1 00:00:00 --> 00:00:01 2 00:00:01 --> 00:00:03 The following content is provided by MIT OpenCourseWare 3 00:00:03 --> 00:00:05 under a Creative Commons license. 4 00:00:05 --> 00:00:09 Additional information about our license and MIT 5 00:00:09 --> 00:00:19 OpenCourseWare in general is available at OCW.mit.edu. 6 00:00:19 --> 00:00:21 PROFESSOR: Good afternoon. 7 00:00:21 --> 00:00:24 8 00:00:24 --> 00:00:30 When we parted last time, I was -- you just did that demo 9 00:00:30 --> 00:00:36 with Sam, who was either collecting stamps or lady's 10 00:00:36 --> 00:00:38 undergarments, depending. 11 00:00:38 --> 00:00:47 And the point there was to describe the fact that any 12 00:00:47 --> 00:00:52 behavior is going to be distributed across the 13 00:00:52 --> 00:00:54 population in some fashion. 14 00:00:54 --> 00:01:00 It may well be that the extreme of the population is abnormal 15 00:01:00 --> 00:01:07 in some meaningful sense, maybe even pathological in some 16 00:01:07 --> 00:01:12 sense, but that the border between what is normal and what 17 00:01:12 --> 00:01:18 is abnormal is going to be necessarily ambiguous. 18 00:01:18 --> 00:01:21 There's not going to be some nice, neat line that can 19 00:01:21 --> 00:01:25 be drawn in all cases. 20 00:01:25 --> 00:01:31 I was arguing that something like schizophrenia is a bit 21 00:01:31 --> 00:01:34 more like that, where the abnormal state really does look 22 00:01:34 --> 00:01:40 quite different from the normal state and less like that 23 00:01:40 --> 00:01:42 it's on a continuum. 24 00:01:42 --> 00:01:46 You will notice on your handout that it says Lecture 20. 25 00:01:46 --> 00:01:49 And those of you who are particularly observant 26 00:01:49 --> 00:01:53 will say, last one was called Lecture 20. 27 00:01:53 --> 00:01:56 And that's true. 28 00:01:56 --> 00:01:59 I just liked 20. 29 00:01:59 --> 00:02:02 No, this is really 21. 30 00:02:02 --> 00:02:06 And with a bit of luck, I'll label the next one 22. 31 00:02:06 --> 00:02:08 Otherwise it'll just turn out that there's 20A and 20B 32 00:02:08 --> 00:02:09 or something like that. 33 00:02:09 --> 00:02:12 Anyway, it really is the right handout. 34 00:02:12 --> 00:02:20 You'll discover that it is closely related to the later 35 00:02:20 --> 00:02:25 pages of the last handout that we didn't get to last time. 36 00:02:25 --> 00:02:28 Yeah, it's kind of the same is what people are noting. 37 00:02:28 --> 00:02:30 But I didn't have any faith that people would remember 38 00:02:30 --> 00:02:32 to bring the real Lecture 20 handout. 39 00:02:32 --> 00:02:40 Anyway, what I want to talk about, at least initially here, 40 00:02:40 --> 00:02:44 is to talk a bit about how you would end up in this abnormal 41 00:02:44 --> 00:02:48 bin of schizophrenia. 42 00:02:48 --> 00:02:51 And one reasonable question to ask is, well, 43 00:02:51 --> 00:02:51 it's on the handout. 44 00:02:51 --> 00:02:55 It says, is there evidence for a genetic component? 45 00:02:55 --> 00:02:57 And the answer is yes. 46 00:02:57 --> 00:03:01 And the way you get one of the important sources of that 47 00:03:01 --> 00:03:05 information is similar to the data that we were talking about 48 00:03:05 --> 00:03:07 in intelligence testing. 49 00:03:07 --> 00:03:13 Take a look at people who vary in the amount that they are 50 00:03:13 --> 00:03:14 genetically related to each other. 51 00:03:14 --> 00:03:21 Notably here, MZ stands for monozygotic or identical 52 00:03:21 --> 00:03:22 single-egg twins. 53 00:03:22 --> 00:03:28 And DZ stands for dizygotic two-egg twins who are no 54 00:03:28 --> 00:03:30 more similar than siblings. 55 00:03:30 --> 00:03:38 Concordance means what the chance is of Twin Two having 56 00:03:38 --> 00:03:41 the disease if Twin One has it. 57 00:03:41 --> 00:03:45 And so what you can see is that for monozygotic twins, if one 58 00:03:45 --> 00:03:49 of a pair of identical twins becomes schizophrenic, there's 59 00:03:49 --> 00:03:53 a 50% chance that the other one will, too. 60 00:03:53 --> 00:03:55 That tells you two things. 61 00:03:55 --> 00:03:57 Well, it only tells you two things if you look 62 00:03:57 --> 00:03:58 at the dizygotic. 63 00:03:58 --> 00:04:01 The dizygotic twins have a much lower concordance 64 00:04:01 --> 00:04:04 rate of about 15%. 65 00:04:04 --> 00:04:08 So that tells you first of all that there's a probable genetic 66 00:04:08 --> 00:04:12 component there, and second of all, that it's not absolute. 67 00:04:12 --> 00:04:17 If you have the genetic mutation that makes you 68 00:04:17 --> 00:04:22 color-blind or color anomalous, you'll be color anomalous. 69 00:04:22 --> 00:04:25 There's no big mystery at this point about that. 70 00:04:25 --> 00:04:30 If you have whatever the genetic predisposition is for 71 00:04:30 --> 00:04:36 schizophrenia, something else has to happen before you would 72 00:04:36 --> 00:04:38 end up showing the disorder. 73 00:04:38 --> 00:04:42 Now, these twin studies run into the same problem that the 74 00:04:42 --> 00:04:45 intelligence testing twin studies did, which is that 75 00:04:45 --> 00:04:48 monozygotic twins are simply more similar on all 76 00:04:48 --> 00:04:49 sorts of things. 77 00:04:49 --> 00:04:51 You know, they're treated more similarly and so on. 78 00:04:51 --> 00:04:56 One way to look at whether or not there is a, you know, 79 00:04:56 --> 00:05:01 to try parceling this out, is this third line here. 80 00:05:01 --> 00:05:04 This was a population of dizygotic twins who thought 81 00:05:04 --> 00:05:05 they were identical. 82 00:05:05 --> 00:05:06 You know, they looked alike. 83 00:05:06 --> 00:05:09 Presumably they're the same sex and stuff like that. 84 00:05:09 --> 00:05:11 Thought they were identical. 85 00:05:11 --> 00:05:13 You'll see that their concordance rate was less 86 00:05:13 --> 00:05:18 than the 50% that the true monozygotic twins had. 87 00:05:18 --> 00:05:20 So there does seem to be something to being really 88 00:05:20 --> 00:05:21 genetically identical. 89 00:05:21 --> 00:05:25 You can also do twins reared apart things. 90 00:05:25 --> 00:05:28 But look, if you have a set of -- twins reared 91 00:05:28 --> 00:05:30 apart -- not common. 92 00:05:30 --> 00:05:32 But all those twins have IQs. 93 00:05:32 --> 00:05:35 You can always measure their IQs. 94 00:05:35 --> 00:05:40 If you take twins reared apart and then take the cases where 95 00:05:40 --> 00:05:47 one of them has schizophrenia and ask what the concordance 96 00:05:47 --> 00:05:49 rate is, the answer is it's quite elevated. 97 00:05:49 --> 00:05:52 But, you know, it's a really small population of people. 98 00:05:52 --> 00:05:54 You know, twin reared apart and schizophrenic, 99 00:05:54 --> 00:05:58 it's not a big crowd. 100 00:05:58 --> 00:06:05 Now, when you go look for the genetic marker, since the late 101 00:06:05 --> 00:06:09 '80s, there have been a slew of papers on genetic markers 102 00:06:09 --> 00:06:10 for schizophrenia. 103 00:06:10 --> 00:06:12 The way you look for this -- one of the typical ways to look 104 00:06:12 --> 00:06:16 for this is that schizophrenia runs in families. 105 00:06:16 --> 00:06:21 And if you go and analyze the genetics of families, you can 106 00:06:21 --> 00:06:26 find specific loci that seem to be abnormal in the 107 00:06:26 --> 00:06:29 schizophrenic members of the family. 108 00:06:29 --> 00:06:32 The difficulty or the interesting aspect of this 109 00:06:32 --> 00:06:36 genetic story is that the story that works for this family 110 00:06:36 --> 00:06:40 doesn't necessarily work for this family. 111 00:06:40 --> 00:06:43 In the early days of this, there'd be some big article in 112 00:06:43 --> 00:06:47 Science or Nature or something saying gene locus on chromosome 113 00:06:47 --> 00:06:52 eight for schizophrenia or whatever. 114 00:06:52 --> 00:06:53 I'm making it up. 115 00:06:53 --> 00:06:57 And then, you know, either in the same issue or in the, you 116 00:06:57 --> 00:06:59 know, next week, there'd be another thing saying, 117 00:06:59 --> 00:07:01 but not in this family. 118 00:07:01 --> 00:07:04 Clearly schizophrenic but not clearly having the same defect. 119 00:07:04 --> 00:07:10 It suggests that there are multiple roots, genetic 120 00:07:10 --> 00:07:12 predispositions, to schizophrenia. 121 00:07:12 --> 00:07:14 It's also possible that you need more than 122 00:07:14 --> 00:07:17 one genetic insult. 123 00:07:17 --> 00:07:21 That's jargon -- you don't say, you got an ugly gene. 124 00:07:21 --> 00:07:25 You need to have perhaps more than one defect in order to 125 00:07:25 --> 00:07:30 have the susceptibility to schizophrenia. 126 00:07:30 --> 00:07:34 One of the curious little wrinkles that I dug up in my 127 00:07:34 --> 00:07:37 reading on this -- and I've only read this in a 128 00:07:37 --> 00:07:37 secondary source. 129 00:07:37 --> 00:07:39 I have been unsuccessful in tracking down 130 00:07:39 --> 00:07:40 the primary source. 131 00:07:40 --> 00:07:45 But I'll tell you anyway -- is a study -- it turns out that 132 00:07:45 --> 00:07:47 there are two types of identical twins. 133 00:07:47 --> 00:07:51 There are, sort of, plain vanilla identical twins. 134 00:07:51 --> 00:07:53 You know, Twin One is right-handed. 135 00:07:53 --> 00:07:55 Twin Two is right-handed and so on. 136 00:07:55 --> 00:07:57 And then there are so-called mirror twins. 