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anonymous

Opinion | How to Fix the Debate Over Guns - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...gun-reform-us.html

shared by anonymous on 26 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • We can find real solutions to gun violence if we recognize the trauma it causes.
  • In the span of a week, two acts of public violence have stolen the lives of 18 people and provided a stark reminder of the mass gun violence that characterized the pre-Covid United States
  • Gun violence did not go away during 2020. Gun homicides jumped 25 percent from the year before, apparently fueled in part by a rise in intimate partner violence
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • In the U.S., people often reach for more guns as a response to mass shootings and in anticipation of needing a method of home protection, but also — as we saw in 2020 and into 2021 — in response to presidential elections, political unrest and mass-scale infectious disease.
  • Gun violence entails immediate physical trauma, but it also elicits forms of trauma that can ricochet far beyond its initial target
  • If we understand trauma as social, psychological and physical responses to experiences that cannot be assimilated into an individual’s existing understandings of themselves and the world around them, then gun trauma goes far beyond
  • Having someone taken through gun violence, surviving gun violence oneself, even hearing gunshots tears at our basic sense of safety, of security and of self
  • Research has found that surviving or being exposed to gun violence survival is associated with an increased risk of symptoms linked with PTSD (including anxiety and depression) in both urban and rural contexts, short-term decreases in reading ability, vocabulary, and impulse control, unemployment and substance use and even shifts in friendship formation
  • While gun trauma most certainly shapes the aftermath of shootings, it also shapes our day-to-day decisions and sensibilities far beyond specific acts of gun violence
  • Policies that purport to end the trauma of gun violence by increasing the punitive surveillance of individuals with mental illness, increasing police presence and surveillance of students at schools, or bringing more people into contact with the criminal justice system may ultimately create more, if different, trauma.
  • This trauma-violence cycle cannot break itself — but certainly has the power to break us.
  • Gun trauma is implicated in how guns harm us, why we turn to guns, and — to the extent that we depend on punitive criminal justice approaches to address it — how we attempt to solve the problem of gun violence.
  • We must dismantle this trauma-violence cycle, and the first step is centering gun trauma within the gun debate and addressing gun violence
  • what this might look like: the Community Justice Action Fund and Revolve Impact’s By Design campaign, which aims to “change the conversation” on gun violence by elevating leaders of color to “interrupt systems of violence and ultimately build power for communities most impacted by gun violence”
  • Approaching guns from the perspective of trauma will require some imagination — and some courage
lucieperloff

Why We Reach for Nostalgia in Times of Crisis - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...coronavirus-nostalgia.html

psychology knowledge

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Even things in recent history that I thought were awful only a few months ago — failing to avoid “Avengers: Endgame” spoilers, or the White Claw seltzer shortage — now pale in comparison to the ongoing trauma of … all of this.
  • Even things in recent history that I thought were awful only a few months ago — failing to avoid “Avengers: Endgame” spoilers, or the White Claw seltzer shortage — now pale in comparison to the ongoing trauma of … all of this.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Nostalgia can be an escape
  • “Trauma takes away our gray areas. It divides our timeline into a before and an after,”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The 'before' can be very comforting
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • In this case, nostalgia serves as a kind of emotional pacifier, helping us to become accustomed to a new reality that is jarring, stressful and traumatic.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It gives you something to hold on to
  • “So if you watch a movie and remember who you watched it with as a kid, and maybe connect with that person and you reach out to them instead of just drowning in isolation, that can be really helpful.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Leads to connecting with people who you haven't connected with in a long time
  • “I have reached out to a few friends from high school in recent weeks, some of whom I haven’t talked to in years, and we’ve been in close contact lately.”
  • during times of duress, our brains often take us to places that we subconsciously designate as “safe,” like past memories of a joyful vacation or happy childhood moments that made us feel loved.
  • To harness that response, Dr. Saint-Jean suggests making a list of safe places when you’re not stressed, anxious or experiencing the mental and physical ramifications of trauma.
  • “I’ve definitely been dressing more like my teenage self,” she said, “partly because I’ve been opting for comfier clothes anyway, but also because it feels good to lean into ’90s fashion and invoke the feeling of simpler times.”
  • ”While people are going to a past place for coping, it may not necessarily be a healthy place,”
  • Which is why, according to Dr. Stoycheva, self-awareness is key when navigating not only the present moment, but the ways in which nostalgia presents itself as a coping mechanism.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      You have to be aware of how nostalgia affects you
sissij

A Scar on the Chinese Soul - The New York Times - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...-scar-on-the-chinese-soul.html

new york times language social media

shared by sissij on 19 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • It “is that the Chinese, without direct orders, were so cruel to each other.”
  • The blurry distinction between perpetrators and victims makes collective healing by confronting the past a thorny project.
  • neither joining the Red Guards nor believing in Maoism protected someone from suffering long-term trauma.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Cultural Revolution trauma differs from that related to other horrific events, like the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide, studies have noted, in part because in China, people were persecuted not for “unalterable” characteristics such as ethnicity and race, but for having the wrong frame of mind.
  • The idea that life experiences could cause inheritable genetic changes has been identified among children of Holocaust survivors, who have been shown to have an increased likelihood of stress-related illnesses.
  • The possibility of epigenetic inheritance has been raised by Chinese academics regarding the Cultural Revolution, but to research the topic would most certainly invite state punishment.
    • sissij
      sissij on 19 Jan 17
       
      I think this article is a little bit exaggerating. Nobody is perfect, even the Mao that saved China from the hand of the Japanese. The title "a scar on the Chinese soul" is just too heavy. It is only showing one perspective of the event and it can be misleading to the general population America. From a media course I took during the winter break, it shows that there are cultural elements influencing the media inevitably. For America, the key words are "freedom", "supremacy", "heroism", "democracy"... I can see those elements influencing the view of the author in this article. And he is not the only one. There is a book called "Street of Eternal Happiness". It is also talking about Chinese suffering. There is confirmation bias in whom the author is interviewing and what data he is using in support to his argument. --Sissi (1/19/2017)
Javier E

