Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease 222
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Washington University has found that the condition known as schizophrenia is not just a single disease, but instead a collection of eight different disorders. For years, researchers struggled to understand the genetic basis of schizophrenia. This new method was able to isolate and identify the different conditions (each with its own symptoms) currently classified under the same heading (abstract, full text). "In some patients with hallucinations or delusions, for example, the researchers matched distinct genetic features to patients' symptoms, demonstrating that specific genetic variations interacted to create a 95 percent certainty of schizophrenia. In another group, they found that disorganized speech and behavior were specifically associated with a set of DNA variations that carried a 100 percent risk of schizophrenia." According to one of the study's authors, "By identifying groups of genetic variations and matching them to symptoms in individual patients, it soon may be possible to target treatments to specific pathways that cause problems."
Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Funny)
that schizophrenia itself has a bit of a split personality.
Re:Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Informative)
I'm schizophrenic with mild hallucinations but I hear shit around the clock and it gets extremely annoying. I know it's not real, but there are days where I'm like leave me the fuck alone. I'd be cool with it if it were Ed Harris but everything I hear is abstract so I keep it pretty loud in my room to drown it out. Luckily my case is not too bad, but it's bad enough that I can imagine what people with serious cases go through. I feel extremely bad for people that have been drove out of their minds.
The feeling of knowing what you're seeing or hearing is fake is indescribable.
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The feeling of knowing what you're seeing or hearing is fake is indescribable.
Odd I seem to remember, in my youth, that acid was pretty much that to a T and I can describe it as pretty awesome. :(
That said I KNEW why it was happening and I am sure that is much different that having it happen for no good reason
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More importantly, not only did you know why it was happening, whether or not it happened was *your choice*.
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I'd be cool with it if it were Ed Harris
If you're referring to Pollock [imdb.com], hee came across in the movie as being manic-depressive, not schizophrenic.
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The feeling of knowing what you're seeing or hearing is fake is indescribable.
You make it sounds like it's a problem.
Personally, I'm a meditator, and I *know* that everything is fake and I accept this as a fact, so I concentrate on my perception of the "reality".
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I have a feeling that part of what afflicts people like you is a superior ability of pattern recognition. Unfortunately, that means you can "hear things" in the background noise of the world and they are recognized as voices and words.
I would assume that it's closely related to genetic advantages that would allow you to learn people's faces more easily.
Re:Then I guess you could say... (Score:4, Interesting)
I've always wondered whether someone experiencing audio hallucinations they couldn't distinguish from real sounds could use software as a prosthetic. Say, write a program to continuously sample sound, display the past 5 minutes or so of waveform history on-screen, do realtime speech recognition, and annotate the waveform display with a transcript of what it thought it heard... so if they thought they heard something really disturbing, they could look at the display to see whether there was an organized waveform a few moments earlier, and listen to it again if they wanted to be sure..
If someone with schizophrenia did that, would it help? Or would it stimulate the development of new neural pathways & eventually make matters worse by inducing visual hallucinations on top of the auditory ones in an attempt to bring their physical perception of reality in line with their mental one?
Re:Then I guess you could say... (Score:4, Interesting)
That would likely help. For those that don't know if the hallucinations are real. However, the problem with hallucinations is that they'll drive you nuts even if you know they're not real. I remember the hallucinations would get so loud that I'd yell at them even though I knew they weren't real because I could barely hear anything else.
The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick. They need to start treating us like we're real people that just happen to have a different sense of reality. Trying to force us to buy into a reality that's every bit as fake as the one they're trying to get us to give up is ludicrous. It's not curable per se, but if we're given the tools to evaluate things for ourselves, the brain will eventually rewire itself in a way that's more functional.
Ultimately, people need to accept the symptoms as symptoms. Trying to fight the disorder is a losing battle. Eventually I got to the point where I missed the voices and started to intentionally cause the hallucinations. Before too long I was having trouble maintaining them and that aspect of the disorder was more or less gone.
The rest is really psycho-social education. It's not that schizophrenics can't be treated or virtually cured, it's that the mental health establishment makes more money with ineffectual treatments than it does for treatments that would improve the situation. There's some very good work being done in the neurosciences that could make a huge difference. Unfortunately, it would put psychologists completely out of business as it requires work from psychiatrists and therapists, but not psychologists.