137 00:07:57 --> 00:08:02 They're genetically identical, but the phenotype, the actual 138 00:08:02 --> 00:08:09 organism, is mirrored rather than identical or 139 00:08:09 --> 00:08:10 something like that. 140 00:08:10 --> 00:08:12 So if one's right-handed, the other is left-handed. 141 00:08:12 --> 00:08:16 You know, swirl on the top of your head, if it swirls 142 00:08:16 --> 00:08:20 clockwise for one twin, it swirls the other way for 143 00:08:20 --> 00:08:22 the other twin and so on. 144 00:08:22 --> 00:08:25 And the curious finding reported in this one relatively 145 00:08:25 --> 00:08:30 small study, I think, is that the concordance rates for 146 00:08:30 --> 00:08:33 identical identical twins, the right hand, right hand 147 00:08:33 --> 00:08:37 identical twins, very high in this study, like over 90%. 148 00:08:37 --> 00:08:41 If one twin was schizophrenic, the other was schizophrenic. 149 00:08:41 --> 00:08:47 The mirrored twins, the left, right ones, were concordance 150 00:08:47 --> 00:08:50 rate down at about 25%. 151 00:08:50 --> 00:08:54 Both of these are genetically identical pairs of twins. 152 00:08:54 --> 00:08:59 It's abundantly unclear what it is that makes these two groups 153 00:08:59 --> 00:09:03 different, if indeed that turns out to be a reliable result. 154 00:09:03 --> 00:09:05 I went hunting in the databases, and I think I 155 00:09:05 --> 00:09:07 found the guy who did it. 156 00:09:07 --> 00:09:12 So I sent him an email, but he didn't get back to me in time. 157 00:09:12 --> 00:09:13 Oh, that reminds me. 158 00:09:13 --> 00:09:16 It's a little late in the day to tell you this, but if you 159 00:09:16 --> 00:09:20 discover that something that you're looking for in primary 160 00:09:20 --> 00:09:23 source land, you know, you're looking for the Journal of 161 00:09:23 --> 00:09:26 Hoozy Phoozy Results or whatever, and oh my god, MIT 162 00:09:26 --> 00:09:30 doesn't carry it so you don't have access to it, it's often 163 00:09:30 --> 00:09:33 very useful to go and see if you can find the website for 164 00:09:33 --> 00:09:34 the lab where the work was done. 165 00:09:34 --> 00:09:39 Because many, many of us post all of our publications, or as 166 00:09:39 --> 00:09:42 many as we have PDFs for, on the website to be downloaded. 167 00:09:42 --> 00:09:46 And so you can dig things up. 168 00:09:46 --> 00:09:48 You can dig things up that way. 169 00:09:48 --> 00:09:51 So anyway, there's pretty strong evidence for 170 00:09:51 --> 00:09:53 a genetic component. 171 00:09:53 --> 00:09:56 And then there's pretty strong evidence that that 172 00:09:56 --> 00:09:58 by itself is not enough. 173 00:09:58 --> 00:10:01 Unlike a variety of other neurological disorders, there 174 00:10:01 --> 00:10:04 are plenty of neurological disorders where if you've got 175 00:10:04 --> 00:10:08 this problem with your genome, it's going to munch up your 176 00:10:08 --> 00:10:10 brain in the following fashion, you're going 177 00:10:10 --> 00:10:10 to have this problem. 178 00:10:10 --> 00:10:14 And fortunately most of these are very rare. 179 00:10:14 --> 00:10:17 But they're straightforward genetic stories. 180 00:10:17 --> 00:10:21 In schizophrenia, something about the environment seems to 181 00:10:21 --> 00:10:22 be important to trip it off. 182 00:10:22 --> 00:10:25 The leading notion is stress. 183 00:10:25 --> 00:10:27 So, actually, does anybody remember? 184 00:10:27 --> 00:10:33 The book used to go on at vast lengths about the stress 185 00:10:33 --> 00:10:36 diathesis model of schizophrenia. 186 00:10:36 --> 00:10:39 Does this sound familiar to anybody? 187 00:10:39 --> 00:10:43 Has anybody looked at the relevant parts of the book yet? 188 00:10:43 --> 00:10:44 Nobody knows. 189 00:10:44 --> 00:10:50 All right, well anyway, one of the leading notions about what 190 00:10:50 --> 00:10:55 it is that actually produces the florid disease, is that you 191 00:10:55 --> 00:10:57 need to have some genetic predisposition and then you 192 00:10:57 --> 00:11:02 need something like stress to drop-kick you into pathology. 193 00:11:02 --> 00:11:07 Now, this is an interesting -- this raises interesting 194 00:11:07 --> 00:11:09 problems for public policy. 195 00:11:09 --> 00:11:12 I think we talked last time about, you know, when is it 196 00:11:12 --> 00:11:17 OK to force somebody to be medicated, right? 197 00:11:17 --> 00:11:19 This is a similar sort of problem. 198 00:11:19 --> 00:11:25 199 00:11:25 --> 00:11:29 Suppose you are applying to MIT this year. 200 00:11:29 --> 00:11:33 Should I be able to -- should I go and suggest to the head of 201 00:11:33 --> 00:11:36 admissions that we really should get little tubes 202 00:11:36 --> 00:11:38 of blood from everybody? 203 00:11:38 --> 00:11:40 Because if we got little tubes blood from everybody, we could 204 00:11:40 --> 00:11:42 genetically screen them. 205 00:11:42 --> 00:11:47 And we know where -- we don't know exactly which loci are 206 00:11:47 --> 00:11:50 critical, but we know a bunch of loci that seem to be 207 00:11:50 --> 00:11:53 related to family histories of schizophrenia. 208 00:11:53 --> 00:11:55 And anyway, there's all sorts of other interesting genetic 209 00:11:55 --> 00:11:56 markers out there at this point. 210 00:11:56 --> 00:11:59 We could screen the incoming population or the population of 211 00:11:59 --> 00:12:07 applicants and systematically decide not to admit people who 212 00:12:07 --> 00:12:11 had the genetic marker for schizophrenia or for some other 213 00:12:11 --> 00:12:12 -- well, schizophrenia is a good example. 214 00:12:12 --> 00:12:14 Why in the world would we do this? 215 00:12:14 --> 00:12:18 Well, is there anybody currently present who believes 216 00:12:18 --> 00:12:23 that MIT is a at least modestly stressful environment? 217 00:12:23 --> 00:12:24 All right. 218 00:12:24 --> 00:12:26 219 00:12:26 --> 00:12:29 Short of Guantanamo Bay or something, you know, 220 00:12:29 --> 00:12:30 it's right up there. 221 00:12:30 --> 00:12:33 222 00:12:33 --> 00:12:35 All right. 223 00:12:35 --> 00:12:40 The state of the art is that we know that stress is a 224 00:12:40 --> 00:12:42 contributing factor to a variety of mental 225 00:12:42 --> 00:12:45 illnesses, notably in this example schizophrenia. 226 00:12:45 --> 00:12:51 If we admit people to an environment that we know is 227 00:12:51 --> 00:12:58 highly stressful, we are asking for a certain number of 228 00:12:58 --> 00:13:01 psychiatric problems. 229 00:13:01 --> 00:13:06 Isn't it our responsibility to prevent that from happening? 230 00:13:06 --> 00:13:10 Well, now, typically the -- I won't take a poll, but the 231 00:13:10 --> 00:13:13 typical answer is, no, that doesn't sound right. 232 00:13:13 --> 00:13:17 You know, that somehow that sounds a little too 233 00:13:17 --> 00:13:21 paternalistic, too invasive for me to be screening your genes. 234 00:13:21 --> 00:13:21 And, you know, who knows? 235 00:13:21 --> 00:13:24 Down the line, we take a look at this hunk of the genome and 236 00:13:24 --> 00:13:30 we say, you know, sorry, you're just never passing 18.03. 237 00:13:30 --> 00:13:34 You know, what would we ever do with information like that? 238 00:13:34 --> 00:13:38 But the disease case, it doesn't feel right 239 00:13:38 --> 00:13:40 typically to people. 240 00:13:40 --> 00:13:44 But on the other hand, we spend a lot of time worrying, 241 00:13:44 --> 00:13:48 believe it or not, about your mental health. 242 00:13:48 --> 00:13:54 The dean's office has substantial branches devoted to 243 00:13:54 --> 00:13:57 mental health issues as does the medical department. 244 00:13:57 --> 00:14:00 We know that university environments kick up a certain 245 00:14:00 --> 00:14:04 amount of psychiatric problems. 246 00:14:04 --> 00:14:07 And we know that that can be catastrophically bad 247 00:14:07 --> 00:14:11 for the person and for people around them. 248 00:14:11 --> 00:14:13 Wouldn't it be our responsibility to do 249 00:14:13 --> 00:14:14 something about that? 250 00:14:14 --> 00:14:16 Well, look, I'm not going to give you an answer to that, and 251 00:14:16 --> 00:14:19 I promise not to ask on the exam, you know, should we get 252 00:14:19 --> 00:14:22 blood samples from everybody and, you know, the choices are 253 00:14:22 --> 00:14:28 yes, no, all of the above or something like that. 254 00:14:28 --> 00:14:34 I raise that as an issue to think about. 255 00:14:34 --> 00:14:37 When you take a look at the brains of schizophrenics, by 256 00:14:37 --> 00:14:44 the way, they don't look like the brains of healthy, 257 00:14:44 --> 00:14:45 normal individuals. 258 00:14:45 --> 00:14:49 So you get things like shrinkage of grey matter. 259 00:14:49 --> 00:14:53 You get enlargement of the ventricles. 260 00:14:53 --> 00:14:55 The ventricles are those nice, empty fluid-filled 261 00:14:55 --> 00:14:57 spaces in your brain. 262 00:14:57 --> 00:15:00 Great answer for a -- if you're looking at the multiple-choice 263 00:15:00 --> 00:15:04 question on the final, and you're thinking, I'm going to 264 00:15:04 --> 00:15:08 go for, you know, the third ventricle as the answer, 265 00:15:08 --> 00:15:11 you're probably getting suckered here, right? 266 00:15:11 --> 00:15:14 Because the ventricles are empty fluid-filled spaces. 267 00:15:14 --> 00:15:19 It's not where any of the more important mental functions are 268 00:15:19 --> 00:15:22 thought to be localized, at least not since the Middle 269 00:15:22 --> 00:15:25 Ages, where people did think that memories were stored in 270 00:15:25 --> 00:15:26 the ventricles, because after all they looked 271 00:15:26 --> 00:15:28 like store rooms. 