medicalcondition:ptsd

The New Science of Psychedelics : A Tool for Changing Our Minds
▻https://singularityhub.com/2019/03/31/the-new-science-of-psychedelics-a-tool-for-changing-our-minds

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Moving Forward

The psychedelics renaissance is coming at a time when new tools for mental health are sorely needed.

Other branches of medicine—cardiology, oncology, infectious disease—have made huge strides in the last 50 years, both in reducing suffering and prolonging life. But mental healthcare has essentially been at a standstill since the introduction of the antidepressants known as SSRIs in the 1980s.

To go from their current classification as Schedule 1 drugs—high potential for abuse and no currently accepted medical use—to getting approved as a medicine, psychedelics need to go through the standard three-phase FDA approval process: first an open-label, no-placebo pilot study, followed by a placebo-controlled trial, then a larger placebo-controlled trial.

Pollan believes MDMA and psilocybin could be approved within five years; the FDA has granted breakthrough therapy status to both, which means they actively help researchers design trials that will move the drugs to approval. MDMA is already in Phase 3 trials.

The biggest bottleneck is funding. The studies are expensive and controversial, and the National Institute of Mental Health has a minuscule budget compared to that of the National Institute of Health. Thus far, psychedelics research has been privately funded.

“It’s not a right-left issue, especially when it comes to treating soldiers with PTSD,” Pollan said. But there is the issue of how to incorporate the drugs into mental healthcare as we currently practice it. The pharmaceutical industry isn’t interested in a drug people only need to take once; likewise, the therapy business model depends on people coming back every week for years. Even if this shifted, therapists would need extensive training before being able to administer psychedelics.

“I think we’ll figure it out, but it’s a whole new structure, a whole new paradigm, and that may take a little while,” Pollan said. After all his research, though, he for one is highly optimistic.

“One of the things that excites me most about psychedelics is that yes, there’s a treatment here—but they’re also very interesting probes to understand the mind,” he said.

#Psychédéliques

#technology’s Role in Helping #veterans Deal With #ptsd
▻https://hackernoon.com/technologys-role-in-helping-veterans-deal-with-ptsd-7ad736a4ab06?source=

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Living with PTSD can be very challenging for veterans trying to integrate back into civilian life. As part of dealing with battle experiences, about 20 percent of veterans end up abusing drugs or alcohol after they return home, according to the U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs.They state that PTSD affects roughly 33 percent of soldiers. The symptoms of PTSD are difficult to live with and can include depression, difficulty sleeping, isolation, aggression, irritation, fear, and self-destructive behaviors. Veterans use alcohol and drugs to lessen the symptoms, but such dependency inevitably makes things worse.The VA also reports that 20 veterans suffering from PTSD take their lives every day. Because of that statistic, developers have created some innovative #apps to help vets who have (...)

#healthcare-technology

Linguistic red flags from Facebook posts can predict future depression diagnoses — ScienceDaily
▻https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181015150643.htm

Research finds that the language people use in their Facebook posts can predict a future diagnosis of depression as accurately as the tools clinicians use in medical settings to screen for the disease.

In any given year, depression affects more than 6 percent of the adult population in the United States — some 16 million people — but fewer than half receive the treatment they need. What if an algorithm could scan social media and point to linguistic red flags of the disease before a formal medical diagnosis had been made?

Ah oui, ce serait fantastique pour les Big Pharma : la dépression est une maladie complexe, dont les symptômes graves sont souvent confondus avec la déprime qui est un état sychologique que nous connaissons tous. Notre Facebook, couplé avec notre assistant vocal Amazon nous gorgerait de Valium, et tout irait pour le mieux dans le Meilleur des mondes.

Considering conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD , for example, you find more signals in the way people express themselves digitally."

For six years, the WWBP, based in Penn’s Positive Psychology Center and Stony Brook’s Human Language Analysis Lab, has been studying how the words people use reflect inner feelings and contentedness. In 2014, Johannes Eichstaedt, WWBP founding research scientist, started to wonder whether it was possible for social media to predict mental health outcomes, particularly for depression.

“Social media data contain markers akin to the genome,” Eichstaedt explains. “With surprisingly similar methods to those used in genomics, we can comb social media data to find these markers. Depression appears to be something quite detectable in this way; it really changes people’s use of social media in a way that something like skin disease or diabetes doesn’t.”

Il y a au moins une bonne nouvelle sur la déontologie scientifique :

Rather than do what previous studies had done — recruit participants who self-reported depression — the researchers identified data from people consenting to share Facebook statuses and electronic medical-record information, and then analyzed the statuses using machine-learning techniques to distinguish those with a formal depression diagnosis.

Les marqueurs considérés sont aussi des marqueurs sociaux et économiques, qu’il faudrait traiter autrement qu’avec des médicaments.

They learned that these markers comprised emotional, cognitive, and interpersonal processes such as hostility and loneliness, sadness and rumination, and that they could predict future depression as early as three months before first documentation of the illness in a medical record.

La conclusion est fantastique : il faut rendre le balayage obligatoire !!!

Eichstaedt sees long-term potential in using these data as a form of unobtrusive screening. “The hope is that one day, these screening systems can be integrated into systems of care,” he says. “This tool raises yellow flags; eventually the hope is that you could directly funnel people it identifies into scalable treatment modalities.”

