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Creative minds 'mimic schizophrenia'

Artist Salvador Dali is known for his surreal paintings and eccentric personality

Creativity is akin to insanity, say scientists who have been studying how the mind works.

Brain scans reveal striking similarities in the thought pathways of highly creative people and those with schizophrenia.
Both groups lack important receptors used to filter and direct thought.
It could be this […]

Expectant mom's flu exposure stunts baby's brain development

MADISON - For expectant mothers, catching even a mild case of the flu could stunt brain development in their newborns, according to a new study conducted in rhesus macaques.
Writing in the most recent online edition (Jan. 22) of the journal Biological Psychiatry, a team led by Christopher Coe of the University of Wisconsin-Madison reports that […]

Medical Mystery: A Girl Loses Her Mind

Doctors couldn’t explain this 16-year-old’s bizarre neurological and psychiatric symptoms.
New York University neurologist Souhel Najjar specializes in solving puzzling cases that other doctors have given up on. Last August he took on one of the most challenging cases of his career.
He saw a 19-year-old girl who had been an honor student before experiencing a bizarre […]

Glenn Close and Family Join Director Ron Howard To Combat Misconceptions About Mental Illness

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUaXFlANojQ
LOS ANGELES, October 21, 2009 | SHOOT Publicity Wire | — Oscar® winning director Ron Howard and award-winning actress Glenn Close collaborate to raise awareness of mental illness in the new :30/:60 PSA "Say" for Bring Change 2 Mind. Created by New York ad agency the watsons, the spot was shot in New York’s Grand […]

When a Child Has a Mental Illness

Garen Staglin and his wife were on a business trip to France back in 1991 when they got a phone call that would change everything. The news — that their 19-year-old son Brandon had been admitted to a psychiatric hospital — was so unexpected that, at first, they thought it was a wrong number.
But Brandon […]

Schizophrenia - Advice from a Parent

Garen Staglin

Nearly two decades ago, my son, Brandon, was diagnosed with schizophrenia after his freshman year in college when he was 19 years old. For him and for our family, that moment was the beginning of a long journey, a journey that took us through fear and darkness and, eventually, to hope and thankfulness.
There […]

Films attack mental health stigma

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-JVBO7nLv0

Two films are being launched in cinemas in England and online to challenge the misconception that all sufferers of schizophrenia are violent.
The move comes as a YouGov poll of 2,010 people found that more than a third held this belief.
Campaigners Time to Change said someone was as likely to be hit by lightning as […]

Schizophrenia struggle for family

People with schizophrenia are more likely to experience discrimination by those closest to them than by employers or officials, a global survey suggests.
Nearly half of the 730 respondents to the King’s College, London, study reported negative treatment by relatives and friends after diagnosis.
About a third said they had encountered problems when seeking or keeping […]

Consciousness, Science's biggest mystery

 

http://videos.sapo.pt/fYc8oZNoq4fRB5lglqmF

A beautiful mind

Stuart Baker-Brown, 43, a photographer and writer based in Dorset, was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1996. On World Mental Health Day, he delivers a unique personal insight into how his condition has nurtured his artistic expression.
In the past, schizophrenia has broken my life and taken away many of life’s opportunities, such as work and the […]

Brain tissue reveals possible genetic trigger for schizophrenia

Diana Perkins

CHAPEL HILL – A study led by scientists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill may have identified a molecular mechanism involved in the development of schizophrenia.
In studying the postmortem brain tissue of adults who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia, the researchers found that levels of certain gene-regulating molecules called microRNAs […]

Picower study points to a genetic link for schizophrenia

Susumu Tonegawa

Gene mutations governing a key brain enzyme make people susceptible to schizophrenia and may be targeted in future treatments for the psychiatric illness, according to MIT and Japanese researchers. The work, by scientists from MIT’s Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and Japan’s RIKEN Brain Science Institute, will be reported in the early online […]

Scientists find stronger evidence for link between cat faeces and schizophrenia

Researchers discover schizophrenia drugs work on cat parasite

Researchers have found stronger evidence for a link between a parasite in cat faeces and undercooked meat and an increased risk of schizophrenia.
Research published today in Procedings of the Royal Society B, shows how the invasion or replication of the parasite Toxoplasma gondii in rats may be […]