272 00:15:28 --> 00:15:29 Anyway, the ventricles get bigger. 273 00:15:29 --> 00:15:31 That's presumably not a good thing because it's reflecting 274 00:15:31 --> 00:15:33 loss of brain tissue. 275 00:15:33 --> 00:15:37 What's not absolutely clear is whether or not abnormalities 276 00:15:37 --> 00:15:42 in brain structure precede disease. 277 00:15:42 --> 00:15:44 You know, are they there somehow from birth? 278 00:15:44 --> 00:15:47 Is part of what the gene is doing somehow changing the 279 00:15:47 --> 00:15:50 structure of the brain in such a way that it makes it 280 00:15:50 --> 00:15:53 vulnerable, or is it that having the disease itself 281 00:15:53 --> 00:15:57 is bad for the brain? 282 00:15:57 --> 00:16:04 In any case, the point to take away here is there are lots of 283 00:16:04 --> 00:16:10 different routes into the kingdom of schizophrenia. 284 00:16:10 --> 00:16:13 It's not a nice, clean simple diagnosis where you say, you 285 00:16:13 --> 00:16:18 get this bacterium, you get this disease, we give you this 286 00:16:18 --> 00:16:20 antibiotic, and you're OK. 287 00:16:20 --> 00:16:25 Multiple routes in and treatment options are, 288 00:16:25 --> 00:16:30 you know, getting better but remain difficult. 289 00:16:30 --> 00:16:30 Let's see here. 290 00:16:30 --> 00:16:31 Oh yes. 291 00:16:31 --> 00:16:36 What I think I will do is switch gears and talk a 292 00:16:36 --> 00:16:38 bit about depression. 293 00:16:38 --> 00:16:42 But in order to talk about depression, what I want you to 294 00:16:42 --> 00:16:47 do is to decide how you want to treat my three invented 295 00:16:47 --> 00:16:50 patients on the handout. 296 00:16:50 --> 00:16:53 The third one is on the back of the page. 297 00:16:53 --> 00:16:54 So play with that for a second. 298 00:16:54 --> 00:16:58 Kristen, can you do me a favor? 299 00:16:58 --> 00:16:59 Go find me a bottle of water. 300 00:16:59 --> 00:17:01 I'm going to expire today otherwise. 301 00:17:01 --> 00:17:02 AUDIENCE: I have some. 302 00:17:02 --> 00:17:03 Do you want some? 303 00:17:03 --> 00:17:03 PROFESSOR: I don't know. 304 00:17:03 --> 00:17:04 Do you got any interesting diseases? 305 00:17:04 --> 00:17:06 AUDIENCE: No. 306 00:17:06 --> 00:17:10 PROFESSOR: I don't want to steal yours. 307 00:17:10 --> 00:17:11 Find me something somewhere. 308 00:17:11 --> 00:17:12 Thank you. 309 00:17:12 --> 00:17:17 310 00:17:17 --> 00:17:21 I'm recovering from a cold still, and I can feel that I'm 311 00:17:21 --> 00:17:24 going to run out of moisture. 312 00:17:24 --> 00:17:26 And my tongue is going to get all big and like a 313 00:17:26 --> 00:17:26 parrot or something. 314 00:17:26 --> 00:17:28 I won't be able to talk. 315 00:17:28 --> 00:17:31 All right, have you managed to do this? 316 00:17:31 --> 00:17:31 Still working on it. 317 00:17:31 --> 00:17:32 All right. 318 00:17:32 --> 00:17:34 Don't cheat off your neighbors. 319 00:17:34 --> 00:17:38 But I promise you this time, none of these guys are dealing 320 00:17:38 --> 00:17:38 in lady's undergarments. 321 00:17:38 --> 00:17:42 322 00:17:42 --> 00:17:42 Here. 323 00:17:42 --> 00:17:44 Let's collect some. 324 00:17:44 --> 00:17:51 325 00:17:51 --> 00:17:51 All right. 326 00:17:51 --> 00:17:57 Let's collect us some data. 327 00:17:57 --> 00:18:03 328 00:18:03 --> 00:18:05 OK. 329 00:18:05 --> 00:18:09 Everybody pretty much done here? 330 00:18:09 --> 00:18:12 Make assenting noises or something. 331 00:18:12 --> 00:18:13 OK, that's good. 332 00:18:13 --> 00:18:15 That sounded very assenting. 333 00:18:15 --> 00:18:19 OK, so Sarah had a bad day. 334 00:18:19 --> 00:18:25 How many people would, let's see, so that -- slow numbers 335 00:18:25 --> 00:18:28 are the "no way, we're not going to medicate this 336 00:18:28 --> 00:18:31 depression." How many people -- oh, that was quick. 337 00:18:31 --> 00:18:32 That was good. 338 00:18:32 --> 00:18:34 Thank you. 339 00:18:34 --> 00:18:37 How many people are going to give her no meds? 340 00:18:37 --> 00:18:38 Oh, OK. 341 00:18:38 --> 00:18:43 So the answer is everybody, more or less. 342 00:18:43 --> 00:18:45 Don't worry if you said, I'll give her a little bit of med. 343 00:18:45 --> 00:18:46 That's OK, too. 344 00:18:46 --> 00:18:49 But I won't bother asking about it. 345 00:18:49 --> 00:18:51 These really are all the same, by the way. 346 00:18:51 --> 00:18:53 There's no fifty-fifty split. 347 00:18:53 --> 00:18:55 This is just straight up, normal. 348 00:18:55 --> 00:18:57 I'm not tricking you this time. 349 00:18:57 --> 00:19:00 OK. 350 00:19:00 --> 00:19:04 And by contrast if we look at Sam, Sam's depressed, no 351 00:19:04 --> 00:19:06 particular reason, just happens. 352 00:19:06 --> 00:19:10 And he oscillates between manic and depressed states. 353 00:19:10 --> 00:19:15 How many people think no treatment or unlikely 354 00:19:15 --> 00:19:18 to medicate? 355 00:19:18 --> 00:19:20 How many moderately like, you know, somewhere in the 356 00:19:20 --> 00:19:21 four to seven department? 357 00:19:21 --> 00:19:24 Well, a few people in there. 358 00:19:24 --> 00:19:27 And you have all embodied the ethos of the 359 00:19:27 --> 00:19:29 yeah, yeah, OK, good. 360 00:19:29 --> 00:19:34 I mean, I don't know if it's good or not, but it's clearly 361 00:19:34 --> 00:19:39 where medical science, I suppose, is these days, which 362 00:19:39 --> 00:19:42 is that he would be a candidate for an antidepressant in 363 00:19:42 --> 00:19:44 a way that she wouldn't. 364 00:19:44 --> 00:19:45 Why not? 365 00:19:45 --> 00:19:47 Why wouldn't you give her an antidepressant? 366 00:19:47 --> 00:19:48 She's depressed. 367 00:19:48 --> 00:19:53 368 00:19:53 --> 00:19:56 AUDIENCE: It's normal for her to be depressed. 369 00:19:56 --> 00:19:59 Like, anyone could be depressed in that situation, but if 370 00:19:59 --> 00:20:04 you're depressed for no reason, then that [UNINTELLIGIBLE] 371 00:20:04 --> 00:20:08 problem in the brain that could be solved by medication, 372 00:20:08 --> 00:20:11 whereas with her thing, all that needs to happen is the 373 00:20:11 --> 00:20:12 problem's [? cured. ?] 374 00:20:12 --> 00:20:15 PROFESSOR: There's a couple of things that are worth 375 00:20:15 --> 00:20:17 picking up on here. 376 00:20:17 --> 00:20:23 One is, I mentioned last time that the exact mapping between 377 00:20:23 --> 00:20:28 cause and treatment shouldn't be seen as one to one. 378 00:20:28 --> 00:20:35 So even if we take as correct for present purposes that Sam's 379 00:20:35 --> 00:20:38 got something biochemical wrong with him, it wouldn't 380 00:20:38 --> 00:20:41 necessarily be the case that the only way to deal with this 381 00:20:41 --> 00:20:45 would be by a biochemical kind of treatment. 382 00:20:45 --> 00:20:47 There isn't that necessary one-to-one mapping. 383 00:20:47 --> 00:20:50 But it's not an unreasonable thought. 384 00:20:50 --> 00:20:53 And the other part of that thought was, you know, she's 385 00:20:53 --> 00:20:55 depressed for a reason. 386 00:20:55 --> 00:21:01 And we don't want to shield her necessarily from 387 00:21:01 --> 00:21:02 that depression. 388 00:21:02 --> 00:21:09 Though this gets raised as an issue too now. 389 00:21:09 --> 00:21:12 I talked last time about treatments for post-traumatic 390 00:21:12 --> 00:21:14 stress disorder. 391 00:21:14 --> 00:21:22 One of the notions is that you could give people medications 392 00:21:22 --> 00:21:26 that would in a sense prevent them from feeling as bad about 393 00:21:26 --> 00:21:32 something horrible as they normally would. 394 00:21:32 --> 00:21:34 I mean, this is a real something horrible 395 00:21:34 --> 00:21:35 now, you understand. 396 00:21:35 --> 00:21:38 But we're going to get you -- something horrible has happened 397 00:21:38 --> 00:21:43 -- we're going to give you a pill that is going to decrease, 398 00:21:43 --> 00:21:45 we hope, the chance of you having a post-traumatic stress 399 00:21:45 --> 00:21:48 disorder, but it's going to do that by blunting your 400 00:21:48 --> 00:21:54 emotional response and your memory for that event. 401 00:21:54 --> 00:21:57 Is that something that we want to get into? 402 00:21:57 --> 00:22:06 Now, Sam I described as having this -- if this is now, oh, 403 00:22:06 --> 00:22:10 I suppose, mood -- Sam I described as having one of 404 00:22:10 --> 00:22:14 these oscillatory or bipolar conditions where he bounces 405 00:22:14 --> 00:22:18 back and forth between -- well, let's see, which end is this? 406 00:22:18 --> 00:22:26 This can be the manic end and the depressed end. 407 00:22:26 --> 00:22:32 408 00:22:32 --> 00:22:36 You sometimes think that it might kind of be worth it, 409 00:22:36 --> 00:22:40 right, because you have to put up with the depression, but the 410 00:22:40 --> 00:22:42 manic energy thing would be good. 411 00:22:42 --> 00:22:45 Well, the manic energy thing is kind of good here, maybe. 412 00:22:45 --> 00:22:48 You know, you get all your problem sets done in ten 413 00:22:48 --> 00:22:50 minutes or something. 414 00:22:50 --> 00:22:56 But by the time you get out here, you are just as abnormal, 415 00:22:56 --> 00:22:59 if you like, or just as crazy if we want to be colloquial 416 00:22:59 --> 00:23:04 about this, out here as you are down here. 417 00:23:04 --> 00:23:07 And you can be pretty hard on your friends and neighbors 418 00:23:07 --> 00:23:11 and yourself, in fact. 419 00:23:11 --> 00:23:13 I don't need -- I mean, this is very MIT, right -- I 420 00:23:13 --> 00:23:14 don't need to sleep anymore. 