Re:Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick. They need to start treating us like we're real people that just happen to have a different sense of reality.
In a sense, I sort of agree with you, in another, totally not. Depression is also another way of viewing reality. Is someone who's depressed "wrong" about concentrating on the negative aspects of living? No... but I think most people who're depressed would rather NOT be depressed. Obviously telling someone who's depressed to just "cheer up", and "things aren't that bad" isn't going to help much. But like a disease, it's an aspect of yourself you'd rather not have and aren't in total control of, and want to be "cured" of. So the disease model isn't too far from the truth. I don't see how scizophrenia is much different.
You yourself don't really like your symptoms, wouldn't you rather they be gone? So I'm not sure I really understand your point.
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The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick. They need to start treating us like we're real people that just happen to have a different sense of reality. In a sense, I sort of agree with you, in another, totally not. Depression is also another way of viewing reality. Is someone who's depressed "wrong" about concentrating on the negative aspects of living? No... but I think most people who're depressed would rather NOT be depressed. Obviously telling someone who's depressed to just "cheer up", and "things aren't that bad" isn't going to help much. But like a disease, it's an aspect of yourself you'd rather not have and aren't in total control of, and want to be "cured" of. So the disease model isn't too far from the truth. I don't see how scizophrenia is much different.
You yourself don't really like your symptoms, wouldn't you rather they be gone? So I'm not sure I really understand your point.
I have met (and married) people who "didn't feel normal" when they weren't depressed and would have constant lapses in treatment drugs (even if they worked, which most didn't).
While they didn't enjoy being depressed, they enjoyed "not being themselves" less, or were so screwed up the cause-effect understanding was broken.
Depression while also a complicated and layered description containing many different states, is not similar in that people always want to not be it.
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Huh? I've not been given the impression that anybody wants to take away my right to my own decisions because of any disease, whether it be flu, coronary artery disease, or depression. (They do want to monitor suicidal thoughts with depression, but that's not the same thing.)
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There is an ongoing study that involves having patients yell at computer generated avatars to get the source of their hallucinations to STFU. Perhaps it may interest you: http://www.vice.com/en_ca/read... [vice.com]
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That works for more than hallucinations, I can assure it. I find it quite effective for many of life's little frustrations.
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The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick...It's not that schizophrenics can't be treated or virtually cured
Your two statements contradict each other.
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If you completely ignore the illness, you're not doing much good (at least in cases of depression). A lot of depression therapy is about managing depressive tendencies, which is working with the patient, not on the patient, but does require acknowledging the mental illness.
Re:Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Probably pattern recognition. If innocuous background noise is perceived to be intelligent data, the brain amplifies it (isolates / focuses) rather than filtering it out. It's possible that the voices go away in complete sensory deprivation.
On the other hand, some studies show people born deaf also have language hallucinations - in sign language or lip movement.
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I don't think people appreciate how biological reasoning actually is, and just how modular the brain is, with every part having to trust the other parts to do their jobs. Your reasoning might be perfectly intact, but perhaps your visual perception has a problem, which means that you're going to make bizarre decisions.
You can have a brain that does 95% of everything spot-on, but some very specific abnormality causes really bizarre cognitive functionality.
Just talk to anybody young who had a serious stroke.
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> that schizophrenia itself has a bit of a split personality.
Wrong.
Schizophrenia is when you hear "god" telling you to kill that actress.
DID is when at times you really believe you are god, then a moment later you believe you're a receptionist at a law firm, then you believe you're a construction worker - and your personalities may or may not know one another and be friends. It's a really messed up condition - I had a friend with DID once and it was unnerving because I'd wonder who I would be talking to
Re: Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Informative)
You could also be referring to "multiple personalities," which is also known as Dissociative Identity Disorder. Neither Bipolar nor DID are the same as Schizophrenia.
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It's actually not really a comical thing, they like to blame physiology. For the most part it is the pressure applied by society simply because the numbers are not consistent with the growth of it.
