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“Something just snapped”
Georgetown University’s The Hoya reports on a young investment banker who apparently comitted suicide earlier this week by throwing herself off Trump Tower in New York.
Jessica Fashano (MSB ’05) shocked much of the New York financial world Saturday when she allegedly threw herself off of the Trump Palace in New York City. According to the New York Police Department, there is no evidence of foul play in the death of the 27-year-old alumna who worked as an investment banking associate at Citi Global Market.
But the real story comes much later – She was taking antidepressants. So nobody should have been all that shocked.
….
Fashano was taking depression medication, according to the police, but Javian said she talked to her daily. “It’s like something just changed overnight … .Something just snapped, and we don’t know,” she told the Times.
Chances are she forgot to take her “medication” or tried to quit taking it too too fast. A change in antidepressant dosing, perhaps combined the realization that our entire financial system is a fraud and a house of cards… is enough to send anyone into an emotional tailspin.
There’s not much point in speculating about her death, but I wanted to share with you that I’ve personally seen “something snap” in people on antidepressants on several occasions.
People, especially women misplace their trust in a drug-peddling psychiatric system that sees them as nothing but revenue streams, while studies show that in the aggregate antidepressants are no better than placebo at treating depression. That statistic does not mean, however that these drugs aren’t psychoactive. They certainly are, and cause all kinds of undesired side-effects, especially when changing doses. Some people may even benefit from them. I don’t know. But overall they’re bad news.
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Detroit Is Halting Garbage Pickup, Police Patrols In 20% Of City: Expect Bankruptcy In 2011
(Business Insider) Detroit has been bankrupt for years. It simply refuses to admit it. Detroit’s schools are bankrupt as well. A mere 25% of students graduate from high school.
Yet, in spite of hints and threats from mayors and budget commissions, and in spite of common sense talk of bankruptcy, Detroit has not pulled the bankruptcy trigger.
In a futile attempt to stave off the inevitable one last time, Mayor Bing’s latest plan is to cutoff city services including road repairs, police patrols, street lights, and garbage collection in 20% of Detroit.
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Israeli team says it has developed software to spot depressed bloggers
Inventors say program could enable mental health workers to identify individuals in need of treatment and recommend they seek help.
(HAARETZ) Israeli researchers have developed software that claims to identify depressed bloggers by analyzing their writing.
The program scours blogs for words and phrases, descriptions and metaphors that can indicate the writer’s psychological state.The software’s initial test run, which was part of a research study headed by Professor Yair Neuman of Ben-Gurion University’s department of education, combed more than 1,000 blog posts written by American bloggers that were online in 2004.
As part of the research, the software was asked to determine what it perceived as the 100 “most depressed” bloggers and the 100 “least depressed.”
Neuman told Haaretz that the software diagnoses largely matched those of four clinical psychologists who made their own diagnoses based on the blog posts.
“We found an 80 percent match between the automatic identification mechanism of the software and the human diagnosis given by the psychologists,” Neuman said.
“A psychologist knows how to spot various emotional states through intuition,” he said. “Here we have a program that does this methodologically through the innovative use of ‘web intelligence.’”
Neuman said the software could enable mental health workers to identify individuals in need of treatment and to recommend that they seek help.
“What does all of this mean from a practical standpoint?” he asked. “First of all, it shows that the technology is here and available and that it could be put to use.”
“In the United States there is a wide-ranging problem with depression,” said Neuman. “Through this software it will be possible to contact a blogger and request a general examination of the contents of his blog. If the blogger agrees, he will know whether he needs to seek professional counseling for any possible distress.”
Neuman said the researchers had received permission to analyze the blog posts.
The research and development for the software was funded by the Defense Ministry, yet Ben-Gurion University officials said yesterday the project would not be used for military purposes.
The program is capable of spotting words that express various emotions, like the names of colors that the writer employs to metaphorically describe certain situations. Hence words like “black,” if combined with other terms that describe such symptoms of depression as sleep deprivation and loneliness will be recognized by the software as “depressive” texts.
The software can also spot love and vengefulness (or at least thinks it can ).