421 00:23:14 --> 00:23:17 I can talk all night. 422 00:23:17 --> 00:23:18 You don't want to listen to me? 423 00:23:18 --> 00:23:19 Well, I'll talk anyway. 424 00:23:19 --> 00:23:22 425 00:23:22 --> 00:23:28 I remember reading a memoir by the child of a manic depressive 426 00:23:28 --> 00:23:33 mother, who as I recall comes home -- the child comes home 427 00:23:33 --> 00:23:36 from school one day, discovers mom has decided we're going to 428 00:23:36 --> 00:23:40 have a great old-fashioned Christmas this year. 429 00:23:40 --> 00:23:44 So she went out and bought like thirty-five Christmas trees. 430 00:23:44 --> 00:23:47 And you walk into the living room and it's just, you 431 00:23:47 --> 00:23:48 know, forest in there. 432 00:23:48 --> 00:23:51 She's stuffed the Christmas trees all over the -- and, you 433 00:23:51 --> 00:23:54 know, this is, I'm sorry, I'm glad you're feeling really 434 00:23:54 --> 00:23:58 up, but this is nuts too. 435 00:23:58 --> 00:23:59 It's not working. 436 00:23:59 --> 00:24:05 437 00:24:05 --> 00:24:09 It's an interesting observation. 438 00:24:09 --> 00:24:14 There are interesting data suggesting that this sort of 439 00:24:14 --> 00:24:17 bipolar disorder, this oscillation between deep 440 00:24:17 --> 00:24:24 depression and this wild mania, that that's overrepresented in 441 00:24:24 --> 00:24:27 at least some creative populations. 442 00:24:27 --> 00:24:31 The notable one is poets. 443 00:24:31 --> 00:24:35 It's notable because a woman named -- what is her full name? 444 00:24:35 --> 00:24:38 -- well, anyway, Jamison is her last name. 445 00:24:38 --> 00:24:41 446 00:24:41 --> 00:24:43 I think it's spelled like this. 447 00:24:43 --> 00:24:46 Anyway, she wrote a book called Touched by Fire where what she 448 00:24:46 --> 00:24:49 did was she went and looked at the biographies of, in 449 00:24:49 --> 00:24:53 particular, sort of the run of famous English poets. 450 00:24:53 --> 00:24:56 And over and over in their biographies you get these 451 00:24:56 --> 00:25:00 descriptions that -- you know, they didn't have the diagnosis 452 00:25:00 --> 00:25:04 in 18th century England, but it sure sounds like a manic 453 00:25:04 --> 00:25:05 depressive disorder. 454 00:25:05 --> 00:25:08 You know, Shelley or Keats or somebody writes eight million 455 00:25:08 --> 00:25:13 poems and then lies in bed for a month. 456 00:25:13 --> 00:25:14 It's that sort of thing. 457 00:25:14 --> 00:25:16 Now, great, you know. 458 00:25:16 --> 00:25:17 I can be a famous poet. 459 00:25:17 --> 00:25:18 All I have to do is put up with this. 460 00:25:18 --> 00:25:21 The problem -- well, there are a number of problems with this. 461 00:25:21 --> 00:25:24 First of all, you become a little intolerable to your 462 00:25:24 --> 00:25:25 immediate surroundings. 463 00:25:25 --> 00:25:29 The other thing is that a very serious consequence 464 00:25:29 --> 00:25:33 of deep depression is the threat of suicide. 465 00:25:33 --> 00:25:38 Interestingly, you would think that this was a continuum 466 00:25:38 --> 00:25:41 thing, right, that you go way, way down here and if you get 467 00:25:41 --> 00:25:45 this far down into depression, that's when people 468 00:25:45 --> 00:25:46 commit suicide. 469 00:25:46 --> 00:25:48 Turns out not to be the case. 470 00:25:48 --> 00:25:50 When people describe their really deep -- there's 471 00:25:50 --> 00:25:52 a huge genre here. 472 00:25:52 --> 00:25:54 It's a very popular genre at the moment. 473 00:25:54 --> 00:25:59 If you're into depression, your, you know, Christmas 474 00:25:59 --> 00:26:01 reading list can be all set out because there's all 475 00:26:01 --> 00:26:04 sorts of people who are happy to describe 476 00:26:04 --> 00:26:08 -- happy to describe their depression? -- anyway, more 477 00:26:08 --> 00:26:12 than willing to describe their depression in 478 00:26:12 --> 00:26:14 volumes thin or thick. 479 00:26:14 --> 00:26:16 Jamison actually has a volume of her -- she got interested in 480 00:26:16 --> 00:26:21 this because she was a manic depressive and trained 481 00:26:21 --> 00:26:22 in psychiatry. 482 00:26:22 --> 00:26:24 So she's coming at it from every which way. 483 00:26:24 --> 00:26:28 Anyway, she has a memoir -- I don't remember the title of it 484 00:26:28 --> 00:26:34 -- about her own depression that's actually nice and slim. 485 00:26:34 --> 00:26:36 It's not a bad read. 486 00:26:36 --> 00:26:40 But what the descriptions sound like is that when you're 487 00:26:40 --> 00:26:43 really, really deeply depressed, you just 488 00:26:43 --> 00:26:44 don't do anything. 489 00:26:44 --> 00:26:48 You might in some sense want to be dead, but that's just 490 00:26:48 --> 00:26:53 too much effort to do anything about that. 491 00:26:53 --> 00:26:59 The danger for suicide in bipolar disorders turns out to 492 00:26:59 --> 00:27:03 be -- well, let's get rid of this -- turns out to be when 493 00:27:03 --> 00:27:06 you're on your way back out. 494 00:27:06 --> 00:27:12 Still depressed, but now you're activated enough that you can 495 00:27:12 --> 00:27:14 do stuff, but you're not convinced you're ever really 496 00:27:14 --> 00:27:16 going to get better. 497 00:27:16 --> 00:27:19 I mean, look, most of us have not been really clinically 498 00:27:19 --> 00:27:25 depressed, but many of us can tap into this, into this aspect 499 00:27:25 --> 00:27:30 in the sense of have you had the flu or some, you know, 500 00:27:30 --> 00:27:33 relatively disgusting disorder of some variety where you're 501 00:27:33 --> 00:27:37 sitting there thinking, "I know rationally that I'm going to 502 00:27:37 --> 00:27:41 get better, but am I really going to get better, or am I 503 00:27:41 --> 00:27:47 just going to be barfing forever?" So you're coming on 504 00:27:47 --> 00:27:51 your way out, and that's where the suicide risk is high. 505 00:27:51 --> 00:27:57 Now, that phenomenon may be related to something that hit 506 00:27:57 --> 00:28:05 the news a lot this year, which was concerns about giving 507 00:28:05 --> 00:28:10 antidepressants to children and adolescents. 508 00:28:10 --> 00:28:13 Because there are data out there that say that the suicide 509 00:28:13 --> 00:28:18 risk in depressed adolescents taking antidepressants 510 00:28:18 --> 00:28:19 is elevated. 511 00:28:19 --> 00:28:21 Exactly what you don't want to have happen, right? 512 00:28:21 --> 00:28:24 What you really want to not have happen is people 513 00:28:24 --> 00:28:26 committing suicide when they're depressed. 514 00:28:26 --> 00:28:28 What is the cause of this? 515 00:28:28 --> 00:28:30 Well, we don't actually know, I don't think. 516 00:28:30 --> 00:28:31 At least I haven't seen anything definitive. 517 00:28:31 --> 00:28:35 But there are a number -- one theory is that antidepressants 518 00:28:35 --> 00:28:38 work differently in young brains than in older brains. 519 00:28:38 --> 00:28:39 That's one possibility. 520 00:28:39 --> 00:28:42 But the other possibility is that what the antidepressant 521 00:28:42 --> 00:28:49 did was it moved the patient along to a point where they 522 00:28:49 --> 00:28:51 weren't so paralyzed by the depression that suicide 523 00:28:51 --> 00:28:53 became an option. 524 00:28:53 --> 00:28:57 It sounds weird and disturbing, but that is one possibility for 525 00:28:57 --> 00:29:03 where this elevated rate of suicide in antidepressant 526 00:29:03 --> 00:29:07 treated young patients came from. 527 00:29:07 --> 00:29:10 528 00:29:10 --> 00:29:20 Let's see, what else do I want to say about Sam and Emma here? 529 00:29:20 --> 00:29:22 Oh, Emma's the one on the back. 530 00:29:22 --> 00:29:24 All right, so how about Emma? 531 00:29:24 --> 00:29:30 We need to collect some data on Emma. 532 00:29:30 --> 00:29:32 Did I describe Emma as dysphoric? 533 00:29:32 --> 00:29:32 Yes. 534 00:29:32 --> 00:29:34 Emma is a dysphoric. 535 00:29:34 --> 00:29:36 That's the opposite of euphoric. 536 00:29:36 --> 00:29:38 So it's not depressed. 537 00:29:38 --> 00:29:41 It would be sort of lying around here somewhere. 538 00:29:41 --> 00:29:43 Just kind of flat. 539 00:29:43 --> 00:29:45 All right. 540 00:29:45 --> 00:29:55 So how many people voted that we'll leave her be? 541 00:29:55 --> 00:29:55 OK. 542 00:29:55 --> 00:29:59 How many people voted maybe? 543 00:29:59 --> 00:30:02 And how many people voted sure? 544 00:30:02 --> 00:30:05 Well, OK, we got a normal curve out of that. 545 00:30:05 --> 00:30:10 Well, I could have gone -- it looked sort of like this to me. 546 00:30:10 --> 00:30:14 547 00:30:14 --> 00:30:17 So people are sort of unsure about -- oops. 548 00:30:17 --> 00:30:19 Well, I guess it's going over there now. 549 00:30:19 --> 00:30:22 People are sort of unsure about it. 550 00:30:22 --> 00:30:24 So what are the issues here? 551 00:30:24 --> 00:30:27 Why wouldn't you give it to her? 552 00:30:27 --> 00:30:27 Yeah? 553 00:30:27 --> 00:30:29 AUDIENCE: If she doesn't want it. 554 00:30:29 --> 00:30:30 PROFESSOR: Oh, yes, yes. 555 00:30:30 --> 00:30:30 Well, that's a separate issue. 556 00:30:30 --> 00:30:34 Did I say anything about it? 557 00:30:34 --> 00:30:36 No, no, no, this is just -- well, actually, we'll 558 00:30:36 --> 00:30:37 come back to that. 559 00:30:37 --> 00:30:39 That's an interesting problem. 