Bernards Voices

Psychologists describe a phenomenon called fundamental attribution error, which explains her [math teacher's] inclination to initially judge this boy negatively based on his behaviors. Stated simply, when observing the behavior of others, most people tend to rely too much on personality-based explanations and rely too little on situational explanations.

via Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps: Be Careful of How You Judge Others and Yourself « The Art of Relationships.

When I met my therapist last week, we were talking about behavior. I talked about something stupid I was doing, and something stupid I perceived someone else was doing. He said all behavior was a solution to something. The solution may be a good one or “mal-adaptive”–his better word than my “stupid.”

He also said no one was immune to poor behavior.

And he suggested that the appropriate stance was to be curious about the solution chosen, what was the source problem?

As [the teacher] talked with him, she learned that he also had two friends who recently died. After this conversation, he listened well in class and “aced” the tests. She ended her letter with the realization, “And I thought he was the one not paying attention.”

This very human failing [fundamental attribution error] can cause people to make snap judgments that are inaccurate, or at least don’t capture the whole picture.

This dynamic is complicated by the fact that people are much more inclined to blame their own problems on the situation than on themselves.

Leslie goes on the acknowledge that the opposite is true (blame self vs. situation) for many other people. I wonder if it is situational or more consistently personality driven: i.e. in some contexts (the office, the yoga studio, the tennis court … ) is someone is more apt to blame the situation then self?

The Somerset County Chapter of the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) provides a free course entitled Family-to-Family designed to help families negotiate the stresses of dealing with mental illness.  The course runs for 12 weeks and will be next offered beginning September 13 at Richard Hall in Bridgewater, NJ.  For further information about the course you can view the NAMI website and video at http://www.nami.org/Template.cfm?Section=Family-to-Family&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TPLID=4&ContentID=85606 or contact the course teacher, Sue Ferranti, at ms_sues_mail@yahoo.com.

Covenant Chapel Reformed Episcopal Church, 127 West Oak Street in Basking Ridge has launched a group aimed at providing support for caregivers to those with mental illness.  The group meets on the 1st Monday of the month at 7:30 at the church.  In the fall mental health professionals will speak at select meetings to share resources and techniques helpful to caregivers as they seek to care for their loved ones suffering with mental illness.  To see a group brochure go to www.covenantchapel.org/MICSBROCHURE.PDF.

It’s important to understand that the purpose of meditation is to see your consciousness (the flow of your thoughts and feelings). Most people are not aware of just how busy their minds are until they really pay attention. So, if you approach meditation as a practice of seeing your consciousness, then you can undoubtedly meditate – because all you need to do is be aware.

via Open Your Mind And Say Ahhh | Psychology Today. – Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps

From Dr. Leslie Becker-Phelps Psychology Today blog, Making Change.

In contrast, kindness brings emotions in more closely. Acceptance calms them and dispenses with their need to defend against a critical adversary. Then, when a person experiences – in an accepting way – their painful emotion, they become more comfortable with it and less upset by it. It still hurts, but they are no longer also feeling distress about having the emotion.

Kindness, compassion … being generous to yourself. These are repeating themes: in Leslie’s posts, and in my visits to my therapist and yoga studio. And from my friend’s recommendation 5 years ago of Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem, Kindness, which Libby and I read at Jack’s memorial service.

I’ve attached two articles from last week’s New York Times that I believe many of you will find interesting (and may have already seen)….

…the first, Learning Empathy by Looking Beyond Disabilities is an account of a program initiated at Ridgewood High School that seeks to create empathy and understanding between teens with and without special needs. I think this is something that could be easily transferable to our community, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.

The second, Expert on Mental Illness Reveals Her Own Fight, was a front page article about a prominent psychologist and researcher who has developed an approach to therapy for those who are at risk for suicide — it is based on her own struggles, and it’s a very inspiring testimony. Moreover, it underscores that slowly, but surely, mental illness is coming out of the closet, and it’s stories like these that are pushing it along. There’s an excellent companion piece by Tara Parker Pope that I’ve also included.

Finding any sort of treatment [for TBI], much less a cure, has not been easy. But some neuroscientists now see great potential in techniques of manipulating the brain’s “neuroplasticity,” its propensity to rearrange its neuronal structure in response to behavior and stimuli.

Earlier this year, the Department of Defense awarded a $2 million grant to Brain Plasticity Inc. to study the effectiveness of Posit Science software in restoring memory and attention in victims of traumatic brain injury, or T.B.I. Posit Science, based in San Francisco, is one of several companies, including Nintendo and Luminosity, that sell brain health software products to consumers.

In Turning to Software to Help Treat Brain Injuries – NYTimes.com, Gordy Slack reports (June 17, 2011) such software could potentially help Traumatic Brain Injury patients and also those who have been determined to have autism, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and other psychiatric and neurological diseases.

“This is the beginning of a revolution,” said Michael Merzenich, the co-founder and chief scientist of Posit Science; the president of Brain Plasticity; and a celebrated University of California, San Francisco, neuroscientist who pioneered the idea of neuroplasticity.

“There is a big gap between the claims and the evidence,” said Dr. Doraiswamy [a Duke University psychiatrist], who said he doubted whether short-term improvements in memory would last longer than the three-month period most studies test.

“If they were a drug,” he said of the software, “they would have been pulled from the market.”

The malfunctioning brain, or what Dr. Merzenich calls the “noisy” brain, is like a radio that, for any number of reasons, is badly tuned to its intended station. The objective of his software, he says, is to clarify a strong signal by repeatedly practicing simple tasks, like recognizing repeated visual patterns.

Theoretically, the brain training software could address both cognitive problems and post-traumatic stress, said Henry Mahncke, Posit Science’s chief executive, a neuroscientist and a former student of Dr. Merzenich.