Re: Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Informative)
*rimshot*. I do realise your just making a joke, however it is worth noting that multiple personalities is not considered part of the schizophrenia spectrum, but rather part of the disasociative disorders spectrum. Its a ketamine disease rather than an Acid disease, to make a metaphor.
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and its worth noting that this means the basis for the joke is actually the same as the basis for the article, that its actually hard to tell disorders apart from an outside view. Its almost a second joke layered on top.
Re: Then I guess you could say... (Score:5, Interesting)
No, he's thinking of multiple personality disorder, which is extremely rare and much different than schizophrenia. It's confused with schizophrenia because of the hallucinatory voices common in schizophrenia, but those "voices" aren't different personalities of the afflicted; they're just hallucinations. Multiple personality disorder is the split personality one -- the person is basically like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, although the personalities don't have to be good/evil or working at cross purposes to each other, and there can be more than two.
i knew that. (Score:3, Funny)
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We are not amused.
Schizophrenia is not multiple personality disorder (Score:4, Informative)
AKA Dissociative identity disorder. There is a slight comorbidity between the conditions, but depression and anxiety are also comorbid.
5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe (Score:5, Interesting)
Well - they make you feel a little sluggish, and quite drowsy for about 8 hours (more at higher doses) after they kick in (so don't take them for breakfast if you have plans), but not depressed. It is possible to feel despair because of your chronic condition and the prospect of long term sluggishness I suppose but
Schizophrenics who seek help often do so for anxiety and depression rather than psychosis. There is often a history of these issues predating medication, but not always.
It's not just Hollywood, it's everywhere. The psychotic=violent myth is in every media that has discussed the issue. Newspapers only mention schizophrenia if someone was hurt, furthering the association in people's minds. My current employer refused to let me work without supervision because I had advised them I have had psychotic episodes and am undergoing treatment until I gave them a psych's letter telling them they were being morons (small and new business, so I forgave and educated instead).
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Part of the problem is that some schizos ARE dangerous - we just don't know ahead of time who they are. If this lets us tell the two apart, awesome. Of course, there's the problem of false positives, as well as the question of environment (does a tendency to be dangerous still need an environmental trigger to manifest itself)?
Unfortunately, all meds have side effects. It's up to the patient, in consultation with their doctors and therapists, to find the right balance, which can change over time. "I f
Re:5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with meds is that they aren't a treatment, they are at best a bandage.
For the majority of medical afflictions being treated today there is no cure, so the best doctors can do is offer palliative care.
There is no cure for cancer, heart disease, athsma, arthritis, or even the common cold. So little is known about the human brain that zero percent of psychological disorders are effectively treated. Whenever I hear a doctor brag about how much they know about the human body or worse a psychologist remark about how much is known about the brain I always remind them how much there is they don't know.
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> There is no cure for cancer, heart disease, athsma, arthritis, or even the common cold.
Your definition of "cure" seems quite odd. "cancer" can include quite modest, benign lymphomas, easily and safely excised. Some types of heart disease, such as pericarditis, are very effectively cured with antibiotics. "asthma" can include environmental asthma, easily handled by getting _out_ of cities and moving to a beach can handle it quite effectively. Many cases of mild Type 2 diabetes are effectively cured by w
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My definition of "cure "is when people stop dying of these diseases. My point was that medical doctors and psychiatrists in particular have but a tenuous grasp on the actual workings of the human body. Many doctors contend if you have a mental illness that it is not a medical problem. You have to go see a psychiatrist for that. As if the brain weren't part of the human body.
If you want to cherry-pick cases where where medical science reigns supreme, I'm all in favor of antibiotics. I will gladly join you in
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My definition of "cure "is when people stop dying of these diseases. My point was that medical doctors and psychiatrists in particular have but a tenuous grasp on the actual workings of the human body.
To be fair, many of these "diseases" are just labels applied to general classes of symptoms, which probably have many underlying mechanisms. It is a bit like saying we haven't come up with a cure for "ache" yet, even though many conditions that cause aches do in fact have genuine cures.
Many doctors contend if you have a mental illness that it is not a medical problem. You have to go see a psychiatrist for that. As if the brain weren't part of the human body.
Heck, I can't figure out why in the US dentistry is treated differently than any other form of medicine. I can appreciate that insurers don't want to pay for cosmetic treatments like teeth whitening, but if I break any bone
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You seem not to understand your parent: for most cases you mention: is no cure!
