SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
...
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, @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.