Despite some limitations to the study, including its strictly urban sample, and limitations in the field itself — not every depression diagnosis in a medical record meets the gold standard that structured clinical interviews provide, for example — the findings offer a potential new way to uncover and get help for those suffering from depression.

#Dépression #Facebook #Foutaises #Hubris_scientifique #Big_pharma #Psychologie

Can PTSD Be Good for You? - Facts So Romantic
▻http://nautil.us/blog/can-ptsd-be-good-for-you

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There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD.WikicommonsYou might think it insensitive or even offensive to ask whether PTSD could be good for someone. Who wants a disorder, let alone one caused by “post-traumatic stress”? Yet when Nautilus posed this question to Rachel Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience and the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City—where she’s worked with war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and other trauma victims—she said, “I don’t know.”That ambivalence partly stems from the fuzzy concept of “trauma.” There’s no way to be sure what will traumatize someone, and not everyone exposed to “trauma” develops PTSD. “We’re now having a (...)

Soldiers of the Vine: Healing War Trauma with Plant Medicine (2017)
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/soldiers-of-the-vine-2017

Six American war veterans go to Peru to explore a 10-day medicinal plant diet to treat PTSD.

Written, Photographed, Edited & Directed by CHARLES SHAW Produced by MITCH SHULTZ & DIMITRI MUGIANIS

Ingenious: Rachel Yehuda - Issue 31: Stress
▻http://nautil.us/issue/31/stress/ingenious-rachel-yehuda

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Although post-traumatic stress disorder is an established diagnosis in psychology, and stressed combat veterans are a cliché in Hollywood, it wasn’t long ago when PTSD wasn’t well understood at all. “There was a time when our lack of knowledge about post-traumatic stress disorder was really harmful and resulted in the fact that a lot of people did not get treated or treated properly by the healthcare system,” says Rachel Yehuda. In the past 25 years, Yehuda has done as much as any scientist to understand the debilitating disorder. Yehuda, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience, is the director of the Traumatic Stress Studies Division at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City. She has worked with war veterans, Holocaust survivors, and other trauma victims to gather insights (...)

How the Military Severed Brainstems to ’Cure’ PTSD | Brainwash Update
▻http://www.filmsforaction.org/watch/How_the_Military_Severed_Brainstems_to_Cure_PTSD_Brainwash_Update

Abby Martin talks about a new Wall Street Journal report that highlights the Veteran’s Administration’s role in performing forced lobotomies on mentally ill veterans during the late 40s and 50s...

Tasteless montage: Pro-Israel group puts IDF soldiers in line with Nazi camp inmates | +972 Magazine
▻http://972mag.com/tasteless-montage-pro-israel-group-puts-idf-soldiers-in-line-with-nazi-camp-inmates/68416

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How does one give therapy to a whole nation? This is the question I asked myself after seeing this photo montage made by the pro-Israel group Stand With Us, celebrating that Israel is now the largest center of Jews in the world. (UPDATE: Stand With Us took the picture off their Facebook wall)

That’s the only way I can explain a photo like this. The Jewish nation goes through one of the most traumatic events in history, and the result is some sort of disorder, a PTSD on national levels. How does one treat that?

How does one convince a people that yes, what you’ve been through was horrific on levels so hard to grasp – but you can not be a victim forever? I’m saddened to think about the prospects for reconciliation with our neighbors, if this level of victimhood is what dictates our thoughts every second. When something like this is ingrained so deeply in the national psyche, what are the hopes in the near future for freeing ourselves from it?

It’s always the little things, like a stupid photo montage, that really bring it home to me, that really fill me with despair.

Yet, besides saddening me this photo also angers me. It angers me how someone can cynically use a picture of concentration camp inmates for their own purposes. Especially when it turned out that Israel was probably the worst place a Holocaust survivor could have chosen to live in. Of all places, Israel let the survivors in its midst die in utter poverty. Israel never forgot the Holocaust, but certainly forgot its survivors.

New Labor MK Merav Michaeli wrote in an op-ed in Haaretz over a year ago on how the Holocaust is remembered in Israel. She wrote it after a poll was published that said 98 percent of Israelis consider it “either fairly important or very important to remember the Holocaust, attributing to it even more weight than to living in Israel, the Sabbath, the Passover seder and the feeling of belonging to the Jewish people.” Here is an excerpt:

The Holocaust is the primary way Israel defines itself. And that definition is narrow and ailing in the extreme, because the Holocaust is remembered only in a very specific way, as are its lessons. It has long been used to justify the existence and the necessity of the state, and has been mentioned in the same breath as proof that the state is under a never-ending existential threat. The Holocaust is the sole prism through which our leadership, followed by society at large, examines every situation. This prism distorts reality and leads inexorably to a forgone conclusion – to the point that former Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau announced at a Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony three years ago that Moses was the first Holocaust survivor. In other words, all our lives are simply one long Shoah.

Ecstasy As Treatment for PTSD from Sexual Trauma and War? New Research Shows Very Promising Results | | AlterNet
►http://www.alternet.org/story/151263/ecstasy_as_treatment_for_ptsd_from_sexual_trauma_and_war_new_research_show

According to outgoing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, rising health care costs for the military have ballooned from $19 billion in 2001 to over $52 billion in 2011. But there’s a pill for that, explained Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies’ (MAPS) executive director Rick Doblin.

It’s called MDMA, or ecstasy, and it’s gaining serious traction as a treatment option for soldiers, and civilians, suffering from crippling post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)❞