The idea of a VR-approximation of schizophrenia has been in the works for some time now, but this article, unlike others, describes the 'approximation''s content:
While only someone afflicted with the mental illness can know what it's like to be at the mercy of delusions, an interactive computer technology called Virtual Hallucinations is allowing others to experience a snapshot approximation.Wearing earphones and viewing goggles, a person can step into the schizophrenic's shoes and see the world through his eyes and ears as he makes his way through a supermarket to the in-store pharmacy counter.
"I lost my medication a couple of weeks ago and I need to get my refill," the pseudo-schizophrenic is told to say.
Behind the counter, the pharmacist seems to warp-speed from one spot to another as she checks on the customer's insurance coverage, then says she must call his doctor. She laughs with a co-worker, but it turns to a cackling whisper: "Why did they let him out of the hospital?"
Voices, male and female, barrage the mind. "Don't take that, they're trying to poison you."
ANN ARBOR, Mich., Oct. 14 (AScribe Newswire) -- The brains of people with severe depression have lower levels of several related molecules that are key to the development, organization, growth and repair of the brain than the brains of people without the disease, or those with the bipolar form of depression, a new study finds.The discovery, which surprised researchers in the multi-university consortium that made it, suggests a whole new direction for understanding depression and developing new depression treatments. It may even help scientists understand how some antidepressant medications work in the brain to ease symptoms, and why there is wide variation in how depressed people respond to different antidepressants.
... In the current paper, the researchers report what they found when they zeroed in on a group of six kinds of related mRNA that had the most coordinated differences between the samples from depressed brains, the non-depressed brains and the bipolar brains.
These turned out to be mRNAs for four different FGF molecules and two receptors that bind to FGF and are key to their function. Levels of all of the mRNAs encoding these proteins were lower in the brains of people with major depression. Lower mRNA levels mean the brain may not produce enough protein to carry out normal function.
... Akil notes that the brains of bipolar people in the study did not show the decreased FGF gene activity. "This was all the more remarkable since both groups of individuals were severely depressed at the time of death," she says. "This is yet another indication that bipolar illness, though classified with depression as a mood disorder, is biologically a very different disease.
The NY Times examines the posthumous success of playwright Sarah Kane:
Moreover, Ms. Kane's tendency toward poetic imagery and form seems to translate well. As an example, she writes in "Psychosis": "They love me for that which destroys me, the sword in my dreams, the dust of my thoughts, the sickness that breeds in the folds of my mind." And that, too, has come to seem prophetic.Ms. Kenyon said that those words were flowing out of a sudden bout of depression that Ms. Kane had neither expected nor prepared for. "She had no control over it," Ms. Kenyon said. "She said: 'You don't know what its like. It just comes back.' "
The circumstances of her death, of course, inevitably leave a sad question hanging over Ms. Kane's work: Is she produced now because she was good and bold and ahead of her time? Or is it her biography - and especially the circumstances of "4.48 Psychosis" - that has added to her allure and that of her play?
"She has become more popular over the last five years, but I wouldn't be comfortable with saying it's because she killed herself," Mr. Kane said, before adding: "I'd like to think it wasn't. She's a great writer. It would be doing her a disservice to say she's popular just because she committed suicide."
Ms. Kenyon added: "I think people have become more aware of her work, unfortunately, and I think she has been more produced since she died."