Knowledge Is Necessity

Rerun: McMan's Dispensable Rules and Observations for Right Living

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 09:18:07 PST

I've been tied up with a lot of volunteer work and work on new projects. Looking forward to returning to live posting fairly soon. In the meantime, this from April last year ... My grandson’s birth in Sept 2009 inspired me to come up with two posts along the lines of the clan elder (me) offering his sage advice to the newest member of the tribe. The piece below represents a reshuffle of my

Rerun: Is Republicanism the New Stupid?

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 20:42:36 PST

From Sept, 2010, still relevant ... "Republicanism isn't a party. It's a diagnosis." A friend of mine happened to relate that to me in a conversation about a year ago, and I have no reason to dispute it. In fact, we actually have the brain science to lend credence to his statement. The same findings also indict Democrats, though I would contend there are mitigating circumstances. It breaks down

Rerun - Presidents Day Special: Lincoln and His Depressions

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Mon, 20 Feb 2012 13:07:03 PST

I originally published this as a newsletter piece in 2005 and soon after on mcmanweb. Enjoy ... The year is 1860. In a makeshift meeting hall, the Illinois delegation to the approaching Republican Convention is meeting to consider which of their own to back as a favorite son for the Presidential nomination. There is no clear-cut favorite. Moreover, it’s widely acknowledged the choice

Is Bereavement Part of Depression? And What the Hell is Depression, Anyway?

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Fri, 17 Feb 2012 15:46:20 PST

Willa Goodfellow’s latest Prozac Monologues piece raises the very important discussion about how bereavement fits (or not) into depression. Ronald Pies, one of the two principal figures behind the proposed DSM-5 “bereavement exclusion” to the depression diagnosis, has left a comment. The discussion is framed in such a way that the nominal topic - bereavement - unlocks the key to the real issue

Willa Goodfellow's Prozac Monologues: Still Going Strong

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 22:32:24 PST

I’ve been telling people for years that my beat covers everything from God to neurons. A month or two ago, I incorporated “From God to Neurons” into the subtitle of Knowledge is Necessity. In mid-2009, I had the pleasure of discovering online the other person on the planet blogging from God to neurons, Willa Goodfellow (pictured here). Willa was only a few months into her vastly wise and funny

Revisiting the Normal vs Crazy Thing

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 01:03:59 PST

Last night, I had a nightmare that I danced like a white man. This was way worse than my recurring dream where I’m married to Sarah Palin. Naturally, it was a huge relief to wake up and - oh crap! - well, at least I’m bipolar. Most of you know what I’m talking about. We have a different way of perceiving reality, which of course affects our behavior. Too often, the result is outsider status. No

In Memoriam: Charles Sakai

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 14:35:19 PST

I just learned that someone dear to me, Charles Sakai, passed away two or three weeks ago. Charles was a comrade-in-arms - mental health advocate, history buff, and Mahler fan. We’d been in each other’s lives for at least ten years, the last three or so as Facebook friends. We met online sometime in the very early days of my writing about my illness, around 2000, and exchanged emails

Can Integrative Psychiatry Save Psychiatry?

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 22:07:20 PST

Integrative psychiatry involves incorporating complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) into clinical practice. I first came across the term in mid-2003 at a two-day conference, “Non-Pharmaceutical Approaches to Mental Disorders” staged in Pasadena by the nonprofit organization, Safe Harbor. Two weeks earlier, I had attended the six-day American Psychiatric Association annual meeting in San

Charles Darwin and Evolutionary Psychiatry

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 10:07:12 PST

In honor of Darwin's 2003rd birthday, from mcmanweb ... Here's an interesting fact: Peacock tails drove Darwin crazy. The sight of one "makes me sick," he wrote. These feathered accessories played havoc with his work-in-progress theory of natural selection. Surely, any bird stupid enough to flaunt their colors in the wild wouldn't live long enough to mate. Darwin's solution seems obvious enough

Rerun: My Visit to the Local Creationist Museum (Seriously, I'm Not Making This Up)

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 11:24:53 PST

In honor of Charles Darwin's birthday tomorrow, this piece from Dec 2010 ... Believe it or not, this museum is only 10 or 12 miles from my home, outside San Diego. This journey through time will be a very short one, as the entire universe, earth included, according to creationist belief, is only 6,000 years old. This works way better than carbon-14 dating. I missed whether it was a

Shedding Light on Brain Research: A Scientist Responds to Whitaker

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:37:59 PST

Last week, I wrote a piece highly critical of a post Robert Whitaker published on his blog, Mad in America. His post attacked a very recent Scripps Institute study, which became the basis of his own editorializing on the research agenda of the NIMH, namely that “decades of such brain research has not produced any notable therapeutic payoff.” My post noted that Whitaker had a point concerning one

The Cortical Factor: What Is Going On In Our Brains With Gay Marriage and All That?