Only adapting/changing your lifestyle and time cures it.
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Re:5 Ridiculous Myths You Probably Believe (Score:5, Interesting)
Part of the problem is that some schizos ARE dangerous
So are sociopaths and psychopaths. What you are trying to imply is that schizophrenics are more dangerous than other mental disorders.
I never came near implying that. Not once did I mention sociopaths OR psychopaths. To the contrary, I wrote that if this finding lets us tell the dangerous schizos from those who aren't, this will be awesome. My answer presumes that many schizos are not dangerous. I even went further, posing the question of whether a tendency towards violence might still need an environmental trigger.
A real-life example from one of my classmates in high school. Diagnosed as schizophrenic at 8 years of age, his father basically tried to "beat the devil out of him" for the next 8 years. That's akin to pounding on a bomb to see if it's armed. Even if he wasn't dangerous before, this course of conduct almost certainly lead to "arming the bomb." He beat his father to death right in front of me, and I was next on his list. He was found to be not criminally responsible, in part due to my testimony, and having seen and heard what he did that night, I believe the jury got it right.
Does that sound like someone who's unsympathetic to the problem?
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Meh. That just isn't as funny as the old one.
DNA? (Score:5, Interesting)
If it is embedded in DNA, is it hereditary?
If it is, I hope it does not bring back Eugenics or the forced sterilization practices of the early 19th century. That didn't end well on several fronts.
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Let's be honest there is quite a bit of difference on a planet with 7 billion people to enact laws making procreation and child rearing a privilege and responsibility only for those appropriate to do so versus you can spit out all the ones you want expecting the rest of society to care for them and take responsibility for them, this versus extermination camps.
Suck it up, despite all the whining about how badly it was done in the past it will not ever stop all of us or future generations from biting the b
Re:DNA? (Score:4, Insightful)
You will be amazed at how few babies people have once you give them (especially women) access to birth control (and the realistic ability to use it without terrible social stigma), as well as a livable income.
The stats have shown this throughout history....high birth levels are associated with poverty, and also with the unavailability of (completely voluntary) birth control. The wealthy class across the globe generally has zero or one child per couple, whereas indigents generally have 5 or more per couple. And government funded birth control being freely given to the populace has also been shown to significantly reduce birth rates.
Before you go sterilizing people, consider that there may be a much more just and humane way of achieving the exact same goals, and making everyone involved a whole lot happier about it.
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Waiting to put on a black shirt?
Who is first on your extermination list?
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Let's be honest there is quite a bit of difference on a planet with 7 billion people to enact laws making procreation and child rearing a privilege and responsibility only for those appropriate to do so versus you can spit out all the ones you want expecting the rest of society to care for them and take responsibility for them, this versus extermination camps.
Suck it up, despite all the whining about how badly it was done in the past it will not ever stop all of us or future generations from biting the bullet, it is a matter of inevitability or total collapse from the 20 billion idiocracy taking over and an extinct species replacing them.
A whole lot of problems can be safely easily eliminated in a generation or three or we can continue to fail future generations with them.
Absolutely. Let's start with you. Seems reasonable to me. Do I hear a second?
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I'll second that moron, check before you make statements and if you can't check don't assume otherwise you'll make an ass out of yourself.
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it is not, probably doesn't exist (Score:3, Interesting)
oh man...so is crazy genetic?
no...but this study is from the University of Washington St. Louis wants to say it is...they analyzed data and this is what they conclude, from full text:
That's what they say..."group of heritable disorders"...it reminds me of when I studied Mendell in HS science and fruit flies and hemophilia.