How 'Concept Creep' Made Americans So Sensitive to Harm - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...477939

concept creep psychology liberalism harmful trauma torture

shared by Javier E on 19 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • How did American culture arrive at these moments? A new research paper by Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, Australia, offers as useful a framework for understanding what’s going on as any I’ve seen. In “Concept Creep: Psychology's Expanding Concepts of Harm and Pathology,”
  • concepts like abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice, “now encompass a much broader range of phenomena than before,”expanded meanings that reflect “an ever-increasing sensitivity to harm.”
  • “they also have potentially damaging ramifications for society and psychology that cannot be ignored.”
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • He calls these expansions of meaning “concept creep.”
  • critics may hold concept creep responsible for damaging cultural trends, he writes, “such as supposed cultures of fear, therapy, and victimhood, the shifts I present have some positive implications.”
  • Concept creep is inevitable and vital if society is to make good use of new information. But why has the direction of concept creep, across so many different concepts, trended toward greater sensitivity to harm as opposed to lesser sensitivity?
  • The concept of abuse expanded too far.
  • Classically, psychological investigations recognized two forms of child abuse, physical and sexual, Haslam writes. In more recent decades, however, the concept of abuse has witnessed “horizontal creep” as new forms of abuse were recognized or studied. For example, “emotional abuse” was added as a new subtype of abuse. Neglect, traditionally a separate category, came to be seen as a type of abuse, too.
  • Meanwhile, the concept of abuse underwent “vertical creep.” That is, the behavior seen as qualifying for a given kind of abuse became steadily less extreme. Some now regard any spanking as physical abuse. Within psychology, “the boundary of neglect is indistinct,” Haslam writes. “As a consequence, the concept of neglect can become over-inclusive, identifying behavior as negligent that is substantially milder or more subtle than other forms of abuse. This is not to deny that some forms of neglect are profoundly damaging, merely to argue that the concept’s boundaries are sufficiently vague and elastic to encompass forms that are not severe.”
  • How did a working-class mom get arrested, lose her fast food job, and temporarily lose custody of her 9-year-old for letting the child play alone at a nearby park?
  • One concerns the field of psychology and its incentives. “It could be argued that just as successful species increase their territory, invading and adapting to new habitats, successful concepts and disciplines also expand their range into new semantic niches,” he theorizes. “Concepts that successfully attract the attention of researchers and practitioners are more likely to be applied in new ways and new contexts than those that do not.”
  • Concept creep can be necessary or needless. It can align concepts more or less closely with underlying realities. It can change society for better or worse. Yet many who push for more sensitivy to harm seem unaware of how oversensitivty can do harm.
  • The other theory posits an ideological explanation. “Psychology has played a role in the liberal agenda of sensitivity to harm and responsiveness to the harmed,” he writes “and its increased focus on negative phenomena—harms such as abuse, addiction, bullying, mental disorder, prejudice, and trauma—has been symptomatic of the success of that social agenda.”
  • Jonathan Haidt, who believes it has gone too far, offers a fourth theory. “If an increasingly left-leaning academy is staffed by people who are increasingly hostile to conservatives, then we can expect that their concepts will shift, via motivated scholarship, in ways that will help them and their allies (e.g., university administrators) to prosecute and condemn conservatives,
  • While Haslam and Haidt appear to have meaningfully different beliefs about why concept creep arose within academic psychology and spread throughout society, they were in sufficient agreement about its dangers to co-author a Guardian op-ed on the subject.
  • It focuses on how greater sensitivity to harm has affected college campuses.
  • “Of course young people need to be protected from some kinds of harm, but overprotection is harmful, too, for it causes fragility and hinders the development of resilience,” they wrote. “As Nasim Taleb pointed out in his book Antifragile, muscles need resistance to develop, bones need stress and shock to strengthen and the growing immune system needs to be exposed to pathogens in order to function. Similarly, he noted, children are by nature anti-fragile – they get stronger when they learn to recover from setbacks, failures and challenges to their cherished ideas.”
  • police officers fearing harm from dogs kill them by the hundreds or perhaps thousands every year in what the DOJ calls an epidemic.
  • After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush Administration and many Americans grew increasingly sensitive to harms, real and imagined, from terrorism
  • Dick Cheney declared, “If there's a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It's not about our analysis ... It's about our response.” The invasion of Iraq was predicated, in part, on the idea that 9/11 “changed everything,”
  • Before 9/11, the notion of torturing prisoners was verboten. After the Bush Administration’s torture was made public, popular debate focused on mythical “ticking time bomb” scenarios, in which a whole city would be obliterated but for torture. Now Donald Trump suggests that torture should be used more generally against terrorists. Torture is, as well, an instance in which people within the field of psychology pushed concept creep in the direction of less sensitivity to harm,
  • Haslam endorses two theories
  • there are many reasons to be concerned about excessive sensitivity to harm:
maxwellokolo

A Trauma Nurse Reflects On 'Compassion Fatigue' - 0 views

www.npr.org/...reflects-on-compassion-fatigue

shared by maxwellokolo on 30 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 30 Apr 17
     
    Sometimes, even professionally compassionate people get tired. Kristin Laurel, a flight nurse from Waconia, Minn., has worked in trauma units for over two decades. The daily exposure to distressing situations can sometimes result in compassion fatigue. "Some calls get to you, no matter who you are," she says.
manhefnawi

Two New Studies Explore the Neuroscience of Negative Emotions | Mental Floss - 0 views

mentalfloss.com/...neuroscience-negative-emotions

Emotions Neuroscience

shared by manhefnawi on 14 Jun 18 - No Cached
  • We've all had experiences we'd prefer not to remember. That's especially true for people who have gone through a traumatic event such as childhood abuse, combat-related PTSD, or a bad accident. But there may be positive health applications for identifying, predicting, and retrieving negative emotions in the brain, according to two new studies. 
  • Researchers identified the different networks in the brain that all work together during a participant’s negative emotional experience, which they call a “brain signature.” Then, they used machine-learning algorithms to find global patterns of brain activity that best predicted the participants’ responses. “What we’re calling a 'brain signature' is basically a configuration—a brain pattern that is predictive of a state,” Chang tells mental_floss. He compares the process to the way that Netflix predicts who is watching a certain type of show based on the watcher’s choices in programming.
  • MEMORIES CAUSED—AND LOST—BY TRAUMA
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Many psychologists believe that in order for patients to recover from trauma, they often need to be able to recall what happened to them. The second study, published in Nature Neuroscience, investigated how the brain stores negative memories, known as “state-dependent learning.” The study, conducted in mice at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, suggests that negative memories caused—and then “lost”—by traumatic experiences may be retrieved by re-creating the state of the brain in which the memory first occurred.
  • The study suggests that in response to trauma, the brain activates this extra-synaptic GABA system, which appears to encode memories of fear-inducing events and hide them away from consciousness, rather than the glutamate system, which helps to store all memories, positive and negative. This research may provide a window into how to access these traumatic memories when needed for therapeutic reasons.
Javier E

