Why people may not seek treatment?

There are many people with undiagnosed mental health issues. There are also many who refuse seeking treatment despite being asked to do so by their family, friends, employer, or primary care giver.  Why is that? Why would not want to seek help and get better, or just figure out if they need help or not, when well-intended individuals advise them to do. Well, there can be many reasons:

1. They may not trust their privacy is honored. They may think this information will be shared with others, or be used against them in future.
2. They may not have a good health insurance and not have the financial means to seek help.
3. They may be too sick, too depressed to even see things clearly or have the energy and will power to do anything.
4. They may not see anything is wrong with them since that is the only way of life they have known. They have normalized and rationalized their behavior.
5. They think they are smart and capable enough to be able to cure themselves.
6. Subconsciously they do not believe they deserve to get better or have a better life.

While they may have good reasons to believe any of the above, not seeking treatment affects their quality of life and loved ones around them. The very first step, is to make an appointment. To accept help, or acknowledge needing it.

Empathy vs Sympathy

Here is a nice short clip demonstrating the difference between sympathy and empathy, and how sympathy can be destructive.  

The great take away lesson:

“The truth is, rarely can a response make something better — what makes something better is connection.”

It seems to me that the requirement for emphasizing is feeling the hurt person's feelings and placing ourselves in their shoes.  However, what if we cannot emotionally handle experiencing and feeling that pain, or rather not to?  Does it mean we will be incapable of emphasizing with and helping the person in need?

Dress to impress yourself!

Today I learned about the stroop effect, a measure of our brain's reaction time. There is a test associated with this effect, mentioned on the right hand side column of the link below:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stroop_effect

Apparently, there are other things that can affect our brain's reaction time, including our clothing!

"
“The clothes we wear have power not only over others, but also over ourselves,” Northwestern University scholars Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky write in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. While much research has looked at how our wardrobe influences the way we’re perceived, their study examines its impact on our own thinking and behavior.
"

Learn more here:
http://www.miller-mccune.com/science/the-brain-focusing-power-of-the-lab-coat-40108/

Do you want to forget it?

Do you want to delete your traumatic, stressful memories? Is there a past event that keeps haunting you? There is an article that suggests you can forget! Their method is a very novel one!

Previously, the most common approach for preventing post dramatic stress disorder (PTSD) was to make potential patients talk about it as soon as possible before the memory is sealed and repressed within them. Or to make PTSD patients recall the memory and talk about it.

It turns out this approach was flawed and wrong. Remembering bad memories does not unburden us, they reinforce the stress and pain every time we relive those memories!

The new approach exploits the changed set of connections in the brain that occur when we recall something

"Every time we think about the past we are delicately transforming its cellular representation in the brain, changing its underlying neural circuitry. It was a stunning discovery: Memories are not formed and then pristinely maintained, as neuroscientists thought; they are formed and then rebuilt every time they’re accessed. “The brain isn’t interested in having a perfect set of memories about the past,” LeDoux says. “Instead, memory comes with a natural updating mechanism, which is how we make sure that the information taking up valuable space inside our head is still useful. That might make our memories less accurate, but it probably also makes them more relevant to the future."

The new approach uses a drug to target those specific neural connections that occur through protein synthesis. Then a drug is used to target and ruin those proteins. The timing is the key to get it done right! Later on, even if you want to remember that memory you cannot! "Because the protein required to reconsolidate the memory will be absent, the memory will cease to exist."

This to me sounds like having a memory leak in computer science! Delete the pointers or links between memory cells and let them just hang out there? I wonder if this approach would cause other problems? I guess maybe like large computers with a lot of memory, we can afford to have a few unused, unconnected cells, floating around!

"In the very near future, the act of remembering will become a choice."

I think maybe to some extent we still have this choice, not necessarily for traumatic and stressful life changing events though, maybe just for some unpleasant and negative memories. We can refuse to get into a negative cycle of remembering them, and talking about them and reliving them over and over and over ....

Reference:
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2012/02/ff_forgettingpill/all/1

Pill controls more than just the birth!

As you may know, several recent articles on psychology of love and attraction suggests that we subconsciously select mates that increase the odds of us having stronger, healthier children. One of the major factors in making this decision is how we perceive the smell of our potential mate. We naturally find the smell of those whose immune system is way different from ours more attractive [1]. Now, the thing I did not know and learned during the last Nerd Nite is that when a woman is on birth control pills, this natural selection does not work as designed. In fact, it works in the exact opposite way: the woman finds men with similar immune system to her own, attractive [2]. Then, say if things work great between them, they get married, and decide to have kids, and the woman goes off the birth control pill, what happens? She does not feel attracted to her husband. She wonders "what the hell have I done?". Who did I marry?! Interesting, huh?