It sounds fish as hell to me..
citation note (Score:2)
those quotations are from page 2 and 3 of the full text of the study respectively
Re:it is not, probably doesn't exist (Score:4, Insightful)
environment, choices, and genetics (Score:2)
if it is such common knowledge, you should easily be able to point me to some sort of proof
lets see it...show me proof
also, after you paste a link to support your claim, I'd like for you to addess this as well: you're taking a complex situation, over-simplifying it, then telling me all the ways it becomes complex but just using your own rhetoric
in one sense, i agree, everyone knows that your genes deter
sources are not scientific & religious familie (Score:2)
you linked me to "schizophrenia.com"...which is sort of like linking me to "antivaxer.com" to as evidence vaccinations cause autism
you even admit it yourself: "Some of those links include actual cites from scientific studies, by the way"
how do you know that? how do you know those links cite scientific studies? did you see it yourself?
so you looked at these articles, saw that they had actual research cited, but you chose **NOT** to copy/paste that information, instead, you chose to copy/paste information tha
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"Heritable" doesn't mean exactly the same as "genetic".
"Heritability" refers to how much of the variation of a trait in a population is due to genetics. The number of heads or legs a person has is most definitely "genetic", but not really "heritable" at all; if you meet someone with one leg or two heads,the reason for that is almost certainly NOT because of a mutat
compare it to hemophilia (Score:2)
ok...compare "schizophrenia" as you are trying to explain it to something like hemophilia
some disorder that is not based on perception of behavior
so...hemophilia...the English royal family famously inbred so much that hemophilia became a problem genetically
is hemophilia "heritable" or is it "caused" by genetics...show me in comparison to hemophilia how schizophrenia is "heritable" and "genetic"
Re:Eugen Fischer (Score:5, Informative)
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Are you joking?
Yes, in part. But proponents of eugenics will still need to disguise it to the public because Fischer or no Fischer, the public still associates eugenics with Nutsies.
"Eugenics" comes from Greek.
So does the name Eugene [behindthename.com], which is rendered "Eugen" in German.
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An utopia is not nevessaryly good and most definitely does not start with an 'Eu'.
But perhaps not yor fault that americans don't know/care how to pronounce the 'eu' correctly, hint: 'joy' - 'eu' is pronounced correctly like the 'oy' in the enlish word 'joy'.
And no, Zeus, is not pronounced Zoooooos!
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The word "utopia" comes from the Greek "eu" + "topos", i.e. "good place". The English spelling "utopia" is supposed to preserve the pun of confusing eutopia with "ou" + "topos", "no place".
I don't know about modern Greek pronunciations, but in Attic Greek, "eu" wouldn't have been pronounced as 'oy', as in the enlish word 'joy'. At least not as far as I've ever heard. It would have been more like the "eu" in the english word "feud" [berkeley.edu]. My recollection is that the pun is used in Platonic dialogues, though I
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Sorry, but what is in you ears the difference between 'oy' in joy an 'eu' in feud? For me as a layman there is none. :)
Your deduction of the word utopia is half right: It comes from 'ou' - nothing/none and 'tropia' - place, meaning 'no such place'. But 'ou' is not the same as 'eu', obviously. Hint: there are classic greek 'utopia' novels which make pretty clear what the origion of the word is
How attic greek actually was pronounced, no one knows. But best bet is: similar to modern greek.
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Sorry, but what is in you ears the difference between 'oy' in joy an 'eu' in feud? For me as a layman there is none.
Well you implied that you weren't American, so maybe it's your accent? Because pronouncing the "eu" like you would in "feud" makes "Zeus" pronounced like "Zoooooos".
How attic greek actually was pronounced, no one knows. But best bet is: similar to modern greek.
Except for the fact that people have studied it quite a lot, and have a pretty good idea of how it was pronounced.
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Well, than as a german I pronounce feud wrong.
Except for the fact that people have studied it quite a lot, and have a pretty good idea of how it was pronounced.
If that was the case, americans would not pronounce it wrong.
And: you can not study the pronunciation of a DEAD language.
EU is pronounced as the 'oy' in joy, believe it or not.
And Achilles is not pronounced Ak-kill-as. However we get used those absurdities, it only makes watching movies like Troy a pain to the ears.
Two greek protagonists holding up c
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And: you can not study the pronunciation of a DEAD language.