560 00:30:39 --> 00:30:42 But yes, I was not suggesting that we jam it down her throat, 561 00:30:42 --> 00:30:46 which is by the way not the problem with Prozac. 562 00:30:46 --> 00:30:50 563 00:30:50 --> 00:30:54 Let's imagine that the antidepressant is Prozac here, 564 00:30:54 --> 00:30:57 or one of its newer friends. 565 00:30:57 --> 00:31:05 Prozac gets a lot of play in the public sphere. 566 00:31:05 --> 00:31:06 Whoops. 567 00:31:06 --> 00:31:09 Well, I'll put a P there now. 568 00:31:09 --> 00:31:09 Uh oh. 569 00:31:09 --> 00:31:11 C or K? 570 00:31:11 --> 00:31:12 AUDIENCE: C. 571 00:31:12 --> 00:31:12 PROFESSOR: C. 572 00:31:12 --> 00:31:12 Yes. 573 00:31:12 --> 00:31:13 Thank you. 574 00:31:13 --> 00:31:14 OK. 575 00:31:14 --> 00:31:25 Prozac is a serotonin -- that's a neurotransmitter -- selective 576 00:31:25 --> 00:31:27 -- thank you, where was that coming -- 577 00:31:27 --> 00:31:27 AUDIENCE: It's first. 578 00:31:27 --> 00:31:29 PROFESSOR: Oh, it's a selective serotonin, not 579 00:31:29 --> 00:31:30 serotonin selective. 580 00:31:30 --> 00:31:31 It's SS. 581 00:31:31 --> 00:31:33 All right. 582 00:31:33 --> 00:31:33 All right. 583 00:31:33 --> 00:31:41 It's a serotonin selective -- reverse -- uptake, reuptake 584 00:31:41 --> 00:31:43 -- can I do reuptake? 585 00:31:43 --> 00:31:44 AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] 586 00:31:44 --> 00:31:44 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 587 00:31:44 --> 00:31:44 Yeah. 588 00:31:44 --> 00:31:46 OK. 589 00:31:46 --> 00:31:54 Reuptake inhibitor. 590 00:31:54 --> 00:31:58 591 00:31:58 --> 00:32:02 Or an SSRI, which makes it understandable how I would have 592 00:32:02 --> 00:32:06 thought it might have been an SSRI rather than an SSRI. 593 00:32:06 --> 00:32:09 594 00:32:09 --> 00:32:14 But let me explain what this is doing actually. 595 00:32:14 --> 00:32:18 So remember that in schizophrenia, the first big 596 00:32:18 --> 00:32:21 psychopharmacological breakthrough was the discovery 597 00:32:21 --> 00:32:22 there's too much dopamine in bits of the brain. 598 00:32:22 --> 00:32:29 If we block some dopamine receptors, we reduce 599 00:32:29 --> 00:32:30 the symptoms. 600 00:32:30 --> 00:32:35 In the case of at least some forms of depression, the 601 00:32:35 --> 00:32:38 problem seems to be too little serotonin -- or a problem. 602 00:32:38 --> 00:32:40 Seems to be too little serotonin in some 603 00:32:40 --> 00:32:42 parts of the brain. 604 00:32:42 --> 00:32:45 And so you've got a synapse. 605 00:32:45 --> 00:32:50 606 00:32:50 --> 00:32:54 And serotonin is being released here and binding 607 00:32:54 --> 00:32:57 to the other side. 608 00:32:57 --> 00:33:02 But now, in order to have this synapse be reusable, once 609 00:33:02 --> 00:33:05 you've released some serotonin, you've got to get rid of it. 610 00:33:05 --> 00:33:07 You've got to get it out of the synapse so you can do it 611 00:33:07 --> 00:33:08 again and again and again. 612 00:33:08 --> 00:33:12 One of the techniques is to take the molecules and 613 00:33:12 --> 00:33:18 suck them back into the originating neuron. 614 00:33:18 --> 00:33:20 That's called reuptake. 615 00:33:20 --> 00:33:23 Now, if you don't have enough serotonin here to do the job, 616 00:33:23 --> 00:33:28 one thing to do is to slow down this reuptake so that 617 00:33:28 --> 00:33:30 the serotonin hangs around here longer. 618 00:33:30 --> 00:33:36 And that way you get more bang for your molecular buck. 619 00:33:36 --> 00:33:40 And so that's what Prozac is doing. 620 00:33:40 --> 00:33:45 The reason I put Emma on here is that Prozac seemed to do 621 00:33:45 --> 00:33:50 good things for dysphoric patients, patients who did not 622 00:33:50 --> 00:33:57 meet a clinical criterion for depression but who found -- I 623 00:33:57 --> 00:34:03 think in part because the drug manufacturer gave the docs 624 00:34:03 --> 00:34:05 piles of free Prozac. 625 00:34:05 --> 00:34:08 You know, patient comes through and says, "I feel kind 626 00:34:08 --> 00:34:10 of down." So, "Oh yeah. 627 00:34:10 --> 00:34:11 Try this. 628 00:34:11 --> 00:34:14 This is new." You know, "All right. 629 00:34:14 --> 00:34:14 Hey! 630 00:34:14 --> 00:34:16 I feel better. 631 00:34:16 --> 00:34:17 I feel a bunch better. 632 00:34:17 --> 00:34:22 I'm not clinically depressed, but I really like this stuff. 633 00:34:22 --> 00:34:24 634 00:34:24 --> 00:34:28 And not only that, if I go off it, I go back 635 00:34:28 --> 00:34:30 to my dysphoric state. 636 00:34:30 --> 00:34:32 I go back to -- " 637 00:34:32 --> 00:34:34 The example says something to the effect of, that's 638 00:34:34 --> 00:34:37 just the way she is. 639 00:34:37 --> 00:34:43 If she goes off Prozac, there are lots of reports even in the 640 00:34:43 --> 00:34:46 popular literature of this, of people who said, you know, if 641 00:34:46 --> 00:34:48 I'm off Prozac, I'm just, ughh. 642 00:34:48 --> 00:34:52 But if I'm on Prozac, I'm just a better me. 643 00:34:52 --> 00:34:54 Well, do you give them the drug? 644 00:34:54 --> 00:34:55 Do you give them the drug? 645 00:34:55 --> 00:34:57 Do you allow them to continue taking the drug for the rest 646 00:34:57 --> 00:35:00 of their natural born days, particularly since we have no 647 00:35:00 --> 00:35:03 idea since it's a new drug -- well, now it's over 648 00:35:03 --> 00:35:04 a decade old. 649 00:35:04 --> 00:35:05 But, you know, we don't know what happens if you take this 650 00:35:05 --> 00:35:08 for twenty, thirty, forty years. 651 00:35:08 --> 00:35:10 Who should pay for it? 652 00:35:10 --> 00:35:14 You know, if you think that this drug makes you feel 653 00:35:14 --> 00:35:16 better, that's lovely. 654 00:35:16 --> 00:35:19 Should your insurance company pay for it on 655 00:35:19 --> 00:35:24 a continuing basis? 656 00:35:24 --> 00:35:28 So those are the Emma issues here. 657 00:35:28 --> 00:35:34 The issues about whether or not it's OK to make somebody better 658 00:35:34 --> 00:35:38 than they, in some sense, better than they were. 659 00:35:38 --> 00:35:41 Are you the same person? 660 00:35:41 --> 00:35:44 Is this, you know, is this the real Emma, or is this 661 00:35:44 --> 00:35:47 some medicated Emma? 662 00:35:47 --> 00:35:52 And, well, all right, now let's look back to the comment 663 00:35:52 --> 00:35:54 about forcing them. 664 00:35:54 --> 00:35:55 Well, you know what? 665 00:35:55 --> 00:35:59 It works on kids, too. 666 00:35:59 --> 00:36:06 And you know that there's a fairly substantial industry in 667 00:36:06 --> 00:36:11 feeding psychiatric drugs to kids for various and 668 00:36:11 --> 00:36:13 sundry problems. 669 00:36:13 --> 00:36:18 Suppose, well, we know that shy -- how did I 670 00:36:18 --> 00:36:20 describe old Emma here? 671 00:36:20 --> 00:36:22 Is she shy and withdrawn? 672 00:36:22 --> 00:36:23 No, that was what's his name collecting the 673 00:36:23 --> 00:36:25 underwear, wasn't it? 674 00:36:25 --> 00:36:26 Oh well. 675 00:36:26 --> 00:36:30 676 00:36:30 --> 00:36:33 I could have described Emma as shy and quiet. 677 00:36:33 --> 00:36:37 We know that the kid who's shy and quiet in first grade 678 00:36:37 --> 00:36:40 doesn't get the same amount of attention that the 679 00:36:40 --> 00:36:43 bouncy, active kid gets. 680 00:36:43 --> 00:36:49 And in fact, there's some evidence that if you feed 681 00:36:49 --> 00:36:55 something like Prozac to this kid, the kid will move from 682 00:36:55 --> 00:36:59 here in the -- well, we've got to change the axis again. 683 00:36:59 --> 00:37:00 You know, I don't know, what's the axis here? 684 00:37:00 --> 00:37:02 Bounciness? 685 00:37:02 --> 00:37:05 Technical term. 686 00:37:05 --> 00:37:05 You know. 687 00:37:05 --> 00:37:10 So the kid's going to move from being unbouncy to, you know, 688 00:37:10 --> 00:37:12 Tigger is up here somewhere. 689 00:37:12 --> 00:37:17 690 00:37:17 --> 00:37:21 As are several -- couple of people out there halfway up the 691 00:37:21 --> 00:37:28 -- so there's Tigger, I guess. 692 00:37:28 --> 00:37:30 But, you know, move them up here, let's say. 693 00:37:30 --> 00:37:32 Get them above average and the teacher's going to pay 694 00:37:32 --> 00:37:34 more attention to them. 695 00:37:34 --> 00:37:35 Is it OK to medicate your kid? 696 00:37:35 --> 00:37:37 AUDIENCE: No. 697 00:37:37 --> 00:37:40 PROFESSOR: If it's -- all right, it's not OK to 698 00:37:40 --> 00:37:40 medicate your kid. 699 00:37:40 --> 00:37:42 I'm not going to medicate my kid. 700 00:37:42 --> 00:37:44 Uh oh. 701 00:37:44 --> 00:37:46 The neighbors. 702 00:37:46 --> 00:37:49 They're medicating their kids. 703 00:37:49 --> 00:37:51 So what they've done -- my kid was right here. 704 00:37:51 --> 00:37:54 He was average, right. 705 00:37:54 --> 00:37:57 All right, now what the neighbors and the population as 706 00:37:57 --> 00:38:01 a whole has done is they moved the whole distribution over. 707 00:38:01 --> 00:38:06 Because they're all handing out Prozac in the lunch box. 708 00:38:06 --> 00:38:10 Now is it fair to my kid -- this is a hypothetical my kid. 709 00:38:10 --> 00:38:12 This is not a real issue on my street in case 710 00:38:12 --> 00:38:13 you're wondering. 711 00:38:13 --> 00:38:17 But is it fair to my kid to not medicate him? 712 00:38:17 --> 00:38:20 He's going to fall behind. 713 00:38:20 --> 00:38:24 Is this systematically different, you know, is this 714 00:38:24 --> 00:38:30 sort of morally or ethically different than the Kaplan 715 00:38:30 --> 00:38:34 or Princeton Review approach to SAT tests? 