Regularly, I received — and still receive — phone calls: “My husband is just like — ” one or another figure from a clinical example. For a decade and more, public health campaigns had circulated symptom lists meant to get people to recognize mood disorders, and still there remained a role for narrative to complete the job.
.. This summer, Oxford University Press began publishing a journal devoted to case reports. And this month, in an unusual move, the New England Journal of Medicine, the field’s bellwether, opened an issue with a case history involving a troubled mother, daughter and grandson. The contributors write: “Data are important, of course, but numbers sometimes imply an order to what is happening that can be misleading. Stories are better at capturing a different type of ‘big picture.’ ”
.. I don’t think that psychiatry — or, again, medicine in general — need be apologetic about this state of affairs. Our substantial formal findings require integration. The danger is in pretending otherwise. It would be unfortunate if psychiatry moved fully — prematurely — to squeeze the art out of its science. And it would be unfortunate if we marginalized the case vignette. We need storytelling, to set us in the clinical moment, remind us of the variety of human experience and enrich our judgment.
I’d never offer life insurance to poets
Interview with Margalit Fox, senior writer at the New York Times and author of 1,200 obituaries over 20 years. “This work does skew your worldview a bit. For obit writers, the whole world is necessarily divided into the dead and the pre-dead. That’s all there is … I have maybe one suicide a year and they all seem to be poets. If I were an insurance company, I’d never write a policy for poets” (1,900 words)
.. The one thing that has changed, in terms of journalistic practice, is the cause of death. It’s much less euphemistically couched than in the past. When I was growing up, newspapers were very Victorian when it came to describing death. If you saw “short illness” it meant heart attack and “long illness” meant cancer. In small town papers where obits are written to protect the families, you still see that, but we’re much more straightforward.
How Exercise May Protect Against Depression
Kynurenine can pass the blood-brain barrier and, in animal studies, has been shown to cause damaging inflammation in the brain, leading, it is thought, to depression.
.. But in the mice with high levels of PGC-1alpha1, the kynurenine produced by stress was set upon almost immediately by another protein expressed in response to signals from the PGC-1alpha1. This protein changed the kynurenine, breaking it into its component parts, which, interestingly, could not pass the blood-brain barrier. In effect, the extra PGC-1alpha1 had called up guards that defused the threat to the animals’ brains and mood from frequent stress.
White House Intruder’s Past Raises Concern
Ms. Pierson said that the Secret Service came into contact with roughly 60 people a year outside the White House, like fence jumpers, who appeared to be threats to the president. She said that Mr. Gonzalez seemed like other people who try to get into the White House or close to Mr. Obama, many of whom show symptoms of mental illness. Under questioning, Mr. Gonzalez told officers that he needed to deliver a message to the president about the atmosphere failing.
“To be quite honest with you all, the vast majority of the people we come into contact with exhibit signs of mental illness,” she said.