Psychiatric Restraint - Mirror Neurons - Spinal Injuries - Cannabis Legalization
Breedlove, S
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/21/health/psychiatric-restraint-forced-medication.html
In the House of Psychiatry, a Jarring Tale of Violence
By Ellen Barry
The annual gathering of the American Psychiatric Association is a dignified and collegial affair, full of scholarly exchanges, polite laughter and polite applause.
So it was a shock, for those who took their seats in Room 1E08 of the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in Manhattan, to watch a powerfully built 32-year-old man choke back tears as he described being slammed to the floor and cuffed to a stretcher in a psychiatric unit.
Because the man, Matthew Tuleja, had been a Division I football player, he had a certain way of describing the circle of bodies that closed around him, the grabbing and grappling and the sensation of being dominated, pinned and helpless.
He was on the ground in a small room filled with pepper spray. Then his wrists and ankles were cuffed to the sides of a stretcher, and his pants were yanked down. They gave him injections of Haldol, an antipsychotic medication he had repeatedly tried to refuse, as he howled in protest.
Forcible restraints are routine events in American hospitals. One recent study, using 2017 data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, estimated the number of restraints per year at more than 44,000.
But it is rare to hear a first-person account of the experience, because it tends to happen to people who do not have a platform. Researchers who surveyed patients about restraint and seclusion have found that a large portion, 25 to 47 percent , met criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder.
Listening, rapt, to Mr. Tuleja was a roomful of psychiatrists. It was a younger crowd — people who had entered the field at the time of the Black Lives Matter protests. Many of them lined up to speak to him afterward. “I still can’t forget the first time I saw someone restrained,” one doctor told him. “You don’t forget that.”
© 2024 The New York Times Company
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A Closer Look at the Science of Mirror Neurons
By Meghan Willcoxon
In the summer of 1991, the neuroscientist Vittorio Gallese was studying how movement is represented in the brain when he noticed something odd. He and his research adviser, Giacomo Rizzolatti, at the University of Parma were tracking which neurons became active when monkeys interacted with certain objects. As the scientists had observed before, the same neurons fired when the monkeys either noticed the objects or picked them up.
But then the neurons did something the researchers didn’t expect. Before the formal start of the experiment, Gallese grasped the objects to show them to a monkey. At that moment, the activity spiked in the same neurons that had fired when the monkey grasped the objects. It was the first time anyone had observed neurons encode information for both an action and another individual performing that action.
Those neurons reminded the researchers of a mirror: Actions the monkeys observed were reflected in their brains through these peculiar motor cells. In 1992, Gallese and Rizzolatti first described the cells in the journal Experimental Brain Research and then in 1996 named them “mirror neurons” in Brain.
The researchers knew they had found something interesting, but nothing could have prepared them for how the rest of the world would respond. Within 10 years of the discovery, the idea of a mirror neuron had become the rare neuroscience concept to capture the public imagination. From 2002 to 2009, scientists across disciplines joined science popularizers in sensationalizing these cells, attributing more properties to them to explain such complex human behaviors as empathy, altruism, learning, imitation, autism, and speech.
Then, nearly as quickly as mirror neurons caught on, scientific doubts about their explanatory power crept in. Within a few years, these celebrity cells were filed away in the drawer of over-promised, under-delivered discoveries.
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Device aids recovery of people with spinal injuries, trial finds
Ian Sample Science editor
A device that stimulates the spinal nerves with electrical pulses appears to boost how well people recover from major spinal cord injuries, doctors say.
An international trial found that patients who had lost some or all use of their hands and arms after a spinal cord injury regained strength, control and sensation when the stimulation was applied during standard rehabilitation exercises.
The improvements were small but were described by doctors and patients as life-changing because of the impact they had on the patients’ daily routines and quality of life.
“It actually makes it easier for people to move, including people who have complete loss of movement in their hands and arms,” said Prof Chet Moritz, in the department of rehabilitation medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.
“The benefits accumulate gradually over time as we pair this spinal stimulation with intensive therapy of the hands and arms, such that there are benefits even when the stimulator is turned off.”
Rather than being implanted, the Arc-Ex device is worn externally and uses electrodes that are placed on the skin near the section of the spinal cord responsible for controlling a particular movement or function.
The researchers believe that electrical stimulation helps nerves that remain intact after the injury to send signals and ultimately partially restore some communication between the brain and paralysed body part. More than half of patients who suffer spinal cord injuries still have some intact nerves that cross the injury site.
© 2024 Guardian News & Media Limited
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/health/marijuana-weed-adolescents-coley.html
Does Legalizing Cannabis Increase Adolescent Use? This Expert Found Mixed Results.
By Matt Richtel
With weed these days, it’s a Willy Wonka world: chocolate bars, lollipops, exotic-flavored gummies — to say nothing of joints, vapes, drinks and the rest. Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia have now legalized the sale of marijuana for recreational use, prompting innovation, lowering prices and making the drug — more potent than ever — more widely available. The Biden administration this week recommended easing the federal regulations on cannabis.
What does all of this mean for adolescents?
Studies have demonstrated that marijuana use can harm the developing brain. Some new strains have been linked to psychosis. Many health experts have worried that relaxing the laws around cannabis will lead to more use of the drug among minors. But Rebekah Levine Coley, a developmental psychologist at Boston College, is less certain.
In April, she and colleagues published a study in JAMA that examined drug use patterns among 900,000 high school students from 2011 to 2021, using self-reported data from the Youth Risk Behavior Survey. They found that fewer minors reported having used cannabis in the previous month in states where the drug had been legalized. But they also found that in the 18 states that had both legalized cannabis and allowed retail sales of the drug, some adolescents who were users of the drug used it more frequently. The net effect was a flat or slight decline in cannabis use among adolescents.
Dr. Coley spoke to The New York Times about the study, and its implications for state and federal drug policy. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.
It seems sensible to assume that legalizing marijuana would lead to more use by young people.
Yes, common sense might argue that as cannabis becomes legalized, it will be more accessible. There will be fewer potential legal repercussions, hence availability would increase and use would increase.
© 2024 The New York Times Company
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