I Watched My War Story Become a Movie - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...outpost-afghanistan-movie.html

healing catharsis war trauma grief listening therapy crisis psychology

shared by Javier E on 04 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • It was only then that I truly appreciated how important the listener’s role is in the healing process. In “Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming,” Jonathan Shay calls this form of catharsis the communalization of grief, in which trauma survivors tell their stories and listeners can “listen, believe and remember.” This is when the circle of healing is complete.
Javier E

How Climate Change Is Changing Therapy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...climate-anxiety-therapy.html

climate change therapy mental health adaptation role psychology

shared by Javier E on 22 Oct 23 - No Cached
  • Andrew Bryant can still remember when he thought of climate change as primarily a problem of the future. When he heard or read about troubling impacts, he found himself setting them in 2080, a year that, not so coincidentally, would be a century after his own birth. The changing climate, and all the challenges it would bring, were “scary and sad,” he said recently, “but so far in the future that I’d be safe.”
  • That was back when things were different, in the long-ago world of 2014 or so. The Pacific Northwest, where Bryant is a clinical social worker and psychotherapist treating patients in private practice in Seattle, is a largely affluent place that was once considered a potential refuge from climate disruption
  • “We’re lucky to be buffered by wealth and location,” Bryant said. “We are lucky to have the opportunity to look away.”
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  • starting in the mid-2010s, those beloved blue skies began to disappear. First, the smoke came in occasional bursts, from wildfires in Canada or California or Siberia, and blew away when the wind changed direction. Within a few summers, though, it was coming in thicker, from more directions at once, and lasting longer.
  • Sometimes there were weeks when you were advised not to open your windows or exercise outside. Sometimes there were long stretches where you weren’t supposed to breathe the outside air at all.
  • Now lots of Bryant’s clients wanted to talk about climate change. They wanted to talk about how strange and disorienting and scary this new reality felt, about what the future might be like and how they might face it, about how to deal with all the strong feelings — helplessness, rage, depression, guilt — being stirred up inside them.
  • As a therapist, Bryant found himself unsure how to respond
  • while his clinical education offered lots of training in, say, substance abuse or family therapy, there was nothing about environmental crisis, or how to treat patients whose mental health was affected by it
  • Bryant immersed himself in the subject, joining and founding associations of climate-concerned therapists
  • could now turn to resources like the list maintained by the Climate Psychology Alliance North America, which contains more than 100 psychotherapists around the country who are what the organization calls “climate aware.”
  • Over and over, he read the same story, of potential patients who’d gone looking for someone to talk to about climate change and other environmental crises, only to be told that they were overreacting — that their concern, and not the climate, was what was out of whack and in need of treatment.
  • “You come in and talk about how anxious you are that fossil-fuel companies continue to pump CO2 into the air, and your therapist says, ‘So, tell me about your mother.’”
  • In many of the messages, people asked Bryant for referrals to climate-focused therapists in Houston or Canada or Taiwan, wherever it was the writer lived.
  • his practice had shifted to reflect a new reality of climate psychology. His clients didn’t just bring up the changing climate incidentally, or during disconcerting local reminders; rather, many were activists or scientists or people who specifically sought out Bryant because of their concerns about the climate crisis.
  • Climate change, in other words, surrounds us with constant reminders of “ethical dilemmas and deep social criticism of modern society. In its essence, climate crisis questions the relationship of humans with nature and the meaning of being human in the Anthropocene.”
  • It had been a challenging few years, Bryant told me when I first called to talk about his work. There were some ways in which climate fears were a natural fit in the therapy room, and he believed the field had coalesced around some answers that felt clear and useful
  • But treating those fears also stirred up lots of complicated questions that no one was quite sure how to answer. The traditional focus of his field, Bryant said, could be oversimplified as “fixing the individual”: treating patients as separate entities working on their personal growth
  • Climate change, by contrast, was a species-wide problem, a profound and constant reminder of how deeply intertwined we all are in complex systems — atmospheric, biospheric, economic — that are much bigger than us. It sometimes felt like a direct challenge to old therapeutic paradigms — and perhaps a chance to replace them with something better.
  • In one of climate psychology’s founding papers, published in 2011, Susan Clayton and Thomas J. Doherty posited that climate change would have “significant negative effects on mental health and well-being.” They described three broad types of possible impacts: the acute trauma of living through climate disasters; the corroding fear of a collapsing future; and the psychosocial decay that could damage the fabric of communities dealing with disruptive changes
  • All of these, they wrote, would make the climate crisis “as much a psychological and social phenomenon as a matter of biodiversity and geophysics.”
  • Many of these predictions have since been borne out
  • Studies have found rates of PTSD spiking in the wake of disasters, and in 2017 the American Psychological Association defined “ecoanxiety” as “a chronic fear of environmental doom.”
  • Climate-driven migration is on the rise, and so are stories of xenophobia and community mistrust.
  • eventually started a website, Climate & Mind, to serve as a sort of clearing house for other therapists searching for resources. Instead, the site became an unexpected window into the experience of would-be patients: Bryant found himself receiving messages from people around the world who stumbled across it while looking for help.
  • Many say it has led to symptoms of depression or anxiety; more than a quarter make an active effort not to think about it.
  • A poll by the American Psychiatric Association in the same year found that nearly half of Americans think climate change is already harming the nation’s mental health.
  • In June, the Yale Journal of Biology and Medicine published a paper cautioning that the world at large was facing “a psychological condition of ‘systemic uncertainty,’” in which “difficult emotions arise not only from experiencing the ecological loss itself,” but also from the fact that our lives are inescapably embedded in systems that keep on making those losses worse.
  • According to a 2022 survey by Yale and George Mason University, a majority of Americans report that they spend time worrying about climate change.
  • This is not an easy way to live.
  • Living within a context that is obviously unhealthful, he wrote, is painful: “a dimly intuited ‘fall’ from which we spend our lives trying to recover, a guilt we can never quite grasp or expiate” — a feeling of loss or dislocation whose true origins we look for, but often fail to see. This confusion leaves us feeling even worse.
  • When Barbara Easterlin first started studying environmental psychology 30 years ago, she told me, the focus of study was on ways in which cultivating a relationship with nature can be good for mental health
