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Gambling

McDonald's loses trademark fight against McCurry

source: The Globe and Mail

Mending a broken mind

Mental illness presents one of the great challenges to modern society, a leading cause of disability, absenteeism and deaths due to suicide. Not only does it strike one in five Canadians, usually in their prime, but too often it defies the ability of modern medicine to treat it.


Depression, which affects one in 12 people in this country, is one of the trickiest disorders to cure. While 80 per cent of patients find effective relief with standard drug or psychotherapies, the latest numbers suggest that only 40 per cent truly feel well. Worse, experts estimate that, for 10 to 20 per cent of sufferers, nothing works.

The most promising treatment for intractable depression on the horizon is not a designer drug, a new form of talk or even genetic therapy. It's electricity that can lift the human spirit with deep brain stimulation (DBS),where surgeons implant metal rods that aim steady pulses of electrical current at the faulty neural circuits believed to underlie mental illness.

Society has long separated neurological diseases from psychiatric ones, as though physical conditions can stem from concrete malfunctions of the brain but maladies of the mind cannot.  Dr. Lozano says more than 40,000 Parkinson's patients have already had DBS ease their tremors by targeting parts of the brain where motor neurons misbehave.

In 2003, University of Toronto researchers tested DBS on depression,  it proved safe, it also made some subjects better.  Since then, 50 patients in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, as well as at least 30 in the United States, Europe and South America, have undergone the procedure in a bid to see whether electrical implants can indeed mend a broken mind.

The Toronto researchers point out that it's not the use of electricity that makes their treatment a major advance – it's where they direct it. “With brain surgery, it's like real estate – it's location, location, location,” says Andres Lozano, the neurosurgeon and senior scientist who has led the trials at Toronto Western Hospital.

The only difference in using DBS for depression is that the electrodes target the brain area where sadness lives, behind the eyeballs, four centimetres back in from the forehead. That's where Dr. Mayberg found it after 20 years of brain-imaging studies, in Boston, Texas and then Toronto in the late 1990s.

Seated in the ancient limbic lobe, 'Area 25' connects to the brain structures involved in human function – emotion, memory, stress, sleep, libido, appetite, energy levels and learning. “It's linked into all the core areas involved in depression,” Dr. Mayberg says. The images led to a hypothesis: If they had found one of the sites where a feeling runs amok, could they find a way to fix it? Would the type of DBS used for Parkinson's charge the cells in Area 25 out of their “on” position?

In 2001, Dr. Mayberg and Dr. Lozano met at a conference of neurosurgeons.  Dr. Lozano was world renowned for his brain-stimulation operations. He had performed DBS for Parkinson's and other neurological disorders since 1992 – about six times a month. When Dr. Mayberg suggested that they try it for depression, he thought it was “a long shot” – but right up his alley.

Deciding who makes the cut is in part the job of Sidney Kennedy, the health network's head of psychiatry. Deeply involved in planning the DBS trial, he describes the procedure as a “major paradigm shift” in the treatment of a mood disorder. “It has been an interesting role for the psychiatrist: He's evolved from psychotherapies, to pharmacotherapy … to adjustments with stimulators. … It's one of the best examples where psychiatry meets neuroscience.”

Dr. Lozano stresses that, unlike other psychosurgeries, DBS can be reversed, the electrodes removed, and five years since their first patient, none has suffered serious side effects.

The risk experience with DBS for Parkinson's suggests that one in every 500 patients will suffer a hemorrhage during the surgery. Four in a thousand will suffer a serious complication, such as a permanent neural deficit or even death. If the numbers of patients being treated rise appreciably, “it will happen” for depression as well, he says flatly.

The positive affects rarely appear right away.  Dr. Giaccobe says, it can be difficult for people who have been profoundly depressed for so long suddenly to reclaim their lives. “They still have ups and downs,” and even their relationships change.  Patients can have their moods improve, but still have a lazy libido or erratic appetite and need reminders that it can be tricky to distinguish depression from a mere mood swing.

Mr. Miller says. “You have to remember that every bump in the road is not a return of the depression.”

Pill Popping in Pop Culture

Michael Jackson's Death Adds to the List of Pop Icons Who Battled Prescription-Drug Addiction

Weight gain more likely from beverages

NEW ORLEANS, April 24 (UPI) -- Weight gain is more likely to increase as a result of liquid calories, particularly sugar-sweetened beverages, than solid food calories, U.S. researchers said.

Lead author Dr. Liwei Chen of the Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center said the study reports four principal findings:

• a reduction in liquid calorie intake was significantly associated with weight loss at both six months and 18 months;
• the weight-loss effect of a reduction in liquid calorie intake was stronger than that of a reduction in solid calorie intake;
• a reduction in sugar-sweetened beverage intake was significantly associated with weight loss at both six and 18 months;
• and no other beverage type was associated with weight change.