You can, and people do. In order to study dead languages (or dialects, or accents that no longer exist), linguists can sometimes find old writings from the time and place that describe how things are supposed to be pronounced. That makes things relatively easy. Without those kinds of sources, they can do things like analyze poetry or songs from the time, and figure out how the poetry was supposed to sound. They can look at puns and figure out which words were supposed to sound similar. It may not be a
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mistake of thinking that your German pronunciation is the absolute correct pronunciation, regardless of what language is being spoken or how the original language would have pronounced it. ... name one). The only two examples - from my mind - where it is not is english, and according to the writing, but less to the sound: French. However you certainly f
Well, first of all, for most languages indeed german is very close to their pronunciations (includes wild examples like Finnish, Japanese, Hungarian, Turkish
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no greek complained so far... the only ones who have those ridiculous claims about attic greek are americans and to a lower extend englishs.
Ok, so what I'm taking away from this conversation is simply that you are a highly opinionated person who doesn't know what Attic Greek is. It's a dialect of ancient Greek, and it was not pronounced the same as modern Greek. So when I'm talking about Attic Greek being pronounced in some way, it's not really a sensible argument to say that I'm wrong because modern Greeks pronounce it differently. They're different dialects separated by thousands of years. It would be like insisting that people in Renaiss
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I pointed out that a friend of mine is
a) greek
b) teaches modern greek
c) teaches attic / classic greek
I also pointed out that your illusional 'we can deduce how it sounded' is wrong, as there is no way at it would work for a DEAD language. We can only conclude from current pronunciations of similar words or from pronunciations of foreign words in other languages (imported greek words) etc. In rare cases we have dictionaries ...
Further I would simply follow the majority. If one part of the world speaks Zeus l
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I'd expect most people to interpret "eugenics" as the Greek stems for "good" and "genes", because that's where the word comes from. A fairly obscure nazzy doktor with a similar name isn't what tainted the word.
I'd expect most people neither to associate it with the Greek stems in question nor with Eugen Fischer; I'd expect them to have no clue where the word came from.
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What if instead of sterilization we pass laws saying that if you knowingly and willingly pass defective genes on to your kid, you'll get prosecuted just as though you'd harmed them through abuse. For example, if a couple knew they were both carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene, they had a kid anyway, the kid had CF, and died at age 20, they would go to jail for murder.
captcha = "condom"
That would certainly discourage people from getting tested...
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Life is a fatal condition. Putting arbitrary value on specific lifespans that you deem acceptable aren't as eugenic as you believe.
Helps explain a few things ... (Score:3)
Helps explain why my dog reacts differently to different people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Some he's very friendly with, others he makes it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with them - or with them being around me.
Dogs can sense a lot of things we miss - maybe they can pick up something about the dangerous ones that we can't. And yes, one of the ones he kept growling at eventually went looking for a gun. Told my neighbor (who has 3 registered hand guns) that he hated my guts and where could he buy a gun? Stopped a few weeks later after dusk walking around with a holster with what appeared, in the dark, to be a gun. Knees on the ground, hands in the air, the whole bit. Apparently he wasn't happy that I had reported him to Youth Protection for moving back to the neighborhood after he had assured the court he wouldn't be having any more contact with a kid living in the next building.
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Or your dog could just not like certain people because they smell bad to him. Some schizophrenic people have poor hygiene. Or maybe the dog doesn't like the color of their skin. I met a racist dog once -- it was hilarious :)
In any case, I think it's more likely a coincidence of some sort than the dog peering into someone's soul. Remember, we're the species with orders of magnitude more neurons than everyone else, and dogs are about as smart as small children.
Re:Helps explain a few things ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dogs have had many more generations of breeding to tailor their responses to us than we have had to them - something like 10x as many generations, since they breed about 10x quicker than humans. So they can read us much better than we can read them - they've self-selected for that ability, since the ones that can read us best know best how to suck up to us and get us to feed and shelter them and pick up their poop. Todays dogs are specialists - and their specialty is humans.
Given this, dogs are probably better judges of people than we are.
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Given this, dogs are probably better judges of people than we are.
Clearly dogs should be employed in recruitment departments.
Re:Helps explain a few things ... (Score:5, Insightful)
That's an interesting hypothesis. But I don't buy it, certainly without some scientific testing (versus emotional, speculative anecdotes from people with dogs). Evolution doesn't work like leveling up in a video game. Once a local maximum is reached, further generations have no impact. I would also wager that, while there may have been some selection pressure to "read" a person's immediate emotional state, selection pressure for reading general personalities, etc. was likely much weaker. And, of course, the selection pressure for humans to "read" other humans would have been much, much greater. After all, we have to mate with each other. Dogs don't have to mate with us. They do, however, have to mate with other dogs, and interaction with other dogs probably dominated the selection pressure on dogs' social intuition faculties. So, I would speculate people are likely better judges of people than dogs are.
