Psychiatric Diagnosis and Genetics

An interesting piece by Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks. He notes that recent studies in medical genetics tend to undermine the foundations of some psychiatric diagnoses. At Mind Hacks he summarizes as follows:

The “mental illness is a genetic brain disease” folks find that their evidence of choice – molecular genetics – has undermined the validity of individual diagnoses, while the “mental illness is socially constructed” folks find that the best evidence for their claims comes from neurobiology studies.

And here’s a snippet from the Observer piece he wrote, well worth a read:

This new realisation rests on evidence that genetic factors initially associated with, for example, schizophrenia have now been recognised as equally important in raising the risk for several other problems including epilepsy, attention deficit disorder, autism and learning disability.

If you speak the language of science, there’s also a link to a British Journal of Psychiatry review article on the topic:

There is accumulating evidence for shared genetic as well as environmental risk between intellectual disability and other conditions with a neurodevelopmental basis such as autism, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, epilepsy and schizophrenia. These can be conceived as lying along a continuum of genetically and environmentally induced neurodevelopmental causality.

As usual, not suggesting diseases such as schizophrenia don’t exist — but our understanding of their causes is far from complete. And of course, DSM-V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is slated to come out this May 2013.

 

 

Videogame Treatment for PTSD?

A little fluff I chanced upon over at the Mind Hacks website, regarding the “psychology of Tetris.” It even includes a link to a Psychology Today article about the possibility of using video games such as Tetris to prevent flashbacks in people suffering with PTSD. Here’s the quote from Mind Hacks:

The writer Jeffrey Goldsmith was so obsessed with Tetris that he wrote a famous article asking if the game’s creator Alexey Pajitnov had invented “a pharmatronic?” – a video game with the potency of an addictive drug. Some people say that after playing the game for hours they see falling blocks in their dreams or buildings move together in the street – a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect. Such is its mental pull, there’s even been the suggestion that the game might be able to prevent flashbacks in people with PTSD.

The theory, as noted in the Psychology Today article, is that an “intensive mental task” might actually be able to “compete successfully” with the development of flashbacks. From that article, which you might find interesting:

In their experiment, volunteers were shown a brief video with traumatic scenes of violence and death, and half of them were then assigned to play Tetris for 10 minutes, the other half (the controls) were told to sit quietly, doing nothing. At followup a week later, the Tetris players had fewer flashbacks and lower scores on measures of trauma impact. Holmes concluded, “strategic, selective interference with the consolidation of recently triggered visual memories occurs via the demand on the player’s limited visuospatial working memory resources.”