716 00:38:34 --> 00:38:37 717 00:38:37 --> 00:38:41 What Princeton Review and stuff does is it takes the population 718 00:38:41 --> 00:38:44 and it shoves it on -- everybody gets to gain those 719 00:38:44 --> 00:38:46 hundred points or whatever. 720 00:38:46 --> 00:38:50 So is it OK for you to say, "My kid doesn't need to do that. 721 00:38:50 --> 00:38:55 I didn't do that when I was a kid, and no kid of mine's going 722 00:38:55 --> 00:38:56 to go off and get tutored. 723 00:38:56 --> 00:38:58 He'll do it on his own brains. 724 00:38:58 --> 00:39:01 It's an aptitude test after all." Right. 725 00:39:01 --> 00:39:05 You know, is there a difference between everybody being signed 726 00:39:05 --> 00:39:10 up for Princeton Review versus everybody being signed up, you 727 00:39:10 --> 00:39:11 know, going down to the nurse's office for the 728 00:39:11 --> 00:39:14 daily Prozac dose? 729 00:39:14 --> 00:39:16 Or is there a difference between just sitting there 730 00:39:16 --> 00:39:19 saying, "I'm not going to go and make myself into a better 731 00:39:19 --> 00:39:26 me by popping Prozac all the time. 732 00:39:26 --> 00:39:30 I'll stick with --" What is that, Mountain Dew? 733 00:39:30 --> 00:39:34 You know, twice the caffeine of whatever, right? 734 00:39:34 --> 00:39:35 AUDIENCE: Late night last night. 735 00:39:35 --> 00:39:36 PROFESSOR: Yeah. 736 00:39:36 --> 00:39:37 OK, well, that's good. 737 00:39:37 --> 00:39:38 You're vertical. 738 00:39:38 --> 00:39:40 That's encouraging. 739 00:39:40 --> 00:39:41 Give some to the guy next to you there. 740 00:39:41 --> 00:39:42 He's gone. 741 00:39:42 --> 00:39:45 [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] 742 00:39:45 --> 00:39:46 I shouldn't have said that. 743 00:39:46 --> 00:39:49 744 00:39:49 --> 00:39:52 Anyway, we do this all the time, right? 745 00:39:52 --> 00:39:55 We self-medicate. 746 00:39:55 --> 00:39:59 We self-medicate, particularly with caffeine. 747 00:39:59 --> 00:40:01 But perhaps with a variety of other things. 748 00:40:01 --> 00:40:04 The use of alcohol as an antidepressant is probably a 749 00:40:04 --> 00:40:09 mistake, but is not uncommon. 750 00:40:09 --> 00:40:17 So when is this a sort of an unwarranted medicalization of 751 00:40:17 --> 00:40:21 your life, and when is it, you know, a lifestyle choice? 752 00:40:21 --> 00:40:24 And again, there's not going to be a question on the final that 753 00:40:24 --> 00:40:30 says, "It's OK to drink Mountain Dew: yes, no, only if 754 00:40:30 --> 00:40:37 it was a late night." But you can see that there are 755 00:40:37 --> 00:40:39 issues to wrestle with. 756 00:40:39 --> 00:40:45 And the doctors ended up with or have ended up with a serious 757 00:40:45 --> 00:40:48 problem, which is what do you do with these patients who you 758 00:40:48 --> 00:40:54 cannot in good conscience give a clinical diagnosis of 759 00:40:54 --> 00:40:58 clinical depression to, but who say, you know, if you don't 760 00:40:58 --> 00:41:03 give me my Prozac, I'm just going to be so depressed, who 761 00:41:03 --> 00:41:07 really need that or who think that they really need that. 762 00:41:07 --> 00:41:12 Oh, by the way, OK, what's this? 763 00:41:12 --> 00:41:15 Want to make sure that I do what it says. 764 00:41:15 --> 00:41:15 Oh. 765 00:41:15 --> 00:41:15 Well, OK. 766 00:41:15 --> 00:41:19 Let's say something about how antidepressants work. 767 00:41:19 --> 00:41:24 768 00:41:24 --> 00:41:28 Here's a mystery for you. 769 00:41:28 --> 00:41:30 Take Prozac. 770 00:41:30 --> 00:41:36 It blocks the reuptake pathway within hours. 771 00:41:36 --> 00:41:38 It doesn't take much time at all. 772 00:41:38 --> 00:41:38 OK. 773 00:41:38 --> 00:41:44 So you are down here, clinically depressed. 774 00:41:44 --> 00:41:45 You come into the doctor's office. 775 00:41:45 --> 00:41:47 He says, here's your Prozac. 776 00:41:47 --> 00:41:48 You take the Prozac. 777 00:41:48 --> 00:41:52 A few hours later, more serotonin at 778 00:41:52 --> 00:41:53 all those synapses. 779 00:41:53 --> 00:41:55 How do you feel? 780 00:41:55 --> 00:41:58 Well, you feel depressed, actually. 781 00:41:58 --> 00:42:04 It takes typically at least days, more like several weeks, 782 00:42:04 --> 00:42:10 before an antidepressant of this sort has an effect, beyond 783 00:42:10 --> 00:42:11 perhaps placebo effects. 784 00:42:11 --> 00:42:14 There are placebo effects where you can take any old damn thing 785 00:42:14 --> 00:42:16 and you feel a little better if you're convinced that 786 00:42:16 --> 00:42:17 it's going to work. 787 00:42:17 --> 00:42:21 But the main effect of antidepressants seems 788 00:42:21 --> 00:42:23 to take a long time. 789 00:42:23 --> 00:42:24 That's a mystery. 790 00:42:24 --> 00:42:27 At least as far as I know, there's no neat, clean answer 791 00:42:27 --> 00:42:33 to why it should be the case that the pharmacological effect 792 00:42:33 --> 00:42:37 is there instantly almost and the psychological effect 793 00:42:37 --> 00:42:40 takes a vastly longer time. 794 00:42:40 --> 00:42:43 The reference that I put on the handout is a theory. 795 00:42:43 --> 00:42:44 It's not proven. 796 00:42:44 --> 00:42:48 But it's an interesting theory about what might be going on. 797 00:42:48 --> 00:42:51 As I think I mentioned earlier in the course, one of the 798 00:42:51 --> 00:42:55 interesting new findings in neuroscience is that 799 00:42:55 --> 00:42:56 we grow new neurons. 800 00:42:56 --> 00:42:58 We didn't used to think we grew new neurons. 801 00:42:58 --> 00:43:04 But now it's pretty clear that you grow new neurons. 802 00:43:04 --> 00:43:08 And there's a pretty strong suggestion that this 803 00:43:08 --> 00:43:13 neurogenesis, as it's called, is depressed in depression. 804 00:43:13 --> 00:43:15 You're not making those new neurons. 805 00:43:15 --> 00:43:21 And one theory is that what an antidepressant is doing is 806 00:43:21 --> 00:43:24 jump-starting the neurogenesis, that this is the beginning of a 807 00:43:24 --> 00:43:29 cascade of events that leads eventually to the birth of 808 00:43:29 --> 00:43:31 new cells, new neurons. 809 00:43:31 --> 00:43:33 And only when you manage to sort of grow yourself a new bit 810 00:43:33 --> 00:43:40 of brain, in a sense, does it help you to break out 811 00:43:40 --> 00:43:44 of the depression. 812 00:43:44 --> 00:43:46 The data on how well these things work is a little 813 00:43:46 --> 00:43:47 depressing in its own right. 814 00:43:47 --> 00:43:52 815 00:43:52 --> 00:43:55 Antidepressants, like a lot of these -- antidepressants 816 00:43:55 --> 00:43:58 don't work as well once they go off patent. 817 00:43:58 --> 00:44:02 It's a mysterious thing. 818 00:44:02 --> 00:44:04 You want to worry about this. 819 00:44:04 --> 00:44:07 Over and over again you get some cool new drug like Prozac. 820 00:44:07 --> 00:44:09 It's got no after effects. 821 00:44:09 --> 00:44:11 It cures the disease like that. 822 00:44:11 --> 00:44:16 And everybody is better, and it's a miracle drug. 823 00:44:16 --> 00:44:19 Amazingly, by the time, you know, Eli Lilly or whoever's 824 00:44:19 --> 00:44:22 patent has worn off, it now has side effects, doesn't work all 825 00:44:22 --> 00:44:27 that well, but you want to try my new amazing wonder drug. 826 00:44:27 --> 00:44:30 So the last few reviews I've read of the effectiveness of 827 00:44:30 --> 00:44:33 antidepressants have been, well, they've been sort of 828 00:44:33 --> 00:44:38 depressing, actually, that they're not magic bullets. 829 00:44:38 --> 00:44:41 Now, there are several ways to treat depression. 830 00:44:41 --> 00:44:45 And how you treat it depends -- there are also several 831 00:44:45 --> 00:44:48 flavors of depression. 832 00:44:48 --> 00:44:51 Not all depressions -- well, certainly not all are bipolar. 833 00:44:51 --> 00:44:56 And there's evidence that they differ both in their symptoms 834 00:44:56 --> 00:44:59 and in their neurochemistry. 835 00:44:59 --> 00:45:02 So for instance, say, I think it says on the handout -- 836 00:45:02 --> 00:45:05 yeah, typical versus atypical depression. 837 00:45:05 --> 00:45:09 I'm sure if I rummaged around I'd remember which was which. 838 00:45:09 --> 00:45:15 But in some forms of depression, people sleep 839 00:45:15 --> 00:45:17 too much and eat too much. 840 00:45:17 --> 00:45:19 In other forms of depression, they sleep too little 841 00:45:19 --> 00:45:22 and eat too little. 842 00:45:22 --> 00:45:27 They're both depressions in terms of the mood, but they 843 00:45:27 --> 00:45:31 are clinically distinct and psychopharmacologically 844 00:45:31 --> 00:45:32 distinct. 845 00:45:32 --> 00:45:42 Actually, bipolar disorders, the treatment of choice for 846 00:45:42 --> 00:45:45 long before Prozac came on the scene was of all 847 00:45:45 --> 00:45:46 things lithium chloride. 848 00:45:46 --> 00:45:49 It's just the salt of lithium. 849 00:45:49 --> 00:45:51 You know, just move right up from sodium chloride. 850 00:45:51 --> 00:45:54 851 00:45:54 --> 00:45:58 Jamison credits lithium with keeping her alive, that if she 852 00:45:58 --> 00:46:03 had not been put on lithium as a treatment for her bipolar 853 00:46:03 --> 00:46:05 disorder, that she thinks she probably would have ended 854 00:46:05 --> 00:46:07 up committing suicide. 855 00:46:07 --> 00:46:11 Anybody an expert on how lithium works? 856 00:46:11 --> 00:46:11 No. 857 00:46:11 --> 00:46:13 I think I don't know the answer to this. 858 00:46:13 --> 00:46:14 I'm not sure it's known. 