Scientific American Topic - Anxiety and Panic Disorders

LSD Returns--For Psychotherapeutics

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 08:00:00 EST

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.

For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”

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Where the Desire for Change Resides

Wed, 09 Sep 2009 00:00:08 EST

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Can fearful memories be erased?

Thu, 03 Sep 2009 18:35:00 EST

In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , Joel and Clementine's relationship ends so sourly that the couple elects to have their mutual memories swept away via a non-surgical procedure called "targeted memory erasure." No such tool actually exists. Even the most intense therapies can't completely erase troubling or fearful memories in adults. Yet, if two young rats fall in and out of love--or, more likely, have a close encounter with a subway car--permanent memory erasure may actually be possible, previous research has suggested. So, what happens in a growing rodent brain to cause this change? [More]

Readers Respond on "The Expanding Universe"

Fri, 24 Jul 2009 08:00:00 EST

Quantifying Quandary In " The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap ," David Dobbs reports on a growing number of experts who believe that post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is being overdiagnosed. In support of this argument, Dobbs cites a 1990s study in which researchers asked veterans "about 19 specific types of potentially traumatic events.... Two years out, 70 percent of the veterans reported at least one traumatic event they had not mentioned a month after returning, and 24 percent reported at least three such events for the first time." These memories are assumed to be "new," but it may be that the subjects simply could not bring themselves to put their experiences into words so soon after those experiences occurred and that after some time they could. [More]

MIND Reviews: A Healthy Mind

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:00:00 EST

Healthy Minds www.wliw.org/healthyminds

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The Science of Economic Bubbles and Busts (preview)

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 08:00:00 EST

It has all the makings of a classic B movie scene. A gunman puts a pistol to the victim’s forehead, and the screen fades to black before a loud bang is heard. A forensic specialist who traces the bullet’s trajectory would see it traversing the brain’s prefrontal cortex--a central site for processing decisions. The few survivors of usually fatal injuries to this brain region should not be surprised to find their personalities dramatically altered. In one of the most cited case histories in all of neurology, Phineas Gage, a 19th-century railroad worker, had his prefrontal cortex penetrated by an iron rod; he lived to tell the tale but could no longer make sensible decisions. Cocaine addicts may actually self-inflict similar damage. The resulting dysfunction may cause even abstaining addicts to crave the drug any time, say, the thudding bass of a techno tune reminds them of when they were stoned.

Even people who do not use illicit drugs or get shot in the head have to contend with the [More]

Soldiers' Stress: What Doctors Get Wrong about PTSD (preview)

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 08:00:00 EST

In 2006, soon after returning from military service in Ramadi, Iraq, during the bloodiest period of the war, Captain Matt Stevens of the Vermont National Guard began to have a problem with PTSD, or post-traumatic stress disorder. Stevens's problem was not that he had PTSD. It was that he began to have doubts about PTSD: the condition was real enough, but as a diagnosis he saw it being wildly, even dangerously, overextended.

Stevens led the medics tending an armored brigade of 800 soldiers, and his team patched together GIs and Iraqi citizens almost every day. He saw horrific things. Once home, he said he had his share of "nights where I'd wake up and it would be clear I wasn't going to sleep again."

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From Dark Energy to Lone Star Lunacy

Thu, 02 Apr 2009 10:09:08 EST

Podcast Transcription

Welcome to Science Talk , the weekly podcast of Scientific American , for the week of April 2nd, 2009. I'm Steve Mirsky. This week on the podcast, Eugenie Scott brings us up to date on the strange goings-on at the Texas school board, but first Scientific American Editor in Chief John Rennie talks about the new April issue of Scientific American magazine. We spoke in the magazine's library.

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Readers Respond on Talking about Terrorism--And More...

Fri, 20 Feb 2009 07:00:00 EST

No War On Terror “ Talking about Terrorism ,” by Arie W. Kruglanski, Martha Crenshaw, Jerrold M. Post and Jeff Victoroff, makes an important point. Whether we are antiterrorism, antiwar or anticancer, when we wage a war against the enemy we empower that enemy. Mother Teresa is reported to have said about her refusal to take part in antiwar rallies, “If you ever have a pro-peace rally, I’ll be there.”

