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Aswad -> RE: So Why Are All The Genius's Insane? (6/5/2007 3:21:23 PM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: thompsonx
When you do jot them down I would be interested in reading them.
If and when I do, I'll try to keep that in mind.
There's just so much stuff going through my head sometimes, that I can't finish all of it.
Thus, rather than letting the ideas and thoughts go to waste, I try to put them somewhere so they can (hopefully) be of some use to someone, whether as inspiration or as something else. Then I concentrate on a few of them that I try to bring to fruitition. This one may end up in the latter category, depending on how my schedule works out. It takes a bit of thinking to do anything useful about it, though.
If I decide to take the offer to study psychiatry in the regular way (med school + specialization), or if they get around to offering a customized study (like the ones they have in the US; just the stuff you need for psychiatry, like endocrinology and cardiovascular stuff, but without stuff like STDs and how to treat burn victims (our local specialty) and such), then I'll probably do something about it. No point in going that route and not publishing something; even as an amateur, I've been more successful than most professionals so far, so I figure a complete education in the field should give some grounds for actually doing something really useful.
It seemed plausible that there may be a connection, though.
On a related note, if anyone here is looking into those kinds of things, high-school shootings in conjunction with SSRIs brought up a couple of interesting thoughts, quite aside from the tie-in with akathisia and such: SSRIs cause downregulation of the central β-adrenergic system, which is involved in context priority during memory encoding, and it is plausible that this may induce a reframing effect similar to certain experimental psychoterapies that use conscious reframing.
Basically, whenever our brain calls up a memory, it tends to store a new copy of it. If you bring up a traumatic memory, and reframe it in a better way, the stored copy is less traumatic. If you do this for all "paths" that lead to the original memory, you get closure. Or, at least, that's the theory behind reframing.
How this applies to SSRIs and one more potential tie-in with high-school shootings, is that these people are frequently in a mental space where the new context will be worse than the old one. Thus, traumatic memories keep getting formed. But at the same time, old memories with positive context are unintentionally, and continously, reframed in a flatter, low-impact version, potentially causing a lot of the good sides of life to get "lost" over time, given the small volume of memory present to that point, while the negative stimuli remain in effect.
My thought was that this loss of positive things to "hold on to" may aid in pushing people over the top, as they don't see quite as clearly what they, and others, stand to lose. It becomes a confusing, negative mess with no redeeming value to life. That certainly fits with some of what I experienced with the SSRIs.
Add the tendency to occasionally cause akathisia, a kind of restlessness or "need" to "take action", and you might have part of the recipe for disaster there. For me, I wouldn't suggest using SSRIs on kids, generally, though there are exceptions. And I have some alternatives in mind, but I doubt they'll ever be adopted into mainstream practice. Well, "never" is a big word, but I think the kids will be allowed to smoke pot in their spare time before the docs go with my suggestions there.
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