  • There was little or no attention to the fact that living through, or helping to cause, a collapse of nature can also be mentally harmful.
  • the field is still so new that it does not yet have evidence-tested treatments or standards of practice. Therapists sometimes feel as if they are finding the path as they go.
  • Rebecca Weston, a licensed clinical social worker practicing in New York and a co-president of the CPA-NA, told me that when she treats anxiety disorders, her goal is often to help the patient understand how much of their fear is internally produced — out of proportion to the reality they’re facing
  • climate anxiety is a different challenge, because people worried about climate change and environmental breakdown are often having the opposite experience: Their worries are rational and evidence-based, but they feel isolated and frustrated because they’re living in a society that tends to dismiss them.
  • One of the emerging tenets of climate psychology is that counselors should validate their clients’ climate-related emotions as reasonable, not pathological
  • it does mean validating that feelings like grief and fear and shame aren’t a form of sickness, but, as Weston put it, “are actually rational responses to a world that’s very scary and very uncertain and very dangerous for people
  • In the words of a handbook on climate psychology, “Paying heed to what is happening in our communities and across the globe is a healthier response than turning away in denial or disavowal.”
  • But this, too, raises difficult questions. “How much do we normalize people to the system we’re in?” Weston asked. “And is that the definition of health?
  • Or is the definition of health resisting the things that are making us so unhappy? That’s the profound tension within our field.”
  • “It seems to shift all the time, the sort of content and material that people are bringing in,” Alexandra Woollacott, a psychotherapist in Seattle, told the group. Sometimes it was a pervasive anxiety about the future, or trauma responses to fires or smoke or heat; other times, clients, especially young ones, wanted to vent their “sort of righteous anger and sense of betrayal” at the various powers that had built and maintained a society that was so destructive.
  • “I’m so glad that we have each other to process this,” she said, “because we’re humans living through this, too. I have my own trauma responses to it, I have my own grief process around it, I have my own fury at government and oil companies, and I think I don’t want to burden my clients with my own emotional response to it.”
  • In a field that has long emphasized boundaries, discouraging therapists from bringing their own issues or experiences into the therapy room, climate therapy offers a particular challenge: Separation can be harder when the problems at hand affect therapist and client alike
  • Some therapists I spoke to were worried about navigating the breakdown of barriers, while others had embraced it. “There is no place on the planet that won’t eventually be impacted, where client and therapist won’t be in it together,” a family therapist wrote in a CPA-NA newsletter. “Most therapists I know have become more vulnerable and self-disclosing in their practice.”
  • “If you look at or consider typical theoretical framings of something like post-traumatic growth, which is the understanding of this idea that people can sort of grow and become stronger and better after a traumatic event,” she said, then the climate crisis poses a dilemma because “there is no afterwards, right? There is no resolution anytime in our lifetimes to this crisis that we nonetheless have to build the capacities to face and to endure and to hopefully engage.”
  • “How,” she asked, “do you think about resilience apart from resolution?”
  • many of her patients are also disconnected from the natural world, which means that they struggle to process or even recognize the grief and alienation that comes from living in a society that treats nature as other, a resource to be used and discarded.
  • “I’m so excited by what you’re bringing in,” Woollacott replied. “I’m doing psychoanalytic training at the moment, and we study attachment theory” — how the stability of early emotional bonds affects future relationships and feelings of well-being. “But nowhere in the literature does it talk about our attachment to the land.”
  • Torres said that she sometimes takes her therapy sessions outside or asks patients to remember their earliest and deepest connections with animals or plants or places. She believes it will help if they learn to think of themselves “as rooted beings that aren’t just simply living in the human overlay on the environment.” It was valuable to recognize, she said, that “we are part of the land” and suffer when it suffers.
  • Torres described introducing her clients to methods — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotion regulation — to help them manage acute feelings of stress or panic and to avoid the brittleness of burnout.
  • She also encourages them to narrativize the problem, including themselves as agents of change inside stories about how they came to be in this situation, and how they might make it different.
  • then she encourages them to find a community of other people who care about the same problems, with whom they could connect outside the therapy room. As Woollacott said earlier: “People who share your values. People who are committed to not looking away.”
  • Dwyer told the group that she had been thinking more about psychological adaptation as a form of climate mitigation
  • Therapy, she said, could be a way to steward human energy and creative capacities at a time when they’re most needed.
  • It was hard, Bryant told me when we first spoke, to do this sort of work without finding yourself asking bigger questions — namely, what was therapy actually about?
  • Many of the therapists I talked to spoke of their role not as “fixing” a patient’s problem or responding to a pathology, but simply giving their patients the tools to name and explore their most difficult emotions, to sit with painful feelings without instantly running away from them
  • many of the methods in their traditional tool kits continue to be useful in climate psychology. Anxiety and hopelessness and anger are all familiar territory, after all, with long histories of well-studied treatments.
  • They focused on trying to help patients develop coping skills and find meaning amid destabilization, to still see themselves as having agency and choice.
  • Weston, the therapist in New York, has had patients who struggle to be in a world that surrounds them with waste and trash, who experience panic because they can never find a place free of reminders of their society’s destruction
  • eston said, that she has trouble with the repeated refrain that therapist and patient experiencing the same losses and dreads at the same time constituted a major departure from traditional therapeutic practice
  • she believed this framing reflected and reinforced a bias inherent in a field that has long been most accessible to, and practiced by, the privileged. It was hardly new in the world, after all, to face the collapse of your entire way of life and still find ways to keep going.
  • Lately, Bryant told me, he’s been most excited about the work that happens outside the therapy room: places where groups of people gather to talk about their feelings and the future they’re facing
  • It was at such a meeting — a community event where people were brainstorming ways to adapt to climate chaos — that Weston, realizing she had concrete skills to offer, was inspired to rework her practice to focus on the challenge. She remembers finding the gathering empowering and energizing in a way she hadn’t experienced before. In such settings, it was automatic that people would feel embraced instead of isolated, natural that the conversation would start moving away from the individual and toward collective experiences and ideas.
  • There was no fully separate space, to be mended on its own. There was only a shared and broken world, and a community united in loving it.
maxwellokolo