Pictured above, from left; Sue Diebold, Bill Kimzey, Peter Vogel, Frank Howlett, Nick Kleinert, Bridget Bauer, Mike Gilmore. Not pictured: Julia Verbrugge

On Friday, June 3rd, members of the Ridge High School National Honor Society presented a check in the amount of $1,332 to Bill Kimzey, a member of the Healthy Outcomes Partnership (HOP) of the Somerset Hills YMCA. The money raised will support funding for Mental Health First Aid Training for staff at the Y.

The RHS National Honors Society organized and participated in a fundraiser at the Y in honor of Jack Kimzey, a local youth who was tragically killed at his home in 2006. Next year’s class, the class of 2012, would have been Jack’s graduating class. Jack’s father, Bill Kimzey, an advocate for mental health awareness in Bernards Township, wants Mental Health First Aid Training added to students’ curricula. “Mental Health First Aid Training is imperative for our community; HOP, in partnership with the Y, has certified two instructors at the Y and plans to roll out training to Y staff and the community in the coming months to recognize the warning signs of mental illness before it’s too late. Listening alone is not enough – people need to know how to take action and get help for someone in need.”

Mike Gilmore, an Advanced Placement Physics teacher for 11th and 12th graders at Ridge High School, said, “I would like to see the members of the National Honors Society continue to work with the Y to further develop deep roots and, in particular, to continue fundraising for Mental Health First Aid training. The goal is to support the Y and its initiative to bring awareness of and training for mental health.”

The Ridge National Honor Society welcomes donations, which are tax deductible. Checks can be made payable to the Healthy Outcomes Partnership at the YMCA and mailed to the Somerset Hills YMCA, 140 Mount Airy Road, Basking Ridge, N.J., 07920.

Other ways to donate are listed here.

The Somerset Hills YMCA is a charitable community service organization, rooted in Christian values and dedicated to helping all people grow in spirit, mind and body. We are guided by our core principles of caring, honesty, respect and responsibility.

For more information, please visit www.somersethillsymca.org or call 908-766-7898:

“We build strong kids, strong families, strong communities”

The toll from soaring rates of prescription drug abuse, including both psychiatric medications and drugs for pain, has begun to dwarf that of the usual illegal culprits. Hospitalizations related to prescription drugs are up fivefold in the last decade, and overdose deaths up fourfold. More high school seniors report recreational use of tranquilizers or prescription narcotics, like OxyContin and Vicodin, than heroin and cocaine combined.

via An Addiction Expert Faces a Formidable Foe – Prescription Drugs – NYTimes.com.

This article is more a profile Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the neurologist who heads the National Institute on Drug Abuse, than it is about the science of addition. It also touches on the politics of merging two bureaucracies within the federal National Institutes of Health: N.I.D.A and the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism.

Abuse of prescription drugs presents a different kind of problem than illegal drugs: they have to be available for the medical benefits they bring, but be strictly controlled.

For instance, Dr. Volkow’s group showed several years ago that when cocaine addicts watched videos of people taking drugs, dopamine levels surged in the part of their brains associated with habit and learning, correlating with the intense drug cravings the subjects began to experience.

Her research and that of others has also shown that even after addicts are successfully detoxed and long clean, their dopamine circuits remain abnormally blunted. Substances that elevate dopamine levels in normal subjects had notably muted responses in ex-addicts.

This observation, experts say, may explain the intense difficulty addicts have staying clean, as the ordinary rewards of daily life may have little effect on the recovering brain. Only the drug of choice will send dopamine levels high enough for any kind of pleasure.

And interesting policy point, obvious once pointed out:

To the average doctor, … the addict’s brain is impenetrable. All that is visible is irrational, illegal and sometimes threatening behavior. Surveys show most doctors prefer to keep their distance from addiction and addicted patients.

The number of prescriptions written for potentially addictive pain medications has soared in the last decade, reaching more than 200 million in 2010, Dr. Volkow said. Surveys asking teenagers where they get pills find that relatively few buy from strangers. Many have their own prescriptions, often from dental work.

“Students and residents have gotten the message that pain is undertreated,” said Dr. Mitchell H. Katz, an internist who directs the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services. “So they just prescribe higher and higher doses.” Meanwhile, he said, there is no evidence that treatment with opioids for more than four months actually helps chronic pain, or that higher doses work where lower ones fail. There is good evidence, however, that higher doses raise the risk of overdose and death.

From neuropod podcast, September 2010, discusses research on processing emotions without being aware of it.

Click to listen to podcast and fast forward, if you want, to 18:39.

Driving a car is not a conscious exercise. The perceptions we’re picking up, consciously and subconsciously, continuously, are far too many to process consciously. Emotion, literally, motivate actions like getting out of bed. In the podcast the author endorses the idea that we (scientists, and the general population) overweight the significance of our conscious decisions and actions in daily life.

One example they talk about is visual perceptions. Not all the visual information goes to the visual cortex to be processed. The are other pathways, that go directly to emotional, older, closer to brain stem, more “animal” parts of our brain.

Here is the abstract from the Nature Reviews, Neuroscience, “Neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals” by Marco Tamietto & Beatrice de Gelder:

Many emotional stimuli are processed without being consciously perceived. Recent evidence indicates that subcortical structures have a substantial role in this processing. These structures are part of a phylogenetically ancient pathway that has specific functional properties and that interacts with cortical processes. There is now increasing evidence that non-consciously perceived emotional stimuli induce distinct neurophysiological changes and influence behaviour towards the consciously perceived world. Understanding the neural bases of the non-conscious perception of emotional signals will clarify the phylogenetic continuity of emotion systems across species and the integration of cortical and subcortical activity in the human brain.