What probably happened with the schizophrenic people was perhaps they were anxious, because of delusions or whatever, and the dog picked up on that. You probably also did. That you had a single negative interaction with one person your dog didn't like is not an important piece of information, if we're going to go about this scientifically. But, hey, I'm speculating too. Someone would have to research this. How and why, I have no idea. But my speculation can beat up your speculation :P
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> Once a local maximum is reached, further generations have no impact.
Except when they do, of course. Cross breeding can profoundly remix different 'local maxima' and even produce new breeds. Environmental changes, or changes in other species, can also interact profoundly with inherited characteristics, and some genes are even activated or de-activated by environment. And canine behavior isn't merely genetic, it's trained by the limited culture in dog families, and by the humans they interact with.
Dogs a
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The local maxima for specific traits don't continue to "level up". 20/20 vision is about the best we're going to evolve (with a few minor outliers), because there's no genetic advantage to having better.
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Why wouldn't there be a genetic advantage for better vision? I think we basically are running up against physiology here, and that we'd need to have somewhat different eyes to have greater resolution.
Re: Helps explain a few things ... (Score:2)
What's the survival advantage of better than 20/20 vision? "Good enough" is really as far as natural selection can go.
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Both humans and dogs have had ample opportunity to cross-breed. Dogs' opinions of people are likely to based on the primitive, intuitive brain. I don't know how different their criteria would be. Their main purposes in judging people are probably going to be something like, "Is this person going to feed me, kick me, or kill me or my master?" Hardly conducive to a job interview situation. If you really think the dog is better at judging new hires than yourself or other humans, I suggest you let the dog
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"Helps explain why my dog reacts differently to different people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Some he's very friendly with, others he makes it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with them - or with them being around me. "
Or, most likely, your dog just picks up on your attitude towards those people. They're great at that.
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He wasn't picking up on my attitude. The guy who eventually went looking for a gun because he hated me? I had previously invited him and two of his relatives into my home, and had NO clue whatsoever as to why my dog was growling at him, and only him. I had pretty much an "open door" policy at the time, and he was one of several people he'd let come in, but not get close to me.
He came in handy when another neighbor tried to "squeeze the Sharmin" and didn't want to take no for an answer. Could have use
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Quite a few men apparently, judging from the ones who have either hit on me or tried to force themselves on me in the last few years.
Of course, you're too busy mentally masturbating with your stupid HOSTS file to realize that the world has changed in the last few decades. Both your hosts file and your attitude towards the LGBT are woefully inadequate and obsolete, apk.
It reminds me of the joke I heard as a kid.
Little Johnny pulls down his pants and says "Ha ha, I have one of these and you don't."
Little Suzie pulls up her skirt and says "Ha ha, my mommy says that with one of these I can get as many of those as I want!"
Jealous much?
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Undoing some mod points to reply here, but anyway...
Aside from how dogs have been selected to "read man" (see the results of testing police dogs, where it was found most were alerting not on drugs, but on handler expectations), a dog's nose can pick up even the slightest difference in a person's metabolism -- half a dozen molecules are sufficient for some dogs' noses to distinguish. In crude terms, when there's something "wrong" with the human's chemistry, which includes brain chemistry, they smell differen
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I would bet your dog does not like the ones with anxiety problems.
To the contrary. I have PTSD, and he's been a real lifeline when things have turned pear-shaped. Dogs have helped me hide it for decades, because getting treatment wasn't easy. Now, while I was finally able to successfully get help in the last year, I will always need a dog - which is okay. It's better than the alternative.
Next deconstruction: autism. (Score:5, Insightful)
Next this needs to be done with what we call "autism". There's a reason it's called the "autistic spectrum"; it's a MUCH bigger but nebulous target than schizophrenia. There's so much symptomatic comorbidity that the diagnoses would be funny if the consequences weren't so depressing.
