Salon has a very timely article about the double-whammy the recession has dealt mental health in many communities. While families are under huge financial stress leading to mental health issues, state funding for mental health services is being savagely cut

late 2009, as the unemployment rate in San Joaquin County, California, reached 18 percent and one in twelve homes were being foreclosed, two high school students in the town of Ripon, population 15,000, committed suicide within two months of each other. Over the next eighteen months, sixteen more teenagers around the county took their own lives, a not-uncommon occurrence that public health researchers refer to as “suicide contagion.”

Years of declining budgets had cut the number of counselors, nurses and psychologists in county schools, impairing the ability of individual districts to handle the needs of grieving students, parents and communities on their own.

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/12/the_depressing_toll_of_the_great_recession/

Practitioners of psychodynamic and other depth-psychology modalities often rue the fact that they do not conduct enough clinical research – read randomised control trials – to provide the "evidence base" to demonstrate our usefulness within the NHS and other public health forums.

A study has been published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry which demonstrates how RCTs can produce nonsense results and are by no means to be trusted as the sole way to evaluate psychological therapies.

(Reuters Health) – Neither antidepressants nor "talk therapy" were able to outperform inactive placebo pills in a new clinical trial on depression treatment — though there were hints that the effects varied based on people’s sex and race, researchers report.

The findings, published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, add to evidence that people receiving "real" depression treatment in studies — from antidepressants to St. John’s wort — often do no better than people given a placebo.

A recent review found that a minority of antidepressant users even fared worse than placebo users.

In this latest study, researchers randomly assigned 156 depression patients to either take the antidepressant sertraline (Zoloft and other brands) daily for 16 weeks; undergo a form of psychotherapy called supportive-expressive therapy (twice a week for four weeks, then weekly for 12 weeks); or be in a placebo group given inactive pills.

After 16 weeks, there were no overall differences in how the three groups fared.http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/12/21/us-antidepressant-idUSTRE7BK1ZU20111221

On TED:

Antonio Damasio’s research in neuroscience has shown that emotions play a central role in social cognition and decision-making. His work has had a major influence on current understanding of the… Full bio and more links

Every morning we wake up and regain consciousness — that is a marvelous fact — but what exactly is it that we regain? Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio uses this simple question to give us a glimpse into how our brains create our sense of self.

An Interview with Carl Jung in English Audio

A very interesting and quite moving audio recording of Jung being interviewed by Kaarle Nordentstreng in 1961. The audio is very clear and Jung is lucid, engaging, modest and inspiring. Well worth listening to.

Carl Gustav Jung interviewed by Kaarle Nordenstreng

Zürich‐Küsnacht, February 1961

As a freelance journalist of the Finnish Broadcasting Company and a first‐year student of psychology at the University of Helsinki, I visited friends in Switzerland in February 1961, also hoping to get an interview with C.G. Jung. His secretary Aniela Jaffé first regretted that Prof. Jung’s state of health did not permit the appointment, tentatively scheduled by correspondence. However, I did not give up, called again a week later, and Ms Jaffé told me, after consulting Prof. Jung: “You are lucky, Mr Nordenstreng, come today at 5 p.m.”

The appointment lasted for nearly an hour. We agreed to speak in English, although I did not speak it fluently (this was the first interview I conducted in a foreign language). Jung led me to his library with a large window onto Lake Zürich. He sat in a deep armchair, most of the time smoking a pipe (which can be heard during the pauses). The interview started with my showing Jung the recent Finnish translation of his Genenwart und Zukunft. Later in the discussion Jung showed me a book on Zen philosophy on a nearby desk. After the interview I took a couple of pictures of Jung in his armchair, in natural light with long exposure (as can be heard in the recording). Before leaving I gave Jung a Finnish wooden “Thomas’ cross”.

The interview was made with a tape recorder of the time, which needed to be wound up in the manner of old gramophone (as can be periodically heard in the recording), and the tapes had to be changed every ten minutes. Paying attention to these technicalities while carrying on the discussion once resulted in my mistakenly turning the knob to ‘play’ instead of ‘recording’. Sadly, that part of the discussion was lost, apart from my recollections. At one change of the tapes Jung gives his cynical comments on machines. He declined to read a passage of his book for the tape recorder but agreed to autograph my copy of Gegenwart und Zukunft.

The recording of 24 minutes is available as an mp3 file

http://www.uta.fi/media/public/cmt/jung.html

A seemingly happy family, all out together at an evening social function. They leave, all smiles and thanks to the hosts. The next morning the phone goes strangely unanswered and when much later the police break the door down, they find a murder scene and the perpetrator, the father, dead by his own hand. This scenario is unfortunately not that uncommon, and I think there is reason to believe that with a major economic readjustment looming, that more father’s may be driven to desperate measures.