The Late Effects of Stress: New Insights Into How the Brain Responds to Trauma - 0 views

neurosciencenews.com/stress-trauma-ptsd-5823

shared by maxwellokolo on 10 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • maxwellokolo on 10 Jan 17
     
    Neuroscience News has recent neuroscience research articles, brain research news, neurology studies and neuroscience resources for neuroscientists, students, and science fans and is always free to join. Our neuroscience social network has science groups, discussion forums, free books, resources, science videos and more.
ilanaprincilus06

NFL to stop controversial use of 'race-norming' in brain trauma settlements | NFL | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...orming-brain-trauma-settlement

NFL brain injuries dementia race

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 05 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of “race-norming” which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function in the $1bn settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.
  • The practice made it harder for Black retirees to show a deficit and qualify for an award.
  • Wednesday’s announcement comes after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • According to the NFL, a panel of neuropsychologists that was formed recently to propose a new testing regime to the court includes two female and three Black doctors.
  • The NFL noted that the norms were developed in medicine “to stop bias in testing, not perpetrate it.”
  • The binary race norms, when they are used in the testing, assumes that Black patients start with worse cognitive function than whites and other non-Blacks.
  • The awards so far have averaged $516,000 for the 379 players with early-stage dementia and $715,000 for the 207 players with moderate dementia.
  • he settlement ended thousands of lawsuits that accused the NFL of long hiding what it knew about the link between concussions and traumatic brain injury.
cvanderloo

Why Nearly All Mass Shooters Are Men : NPR - 1 views

www.npr.org/...arly-all-mass-shooters-are-men

guns Colorado men women shootings

shared by cvanderloo on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • As with almost every mass shooter in recorded U.S. history, both of the suspects in the recent attacks are men.
  • "Men just are generally more violent," said the group's president, Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist and professor of criminology and criminal justice at Hamline University. "There are many theories as to why that is."
  • And when women do choose violence, guns are not typically their weapon of choice.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • If men vastly outnumber women as mass shooters, those perpetrators are often a model for the next male shooters who "see themselves in them," Peterson said, a phenomenon she noted is particularly true in young, white men.
  • "Many school shooters study Columbine, for example; other university shooters study the Virginia Tech shooting. And they really are kind of using those previous shootings as a blueprint for their own."
  • But at the same time, as a psychologist, I've been worried about all the risk factors that we know of for mass shootings that have been exacerbated in the pandemic. So, trauma, experiencing a mental health crisis, suicidality, time online and access to firearms have all increased.
  • . We can kind of work our way backwards and say, these are individuals who are in crisis, who have very easy access to firearms. And are there simple things we can do like universal background checks or safe storage that prevent that ease of access?
  • But we can also go further back and talk about things like, how do we make sure everybody's trained in crisis intervention and suicide prevention? How do we build trauma-informed schools, and go even further back?
  • I would say, in particular, the media coverage seems to have shifted. I'm not seeing as much of the perpetrator in the news cycle. I'm not seeing the perpetrator's name and face everywhere, which we know is what contributes to the social contagion.
margogramiak

Brain imaging predicts PTSD after brain injury: Brain volume measurement may provide ea... - 0 views

www.sciencedaily.com/...201229080248.htm

shared by margogramiak on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma
  • Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a complex psychiatric disorder brought on by physical and/or psychological trauma
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      We've talked about PTSD in class before, and its links to memories, thoughts, and feelings.
  • Now, researchers using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have found potential brain biomarkers of PTSD in people with traumatic brain injury (TBI).
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Are they just now identifying something to read from an MRI that marks PTSD? Or is it a new type of MRI? As far as I know, the type of MRI they are referring to is nothing new.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The relationship between TBI and PTSD has garnered increased attention in recent years as studies have shown considerable overlap in risk factors and symptoms,
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Overlap between traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. Interesting.
  • At 3 months, 77 participants, or 18 percent, had likely PTSD; at 6 months, 70 participants or 16 percent did. All subjects underwent brain imaging after injury.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      That's interesting. So, the numbers were decreasing?
  • "MRI studies conducted within two weeks of injury were used to measure volumes of key structures in the brain thought to be involved in PTSD,"
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      What part of the brain is that?
  • Specifically, smaller volume in brain regions called the cingulate cortex, the superior frontal cortex, and the insula predicted PTSD at 3 months.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Answers my previous question. I'm unfamiliar with the cingulate cortex.
  • Together, the findings suggest that a "brain reserve," or higher cortical volumes, may provide some resilience against PTSD.
    • margogramiak
      margogramiak on 17 Jan 21
       
      Is that something they can alter?
huffem4

'Hijacked by anxiety': how climate dread is hindering climate action | Environmental ac... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...aralysing-effect-psychologists

shared by huffem4 on 09 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • climate anxiety – a sense of dread, gloom and almost paralysing helplessness that is rising as we come to terms with the greatest existential challenge of our generation, or any generation.
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 01 Nov 20
       
      Is this anxiety driving many people to disregard or ignore this crisis?
  • “When we look at this through the lens of individual and collective trauma, it changes everything about what we do and how we do it,” says Dr Renee Lertzman, a US-based pioneer of climate psychology. “It helps us make sense of the variety of ways that people are responding to what’s going on, and the mechanisms and practices we need to come through this as whole as possible.”
  • the human psyche is hardwired to disengage from information or experiences that are overwhelmingly difficult or disturbing.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • “For many of us, we’d literally rather not know because otherwise it creates such an acutely distressing experience for us as humans.”
    • huffem4
      huffem4 on 01 Nov 20
       
      People choose to ignore this crisis because it causes panic and makes us feel out of control.
  • this inability to engage presents itself as a complete denial of the climate crisis and climate science. But even among those who accept the dire predictions for the natural world, there are “micro-denials” that can block the ability to take action.
maxleffler

