath usually avoids murder or other offenses that lead to lengthy prison sentences. The larger part of the psychopath’s antisocial behavior can be interpreted as purposely designed to harm himself. Most of the people who commit violent and serious crimes fail to show the chief characteristics of a psychopath.
![“MIT researchers turn on a memory”
Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same dangerous chamber, they remembered the unpleasant electric shock and froze, taking on a defensive stance. Researchers had, however, inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into the cells involved in making a memory. They then tested what happened when they turned on a light to activate those cells, without putting the mice in the same chamber. They saw the freezing behavior, as if the mice were reliving the memory.
“This is the most dramatic way to show that high cognitive phenomenon, like memory recall, can be generated, can be artificially generated by poking cells in the brain,” Tonegawa said in an interview.
He said there were about 20,000 neurons, or brain cells, involved in this particular kind of memory. [via]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1m012mDUF1qan221o1_500.jpg)
“MIT researchers turn on a memory”
Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same dangerous chamber, they remembered the unpleasant electric shock and froze, taking on a defensive stance. Researchers had, however, inserted a gene that codes for a light-sensitive protein into the cells involved in making a memory. They then tested what happened when they turned on a light to activate those cells, without putting the mice in the same chamber. They saw the freezing behavior, as if the mice were reliving the memory.
“This is the most dramatic way to show that high cognitive phenomenon, like memory recall, can be generated, can be artificially generated by poking cells in the brain,” Tonegawa said in an interview.
He said there were about 20,000 neurons, or brain cells, involved in this particular kind of memory. [via]
The amygdalae are almond-shaped groups of nuclei located in the limbic system and temporal lobe of the brain. It is involved in memory and emotion, particularly fear.
The outer layer of the brain is known as the cerebral cortex or grey matter. Grey matter includes regions of the brain involved in muscle control, sensory perceptions such as seeing and hearing, memory, emotions and speech.
The prefrontal cortex is the anterior part of the frontal lobes of the brain, lying in front of the motor and premotor areas.
This brain region has been implicated in planning complex cognitive behaviors, personality expression, decision making and moderating correct social behavior. The basic activity of this brain region is considered to be orchestration of thoughts and actions in accordance with internal goals.
The most typical psychological term for functions carried out by the prefrontal cortex area is executive function. Executive function relates to abilities to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, working toward a defined goal, prediction of outcomes, expectation based on actions, and social “control” (the ability to suppress urges that, if not suppressed, could lead to socially-unacceptable outcomes).
Mania
Mania is a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, arousal, and/or energy levels. In a sense, it is the opposite of depression. It is usually a feeling of well-being, energy and optimism. These feelings can get so intense that the person loses contact with reality. When this happens the person believes in strange things about their personality and they can often act in embarrassing ways and can sometimes even act in dangerous ways.
A manic episode is defined in the American Psychiatric Association’s diagnostic manual as a period of seven or more days of unusually and continuously effusive and open elated or irritable mood, where the mood is not caused by drugs or a medical illness and is causing obvious difficulties at work or in social relationships and activities, or requires admission to hospital to protect the person or others, or the person is suffering psychosis. To be classed as a manic episode, while the disturbed mood is present at least three (or four if only irritability is present) of the following must have been consistently prominent: grand or extravagant style, or expanded self-esteem; reduced need of sleep (e.g. three hours may be sufficient); talks more often and feels the urge to talk longer; ideas flit through the mind in quick succession, or thoughts race and preoccupy the person; over indulgence in enjoyable behaviors with high risk of a negative outcome (e.g., extravagant shopping, sexual adventures or improbable commercial schemes).
Mania is always relative to the normal rate of intensity of the person being diagnosed with it; therefore, an easily-angered person may exhibit mania by getting even angrier even more quickly, and an intelligent person may adopt seemingly “genius” characteristics and an ability to perform and to articulate thought beyond that of which they may be capable in a normal mood. But perhaps the easiest indicator of mania would be if a noticeably clinically depressed person becomes suddenly cheerful, optimistic, happy, and full of energy.
Charles Manson
Charles Manson (born November 12, 1934) is an American criminal who led what became known as the Manson Family, a quasi-commune that arose in California in the late 1960s. He was born to a 16 year old alcoholic mother, and had a troubled childhood, never knowing who his father was. His youth was spent stealing and committing other petty crime, and he spent time in juvenile centers and prisons. By March 21, 1967, his release day from prison (he was arrested for forging checks), he had spent more than half of his 32 years in prisons and other institutions.
Manson moved to San Francisco and established himself as a guru in San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, which, during 1967’s “Summer of Love”, was emerging as the signature hippie locale. Expounding a philosophy that included some of the Scientology he had studied in prison, he soon had his first group of young followers, most of them female. Soon enough, the numbers of the Manson “family” started doubling and they relocated to a ranch in California. Manson treated the women as his servants.
In 1968, Manson discovered the Beatles and became obsessed with their music. For some time, Manson had been saying that racial tension between blacks and whites was growing and that blacks would soon rise up in rebellion in America’s cities, and he thought that the Beatles’ songs spoke of this. He maintained that the Beatles’ White Album was directed at the Family, an elect group that was being instructed to preserve the worthy from the impending disaster. They looked at themselves as the ‘chosen ones.” Manson called the apocalyptic war “Helter Skelter.”
Their crimes started in 1939. They killed a few more people and were responsible for the famous murder of pregnant actress Sharon Tate and three other occupants of the house. Tate pleaded to be allowed to live long enough to have her baby; she cried, “Mother… mother…” until she was dead. Manson picked the house because it was the previous residence of Terry Melcher, who was supposed to help Manson with his music career, and didn’t. After the Tate murders, the Manson family killed supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife.
Manson and his followers were arrested in December 1969, after the police collected enough evidence from different sources to link them to the murders. During the trial, Manson said that he wanted to make it seem like the murders were committed by black people. He, along with the others who participated in the murders, was given life in prison. Manson has three children by three different mothers. He is currently 75 and an inmate at a California prison.
