I grew up in Batavia, N.Y., about ten miles down the road from the small town of LeRoy. I had just gone off to Cornell a few months before the big train derailment in December, 1970, that spilled cyanide crystals and about 30,000 gallons of the solvent called tricholoroethene onto the railroad bed.

I never imagined that 40 years later, as a psychiatrist, I’d be reading about this incident in connection with one of the most mysterious mass outbreaks of neurological symptoms in recent memory. And yet, this past January, the environmental-activist-cum-movie-star, Erin Brockovich, began investigating a possible connection between that chemical spill and the bizarre outbreak among a group of LeRoy Junior-Senior High School students.

I truly don’t know what explains the strange constellation of signs and symptoms seen in this group of young people. I’m not sure anybody does. Most of the expert opinion has settled on the description of “mass psychogenic illness.”

Happy Saturday! Welcome to the weekend. Time to kick back, relax, and let the workweek stress just melt away. (Wouldn’t it be nice if we could melt stress away on command?)

If you had a busy week, you probably missed out a few of Psych Central’s most interesting news stories. But, do not fear: I’ve summarized three of our top brain, tech, and workplace news stories in this week’s “Week in Review” video podcast. In this episode, we answer the following questions:

• How do metaphors affect your brain?
• Can a Smartphone determine when you’re depressed?

• What causes a loss of $225.8 billion per year in the US alone?

Check out our latest video podcast below for the answers:

A week ago, an op-ed appeared in the New York Times by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota’s Institute of Child Development, questioning society’s reliance on medications to help children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). He suggested that Ritalin has “gone wrong,” in that we simply rely too heavily on drugs to treat childhood disorders.

He starts off the op-ed, “As a psychologist who has been studying the development of troubled children for more than 40 years, I believe we should be asking why we rely so heavily on these drugs.”

Like most professionals who are trying to boil down decades worth of research into a layperson-friendly length, Dr. Sroufe unfortunately glosses over the psychological literature and what we know (and don’t know) about ADHD medications.

I will say this before we begin… most children would benefit not just from being prescribed an ADHD medication, but also getting specific psychological treatment as well. Few child psychologists and child specialists would be happy if their patients were only getting the benefits of one type of treatment, and many would agree that parents are too quick to medicate before trying non-medication options.

If you sprinkle a hefty dose of Catholic (or Jewish) guilt unto a fragile biochemistry headed toward a severe mood disorder, you usually arrive at some kind of a religious nut. Not that there’s anything wrong with that! For I am one.

I have said many places that growing up Catholic, for me, was both a blessing and a curse.

A blessing in that my faith became a refuge for me, a retreat (no pun intended) where my disordered thinking could latch unto practices and traditions that made me feel normal. Catholicism, with all of its rituals and faith objects, provided me a safe place to go for comfort and consolation, to hear I wasn’t alone, and that I would be taken care of. It was, and has been throughout my life, a source of hope. And any speck of hope is what keeps me alive when I am suicidal.

But my fervent faith was also a curse in that, with all of its stuff (medals, rosaries, icons, statues), it dressed and disguised my illness as piety. So instead of taking me to the school psychologist or to a mental health professional, the adults in my life considered me a very holy child, a religious prodigy with a curiously intense faith.

I live in a college town.

In fact, I live in the college town in which I used to attend college.

I moved back here a few months ago and I pass my (er, the college’s) library daily. It brings back plenty of academic memories — and, surprisingly, they’re not the stressful ones. In the six years that have passed since my graduation, the memories of stress and panic and due dates and overwhelming projects has faded.

But the positive stuff remains: the nights spent in a library study nook with my Intro to Communication textbook and a highlighter. (I loved that class.)

The satisfaction of applying a concept I learned in my 9 a.m. Intro to Logic class to my 2 p.m. Composition class. (I could point out all the major logical fallacies in our assigned reading.)

The scent of the pages of a brand-new textbook. (Am I the only one who thinks that new books sort of smell like cucumbers on the inside?)

I hit the peak of wistful sentimentality last week and found a way to re-create a portion of the academic college experience (without the stress!): watching actual college lectures on Academic Earth.

You might ask, “Why would anyone want to fake attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)?”

Many years ago, when ADHD was first proposed as a diagnosis, you would’ve been right — few people would’ve bothered faking the diagnosis because it brought you little reward to do so.

