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by Carlie Hoffman The purposes of naming are to help categorize the world in which we live and to aid in grouping similar things together. However, who decides which name is the correct one? Is a child who often cannot pay attention to his classwork “absent-minded,” or experiencing attention deficit hyperactivity disorder? Is a person whose moods often swing from one extreme to the other simply “moody,” or living with bipolar disorder? Naming a lived experience a “mental illness” has the ability to change the social realities of those who receive the diagnosis, altering not only self-perception, but also influencing the perceptions and triggering the biases of others— often in a detrimental manner. So, who has the power to determine how such a label is assigned, and what happens if someone is given the wrong one? The power affiliated with naming has caused the diagnosis of mental disorders to be fraught with controversy. Mental illnesses are defined by the Diagnostic and Statistical Ma...

By Ilina Singh, MSc Ilina Singh is a Professor of Science, Ethics, and Society in the department of Social Science, Health, and Medicine at King’s College London, and is cross-appointed to the Institute of Psychiatry . Her work examines the psycho-social and ethical implications of advances in biomedicine and neuroscience for young people and families. She is also a member of the AJOB Neuroscience Editorial Board.   The developmental logic of early intervention is currently all the rage across child care-related sectors, including education, mental health, juvenile justice and social policy. It’s not a new logic by any means (witness longstanding programmes such as HeadStart ), but it has new energy and justification with the emergence of epigenetic theories of development. Epigenetics has brought attention to ‘environment’ to the fore, particularly in pediatrics and in child psychiatry. While epigenetic theories are still that – theories – the last few years have seen a surge...

Men and women experience fluctuations in sexual motivation over a lifetime. Whether sexual desire is enhanced or diminished at any particular time can depend on a number of factors and circumstances, but researchers from McGill University recently set out to determine specifically how pain impacts sexual behavior. 1 Results from this study , published in The Journal of Neuroscience earlier this year, were the topic of the most recent “Neuroethics and Neuroscience in the News” discussion facilitated by Emory Women’s Gender and Sexuality graduate student Natalie Turrin and Neuroscience graduate student Mallory Bowers. To study how pain impacts sexual motivation, researchers used a partitioned Plexiglas chamber where the partition contained small, semi-circular openings only large enough for the female mice to pass through (this study required that male mice be greater than 45 g and female mice smaller than 25 g). In this set-up, the females were free to either cross the partit...

In the early 1970’s, eight people checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals throughout the United States, complaining of hearing voices. They were all admitted, and during their hospitalizations exhibited no unusual behavior and claimed to no longer be experiencing auditory hallucinations. After stays between 7 and 52 days in the institutions, the patients were discharged and given diagnoses of either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. None of these people had any mental illnesses, and had, in fact, falsified their symptoms as part of an experiment conducted by psychologist David Rosenhan (who was himself one of the “pseudopatients”). The results of the study were published in a 1973 paper in Science titled “On being sane in insane places” . In the paper Rosenhan argues that it is difficult to distinguish between “normality” and “abnormality” when it comes to mental health, and that, once applied, the label of a psychiatric diagnosis can be so strong that all of an individual’s ac...

By Guest Contributor Katherine Bryant PhD Candidate, Neuroscience Emory University Who are synesthetes? [Describing the experiences of subject MMo] Eights are yellow, for example, a square feels like mashed potatoes, and the name Steve is somehow like poached eggs. (Cytowic p. 26) “…I [asked the vendor] what kind of ice cream she had.  ‘Fruit ice cream,’ she said.  But she answered in such a tone that a whole pile of coals, of black cinders, came bursting out of her mouth, and I couldn’t bring myself to buy any ice cream after she’d answered that way…” (Record of patient “S”, Luria p. 82) Colored alphabet, via Wikipedia Commons The unexpected sensory pairings described above are the experiences of a minority of people, perhaps 4% of the population (Simner et al., 2006), known as synesthetes. Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which unusual linkages occur between sensory modalities – sounds may evoke colors, tastes may evoke shapes, or numbers may evoke spatial patterns...