[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/smell-life/200902/the-scent-sex

[2] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=birth-control-pills-affect-womens-taste

The power of vunlerability

I thought of this talk today and felt the need to listen to it again.

"
... you cannot selectively numb emotion. You can't say, here's the bad stuff. Here's vulnerability, here's grief, here's shame, here's fear, here's disappointment, I don't want to feel these. I'm going to have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. I don't want to feel these. And I know that's knowing laughter. I hack into your lives for a living. God. You can't numb those hard feelings without numbing the affects, our emotions. You cannot selectively numb. So when we numb those, we numb joy, we numb gratitude, we numb happiness. And then we are miserable, and we are looking for purpose and meaning, and then we feel vulnerable, so then we have a couple of beers and a banana nut muffin. And it becomes this dangerous cycle.
"

Brene Brown: The power of vulnerability, full lecture here.

"
This is what I have found: to let ourselves be seen, deeply seen, vulnerably seen; to love with our whole hearts, even though there's no guarantee -- and that's really hard, and I can tell you as a parent, that's excruciatingly difficult -- to practice gratitude and joy in those moments of terror, when we're wondering, "Can I love you this much? Can I believe in this this passionately? Can I be this fierce about this?" just to be able to stop and, instead of catastrophizing what might happen, to say, "I'm just so grateful, because to feel this vulnerable means I'm alive." And the last, which I think is probably the most important, is to believe that we're enough. Because when we work from a place I believe that says, "I'm enough," then we stop screaming and start listening, we're kinder and gentler to the people around us, and we're kinder and gentler to ourselves.
"

Even Astronauts Commit Suicide!

"I am writing this now though to ask all of us to not let suicide be a taboo topic. It takes too many great people. In 2001, more people died due to suicide (849,000) then to homicide (500,000) and war-related (230,000) deaths combined (World Health Organization data). ", says my friend Loretta in her article titled "Even Astronauts Commit Suicide: A Tribute to a Friend and a Plea".

September 4–10 was the National Suicide Prevention Week. You can learn about suicide risk factors and warning signs here. If you have lost a loved one to suicide, talk about it.

Paucity and snark

I just learned two words: paucity meaning smallness of quantity, scarcity, and snark meaning a mysterious imaginary animal! You may like the context in which I learned them even more. Well, most likely if you are a woman!

"So I'll keep it short and simple: It's not that women "overdo it" but that some men, like poorly cooked pork at a depressing state fair, are "underdone."

To our abundance, they bring paucity; to our enthusiasm, they bring flat-lined skepticism; to our light, they bring the fog of snark.

I'll take excess over scarcity every time. And I won't apologize for it, either."

from When Apologies Don't Work by Gina Barreca,

Reference:
http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201109/oops-dealing-mistakes/when-apologies-dont-work

Compassion

Here is a way to encourage selfish people become compassionate! It is good for you! From building a better immune system to a more cognitive and active brain, to the way you will feel later, if living in a better world is not good enough.

What is compassion and empathy anyways? According to Joan Halifax:

The capacity and ability to see clearly into the nature of suffering, to recognize that one is not separate from that suffering, to engage in activities to transform suffering, without being attached to the outcome. Compassion has enemies such as pity, moral outrage, and fear.

Reference:
http://www.ted.com/talks/joan_halifax.html

Mad and Depressed?

No worries, apparently that is what world needs more of!  According to Dr. Nassir Ghaemi, the author of "A First Rate Madness", manic people are more creative and depressed people have more empathy and are more realistic!  Now, I wonder if it was because they were too creative and too empathetic that they got madly depressed to begin with?  Is it a one way cause-effect or a two-way relationship?  I guess I have to read his book.  His ideas actually makes sense to me, well just the little that I heard here:

http://www.colbertnation.com/full-episodes/mon-august-8-2011-nassir-ghaemi

Schadenfreude

Do you know what Schadenfreude means?  This is a German word that has entered English language meaning "pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others."  It appears to be closely related to experiencing feelings of envy and jealously, when emphathy is replaced by Schadenfreude.

I learned this from my friend Pedram who made a program about it for Radio College Park in Persian.  The link for that program and the related Scientific American article it was based on are listed under references.

Here are some suggestions for its English translation.  One listener suggested the word glee.  Among friends, we thought it is close to  "دل خنك شدن"  in Persian.

References:
http://www.radiocp.com/?p=249
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=schadenfreude-why-the-news-corp-pho-2011-07-19

Pleasure and pain

The mind is its own place,
and in itself,
Can make a Heaven of Hell,
a Hell of Heaven
John Milton.

Paul Bloom argued how the same experience can feel more pleasurable or painful to us based on how we think about it and perceive it in this Ted talk.