Men who write prose laden with imagery from nature as well as words like “fire” or “lightning” could be determined by the program to be in love, as could women citing poetry or words related to music.
“The software does not rely on a single context-dependent word, but on a series of words strung together, terms and images chosen by the writer,” said Neuman.
…
Neuman cautioned against utilizing the technology for corporate purposes.
“I will not be pleased if this is put to negative use, like advertising for a certain product,” he said. “But I am all for using it as a means to spot cases of emotional distress.”
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An unsurprisingly disingenuous look at “marijuana”
As many of my readers know, I like to pull a lot of breaking science news from Eurekalert. One particular article today has drawn my attention, and I’d like to point out to the very disingenuous manner in which it was presented to the lay audience, who may lack the time, educational background, or simply a healthy amount of skepticism to see the spin.
Entitled “Cannabis and Adolescence,” the press release from Eurekalert is as follows:
Montreal, December 17, 2009 – Canadian teenagers are among the largest consumers of cannabis worldwide. The damaging effects of this illicit drug on young brains are worse than originally thought, according to new research by Dr. Gabriella Gobbi, a psychiatric researcher from the Research Institute of the McGill University Health Centre. The new study, published in Neurobiology of Disease, suggests that daily consumption of cannabis in teens can cause depression and anxiety, and have an irreversible long-term effect on the brain. [...]
“Teenagers who are exposed to cannabis have decreased serotonin transmission, which leads to mood disorders, as well as increased norepinephrine transmission, which leads to greater long-term susceptibility to stress,” Dr. Gobbi stated. [...]
It is also the first study to demonstrate that cannabis consumption causes more serious damage during adolescence than adulthood.
Fair enough. Cannabis effects some neurotransmitters and stuff, and affects the development of the brain. It sounds plausible…
…except the actual study was neither performed on humans nor even involved any actual compounds present in marijuana.
This study (actual pubmed link) used adolescent rats and a compound known as WIN 55,212-2. WIN 55,212-2 is known to both be stronger in its affinity for CB1 receptors than marijuana, and beside that structurally quite different.
Mentioned in the actual paper, but not in the “press release” was that the study did not find that exposure to WIN55,212-2 influenced anxiety-related behaviors, at least not in all of the assays. The elevated plus maze test results did not show an increase in basal level anxiety. In other words, the adolescent exposure to this highly-cb1-agonizing drug did not effect the rats propensity to visit an “open arm” at all. Nor was chronic, daily exposure to WIN 55,212-2 found to effect the rats behavior in the open field test. Both of these tests are considered extremely important in assessing a rats propensity towards anxiety/depressive-like behavior.
The rats did show a reduced tendency to feed in new environments after high exposure to the marijuana-analogue, in a task known as the novelty suppressed feeding task.
However, what about DOSING?
Grabbed from the always helpful reddit commentary:
Lets take a look at the dosage.”the adolescent exposure group received for 20 days once-a-day i.p. injections of a low dose (0.2 mg/kg) or a high dose (1 mg/kg) of WIN55,212-2 or the vehicle.” Lets take an average human weighing 80kg. And an average rat weighing .5kg2mg dose to a human, divided by 80kg is .025 mg/kg the LOW dose to the rat was .1mg/kg intravenous injection. that’s 4 times the human oral ingestion to get high. the high dose was .5 mg/kg thats 20 times the human oral ingestion to get high.Injection should be using A LOT less than an oral ingestion, correct?
Something seems off with the dosages, but I’m not a scientist. Is there anything wrong with my reasoning?
No, sir, the dosing does sound a wee bit high to correlate too strongly to adolescent smoking.
Now, to be fair:
Animal model systems are an essential component to research, as are chemical analogues, and inferences can be made using these. The fact that these techniques were used doesn’t in and of itself invalidate the underlying premise that habitual use of any drug can change human behavior. Nor should data be completely be disregarded simply because one aspect lacks in robustness, but given the actual content of the paper I’ve got to wonder — did the P.R. department even read the paper before typing up their blurb? At what point does over-simplification become deception and misdirection?
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