Resilience theory and the brain - 0 views

www.teachermagazine.com.au/...esilience-theory-and-the-brain

resilience theory brain psychology

shared by maxleffler on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • Encouraging the attributes of resilience in children as part of an early intervention and prevention approach is well supported by the literature, to not only safeguard against the effects of adversity and mental illness, but also enable individuals to acquire the attributes to adapt and thrive in challenging circumstances
  • children with high exposure to risk and low exposure to support are vulnerable to poor mental health and academic outcomes
  • One of the most recent explains it as a multifactorial, multidimensional facet that incorporates the social, environment, and cultural conditioning of the individual.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • A quarter of children in primary school are bullied on the playground, causing significant physiological, psychological and social challenges
  • resilience is developed through social, cultural, mental and physical factors. All facets become important when supporting the growth and development of a child.
  • The earlier the child experiences stress without supportive platforms in place, the more likely that this stress will compromise the cognitive platforms on which the mental constructs of resilience are developed.
  • This experience of early adversity can result as a trauma in the brain, thus compromising the ability for the child to use the executive skills that support the development of cognitive resilience.
  • Understanding the risks and/or impact that early trauma and adversity can have on a developing brain can facilitate the intervention of techniques and a modification in environment that a child may need to transform maladaptive ways of coping to a more adaptive, resilience-supporting response
  • Research indicates school-based mental health, resilience and social and emotional learning initiatives, in Australia and internationally, can significantly improve the health, wellbeing and psychosocial skills of children – particularly for those who may have experienced early adversity.
lucieperloff

12 Ways People Say Their Anxiety Has Changed During 2020 | HuffPost Life - 0 views

www.huffpost.com/...020_l_5f7f3914c5b664e5baba8de3

brain science anxiety social media knowledge

shared by lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.
  • This year has tested our collective mental health again and again — from fears over the coronavirus to the isolating effects of social distancing, the reckoning on racial injustice, financial struggles, natural disasters and a contentious presidential election just weeks away.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      So many more aspects in 2020 that have tested us than just the corona virus.
  • While many people with pre-existing anxiety report their symptoms have worsened in 2020, there’s also a subset who say they’ve been less anxious.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Different responses from everyone to this new trauma
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • It’s hard to break free from anxious thoughts when you’re consumed with the world falling apart with no end in sight.”
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's hard because no one knows (or knew) what was happening.
  • my anxiety always gave me this sinking feeling that something bad was going to happen.
  • But when the isolating isn’t by choice, and it’s to avoid a deadly disease, it can be the cause of panic-inducing thoughts that you can’t escape from.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Something that used to be a good thing created more anxiety
  • “Racial injustice doesn’t mix well with trauma, so I’ve had to do my mental illness a favor and log off of social media.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      Social media can really increase all of the anxieties people feel
  • It’s as if the worry and anxiety is always at the back of my mind even when I sleep and as soon as I wake up, it overwhelms me immediately.
  • “As someone with anxiety, I already feel an unrealistic and heavy responsibility on how my actions and words affect others.
  • At first I was filled with panic, but now I’ve adjusted to this new normal.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      The initially scary realities we were faced with have become routine
  • my anxiety started to stem from not knowing when this will end or when things can go back to feeling normal.
  • Now, I realize that the world can change in a second and that I have to learn to let certain things go. Who knows what is going to happen next.
  • “My mind immediately goes to the worst-case scenario and that’s when things start spiraling for me.
    • lucieperloff
      lucieperloff on 03 Nov 20
       
      It's hard not to when this could easily be someone else's worse-case-scenario mindset
  • Today, after a few months, the COVID anxiety isn’t as strong as it was ― when, strangely, COVID is stronger than ever in my city
anonymous

Inside the Science of Memory | Johns Hopkins Medicine - 0 views

www.hopkinsmedicine.org/...inside-the-science-of-memory

shared by anonymous on 03 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • “Memories are who we are,” says Huganir. “But making memories is also a biological process.”
  • This process raises many questions. How does the process affect our brain? How do experiences and learning change the connections in our brains and create memories?
  • Memory: It’s All About Connections
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • When we learn something—even as simple as someone’s name—we form connections between neurons in the brain. These synapses create new circuits between nerve cells, essentially remapping the brain.
  • The sheer number of possible connections gives the brain unfathomable flexibility—each of the brain’s 100 billion nerve cells can have 10,000 connections to other nerve cells.
  • Huganir and his team discovered that when mice are exposed to traumatic events, the level of neuronal receptors for glutamate increases at synapses in the amygdala, the fear center of the brain, and encodes the fear associated with the memory. Removing those receptors, however, reduces the strength of these connections, essentially erasing the fear component of the trauma but leaving the memory.
  • Now Huganir and his lab are developing drugs that target those receptors. The hope is that inactivating the receptors could help people with post-traumatic stress syndrome by reducing the fear associated with a traumatic memory, while strengthening them could improve learning, particularly in people with cognitive dysfunction or Alzheimer’s disease.
  • Dementia (di-men-sha): A loss of brain function that can be caused by a variety of disorders affecting the brain. Symptoms include forgetfulness, impaired thinking and judgment, personality changes, agitation and loss of emotional control. Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s disease and inadequate blood flow to the brain can all cause dementia. Most types of dementia are irreversible.
  • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD): A disorder in which your “fight or flight,” or stress, response stays switched on, even when you have nothing to flee or battle. The disorder usually develops after an emotional or physical trauma, such as a mugging, physical abuse or a natural disaster. Symptoms include nightmares, insomnia, angry outbursts, emotional numbness, and physical and emotional tension.
annabaldwin_

How Getting Enough Sleep Can Make You Less Afraid - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...543573

REM study sleep brain-activity fear

shared by annabaldwin_ on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A new study suggests that people who naturally get more REM sleep may be less sensitive to frightening things.
  • For the study, a team of researchers from Rutgers University sent 17 subjects home with sleep-monitoring devices—headbands that monitor their brain waves, wristbands that track arm movements, and sleep logs—and asked them to sleep as they normally would for a week. They were monitoring how much sleep they were getting—especially REM, or rapid-eye-movement sleep.
  • Each night, most people sleep about seven or eight hours, about two hours of which is REM sleep, the stage of sleep in which the body relaxes fully and most dreams occur.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The researchers then conditioned the participants to be afraid of certain images by showing them pictures of ordinary-looking rooms lit with lamps of various hues, some of which were paired with a mild shock to the finger. Through the shocks, they were taught to fear the rooms that were lit by certain colors.
  • The subjects with more REM sleep also had less activity in those areas of the brain. That suggests that the more well-rested subjects may not have been hard-wiring those fears into their brains quite as strongly.
  • PTSD is already known to be associated with sleep disturbances, and past studies have shown that sleep-deprived people have more activity in their amygdalae upon being shown upsetting pictures.
  • “REM is very unique because it’s the only time that area of the brain is completely silent,” said Shira Lupkin, one of the study’s authors and a researcher with the Center for Molecular and Behavioral Neuroscience at Rutgers University.
  • Because of that, people who get plenty of REM sleep might be less reactive to emotional stimuli.
  • If the study is replicated, there could be real-world implications for stopping trauma—before it starts.
krystalxu