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:41:03 PST

Picking up from where we left off: According to Robert Sapolsky of Stanford, the amygdala and the frontal cortex essentially regulate each other. The projections from the frontal cortex are inhibitory, as are the projections from the amygdala. In Sapolsky's words: “The frontal cortex is trying to get the amygdala to restrain itself. The amygdala is trying to get the frontal cortex to stop

The Cortical Factor: Developing the Optimum Brain

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 16:23:17 PST

Take the teen-age brain - please! First, a quick review: In our previous post, Robert Sapolsky of Stanford (pictured here) explained how the frontal cortex is about doing the harder thing, if it is the right thing to do. Essentially, the more developed cortical areas modulate our more primitive limbic impulses, including learned (and virtually automatic) behaviors that are no longer stored in

The Cortical Factor

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 10:35:33 PST

I just finished viewing Lecture 18 in a 25-part video series by Robert Sapolsky of Stanford. Dr Sapolsky is to human behavior what Carl Sagan was to astronomy. There is no one better at explaining the topic to the general public than this man. It’s not even close. I first stumbled into Sapolsky in early 2003 and I’ve been something of a groupie ever since. The video series I am watching is an

Epigenetics and Mental Illness and You

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:19:49 PST

Two posts ago, I took Robert Whitaker to task for misreporting an NIMH-funded study in order to advance his own idiosyncratic agenda. Whitaker reported the study as a garden variety postmortem exam of brains of those with schizophrenia vs controls. The study, in fact, involved epigenetics, which Whitaker both failed to mention and displayed no knowledge of. I first came across the field in late

Robert Whitaker: Dangerous in America - Part II

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 12:26:18 PST

Yesterday, I reported on Robert Whitaker’s dangerous tendency to play fast and loose with the facts in support of his own agenda. This worked in his 2010 book, “Anatomy of an Epidemic,” which I was largely supportive of despite my strong reservations over the way he misrepresented the studies he relied upon to make his point, not to mention his unpardonable cheap shots fueled by his profound

Robert Whitaker: Dangerous in America

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 13:43:40 PST

On his Mad in America blog, in a Jan 12 post Rethinking Brain Research in Psychiatry, Robert Whitaker, author of "Anatomy of an Epidemic," made the very legitimate point that brain studies on those with mental illness fail to account for the effects of exposure to psychiatric drugs. Agreed. So, if you slice and dice the brains of deceased individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar and compare

Rerun: Mahler: The Man Who Saw It Coming

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:16:09 PST

I just got in the door from a weekend trip to LA. There, I experienced the ultimate musical performance of my life - Dudamel conducting Mahler Symphony 6. The following is from a mcmanweb article I wrote in 2004, which I posted in edited form as a blog in June 2011. Enjoy ... Gustav Mahler described himself as three times homeless, a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans, and a Jew

The Book of Fort: The Two Wise Old Fools

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 18:48:02 PST

Book II in the series ... At the watering hole, along the barrens of Fey, on the fork of the road leading to Mem in one direction and Ar in the other, the wise and righteous Fort encountered a weary stranger in threadbare garments. And although Fort would later go hungry, he offered the stranger his last loaf, which the man eagerly consumed. Fort bid the stranger to make himself comfortable,

Newt the Borderpath: Making the Case that Psychiatry is Not Allowed to Make

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:42:59 PST

Picking up where we left off ... Thanks to “the Goldwater Rule” embedded into the code of ethics of the American Psychiatric Association, it is unethical for psychiatrists to “offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.” The rule was the direct outcome of more than a thousand psychiatrists venturing

Challenging the Bipolar-Sex Conventional Wisdom

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 12:50:00 PST

I just added a new article to mcmanweb, The Whole Bipolar Sex Thing, which had its genesis in a series of posts on HealthCentral. Following is an extract ... The conventional wisdom is that (hypo)mania increases our sexual drive - often to the point of excess - while depression has the opposite effect. Goodwin and Jamison in their 2007 "Manic-Depressive Illness" note that Aretaeus of Cappadocia

Newt and "The Goldwater Rule": Why Psychiatrists Will Not Tell You the Obvious

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 14:43:12 PST

“Newt Gingrich’s three marriages mean he might make a strong president - really,” ran the headline to a Fox News article published last Friday. What else would you expect from the publicity arm of the Republican Party? The twist was the article was written by a psychiatrist, not just any psychiatrist, a psychiatrist employed by Fox News, Fox News’ house psychiatrist Keith Ablow. Dr Ablow also

The Book of Fort

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 20:38:21 PST

The other day, while hiking in the mountains, I came across some ancient writings secreted in a cave. Clearly, they are Scripture from a forgotten people. I just finished translating the first scroll ... And there lived in the land of Gob a righteous man named Fort, who was a crafter of fine hardwood didgeridoos. And his didgeridoos were strong and resonant and affordable and brought great joy

Incompetence in Psychiatry: Readers Weigh In

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 01:11:01 PST

“What percentage of psychiatrists do you think are incompetent?” I asked in a reader poll that ran some six weeks during December and January. Framing my question negatively carries the strong risk of encouraging rotten tomatoes responses and thus undermining the credibility of any findings, but my attempts at positive construction came out totally pathetic. Sometimes negative is the best option.

Rerun: We Still Have a Dream

noreply@blogger.com (John McManamy) — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:52:52 PST

Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!