UnMASCing Machines in the Brain: Uncovering the molecular networks at the basis of cognition

Network of nerve cells

More than a century ago anatomists found that the human brain was the most complex organ in the human body. Today, we know it is a network of billions of nerve cells in intimate connections at specialized junctions called synapses.
In a report published online on Wednesday 18 January in Molecular Systems […]

Mice with defective memory may hold clues to schizophrenia

Dr. Robert Greene, professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues have found that eliminating a gene in a mouse’s brain creates memory problems that are reminiscent of schizophrenia.

DALLAS - By deleting a single gene in a small portion of the brains of mice, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center found that the animals were affected in […]

Creativity determines sexual success

Lord Byron

The more creative a person is, the more sexual partners they are likely to have, according to a pioneering study which could explain the behaviour of notorious womanisers such as poets Lord Byron and Dylan Thomas.
The research, by the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and the Open University in the UK, found that […]

Edinburgh scientists find new schizophrenia gene

It is now clear that the DISC1 gene plays an important role in the risk of developing schizophrenia or bipolar affective disorder

A Scots-led medical research team has identified a new gene linked to major mental illness that links back to a previously discovered gene known to increase the risk of schizophrenia and depression.
Scientists from […]

Saint Aslam

By Irfan Yusuf, September 21, 2005
I had just parked my car near the intersection of Elizabeth and Cleveland Streets in Strawberry Hills. It was almost midday, and I was meeting a colleague for lunch at our favourite Lebanese restaurant.
He was standing near a shopping trolley containing bottles of water and different kids of soaps. He […]

Yale Study Reconciles Two Models of Schizophrenia

John KrystaL, M.D.

New Haven, Conn. — Yale School of Medicine researchers published a report this month in the Archives of General Psychiatry that highlights the interplay of two brain signaling systems, glutamate and dopamine, in psychosis and cognitive function.
The study helps resolve a long-standing research debate between the “dopamine hypothesis” and the “glutamate hypothesis” or […]

Odd behavior and creativity may go hand-in-hand

These images show the different involvement of the right brain hemisphere during creative tasks performed by schizotypes, schizophrenics and normal controls. In the first image, the orange area indicates how much more activation took place in the right hemispheres of the schizotypes versus the normal controls. The second image illustrates an even greater difference […]

People With Serious Mental Illness Have Gaps in Knowledge of Type-2 Diabetes

Faith Dickerson, lead author of this study

People with serious mental illness have higher rates of type 2 diabetes than the general population, yet their knowledge of diabetes was generally poor and significantly lower than people without mental illness, according to a new study.
This finding “suggests that more education about type 2 diabetes is needed […]

Helping young people come to terms with mental illness

Creating websites is one of the ways self-help support groups could reach young people with a mental illness

Creating websites and placing posters in schools are just some of the ways self-help support groups (SHSGs) could reach young people with a mental illness, according to a study just completed at the University of Western Sydney.
Dr […]

‘Schizophrenia’ may not exist

‘Schizophrenia’ falsely groups people with a wide range of problems together

Schizophrenia has been attributed to everything from genetic predisposition, brain chemistry, sufferers’ home environment and even cat-borne viruses, but no consistent causal pattern has ever been identified. As a result, treatment outcomes for today’s patients are not very different from those of patients treated 100 […]

Schizophrenia ‘price for speech?’

Early humans developed a taste for sea food

"Schizophrenia is the price that homo sapiens pay for language."
That is the controversial theory of one leading psychiatrist.
Professor Tim Crow believes that the difference in the development of the human brain from the primate brain - which allows us to process thought and speech - is linked to […]

Inhibitory Systems Control the Pattern of Activity in the Cortex

David McCormick

New Haven, Conn. — Inhibitory systems are essential for controlling the pattern of activity in the cortex, which has important implications for the mechanisms of cortical operation, according to a Yale School of Medicine study in Neuron.
The findings demonstrate the inhibitory network is central to controlling not only the amplitude, extent and duration of […]