859 00:46:14 --> 00:46:16 The last time I checked on it, we didn't know how it worked. 860 00:46:16 --> 00:46:19 It was -- how was it discovered? 861 00:46:19 --> 00:46:22 It was discovered in some bizarro fashion. 862 00:46:22 --> 00:46:26 You know, where do you find lithium? 863 00:46:26 --> 00:46:30 Like a salt -- I'm remembering some odd 864 00:46:30 --> 00:46:31 story about, you know -- 865 00:46:31 --> 00:46:32 AUDIENCE: Batteries? 866 00:46:32 --> 00:46:32 PROFESSOR: Fine. 867 00:46:32 --> 00:46:34 Batteries? 868 00:46:34 --> 00:46:36 That people -- that's -- 869 00:46:36 --> 00:46:38 AUDIENCE: 7 Up. 870 00:46:38 --> 00:46:39 PROFESSOR: 7 Up. 871 00:46:39 --> 00:46:43 OK, if you dissolve your battery in 7 Up, I don't know 872 00:46:43 --> 00:46:45 what happens but I don't imagine it's good because the 873 00:46:45 --> 00:46:46 mercury and the rest of it probably isn't really 874 00:46:46 --> 00:46:47 good for you. 875 00:46:47 --> 00:46:50 876 00:46:50 --> 00:47:00 The other treatment for -- now, sadly not all depressions are 877 00:47:00 --> 00:47:02 amenable to pharmacology. 878 00:47:02 --> 00:47:09 Oh, first of all, the big mistake, which I think the 879 00:47:09 --> 00:47:14 insurance people are growing out of, was the notion, OK, now 880 00:47:14 --> 00:47:17 that we've got these cool pills, we'll pay for the 881 00:47:17 --> 00:47:19 pills, but that's it. 882 00:47:19 --> 00:47:26 So if it's going to take you several weeks for the medicine 883 00:47:26 --> 00:47:29 to work, it turns out to be very helpful if you're actually 884 00:47:29 --> 00:47:32 talking to somebody during this time, if there's some 885 00:47:32 --> 00:47:36 psychotherapy of some sort going on. 886 00:47:36 --> 00:47:38 Because if you are down here in the depths of the depression 887 00:47:38 --> 00:47:41 and some genius hands you a pill and says, "Go away. 888 00:47:41 --> 00:47:45 Don't bother me no more." You know, if it's true that as 889 00:47:45 --> 00:47:47 you're slowly coming out of the depression, that's when the 890 00:47:47 --> 00:47:51 suicides take place, you know, this is a recipe for disaster. 891 00:47:51 --> 00:47:54 And if it takes a long time to work -- you know, if you take a 892 00:47:54 --> 00:47:57 medicine and nothing happens for weeks, what do you do? 893 00:47:57 --> 00:47:59 You stop taking the medicine. 894 00:47:59 --> 00:48:04 And so what you really need typically as part of a sensible 895 00:48:04 --> 00:48:08 treatment for a depression is not only somebody who will give 896 00:48:08 --> 00:48:09 you the medicine, but somebody who will talk 897 00:48:09 --> 00:48:11 to you about it too. 898 00:48:11 --> 00:48:14 But even so there are depressions that are not 899 00:48:14 --> 00:48:18 amenable -- or don't seem to respond well to any 900 00:48:18 --> 00:48:20 of the medicines that we have at the moment. 901 00:48:20 --> 00:48:24 And under the heading of even more unlikely treatments that 902 00:48:24 --> 00:48:29 really turn out to work, more unlikely than feeding them 903 00:48:29 --> 00:48:33 lithium salts, is what's known as ECT for 904 00:48:33 --> 00:48:35 electroconvulsive therapy. 905 00:48:35 --> 00:48:38 I talked about this a bit when we were talking about memory. 906 00:48:38 --> 00:48:40 Remember this is little rats. 907 00:48:40 --> 00:48:41 They step down. 908 00:48:41 --> 00:48:44 You run electrical current through their heads. 909 00:48:44 --> 00:48:45 You shock their little feet. 910 00:48:45 --> 00:48:47 You run electrical current through their brains. 911 00:48:47 --> 00:48:48 They don't remember that you shocked their feet, so they 912 00:48:48 --> 00:48:50 step down again, you know. 913 00:48:50 --> 00:48:51 Sound familiar? 914 00:48:51 --> 00:48:54 OK, good. 915 00:48:54 --> 00:48:57 Well, this is a treatment for depression. 916 00:48:57 --> 00:49:04 Not abundantly clear why it works, but in my circle of 917 00:49:04 --> 00:49:11 friends, I have a friend who actually went back to -- 918 00:49:11 --> 00:49:13 graduated college, went off, did a whole bunch of stuff, 919 00:49:13 --> 00:49:18 then went back to med school, then became desperately 920 00:49:18 --> 00:49:23 clinically depressed and had to be hospitalized. 921 00:49:23 --> 00:49:29 And what got her through it was electroconvulsive therapy. 922 00:49:29 --> 00:49:33 Not an entirely benign procedure. 923 00:49:33 --> 00:49:36 It does have memory side effects. 924 00:49:36 --> 00:49:39 But it used to be that nobody in an intro psych class thought 925 00:49:39 --> 00:49:41 this was a good idea at all because everybody had seen One 926 00:49:41 --> 00:49:43 Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. 927 00:49:43 --> 00:49:45 How many people have seen that movie? 928 00:49:45 --> 00:49:47 Oh, so still a fair number people have seen it. 929 00:49:47 --> 00:49:49 That's a movie that does nothing good for the reputation 930 00:49:49 --> 00:49:51 of electroconvulsive therapy. 931 00:49:51 --> 00:49:55 Electroconvulsive therapy these days is, you know, you 932 00:49:55 --> 00:49:56 give somebody a sedative. 933 00:49:56 --> 00:49:58 They don't thrash around. 934 00:49:58 --> 00:49:59 They don't hurt themselves. 935 00:49:59 --> 00:50:02 It still has memory consequences, consolidation of 936 00:50:02 --> 00:50:04 memory consequences, but it really does seem to 937 00:50:04 --> 00:50:09 mysteriously break up depressions. 938 00:50:09 --> 00:50:14 Now the latest wrinkle on this, you know, what boils down 939 00:50:14 --> 00:50:17 to smack-them-up-th e-side-of-the-head treatments 940 00:50:17 --> 00:50:21 of depression is the use of, very new, is the use of 941 00:50:21 --> 00:50:25 transcranial magnetic stimulation, which I think I 942 00:50:25 --> 00:50:26 also talked about earlier. 943 00:50:26 --> 00:50:29 But basically what you do is you put a giant electromagnet 944 00:50:29 --> 00:50:32 or strong electromagnet next to the skull. 945 00:50:32 --> 00:50:37 You fire a big pulse of -- a big magnetic field that induces 946 00:50:37 --> 00:50:44 an electrical field locally and knocks out neural 947 00:50:44 --> 00:50:47 activity locally. 948 00:50:47 --> 00:50:50 And there's some evidence that properly applied, that this is 949 00:50:50 --> 00:50:56 a sort of a kinder, gentler version of ECT, that it acts 950 00:50:56 --> 00:50:57 to break up depressions. 951 00:50:57 --> 00:50:59 I don't -- anybody know if there's a brilliant theory 952 00:50:59 --> 00:51:01 for how that works? 953 00:51:01 --> 00:51:02 Uh, who knows? 954 00:51:02 --> 00:51:06 But it's very new. 955 00:51:06 --> 00:51:10 But I expect that in a few years, I'll be lecturing 956 00:51:10 --> 00:51:11 more about that. 957 00:51:11 --> 00:51:18 Because it, at least initially, sounds rather promising. 958 00:51:18 --> 00:51:18 All right. 959 00:51:18 --> 00:51:26 I think this would be a good time to take a break. 960 00:51:26 --> 00:51:30 Let's take -- unless you're too depressed to get 961 00:51:30 --> 00:51:31 up, take a break. 962 00:51:31 --> 00:51:42 963 00:51:42 --> 00:51:47 AUDIENCE: I read Jamison's book. 964 00:51:47 --> 00:51:47 PROFESSOR: Uh huh. 965 00:51:47 --> 00:51:48 Which one? 966 00:51:48 --> 00:51:49 AUDIENCE: Prozac Nation. 967 00:51:49 --> 00:51:50 PROFESSOR: No. 968 00:51:50 --> 00:51:51 Prozac Nation is somebody else's book. 969 00:51:51 --> 00:51:52 AUDIENCE: Not Jamison? 970 00:51:52 --> 00:51:53 PROFESSOR: No, that's somebody else. 971 00:51:53 --> 00:51:56 I can't remember who wrote it, but yes, that's 972 00:51:56 --> 00:51:57 a cool book, too. 973 00:51:57 --> 00:51:57 AUDIENCE: Yes. 974 00:51:57 --> 00:51:58 That's what I thought you were talking about. 975 00:51:58 --> 00:51:59 PROFESSOR: Nope. 976 00:51:59 --> 00:52:00 Nope. 977 00:52:00 --> 00:52:02 But you'll come back and tell me who wrote it. 978 00:52:02 --> 00:52:05 Because we're both forgetting who wrote it. 979 00:52:05 --> 00:52:08 AUDIENCE: Have they ever done, what is it, using sugar pill 980 00:52:08 --> 00:52:10 and Prozac and hand them out to patients and just seeing 981 00:52:10 --> 00:52:11 if the sugar pill -- 982 00:52:11 --> 00:52:16 PROFESSOR: It's a big problem in mental illness in general 983 00:52:16 --> 00:52:19 and certainly in depression, which is, particularly if 984 00:52:19 --> 00:52:21 you've got a cycling depression, who's 985 00:52:21 --> 00:52:22 going to get better? 986 00:52:22 --> 00:52:22 Right? 987 00:52:22 --> 00:52:30 And, yeah, the difference between placebos and Prozac is, 988 00:52:30 --> 00:52:33 at least in some of the studies that I've read, a lot less 989 00:52:33 --> 00:52:36 dramatic than you would think. 990 00:52:36 --> 00:52:41 And the problem with a population like us is that 991 00:52:41 --> 00:52:44 we're too well informed. 992 00:52:44 --> 00:52:45 Placebos are great. 993 00:52:45 --> 00:52:48 The side effects are really limited. 994 00:52:48 --> 00:52:51 In the good old days, your doctor would come around, have 995 00:52:51 --> 00:52:55 no clue, you know, how to treat you, but give you, you know, 996 00:52:55 --> 00:53:01 Dr. Hoozy's magic elixir, and you'd feel better. 