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Training the brain to treat itself is a promising therapy for traumatic stress. The training uses an auditory or visual signal that corresponds to the activity of a particular brain region, called neurofeedback, which can guide people to regulate their own brain activity.
However, treating stress-related disorders requires accessing the brain's emotional hub, the amygdala, which is located deep in the brain and difficult to reach with typical neurofeedback methods. This type of activity has typically only been measured using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which is costly and poorly accessible, limiting its clinical use.
A study published in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry tested a new imaging method that provided reliable neurofeedback on the level of amygdala activity using electroencephalography (EEG), and allowed people to alter their own emotional responses through self-regulation of its activity.
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The researchers built upon a new imaging tool they had developed in a previous study that uses EEG to measure changes in amygdala activity, indicated by its "electrical fingerprint." With the new tool, 42 participants were trained to reduce an auditory feedback corresponding to their amygdala activity using any mental strategies they found effective.During this neurofeedback task, the participants learned to modulate their own amygdala electrical activity. This also led to improved downregulation of blood-oxygen level dependent signals of the amygdala, an indicator of regional activation measured with fMRI.
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 15 2016, @06:44AM
I was thinking of the SJW camps, where it is indeed fashionable to have depression, or PTSD, or some other woe-is-me trauma -- and where they pretty clearly do not want to get well. That's how I became convinced that most of these people have succumbed to the fad of mental illness (whether or not they actually have one, which many probably do not) -- because it's shown off like a badge of poor-me, and they find all sorts of reasons why they can't be treated. Basically, they brag about it and try to one-up one another. Oh, and Patreon.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Thursday September 15 2016, @05:31PM
It sounds like maybe you have a specific personal experience about this. If so then I'm sorry for you; dealing with charlatans and sociopaths isn't fun. Although I would say that that sort of attention-seeking is itself a disorder that we aren't good at diagnosing or treating. A disorder that definitely is not concentrated among so-called SJW camps, but in fact is very common among high-ambition power seekers like the executive types. The kind of attention seeking that you are talking about, however, is based on taking cheap advantage of the kindness of others instead of any kind of hard work.
Whomever it is that you met is destructive to society as a whole, but even more destructive to the groups fighting to de-stigmatize mental illness. To those groups, such an individual leeches on the goodwill of others and gives a terrible face to people who really just want to make the world a better place. These are probably even entire subreddits of cargo-cult "SJW" types who don't actually care about any of that and just like to jockey for fake status.
But that doesn't mean that mental illness isn't a real problem. And where there is suffering in the world, we are morally obligated to do what we can to help. At a bare minimum, we must not make the suffering worse. I'll give you an example of the kind of suffering that we must work to alleviate.
One of the worst mental health problems we face in the United States is the trauma experienced by our war veterans. The same people who went to combat enemies of the United States, who fought to protect the freedoms that we enjoy, come back home as some of the most broken people in our society. We have a duty to those veterans to ease all of the consequences of combat, and while we're doing better at resolving lost limbs or other physical injuries we do pretty poorly at dealing with the mental aspect. The invisible scars of watching your best friend jump on a grenade to save your life - an experience which produces intense, profound feelings of loss, feelings of guilt for being the one who lived, and an ongoing sense of horror that manifests in alcoholism and terrible angry outbursts seemingly out of nowhere.
Relieving the suffering of mental illness begins with well-identified issues like these, and continues with diagnosable and treatable conditions like bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and non-combat related PTSD. It continues with management of less well-defined conditions like depression and anxiety. Unfortunately our mental health system is piss-poor; psychiatrists often practice less scientific medicine than more well-known pseudo-scientific practitioners like chiropractors. They will prescribe the fancy new depression pill that the pharmaceutical rep showed them last month without bothering to properly diagnose anything, despite the fact that the fancy new pill is only supposed to work in a specific 12% of patients diagnosed with clinical depression with the same underlying problem. And while most people with depression are facing life issues and not chemical imbalances, the medical insurance system makes it cheaper to get pills that alter brain chemistry than to see a therapist that can help you know what positive changes you can make to lead a happier, healthier life.
We've got a lot of room for improvement, and it starts with accepting that not everyone is a charlatan. That much of the time we can do real good for the hurt and suffering when we look past the charlatans. That charlatanry is often its own issue that needs treatment. My preferred method for treating the sociopathy that underlies most charlatanry is rhetoric. It may not convince the person who needs help, but at least their inevitable failure to make meaningful points will prove to everyone else that we are dealing with a leech to society and not, in fact, a so-called Warrior fighting for Social Justice.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Reziac on Thursday September 15 2016, @07:40PM
Not just one individual; whole swaths of 'em, particularly congregated in forums dedicated to certain vocations. (We are, amazingly, somewhat saner here on Soylent... possibly because we don't validate and enable weep-wail poor-me.) I'm staff/moderator on one of 'em; the site owner disapproves of snowflaking (especially having had a previously-owned forum hijacked by SJWs), so part of my job is to discourage it without pissing 'em off. :/
I don't disagree with what you say (the "cargo cult SJWs", a wonderful name for them, are indeed perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to all of mental health) but it's to where I no longer take claims of mental illness at their word. And we're developing a culture where instead of helping people get well, we validate and enable dysfunctionality. How is that helpful to anyone? (Other than therapists who make a good living on perpetual clients.)
I think we spend too much time trying to fix the visible psych effects, and not enough effort looking for underlying causes, which are more often biochemical than traumatic. Frex, PTSD has been ID'd as basically the brain's inability to dispose of stress metabolites due to a missing enzyme -- which is a genetic defect. Having ID'd the specific biochemical deficit means it can be pharma-targeted correctly, instead of shotgunned with a drug that only really works on some small subset (probably because they have some *different* genetic flaw). Until that becomes the norm, psych drugs are at best a wild guess, and at worst -- well, we all know of people who went off the deep end after being prescribed antidepressants.
[Insert canned rant about how ALWAYS, before anything else, thyroid function should be thoroughly assessed, and after than parathyroid. Cuz if that system isn't normal, nothing else will work quite right -- it affects *everything* -- and drugs may not perform as expected, sometimes tragically so.]
I have a friend, Vietnam vet, who was twice sole survivor of his unit. So, yeah. Veterans freely traded their lives (or potentially so) for the rest of us; we need to hold up our end of the bargain.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.