Consumer Updates > Coping With Memory Loss - 0 views

www.fda.gov/...ucm107783.htm

memory brain science science psychology memory lost

shared by krystalxu on 03 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Frequent memory lapses are likely to be noticeable because they tend to interfere with daily living.
  • What’s being forgotten?
  • may cause individuals to get lost in a familiar place or put something in an inappropriate place because they can’t remember where it goes (think car keys in the refrigerator).
  • ...15 more annotations...
  • —the process of thinking, learning, and remembering—can affect memory.
  • Anything that affects cognition
  • Depression, which is common with aging, causes a lack of attention and focus that can affect memory.
  • Brain imaging – either using computerized axial tomography (CAT) scans or magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) – can help to identify strokes and tumors, which can sometimes cause memory loss.
  • Heavy alcohol use can cause deficiencies in vitamin B1 (
  • Stress, particularly because of emotional trauma, can cause memory loss. I
  • Doctors evaluate memory loss by taking a medical history, asking questions to test mental ability
  • repeated head trauma, as in boxers and footballers can result in progressive loss of memory and other effects.
  • Research has shown that the combination of shifting estrogen and progestin levels increased the risk of dementia in women older than 65. There is no evidence that the herb ginkgo biloba prevents memory loss.
  • vascular diseases (heart disease and stroke) that result from elevated cholesterol and blood pressure may contribute to the development of Alzheimer’s disease,
  • Don’t smoke or abuse alcohol.
  • Get regular exercise.
  • Maintain healthy eating habits.
  • Maintain social interactions,
  • Keep your brain active
Javier E

How a dose of MDMA transformed a white supremacist - BBC Future - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...ransformed-a-white-supremacist