The findings are published in May 1 issue of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

Recovery and Exercise - Using Exercise to Aid Alcohol and Drug Recovery

Many professional alcohol and drug treatment and rehabilitation programs include exercise as part of an overall program to help patients maintain abstinence and develop a more healthy lifestyle. Many residential treatment centers feature fully-equipped exercise facilities on the premises.

Traditionally, the main reason exercise has been recommended for those trying to quit alcohol and drugs is because it keeps them focused on something other than their withdrawal symptoms or cravings. Now, however, there may be evidence that exercise has additional benefits to those who want to avoid drinking and using drugs.

Research Shows Exercise Can Help: The National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) has set aside $4 million for scientific research to explore a possible role for physical activity in substance abuse and relapse prevention.

When announcing the funding, NIDA director Dr. Nora Volkow cited two studies that have shown exercise to be a benefit. In one, adolescents who exercised daily were half as likely to smoke cigarettes as their sedentary counterparts, and 40% less likely to experiment with marijuana.

In another study, women who were in a smoking-cessation program doubled their chances of quitting by adding exercise to their routines three days a week, compared to women in the study who did not exercise. They also had less weight gain.

Everyone Can Benefit from Exercise:  If exercise can help people in residential treatment facilities and subjects in scientific studies, it can benefit anyone trying to quit drinking and drugging or striving to maintain abstinence.

Exercise is something to which everyone has access. You don't have to become a world-class athlete to enjoy the benefits of exercise as part of your recovery. You don't have to join a professional gymnasium, hire a personal trainer or buy expensive equipment, although those options can be beneficial also. Exercise is something that you can do on your own.

Source:   National Institute of Drug Abuse. "NIDA Explores Exercise as Drug Abuse Prevention Tool." June 2008.

Presbyterian Scotland

John Knox (1505-1572), a Scot who had spent time studying under Calvin in Geneva, returned to Scotland and led the Parliament of Scotland to embrace the Reformation in 1560 (see Scottish Reformation Parliament). The Church of Scotland was eventually reformed along Presbyterian lines, to become the national, established Church of Scotland.
The Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Acts of Union 1707 between Scotland and England guaranteed the Church of Scotland's form of government. However, legislation by the United Kingdom parliament allowing patronage led to splits in the Church, notably the Disruption of 1843 which led to the formation of the Free Church of Scotland. Further splits took place, especially over theological issues, but most Presbyterians in Scotland were reunited by 1929 union of the established Church of Scotland and the United Free Church of Scotland.

The Presbyterian denominations in Scotland today are the Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland, the United Free Church of Scotland, the Free Church of Scotland (Continuing), the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Associated Presbyterian Church, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church of Scotland.


Thanks, Wikipedia

My interest in this topic was sparked by reading a book called, "The Fifth Business" by Robertson Davies wherein his character is a Canadian Scot who has a severe religious upbringing.  It is the first novel in a trilogy and I find it a great read when I'm in bed at night.

R. D. Laing Bio Review

THE WING OF MADNESS: The Life and Work of R. D. Laing
By Daniel Burston

By the time he collapsed and died of a heart attack while playing tennis in August 1989, R. D. Laing had devolved from one of the most compelling intellectual heroes of the 1960's into a gruesome purveyor of mysticism and bad poetry. Once the charismatic power behind a community of radical therapists and the influential author of several provocative books, the Scottish psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who had broken down the barriers between sanity and madness -- in theory, in practice and even in the swagger of his personality -- had become "yesterday's icon," as Daniel Burston describes Laing's last years in "The Wing of Madness."

Born in Glasgow in 1927, Laing was the only child of "a quiet Presbyterian couple," as Mr. Burston calls them, whose behavior was anything but quiet. Laing's father and grandfather had "brutal physical scenes in the parlor," while his mother was wont to burn the family's trash inside the apartment so as to conceal its contents from the neighbors and regularly destroyed her son's toys.

Both "introverted" and "rebellious," Laing was a product of "complex tensions." As a schoolboy, Laing excelled at classics and dabbled in evangelical Christianity; he also maintained a schedule of reading that, by the time he was 15, included Voltaire, Marx, Nietzsche and, of course, Freud.

In 1953, Laing set up the "Rumpus Room," a day room for schizophrenic patients in a hospital near Glasgow, that allowed them some possibility for social interaction. Later that year, he found the case that confirmed his views on the relation between brain and mind, neurology and psychiatry.

Nan, a 15-year-old girl with severe head injuries, had changed her personality after recovering from a coma. Before her accident, she had been a promising young hausfrau; now, Mr. Burston writes, she was a "coquette." Although to the neurologists Nan's first attempts at speech and movement were incoherent, to the rest of the hospital staff "they were construed...as deliberate humor," leading to the rewards of "sweets and caresses." Laing ascribed the change to an interpersonal factor -- "the new 'Nan,' " as he himself put it, "began as a construction of the others."

