Category: mood disorders

GrownChildCam: New Treatment For Depression?

Seth Roberts9 Comments

Jacob Nelik, the friend of a friend, is a businessman/engineer in Los Angeles whose business, ISS Corporation, makes high-tech solutions from off-the-shelf components. Their projects include video camera systems for luxury yachts and retail stores, and technical and marketing support to Israel Aerospace Industries for their wiring design software. His mom, who is 85, lives in Israel in an old-age home. She has short-term memory problems. Jacob wrote me:

I try to visit her 3-4 times a year but at this age the feeling of loneliness and emptiness, compounded with the feeling (and fact) that because of distance, I can’t come and visit her whenever she (or I) would like to, brought her to a stage where she felt she didn’t have a reason to live (“living for what?” as she said). I felt that with my knowledge, experience and the internet, I can make it easier for her. So I utilized a TV set she already owned to create a live picture of me in my office. Whenever I am in the office, she can see me (live). It is on 24 hours a day just like a picture but with live image. I felt that this would bring her closer to me and she would feel (on a daily basis) that I am there with her.
I utilized video parts that my company uses. I took an old home camcorder and connected it to one of the parts we use for our video projects, called a video server or video encoder. It takes the Analog video/picture that the camcorder provides, digitizes it, compresses it, and converts it to IP (Internet Protocol). There are many like this in the market; the one I used allows me to control many parameters including picture compression algorithm, so I can maintain a large physical picture (to fill up the TV screen on my mom’s end without being grainy or fuzzy) with high quality, high frame rate, very short delay (under 2 seconds) and very low bandwidth so I can use the cheapest internet service available. On my mom’s end, I used the same type of circuit to perform the reverse function (Taking the IP video stream, decompress it and convert it back to an Analog video to be fed into the TV set to the same connector where a VCR is connected). I am skipping some technical details but the net result is high quality video from end to end (when each end can be located at different place in the world).

What happened?

From the moment the system started operating (about a year ago) I could see tremendous positive effects on my mom. She no longer says “why do I need to live, what for?” I can detect a smile in her face just by listening to her. Just yesterday she told me that she saw me eating ice cream at my desk. She mentioned a new shirt I was wearing. It gives her many new conversational topics. She tells me that she enters the room and starts talking to me as if I am there with her. She became much more relaxed and as a result, even her blood pressure is better controlled. It fills a void in her life. It affected me positively as well, because I see how much better she is.

Harvard Psychiatrists Don’t Disclose Millions of $$ From Drug Companies

Seth Roberts3 Comments

From the latest BMJ:

Findings that a leading Harvard professor of psychiatry failed to report substantial payments that he received from drug companies has caused Harvard Medical School, one of its affiliated hospitals, and the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to come under fire.

An investigation by the US senator Charles Grassley showed that the psychiatrist, Joseph Biederman, and two of his colleagues, Thomas Spencer and Timothy Wilens, had altogether received more than $4.2m (£2.1m; {euro}2.7m) from drug companies since 2000.

The financial disclosure forms filed by the three doctors, according to Mr Grassley, “were a mess” and made it seem that they had received only “a couple of hundred thousand dollars” in the past seven years. . .Professor Biederman, at the centre of the scandal, has been widely recognised as one of the most influential psychiatrists in the world. He is a leading proponent of the diagnosis of paediatric bipolar disorder and he is currently conducting a study of the antipsychotic, quetiapine (Seroquel) in children aged 4 to 6 years with bipolar disorder.

Details.

More About Faces and Mood

Seth Roberts8 Comments

Today I spoke to someone who has been looking at his face in a mirror every morning to raise his mood. “It’s a big effect,” he said. It raises his mood “about 30 points” on a 0-100 scale where 0 = misery, 50 = neutral, and 100 = ecstasy. He starts around 6 am and does it for about an hour. This is close to what I observed with TV faces: one hour of faces at the best time produced about a 30-point improvement.

Thirty points, however wonderful, is not enough to change his life, he said; he would need 60 points for that. He has been in and out of mental hospitals several times and of course mental illness of that severity destroys all sorts of things we need, such as a decent job and friendships. As he looked at the diagram (two causes of depression) on p. 237 of my self-experimentation paper, his situation sunk in on him. It wasn’t just lack of morning faces that was making him depressed; it was also on-going life events.

My guess is that most Americans, asked to rate their mood, would say they are around 50 — neutral. Sure, they procrastinate, and bad traffic bothers them, but on the whole life is okay. But when something awful happens — they lose a job or a spouse, for example — their mood goes way down and takes a very long time to come back up. It is like AIDS. Our mood regulatory system, which requires morning faces to work properly, functions like our immune system to fight off damage and push us back to normal. In most people, unfortunately, that system is broken, just as AIDS sufferers lack a working immune system. So many people have far too much trouble getting rid of crippling bad moods. I suspect that most addictions, including the food addictions behind serious obesity, Internet addiction and video-game addiction, are self-medication to get rid of bad mood. It is the fact that the addictive act pushes a mood of 20 or 30 up to 50 that makes it so attractive. One of my students investigated the connection between depression and drug addiction; in her small sample, the depression always came first.

Earlier post about faces and mood.

Addendum: A February 2007 article in the American Journal of Psychiatry about bariatric-surgery candidates (average BMI = 52) reported this:

The discrepancy between lifetime and current substance use disorders was striking (32.6% versus 1.7%).

In other words, they used to take drugs but they don’t any more — possibly because food has replaced drugs.