But as ADHD diagnoses bloomed over the past two decades, so did special accommodations in the school systems for children and teenagers diagnosed with the disorder. And one of the primary treatments for attention deficit disorder is stimulant medication, something that can be used for less-than-legitimate reasons.

Could teens today really be faking ADHD to get into college?

Welcome to the world of unintended secondary gains and rewards.

I am often told that I should grow a thicker skin. I’m too sensitive. I let things get to me too much. Most people who struggle with depression are the same. We are more transparent and therefore absorb more into the gray matter of our brain than our thicker-skinned counterpoints.

In his book, Your Emotional Type, Michael A. Jawer and Marc S. Micozzi, Ph.D. examine the interplay of emotions, chronic illness and pain, and treatment success. They discuss how chronic conditions are intrinsically linked to certain emotional types.

I found the boundary concept they explain in the book — first developed by Ernest Hartmann, MD, of Tufts University — especially intriguing.

Anxiety.

Do we know anyone without it?

I mean, yes, some people don’t admit to having it. But it is assumed these days that if you have a pulse, you have anxiety.

One of my best teachers on this topic is Tamar Chansky, a clinical psychologist and one of the nation’s leading experts on anxiety disorders. She is the acclaimed author of several books, including Freeing Your Child from Anxiety, and the founder and director of the Children’s and Adult Center for OCD and Anxiety.

I am a huge fan of her work. I think I was introduced to it by my therapist, when I was terrified that my son would end up with a brain like mine. And then, through blogging, I came to know Dr. Chansky on a personal level, and she has impressed me even more so, because she communicates in a language I can understand! It’s great!

Her first few books were geared toward children’s anxiety and negative thoughts, but the same wisdom she offers for kids works for adults too. In fact, I have always applied her kids’ advice to me.

The importance of the comparative approach to studying the brain cannot be overstated.  The comparative approach allows us to compare human brains to brains of non-humans.

One of the key findings in this area is that the difference between human brains and brains of other species are often quantitative rather than qualitative.  Comparative studies do reveal differences, but they also reveal many similarities that can lead to a better understanding of evolution and brain development.  The primary benefits of using the comparative approach are that simpler brains found in other species make it more likely that brain-behavior relationships will be revealed, and there are fewer ethical restrictions applied to the study of other species.

Researchers who work with our closest relatives, chimps, assume that the things learned about chimps’ brains and behavior could be applied to understanding human brains and behavior.  Researchers can also make meaningful comparisons with more distantly related species: slugs, fruit flies, rats and cats.  Brain-behavior comparisons across species provide information that is difficult to obtain from studying a single species. 

There’s interesting research being conducted into ways to modify fear memories. New methods may unlock the potential to reduce post-traumatic stress disorder and other disorders that debilitate many in our society.

Memory re-consolidation occurs when a memory is retrieved and it becomes unstable, thus allowing new information to be incorporated into the memory. When the memory is unstable its re-stabilization process can be blocked or weakened. This process of memory re-consolidation has been shown to help weaken the memory of the negative emotions associated with the fearful memories (Schiller et al., 2010). This does not imply that conscious memory of the event is weakened, rather, it implies that the negative tone of the memory is weakened.

Research in this area has led to using extinction processes that have been shown to weaken fear-associated memories.

“If you get lost in a trigger that thrusts you to a painful event, take a deep breath and remember: we can’t change that we’ve hurt before, be we can choose not to suffer now.”
~Lori Deschene, Founder of TinyBuddha.com

I perceive happiness to be a choice. It can be as much of a choice as deciding what pair of jeans to wear in the morning, what song to upload onto your iTunes, or what Italian restaurant to dine at on a Friday night.

If we can easily succumb to the negative emotions of hostility, jealousy, anxiety, or sadness, why can’t we turn it around and decide that in the present moment we want to be happy?

Ah patience. How do we cultivate you without driving ourselves more crazy?

Being that my new year’s resolution is to be more content with living with the questions in my life versus rushing towards the answers, I found useful the advice in Allan Lokos’s new book, Patience: The Art of Peaceful Living.

Lokos is the founder and guiding teacher of the Community Meditation Center in New York City, and the author of Pocket Peace: Effective Practices for Enlightened Living.

Here are the three themes that I found most helpful in his book.