The Telegraph has an article worth reading:

After the shocking Pudsey case in which a father murdered his whole family, Dr Max Pemberton investigates the psychology behind ‘family annihilation’.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/8961851/What-drives-a-father-to-kill.html

The Mirror has an article today in which Michael Yardy talks about his depression which forced him to leave the England squad during the 50-over World Cup..

WORLD T20 winner Michael Yardy has lifted the lid on life with depression and revealed his desire to help England retain their trophy.
Yardy hasn’t had any ­involvement with the national side since leaving the 50-over World Cup in India early to face his problem – and learn how to cope with it.
And Yardy said: “What you’ve got to remember is that anyone can get it. It is different ­pressures with different people. There are people who don’t have a ­privileged life like I do, but that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t get depression.
“I see it in the same way as a player who has had injury ­problems. I don’t think it is any different. There is always a risk that someone might pull a hamstring if they have had hamstring ­problems before.
“I see it as a way of living my life. It is a case of ­understanding I have to do certain things to keep well."

http://www.mirror.co.uk/sport/cricket/2011/12/17/depression-left-michael-yardy-a-zombie-115875-23641087/

In a recent New York Review of Books Freeman Dyson reviews Thinking Fast and Slow a book by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

From Wikipedia:

With Amos Tversky and others, Kahneman established a cognitive basis for common human errors using heuristics and biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973; Kahneman, Slovic & Tversky, 1982; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974), and developed prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). He was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work in prospect theory.

In 2011, he was named by Foreign Policy magazine to its list of top global thinkers.[1]

Currently, he is professor emeritus of psychology and public affairs at Princeton University‘s Woodrow Wilson School. Kahneman is a founding partner of The Greatest Good, a business and philanthropy consulting company. Kahneman is married to Royal Society Fellow Anne Treisman.

From Amazon:

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think and make choices. One system is fast, intuitive, and emotional; the other is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities-and also the faults and biases-of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behaviour. The importance of properly framing risks, the effects of cognitive biases on how we view others, the dangers of prediction, the right ways to develop skills, the pros and cons of fear and optimism, the difference between our experience and memory of events, the real components of happiness-each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems work together to shape our judgments and decisions.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/22/how-dispel-your-illusions/?pagination=false

A brain’s failure to appreciate others may permit human atrocities

Mentalising and mentalisation have been criticised by some as rather clumsy terms or by others as somewhat unsophisticated theoretical concepts. However there is no doubt that they are effective in clinical work, even with clients who might be inaccessible to depth psychology work. For more on mentalising see the work of Peter Fonagy and Anthony Bateman.

A newly published piece of research which appears in no way related to work on mentalisation seems to corroborate it:

DURHAM, N.C. — A father in Louisiana bludgeoned and beheaded his disabled 7-year-old son last August because he no longer wanted to care for the boy.

For most people, such a heinous act is unconscionable.

But it may be that a person can become callous enough to commit human atrocities because of a failure in the part of the brain that’s critical for social interaction. A new study by researchers at Duke University and Princeton University suggests this function may disengage when people encounter others they consider disgusting, thus "dehumanizing" their victims by failing to acknowledge they have thoughts and feelings.

This shortcoming also may help explain how propaganda depicting Tutsi in Rwanda as cockroaches and Hitler’s classification of Jews in Nazi Germany as vermin contributed to torture and genocide, the study said.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2011-12/du-abf121411.php

The BBC website has a very sobering story. As we approach the end of the twelfth year of this new century this stark and horrible statistic is a salient reminder that violence against women (and not only overt violence) is remains endemic in all our societies. Feminists, Marxists, Freudians and Jungians may all have differing interpretations of this fact, but the theories pale in significance in the glaring horror of the phenomenon.

Nearly 20% of women in the US are raped or suffer attempted rape at some point in their lives, a US study says.

Even more women, estimated at 25%, have been attacked by a partner or husband, the Centers for Disease Control said.

The findings form part of the first set of results from a nationwide study surveying sexual violence by intimate partners against men and women.

More than 24 people a minute reported rape, violence, or stalking, it says, with 12 million offences reported.

Experts at the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) described the results of the first year of the National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey as "astounding".

A ripping read in Salon.

It was with some trepidation that I called Dr. M.
I had read his articles in various psychoanalytic journals and heard his name tossed around at conferences and institutes. He was one of the princes of psychoanalysis and supervision, a member of the old school. He knew people who had been analyzed by Freud and was a colleague of some of the last century’s bad/good boys of psychoanalysis – Hyman Spotnitz, Lou Ormont, Ethel Clevans, Phyllis Meadow.
Nineteen years I had been with a previous analyst and supervisor with whom I had an irreparable break. Nineteen years may sound like a long time for most people, but in the rarefied world of New York psychoanalysis, 19 years is merely a beginning.
Finally, I had made the phone call. And now I was at Dr. M’s Upper West Side office for my interview. I had built a practice that was already sizable, but would I rate for his famous supervision group?

http://www.salon.com/2011/12/06/my_psychoanalysts_twisted_final_session