Laing's first book, "The Divided Self" (1959), added to the vocabulary of the interpersonal the vocabulary of the existential. Emotional misery, he argued, has its roots in experiences with others, usually in the family, as he would go on to argue (with Aaron Esterson) in " Sanity, Madness and the Family" (1964).

Falling ill is the first step in a "self-cure," a process Laing later called "metanoia," "a term used in the Greek New Testament for atonement." Metanoia, especially in its schizophrenic form, is an existential journey, Laing argued; with safe surroundings, it can actually be a route toward recovery based on choice.

"Laing, like Sartre, construed the mad (or nearly mad) person as an active agent in the creation and perpetuation of his own misery, who must choose, finally, to abandon his schizoid isolation in favor of authentic relatedness to others in order to regain his sanity."

Laing's attempt to put these notions into the radical practice that made him famous came with the establishment in 1964 of Kingsley Hall, the controversial therapeutic community in London's East End in which staff and patients of ten exchanged roles. Laing's "therapeutic utopia," as Mr. Burston amusingly describes it, was "anarchic," and its legendary characters included Mary Barnes, the middle-aged Roman Catholic nurse who attracted wide attention after writing a book about her regression and recovery.

Kingsley Hall was dissolved in 1970, at the beginning of the next phase of Laing's career, a showier phase frankly intended to cash in on his notoriety as a guru (Laing's money problems were endless) and to explore newer interests like the relation between shamanism and psychotherapy.

Despite the Philadelphia Association -- the umbrella organization he had helped to found in 1965, which was stocked with disciples who loosely oversaw a group of therapeutic communities -- Laing's clinical movement also lost steam toward the end of the decade.

By the1980's, Laing was in decline. In 1987, he even lost his license to practice medicine in Britain because a patient alleged he had been "intoxicated and unprofessional" on two occasions. At the end Laing was "a once-famous man with no profession, no fixed address and no funds."

Laing always hesitated to ask: whether or not self and other even exist except in their relation. Laing was unable, or unwilling, to integrate this paradox into his thinking.


In retrospect, Laing's charismatic vexation derives from acting out his overdetermination (to use Freud's terms) as a thinker instead of working it through. Laing was a real and significant sufferer because he took tensions to the limit without managing to resolve them. A crucible for the century's own overdeterminations, Laing's sorrows are a kind of sacrifice for our wider understanding after him -- and in many ways because of him.

POSTSCRIPT

Laing always hesitated to ask: whether or not self and other even exist except in their relation. Laing was unable, or unwilling, to integrate this paradox into his thinking. 

Laing should have read his Buddhist books:

In the beginning is the One, and only the One is. From the One comes Two, the innumerable Pairs of Opposites. But there is no such thing as Two, for no two things can be conceived without their relationship, and this makes three, the basic Trinity of all manifestation.




Document URL: http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/laing.html

ZURICH -- Swiss voters on Sunday backed a scheme allowing heroin addicts to obtain the drug under prescription, angering conservatives who believe crime will rise as result.

Some 68 percent voted in favour of the prescription programme that was already approved by parliament, making permanent an experiment that has been in place since 1994.

The referendum was instigated by the right-wing Swiss People's Party (SVP), which wanted to overturn parliament's decision.

Advocates of the programme say that allowing addicts to be prescribed heroin makes them less likely to turn to crime to pay for their habit and that the treatment can lower mortality rates.

Opponents of the scheme say it has done little to encourage users to give up heroin.

Switzerland's cities were plagued with drug problems in the 1990s, but drug-related crime has declined and addicts' health has improved due to government health plans.

"The people have confirmed that the conditions of the 90s, with open drug scenes in all towns, must belong to the past," the Social Democrats said in a statement.

The Green party also welcomed the result.

But the SVP said it was disappointed with the outcome, saying that the law failed to make abstinence its goal.

"The new legal framework will favour the drug mafia and will lead to new, open drug scenes and make the jobs of the police and justice departments even more difficult," the party said in a statement.

"Several thousand drug addicts are not capable of working anymore and live off social help and disability insurance."

Addicts have to fulfil strict criteria before being allowed to take part in the programme, the Swiss Federal Council said in a document published before the referendum.

At the beginning of 2008, nearly 1,300 addicts were being prescribed heroin out of 26,000 undergoing treatment, many of whom were receiving the synthetic substitute methadone.

"Heroin-assisted treatment (HAT) is designed to help severely dependent heroin users who have fallen through the net provided by other treatment options," the Federal Department of Home Affairs said on its website.

In another referendum on Sunday, the Swiss rejected the decriminalisation of cannabis, with 63 percent voting against an initiative that was supported by the Social Democrats and the Green party.

© Thomson Reuters 2008