Docs have long suspected as much. (Score:3, Interesting)
One of the problems of Psychiatry is that because the brain has been bit of a black box to us for so long (We can see the input, we can see the output, but the gears and cogs inside remain a bit of a mystery) disorder classification has been mostly about symptomology rather than causes, most of the time. Docs have long suspected that "schizophrenia" was a collection of disorders with similar-ish results. This finding appears to confirm it.
See also: ADHD and Autism.
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Old news (Score:4, Informative)
Flavor of the week (Score:3)
Does this mean genetic testing can daignose it? (Score:2, Flamebait)
Bangs head against wall (Score:3)
Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis and Schizophrenia for Dummies who know a little physics etc.
Life is generally in a good position when it has potential (like gravitational potential in the case of high ground) and the capacity to use it in a controlled fashion. That means balancing in a position that would otherwise be considered an unstable equilibrium in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Our bodies are at their most efficient when well balanced (just watch a good dancer to see this in action) and our brains are at their best when similarly balanced. If something disturbs the equilibrium, this disturbance and the required correction can be used to understand the disturbance. This is how stimulation affects us.
Now consider a simple example of a balancing physical object, but with no control mechanism: a spinning top. This has three states--spinning upright (when the gravitational potential is near its maximum), wobbling (when the gravitational potential is slightly lower, in which case it behaves erratically and gives up its energy randomly until...) finally we have the fallen over state. This is what medical people term depression. The simple solution is to get upright and balanced again, but this is hard in our modern overly complex society, and the result of trying to get up is often a lot of wobbling, which gets diagnosed as things like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia depending on how exactly this wobbling manifests itself. The key is to get balanced before you get pushed over, and that is hard when the medical mental health people seem to have the idea that you fix a wobbling spinning top by knocking it over and gluing it to the floor.
Trying to understand mental health in a 'sum of the parts' way is just dumb, but it is the obsession of the medical fraternity, and is to the extent that it is politically very difficult to suggest otherwise. How our genetic code creates us is an approach that misses the point that without the environmental context in which that genetic code develops, it won't develop, so you need to understand the environment as well (and that means understanding the entire world in complete detail, which is rather a long way the other side of impossible).
Viewed as an equilbrium seeking system, 'mental illnesses' like mania and schizophrenia are just seen as things like oscillations and resonant modes that are being excited by either an appropriate drive, or are resonating within the equilibrium seeking system. The biological stuff is just an implementation detail in much the way that transistors on a chip are implementation details of your python program that you are running that you can safely ignore in most cases. Medication is basically trying to solve a software problem by randomly pumping noise into the processor. A computer will crash instantly if you do this, but humans are rather more robust, and can survive for a long time in an unbalanced state. They are, however, rather unproductive in this state and won't tend to find life enjoyable. But they can survive for a long time, but can become desperate to get out of such states.
they're not looking for a way to treat it (Score:2, Informative)
...they're looking for a way to introduce and re-legitimise the term "sociopath" so it sews up the trainwreck that is the DSM.
Nutritional deficiencies! (Score:2, Interesting)
Probably at least a few of those sub-disorders are actually nutritional deficiencies. We have this myth (perpetuated by MDs who have ZERO training in nutrition) that we don't have nutritional deficiencies in America. In fact, the American diet is horrible, and we all know it. B12 deficiencies are common (which is one of the reasons shots are often prescribed), as are deficiencies in magnesium, along with numerous other vitamins and minerals. Since the mid 90's, the FDA has mandated "enrichment" of foods
So what are the 8 specific disorders? (Score:2)
And If Slapping One Label on Eight Is Not Enough.. (Score:2)
We have "Schizo-Affective Disorder" in which we get to claim that the various "schizophrenias" and the various mood disorders are just one big unhappy diagnosis!
Makes things easy for the diagnostician - just one diagnosis, and you can prescribe lithium and anti-psychotics to everyone. And then you can pile on more drugs to treat the side-effects from the drug combinations you started with. And then of course, there are the side-effects of the side-effect treating drugs. Eventually you can work your way up t
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Well - no, and no. Recall that schizophrenia is a perception-of-reality disorder and has almost nothing to do with dissociative identity (a.k.a. multiple personality) disorder
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