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Could a blood pressure drug dim bad memories?

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 12:50:00 EST

In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind , a character played by Jim Carrey visits an eccentric scientist who wipes out the bad memories of his relationship with Kate Winslet's character using a machine that maps their location in his brain and systematically deletes them. The concept might have seemed preposterous, but today scientists are reporting that a common blood pressure drug can produce a similar effect – not by destroying a memory itself, but by wiping out your fearful reaction to it. [More]

Providing Psychotherapy for the Poor

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 09:00:00 EST

It had been four years since 13-year-old Mohamed Abdul escaped civil war in Somalia, but he still had nightmares and flashbacks. When he was nine years old, a crowd fleeing a street shooting trampled him, putting him in the hospital for two weeks. A month later he saw the aftermath of an apparent massacre: about 20 corpses floating in the ocean. Soon after, militia-men shot him in the leg, knocked him unconscious, then raped his best friend, a girl named Halimo.

Recovering in the hospital, Abdul (not his real name) was overwhelmed by fear--and guilt, for not having helped Halimo. He felt unprovoked fury: he mistook people he knew well for the rapist and threatened to kill them. A few months later Abdul fled his homeland and landed in the Nakivale refugee settlement in Uganda. “I felt as if there were two personalities living inside me,” he said at the time. “One was smart and kind and normal; the other one was crazy and violent.”

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Psych Help and Hotline for Military Personnel

Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:58:08 EST

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

Nearly 20 percent of servicemen and women returning from Iraq and Afghanistan report symptoms of post-traumatic stress or major depression. Another 19 percent experience possible traumatic brain injury. Some seven percent may have a combination of brain injury and depression or PTSD. That’s according to a RAND Corporation study.

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Surviving a Plane Crash

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 00:00:08 EST

[ Below is the original script. But a few changes may have been made during the recording of this audio podcast. ]

New York City witnessed the seemingly impossible last week, when US Airways flight 1549 ditched into the icy Hudson river so gently that all 155 passengers walked away unharmed. Those merely witnessing the event, might be all the more frightened now , having not known (before) that birds flying into engines can cause such profound disaster .

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Impact and the Brain (preview)

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 09:00:00 EST

As a combat engineer in Iraq, Jeremy was supposed to find roadside bombs. They found him instead. Within 72 hours of each other, two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) went off within 15 feet of this father in his late 20s. The first set of blast waves, a moving wall of highly compressed air that emanates from an explosion, knocked him out briefly. The second left him dazed for about 30 minutes and produced ringing in his ears that disappeared within a week. These detonations did not visibly injure Jeremy (not his real name)--but he was never the same.

After his tour in Iraq, Jeremy became more irritable with his spouse and child. At his job as a manager of a national firm, he would get very frustrated when customers were abrupt or business was brisk. Jeremy’s memory had deteriorated, too, and he had to use a daily planner to remind himself of even the most basic tasks. He also had incapacitating headaches, spells of panic or confusion, mood swings, and sensory illusions such as a metallic taste or ringing in his ears. Neuropsychological tests revealed that Jeremy had real deficits in mental processing, attention and short-term verbal memory.

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MIND Reviews: Obsession: A History

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 09:00:00 EST

The Criminal Brain: Understanding Biological Theories of Crime by Nicole Rafter. New York University Press, 2008

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The Amnesia Gene

Tue, 09 Dec 2008 07:00:00 EST

Human memory is highly influenced by emotion. In healthy subjects events that are emotionally charged--and it doesn’t matter if the emotions are positive or traumatic--tend to be much better remembered than emotionally neutral events. This psychological tendency comes with a glaring exception, however: in some individuals, extremely stressful or traumatic events can induce amnesia, so that they lose the ability to remember what happened. In some instances this loss can lead to the erasure of a vast amount of memory, so that people even forget basic facts about their identity, such as where they live or what their name is. [More]