psychology research brain science connections empathy

shared by Javier E on 19 Jun 23 - No Cached
  • February 2020, Harriet de Wit, a professor of psychiatry and behavioural science at the University of Chicago, was running an experiment on whether the drug MDMA increased the pleasantness of social touch in healthy volunteers
  • The latest participant in the double-blind trial, a man named Brendan, had filled out a standard questionnaire at the end. Strangely, at the very bottom of the form, Brendan had written in bold letters: "This experience has helped me sort out a debilitating personal issue. Google my name. I now know what I need to do."
  • They googled Brendan's name, and up popped a disturbing revelation: until just a couple of months before, Brendan had been the leader of the US Midwest faction of Identity Evropa, a notorious white nationalist group rebranded in 2019 as the American Identity Movement. Two months earlier, activists at Chicago Antifascist Action had exposed Brendan's identity, and he had lost his job.
  • ...40 more annotations...
  • "Go ask him what he means by 'I now know what I need to do,'" she instructed Bremmer. "If it's a matter of him picking up an automatic rifle or something, we have to intervene."
  • As he clarified to Bremmer, love is what he had just realised he had to do. "Love is the most important thing," he told the baffled research assistant. "Nothing matters without
  • When de Wit recounted this story to me nearly two years after the fact, she still could hardly believe it. "Isn't that amazing?" she said. "It's what everyone says about this damn drug, that it makes people feel love. To think that a drug could change somebody's beliefs and thoughts without any expectations – it's mind-boggling."
  • Over the past few years, I've been investigating the scientific research and medical potential of MDMA for a book called "I Feel Love: MDMA and the Quest for Connection in a Fractured World". I learnt how this once-vilified drug is now remerging as a therapeutic agent – a role it previously played in the 1970s and 1980s, prior to its criminalisation
  • He attended the notorious "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville and quickly rose up the ranks of his organisation, first becoming the coordinator for Illinois and then the entire Midwest. He travelled to Europe and around the US to meet other white nationalist groups, with the ultimate goal of taking the movement mainstream
  • some researchers have begun to wonder if it could be an effective tool for pushing people who are already somehow primed to reconsider their ideology toward a new way of seeing things
  • While MDMA cannot fix societal-level drivers of prejudice and disconnection, on an individual basis it can make a difference. In certain cases, the drug may even be able to help people see through the fog of discrimination and fear that divides so many of us.
  • in December 2021 I paid Brendan a visit
  • What I didn't expect was how ordinary the 31-year-old who answered the door would appear to be: blue plaid button-up shirt, neatly cropped hair, and a friendly smile.
  • Brendan grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb in an Irish Catholic family. He leaned liberal in high school but got sucked into white nationalism at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he joined a fraternity mostly composed of conservative Republican men, began reading antisemitic conspiracy books, and fell down a rabbit hole of racist, sexist content online. Brendan was further emboldened by the populist rhetoric of Donald Trump during his presidential campaign. "His speech talking about Mexicans being rapists, the fixation on the border wall and deporting everyone, the Muslim ban – I didn't really get white nationalism until Trump started running for president," Brendan said.
  • If this comes to pass, MDMA – and other psychedelics-assisted therapy – could transform the field of mental health through widespread clinical use in the US and beyond, for addressing trauma and possibly other conditions as well, including substance use disorders, depression and eating disorders.
  • A group of anti-fascist activists published identifying information about him and more than 100 other people in Identity Evropa. He was immediately fired from his job and ostracised by his siblings and friends outside white nationalism.
  • When Brendan saw a Facebook ad in early 2020 for some sort of drug trial at the University of Chicago, he decided to apply just to have something to do and to earn a little money
  • At the time, Brendan was "still in the denial stage" following his identity becoming public, he said. He was racked with regret – not over his bigoted views, which he still held, but over the missteps that had landed him in this predicament.
  • About 30 minutes after taking the pill, he started to feel peculiar. "Wait a second – why am I doing this? Why am I thinking this way?" he began to wonder. "Why did I ever think it was okay to jeopardise relationships with just about everyone in my life?"
  • Just then, Bremmer came to collect Brendan to start the experiment. Brendan slid into an MRI, and Bremmer started tickling his forearm with a brush and asked him to rate how pleasant it felt. "I noticed it was making me happier – the experience of the touch," Brendan recalled. "I started progressively rating it higher and higher." As he relished in the pleasurable feeling, a single, powerful word popped into his mind: connection.
  • It suddenly seemed so obvious: connections with other people were all that mattered. "This is stuff you can't really put into words, but it was so profound," Brendan said. "I conceived of my relationships with other people not as distinct boundaries with distinct entities, but more as we-are-all-on
  • I realised I'd been fixated on stuff that doesn't really matter, and is just so messed up, and that I'd been totally missing the point. I hadn't been soaking up the joy that life has to offer."
  • Brendan hired a diversity, equity, and inclusion consultant to advise him, enrolled in therapy, began meditating, and started working his way through a list of educational books. S still regularly communicates with Brendan and, for his part, thinks that Brendan is serious in his efforts to change
  • "I think he is trying to better himself and work on himself, and I do think that experience with MDMA had an impact on him. It's been a touchstone for growth, and over time, I think, the reflection on that experience has had a greater impact on him than necessarily the experience itself."
  • Brendan is still struggling, though, to make the connections with others that he craves. When I visited him, he'd just spent Thanksgiving alone
  • He also has not completely abandoned his bigoted ideology, and is not sure that will ever be possible. "There are moments when I have racist or antisemitic thoughts, definitely," he said. "But now I can recognise that those kinds of thought patterns are harming me more than anyone else."
  • it's not without precedent. In the 1980s, for example, an acquaintance of early MDMA-assisted therapy practitioner Requa Greer administered the drug to a pilot who had grown up in a racist home and had inherited those views. The pilot had always accepted his bigoted way of thinking as being a normal, accurate reflection of the way things were. MDMA, however, "gave him a clear vision that unexamined racism was both wrong and mean," Greer says
  • Encouraging stories of seemingly spontaneous change appear to be exceptions to the norm, however, and from a neurological point of view, this makes sense
  • Research shows that oxytocin – one of the key hormones that MDMA triggers neurons to release – drives a "tend and defend" response across the animal kingdom. The same oxytocin that causes a mother bear to nurture her newborn, for example, also fuels her rage when she perceives a threat to her cub. In people, oxytocin likewise strengthens caregiving tendencies toward liked members of a person's in-group and strangers perceived to belong to the same group, but it increases hostility toward individuals from disliked groups
  • In a 2010 study published in Science, for example, men who inhaled oxytocin were three times more likely to donate money to members of their team in an economic game, as well as more likely to harshly punish competing players for not donating enough. (Read more: "The surprising downsides of empathy.")
  • According to research published this week in Nature by Johns Hopkins University neuroscientist Gül Dölen, MDMA and other psychedelics – including psilocybin, LSD, ketamine and ibogaine – work therapeutically by reopening a critical period in the brain. Critical periods are finite windows of impressionability that typically occur in childhood, when our brains are more malleable and primed to learn new things
  • Dölen and her colleagues' findings likewise indicate that, without the proper set and setting, MDMA and other psychedelics probably do not reopen critical periods, which means they will not have a spontaneous, revelatory effect for ridding someone of bigoted beliefs.
  • In the West, plenty of members of right-wing authoritarian political movements, including neo-Nazi groups, also have track records of taking MDMA and other psychedelics
  • This suggests, researchers write, that psychedelics are nonspecific, "politically pluripotent" amplifiers of whatever is going on in somebody's head, with no particular directional leaning "on the axes of conservatism-liberalism or authoritarianism-egalitarianism."
  • That said, a growing body of scientific evidence indicates that the human capacity for compassion, kindness, empathy, gratitude, altruism, fairness, trust, and cooperation are core features of our natures
  • As Emory University primatologist Frans de Waal wrote, "Empathy is the one weapon in the human repertoire that can rid us of the curse of xenophobia."
  • Ginsberg also envisions using the drug in workshops aimed at eliminating racism, or as a means of bringing people together from opposite sides of shared cultural histories to help heal intergenerational trauma. "I think all psychedelics have a role to play, but I think MDMA has a particularly key role because you're both expanded and present, heart-open and really able to listen in a new way," Ginsberg says. "That's something really powerful."
  • "If you give MDMA to hard-core haters on each side of an issue, I don't think it'll do a lot of good,"
  • if you start with open-minded people on both sides, then I think it can work. You can improve communications and build empathy between groups, and help people be more capable of analysing the world from a more balanced perspective rather than from fear-based, anxiety-based distrust."
  • In 2021, Ginsberg and Doblin were coauthors on a study investigating the possibility of using ayahuasca – a plant-based psychedelic – in group contexts to bridge divides between Palestinians and Israelis, with positive findings
  • "I kind of have a fantasy that maybe as we get more reacquainted with psychedelics, there could be group-based experiences that build community resiliency and are intentionally oriented toward breaking down barriers between people, having people see things from other perspectives and detribalising our society,
  • "But that's not going to happen on its own. It would have to be intentional, and – if it happens – it would probably take multiple generations."
  • Based on his experience with extremism, Brendan agreed with expert takes that no drug, on its own, will spontaneously change the minds of white supremacists or end political conflict in the US
  • he does think that, with the right framing and mindset, MDMA could be useful for people who are already at least somewhat open to reconsidering their ideologies, just as it was for him. "It helped me see things in a different way that no amount of therapy or antiracist literature ever would have done," he said. "I really think it was a breakthrough experience."
oliviaodon

Maturation of the adolescent brain - 1 views

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/...PMC3621648

brain research science

shared by oliviaodon on 04 Nov 16 - No Cached
  • The adolescent population is highly vulnerable to driving under the influence of alcohol and social maladjustments due to an immature limbic system and prefrontal cortex.
  • Synaptic plasticity and the release of neurotransmitters may also be influenced by environmental neurotoxins and drugs of abuse including cigarettes, caffeine, and alcohol during adolescence.
  • Brain maturation during adolescence (ages 10–24 years) could be governed by several factors, as illustrated in Figure 1. It may be influenced by heredity and environment, prenatal and postnatal insult, nutritional status, sleep patterns, pharmacotherapy, and surgical interventions during early childhood.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • During adolescence, the neurocircuitry strengthens and allows for multitasking, enhanced ability to solve problems, and the capability to process complex information. Furthermore, adolescent brain plasticity provides an opportunity to develop talents and lifelong interests; however, neurotoxic insult, trauma, chronic stress, drug abuse, and sedentary lifestyles may have a negative impact during this sensitive period of brain maturation
  • oliviaodon on 04 Nov 16
     
    This is a very interesting, but technical, article on the maturation of the adolescent brain and external and internal factors affecting it. 
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