Nairobi Parenting Clinic KNOW THE BASICS OF MENTAL HEALTH

Nairobi Parenting Clinic: KNOW THE BASICS OF MENTAL HEALTH: What is Mental Health? Mental health is not just the absence of mental disorder. It is defined as a state of well-being in which ...

Kenya Launches Mental Health Policy 2015 2030 YouTube 360p

Mental illness in art

The British Journal of Psychiatry has a collection of pages of art from the Royal College of Psychiatry's ">"Psychiatry in Pictures" project, which is just what it sounds like, art about mental illness. Following are some of the pieces included in the project that in one way or another illuminate, depict, or comment upon panic and anxiety.


This one is by a Sri Lankan artist named Sujith Rathnayake, who produced a bunch of art along these lines when he entered a psychiatric hospital after the terrible tsunami at the end of 2004. I categorically do not want to co-opt someone else's tragedy for my own purposes, but I don't have a problem saying that this piece's evocation of the sense of being overcome by forces you can't outrun really resonates with me. More.


This one's by an artist named Ian Palmer. Again with the "trapped" theme. Hello, agoraphobia! More.


This is "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters," by Francisco de Goya. The more we learn about the brain processes involved in panic and anxiety, the more it appears that a version of this -- the "sleep" of reason, or the inability of the "executive function" areas of the brain to calm the brain's more primitive fear centers (see the bottom of this post for a more detailed look at this) -- is central to anxiety and panic. More.


This one's by a then-11-year-old ADHD patient named Darcy Easton. "The Scream" is pretty much the Mona Lisa of anxiety-related art, and it's interesting to note how many plays on that famous painting there are floating around. More.


"Number 15 Digital Cry" is by Steve Blundell, and depicts his experience of depression. See what I mean about "The Scream"? More.


"The Maze" is by William Kurelek. In the author's words:

The subject, seen as a whole, is of a man (representing me) lying on a barren plain before a wheatfield, with his head split open. The point of view is from the top of his head. The subject is then roughly divided into the left hand side of the picture, with the thoughts made in his head represented as a maze; and the right hand side, the view of the rest of his body. The hands and feet are seen through the eyes, nose and mouth, tapering off into the distance and the outside world. The Maze. An exitless one, it occupies and divides the inside of the cranium into groups of thoughts, the passageways being calculated to do the grouping. The white rat curled up in the central cavity represents my Spirit (I suppose). He is curled up with frustration from having run the passages so long without hope of escaping out of this maze of unhappy thoughts. Outside World. Grasshoppers and drought (sun before the clouds) represent the mercilessness of Nature, which bankrupted my father, a farmer, and brought out of him the cornered beast. The thorny, stony ground is a kind of T.S. Eliot Wasteland — spiritual and cultural barrenness: the pile of excrement with flies on it represents my view of the world and the people that live on it. The loosened red ribbon bound together the head of a T.S. Eliot Hollow Man, and was united by psychotherapy (Dr Cormier), but since the outside world is still unappealing, the rat remains inert. Before the head was opened, burrs (bitter experiences) choked the throat and pricked the sensitive underside of the tongue, and when it was opened the sawdust and shavings (tasteless education) spilled out from on top the tongue: mixed with the sawdust are symbols of (to me) equally tasteless Art, painting, literature and music. The burrs also represent, in the eye socket, the successive evaluations of my character by any friend during the process of acquaintance, all repellant but hopeful till the last, when the heart is discovered to be a grub. On the tongue and in the throat, the Kurelek family (big burrs produce little burrs), representing my father as the hard domineering blue burr opening up the mushy yellow burr, my mother, to release a common lot of burrs, my brothers and sisters, and one unique orange one — myself. The last burr, spearing culture, is I at the university. The inverted one is I as a child, trapped painfully between two aspects of my father, the one I hated and the one I worshipped.

If this post is up your alley, check out the series of PANIC! posts called "What fear looks like":
Part 1.
Part 2.
Part 3.

The beneficial mental health effects of being in nature

It's no secret that spending time in the great outdoors can have calming, clarifying effects on the psyche. For those of us without a meditation practice, contemplating an alpine lake or a seaside sunset is probably the quickest path available to true stillness of mind. Anyone who's athletically inclined will tell you it's much more enjoyable to cycle or run through the woods or along the beach than it is to get your heart rate up on an exercycle or a treadmill or some other machine -- and from my perspective, when you're dealing with panic, the prospect of being outdoors typically creates far less anxiety than that of being in a crowded, noisy gym. (I actually have a piece in the most recent esperanza magazine about how I used mountain biking to get through a period of panic when I lived in Los Angeles; at the time, just the thought of entering a gym would've made my skin crawl with claustrophobia.)

Poets and painters have been communicating this truth for eons, but it's only recently that science has gotten in on the act. Despite its subjectivity-focused origins, today the field of ecopsychology is bringing hard evidence into our understanding of the effects of the natural world on mental health:

In the past few years, some ecopsychologists have made significant strides in adding scientific rigor to their field. What their research suggests so far is that even subtle interactions with nature provide a range of cognitive benefits, including elevated mood, enhanced memory, and decreased stress. Staring out a window at pretty scenery can significantly lower one’s heart rate, for example, and some studies even indicate that hospital windows with views of nature can facilitate healing. What’s more, nature provides measurably greater benefits than both manmade environments and simulations of nature. Research demonstrates that walking through the city can tax our attention, whereas a park restores our concentration and can even improve our performance on tests of memory.

