Octopi Personalities and Talk Therapy

Here’s my favorite section of an otherwise typically biologically reductionistic article:
As evolutionary theory would predict, you don’t have to be a person to have a personality. Four of the five factors (apart from conscientiousness, a cognitively complex trait) have been identified in more than sixty species, not only in our fellow primates but also in [...]

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VA Attempts to Cover Up Suicide Rate

Over at PscyhCentral John Grohol is saying the VA is hiding suicide numbers. According to internal memos, veterans are committing suicide at the rate of about 6500 per year. Below are some statistics to put that into the larger context. If the numbers are correct that would put veteran suicides at about 20 percent of [...]

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No End to Deceptive Marketing of Pharmaceuticals

Taken directly from Mind Hacks. More on advertising of drugs. It opens:
We’re so used to drug companies burying data, spinning their results, ghostwriting papers, ‘financially incentivising’ doctors and designing biased studies, you’d just assume that if drug advert cited a research it would back up the claim being made for the medication. According to a [...]

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Prominent Academic Scientists Begin to Reject Industry Pay

The New York Times ran an article on doctor’s beginning to reject industry pay. The article begins: “With little fanfare, a small number of prominent academic scientists have made a decision that was until recently all but unheard of. They decided to stop accepting payments from food, drug and medical device companies.” Here’s one [...]

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PTSD and Multiple Tours of Duty

Acute PTSD. The Charlotte Sun-Herald has a piece on a “baby-faced” Marine who disappeared and was later found dead. His mother: “My son died a long time ago… He wasn’t the same when he came back.” Of course, where he came back from was Iraq, in 2005. The marine suffered from an acute case of [...]

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VA: PTSD not Mental Illness

From a chief advocate for health care in the Veterans Administration:
“The number of patients who have adjustment reactions to the experience that they have in Afghanistan or Iraq is very important, but we don’t believe that’s mental illness,” Kussman said. “It would be unfair and inappropriate to stigmatize people with a mental health diagnosis when [...]

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A History of Trauma

This piece, originally posted in October, is a backdrop to some of the Veterans Administration’s recent statements about PTSD.
Returning Vietnam veterans.
When Bessel van der Kolk was at the Veteran’s Administration (VA) in 1978, he was one of many clinicians fascinated by the complaints of returning Vietnam veterans. At the time, there was no definition [...]

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Some Upcoming Posts

Veterans Administration: PTSD not mental illness
PTSD and multiple tours of duty
Veterans Administration attempts to cover up suicide rate
Getting PTSD in the DSM, A history of trauma
The personalities of octopi
Major depression: The numbers
Who markets psychotherapy?
No end to deceptive marketing of pharmaceuticals

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Procrastination and Guilt, A Pithy Post

Psychology Today writer Timothy Pychyl, writes on procrastination and guilt, based on the work of Rollo May. His post is called “10 Sentences on Guilt and Chronic Procrastination”. Here are three of those sentences.

The emotion most strongly associated with procrastination is guilt.
According to the existential psychologist Rollo May, guilt does not result from violating a [...]

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Twenty Minutes of Housework Reduces Stress

Robust study with 20,000 participants. As reported in Medical News Today (April 17):
Performing as little as twenty minutes of any physical activity, including housework, per week is enough to boost mental health. This conclusion was made as part of a study published on April 10, 2008 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, one of [...]

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