The field is introducing new forms of therapy to the psychological toolkit:

Standing alone atop a modest mountain in rural Maine, Eric Adams looked out into the darkness all around him. Between the silhouettes of boulders and trees, slivers of yellow light wandered and winked — the eyes of wild animals. Fears began to crowd his mind, but he did not push them away. This was part of his therapy....
 
“I don’t have an office — all my meetings are outside regardless of the weather,” said Dennis Grannis-Phoenix, an ecotherapist in Bangor, Maine who began counseling Adams in 2004. Hiking, camping, kayaking — each therapeutic session centered on an outdoor activity. Grannis-Phoenix asked Adams to climb the mountain alone as an exercise in learning to face his fears and anxieties. Instead of rationalizing his fears, Grannis-Phoenix wanted Adams to embrace them — something both therapist and patient feel is easier to learn in nature than in an office.

A final note: This piece brings to mind an interesting recent article from the New York Times about what happened when a group of busy neuroscientists went camping "off the grid" for a week earlier this year. The bottom line: It worked.

MENTAL TENSION CAUSED BY COGNITIVE DISSONANCE

Mr. S., a member of the Indian Communist Party came to the deaddiction centre to get admitted for the treatment of alcoholism. He told me that he was drinking alcohol very secretly because his party was against drinking and he wanted to get rid of addiction. He admitted to his feeling of guilt and was visibly depressed evidently due to a phenomenon called cognitive dissonance.

Leon Festinger’s contribution

Leon Festinger

Cognitive dissonance is a mental condition characterized by feeling of discomfort arising from holding conflicting ideas, beliefs, and values simultaneously. The people suffering from this discomfort have a motivational drive to reduce the mental tension arising from the cognitive dissonance by changing the existing cognitions (ideas, beliefs, and values) or adding new ones to create a no-conflicting belief system in their mind. The phrase was coined by the American social psychologist Leon Festinger (1919-1989) in his 1956 book titled When Prophecy Fails. This notable book chronicled the followers of a UFO Religion in the USA.

UFO religion is an informal term used to describe a group of people who believe the unidentified objects (UFO) come to earth carrying extraterrestrial (ET) beings that are interested in the well being of humanity. For the followers of UFO religion the ET beings are more akin to angels than physical aliens. They also believed in an impending apocalypse.

Leon Festinger and associates infiltrated a religious group that was expecting the imminent end of the world on a certain date. When that date passed without the world ending, the movement did not disband. Instead, the group came to believe that they had been spared in order to spread their teachings to others, a justification that resolved the conflict between their previous expectations and reality.

Cognitive dissonance in daily life

In daily life, smoking is a common example of cognitive dissonance because it is widely accepted that cigarettes can cause lung cancer, and smokers must reconcile their habit with the desire to live long and healthy lives. In terms of the theory, the desire to live a long life is dissonant with the activity of doing something that will most likely shorten one's life. The tension produced by these contradictory ideas can be reduced by any number of changes in cognitions and behaviors. Some may try hard to quit smoke. Those who fail in their attempt to quit smoking may rationalize their behavior by concluding that only a few smokers become ill, that it only happens to very heavy smokers, or that if smoking does not kill them, something else will. This case of cognitive dissonance could also be interpreted in terms of a threat to the self-concept of the individual. He may believe: “I am a smart, reasonable person who makes good decisions.”  When he smokes the thought may arise: “I am increasing my risk of lung cancer.” This thought can be dissonant with self-related belief. It is often easier to make excuses or pass judgments that it is to change behaviour or values. Cognitive dissonance research contributes to the abundance of evidence in social psychology that humans are not always rational beings.

Cognitive dissonance distorts perception

Researchers have found that cognitive dissonance can affect a variety of human judgments, from estimates of statistical likelihood to social assessments, to self-image. Social psychologists Emily Balcetis and David Dunning have established that cognitive dissonance can affect the human perceptual system. The researchers asked the students who participated in the experiment to walk through the campus to cover a specific distance with an unappealing way to estimate themselves the distance they have covered. In this experiment the distance across a university quadrangle was to be covered by walking. They asked students to walk that distance, in full daylight, while dressed as Carmen Miranda: wearing a grass skirt, a coconut brassiere, and, of course, a giant fruit-laden headdress. Carmen Miranda is probably best-known today as the former spokesperson for Chiquita bananas, but she was equally famous as an actress, singer, and dancer in the 1940s and 1950s.

The key to the study was the students' belief that they had chosen to do this. Some of the students were simply told that they were participating in an experiment about their reaction embarrassment and then told to put on the costume and walk across the quadrangle, after which they'd be quizzed about their reaction. Others were told they could either do the Carmen Miranda walk or some other (unnamed) embarrassing task. However, they were strongly encouraged to dress up in the fruity hat, and in fact, none of them chose the other task.

The students who believed they chose to dress up as Carmen Miranda estimated the length of the quadrangle as significantly shorter than those who were simply told to wear the costume. Another group of students was simply asked to estimate and walk the distance without the costume, and again, they believed the distance was significantly longer than those who thought they had chosen to wear the costume. Balcetis and Dunning say that this misperception of the distance (the quadrangle was actually 365 feet long) is caused by cognitive dissonance. Since they chose to walk in the costume, these students convinced themselves their decision must be rational: after all, it's not a very long distance to walk. They experienced less cognitive dissonance.

Brain centre for cognitive dissonance

fMRI showing anterior part of Cingulate Gyrus

Imaging studies with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) conducted by the Dutch neurologist Van Veen and his colleagues have established the front portion of the cingulate gyrus of the cerebral cortex is the brain centre of cognitive dissonance.