997 00:53:01 --> 00:53:04 And it's a great pity that now if I fed you Dr. Hoozy's 998 00:53:04 --> 00:53:07 elixir, the first thing you'd do is Google it and discover 999 00:53:07 --> 00:53:10 that it's snake oil, and feel worse and sue me. 1000 00:53:10 --> 00:53:17 So, yeah, if you turn out to be particularly interested, send 1001 00:53:17 --> 00:53:20 me an email and I can send you a couple of the references of 1002 00:53:20 --> 00:53:22 things that depressed me when I read them. 1003 00:53:22 --> 00:53:25 Because they weren't that much good. 1004 00:53:25 --> 00:53:28 On the other hand, my mother absolutely 1005 00:53:28 --> 00:53:31 swears by this stuff. 1006 00:53:31 --> 00:53:34 She's had her own issues with depression and thinks 1007 00:53:34 --> 00:53:35 that Prozac is wonderful. 1008 00:53:35 --> 00:55:33 [PRIVATE CONVERSATION] 1009 00:55:33 --> 00:55:38 PROFESSOR: I want to talk about a couple of other disease, you 1010 00:55:38 --> 00:55:46 know, mental illness states, in part as a way of illustrating 1011 00:55:46 --> 00:55:50 -- I guess what I really want to illustrate in the last bit 1012 00:55:50 --> 00:55:55 of this lecture is the, sort of, mind and brain links. 1013 00:55:55 --> 00:55:59 We tend to like to make up theories that are 1014 00:55:59 --> 00:56:00 one or the other. 1015 00:56:00 --> 00:56:04 And the current popular trend is towards brain explanations. 1016 00:56:04 --> 00:56:08 Oh, you're depressed because you don't have enough 1017 00:56:08 --> 00:56:10 serotonin happening for you. 1018 00:56:10 --> 00:56:11 We'll boost up your serotonin. 1019 00:56:11 --> 00:56:12 You'll be fine. 1020 00:56:12 --> 00:56:14 It's a very brain kind of thing. 1021 00:56:14 --> 00:56:17 Freudian theories were very mind kinds of things. 1022 00:56:17 --> 00:56:22 But there's a number of cases that really illustrate, I 1023 00:56:22 --> 00:56:28 think, well, what you sort of know intuitively, right? 1024 00:56:28 --> 00:56:31 The brain isn't here and the mind is here. 1025 00:56:31 --> 00:56:33 It's, you know, waves and particles. 1026 00:56:33 --> 00:56:36 They're two manifestations of the same thing. 1027 00:56:36 --> 00:56:39 And brain stuff and mind stuff bounce back and 1028 00:56:39 --> 00:56:41 forth here all the time. 1029 00:56:41 --> 00:56:46 So let's think, for example, of panic attacks. 1030 00:56:46 --> 00:56:49 Which I didn't put on the handout at all, I see, but I 1031 00:56:49 --> 00:56:52 suddenly developed a need to talk about because I 1032 00:56:52 --> 00:56:58 was feeling really anxious and -- no. 1033 00:56:58 --> 00:57:04 So panic attack is this feeling of anxiety out of the blue. 1034 00:57:04 --> 00:57:08 1035 00:57:08 --> 00:57:10 People report that they just suddenly feel very, very, 1036 00:57:10 --> 00:57:13 very fearful and anxious. 1037 00:57:13 --> 00:57:17 And it's scary and it's unpleasant and so on. 1038 00:57:17 --> 00:57:21 You may recall that Freud and his followers had a perfectly 1039 00:57:21 --> 00:57:25 nice notion about this, which was that anxiety was warning 1040 00:57:25 --> 00:57:30 you that you were about to tread on the super ego. 1041 00:57:30 --> 00:57:34 And it was the warning sign of the ego that was saying, 1042 00:57:34 --> 00:57:35 don't go and do that. 1043 00:57:35 --> 00:57:39 But that hasn't worked that well. 1044 00:57:39 --> 00:57:44 More modern notions tend to focus on the idea that it's 1045 00:57:44 --> 00:57:46 essentially neurochemical. 1046 00:57:46 --> 00:57:49 1047 00:57:49 --> 00:57:54 You get too much of some juice, some neurotransmitter. 1048 00:57:54 --> 00:57:57 It fires off the bits of your brain that are responsible for 1049 00:57:57 --> 00:57:59 the experience of anxiety. 1050 00:57:59 --> 00:58:02 And you feel this anxiety. 1051 00:58:02 --> 00:58:07 And this is a lovely case of looping back to a prior 1052 00:58:07 --> 00:58:10 mode of understanding. 1053 00:58:10 --> 00:58:13 The notion that you feel too anxious because you have too 1054 00:58:13 --> 00:58:16 much of this fluid, it's an awful lot like the notion that 1055 00:58:16 --> 00:58:20 you feel melancholic because you have too much black bile. 1056 00:58:20 --> 00:58:22 The difference of course is that we think we've got 1057 00:58:22 --> 00:58:23 a better scientific grounding than we had. 1058 00:58:23 --> 00:58:29 But the form of the argument is rather similar. 1059 00:58:29 --> 00:58:33 So is it the case that panic attacks, the clinical condition 1060 00:58:33 --> 00:58:39 of a panic attack, is just too much of some juice. 1061 00:58:39 --> 00:58:43 It's possible to think about it as being somewhat more 1062 00:58:43 --> 00:58:45 complicated than that. 1063 00:58:45 --> 00:58:47 And, well, I didn't put that reference on the handout, 1064 00:58:47 --> 00:58:48 because I didn't. 1065 00:58:48 --> 00:58:54 But I'm stealing a story from -- who am I stealing it from? 1066 00:58:54 --> 00:59:00 Oh, Dave Barlow, who's over at BU. 1067 00:59:00 --> 00:59:05 This is a three-step route into panic attack. 1068 00:59:05 --> 00:59:12 And the first part of it is that you feel the visible 1069 00:59:12 --> 00:59:15 symptoms of anxiety. 1070 00:59:15 --> 00:59:22 Your heart starts -- remember the shaky bridge experiment 1071 00:59:22 --> 00:59:25 all about misattribution of arousal? 1072 00:59:25 --> 00:59:28 You're feeling "ooh-ooh-ooh" and you see her, and you just 1073 00:59:28 --> 00:59:31 think you're feeling "aah." Right? 1074 00:59:31 --> 00:59:34 So that can work in all sorts of ways. 1075 00:59:34 --> 00:59:38 Suppose that your heart is going through -- there are a 1076 00:59:38 --> 00:59:41 variety of things that cause your heart to go pitter-pat. 1077 00:59:41 --> 00:59:46 Suppose that you get these sort of symptoms and you don't 1078 00:59:46 --> 00:59:50 interpret it as love, you interpret it as "I feel 1079 00:59:50 --> 00:59:52 nervous about something. 1080 00:59:52 --> 00:59:55 I can't quite tell exactly what it is. 1081 00:59:55 --> 00:59:56 But I don't --" 1082 00:59:56 --> 00:59:58 People don't have panic attacks, by the way, 1083 00:59:58 --> 01:00:02 typically, when they're exercising vigorously. 1084 01:00:02 --> 01:00:04 Because they've got a good account of where that 1085 01:00:04 --> 01:00:05 symptom is coming from. 1086 01:00:05 --> 01:00:08 Your heart's pounding, you're sweating, and stuff like that. 1087 01:00:08 --> 01:00:09 Yeah, all right, fine. 1088 01:00:09 --> 01:00:11 If you're walking down the street and your heart is 1089 01:00:11 --> 01:00:15 pounding and you're sweating, you need a different 1090 01:00:15 --> 01:00:16 interpretation. 1091 01:00:16 --> 01:00:19 Now, this is unpleasant. 1092 01:00:19 --> 01:00:23 So you develop, flipping back to an earlier piece of the 1093 01:00:23 --> 01:00:27 course, you develop a conditioned fear of 1094 01:00:27 --> 01:00:29 these symptoms. 1095 01:00:29 --> 01:00:38 So you start avoiding situations that would produce 1096 01:00:38 --> 01:00:43 the symptoms, or that you think might produce these symptoms. 1097 01:00:43 --> 01:00:46 And this can be quite unconscious, right? 1098 01:00:46 --> 01:00:49 This is good classical association learning or 1099 01:00:49 --> 01:00:52 something of that sort. 1100 01:00:52 --> 01:00:55 And that in turn -- that's sort of step two, is sort of a 1101 01:00:55 --> 01:01:04 learning story that is going to cause you to start -- you're 1102 01:01:04 --> 01:01:07 going to act to avoid situations that make 1103 01:01:07 --> 01:01:10 you feel nervous. 1104 01:01:10 --> 01:01:15 But, all right, remember Pavlov? 1105 01:01:15 --> 01:01:16 Bell, tone. 1106 01:01:16 --> 01:01:17 Bell, tone. 1107 01:01:17 --> 01:01:18 Bell, tone. 1108 01:01:18 --> 01:01:19 Now I ring the bell by itself. 1109 01:01:19 --> 01:01:20 No. 1110 01:01:20 --> 01:01:20 Bell, tone. 1111 01:01:20 --> 01:01:23 That's stupid. 1112 01:01:23 --> 01:01:26 I'm not supposed to be the one who notices that first, guys. 1113 01:01:26 --> 01:01:27 You're supposed to -- "What's he talking about?" 1114 01:01:27 --> 01:01:28 Anyway, bell, food. 1115 01:01:28 --> 01:01:29 Bell, food. 1116 01:01:29 --> 01:01:30 Bell, food. 1117 01:01:30 --> 01:01:32 Eventually the bell by itself produces salivation. 1118 01:01:32 --> 01:01:37 So you make this association in your own mind. 1119 01:01:37 --> 01:01:40 So when did this happen to me? 1120 01:01:40 --> 01:01:42 I was outside. 1121 01:01:42 --> 01:01:43 OK. 1122 01:01:43 --> 01:01:47 So now I'm outside, it doesn't happen to me. 1123 01:01:47 --> 01:01:51 But I feel -- I get the conditioned response in effect. 1124 01:01:51 --> 01:01:55 So now something else acts as a trigger for the panic. 1125 01:01:55 --> 01:01:58 The initial feeling of panic might have been, I don't 1126 01:01:58 --> 01:02:03 know, too many bottles of Mountain Dew, right. 1127 01:02:03 --> 01:02:06 You drink enough caffeine, and you'll get b-b-b-b. 1128 01:02:06 --> 01:02:08 Forget that you drank -- your brain doesn't remember the 1129 01:02:08 --> 01:02:10 caffeine part of the story. 1130 01:02:10 --> 01:02:11 And you're going b-b-b-b. 1131 01:02:11 --> 01:02:12 And you say, "Oh! 1132 01:02:12 --> 01:02:17 I'm having a panic attack." Then you don't want that -- 1133 01:02:17 --> 01:02:20 this is an aversive event. 1134 01:02:20 --> 01:02:23 It's just like the business of the rat stepping down, right? 1135 01:02:23 --> 01:02:27 The rat steps down -- oh, all right. 1136 01:02:27 --> 01:02:31 Rat's up here, rat steps down, gets his little feet shocked. 1137 01:02:31 --> 01:02:32 That's unpleasant. 1138 01:02:32 --> 01:02:34 Rat's put back up here. 1139 01:02:34 --> 01:02:35 Does the rat step down again? 1140 01:02:35 --> 01:02:36 No. 1141 01:02:36 --> 01:02:36 Why? 1142 01:02:36 --> 01:02:38 Because he's got this anticipatory fear. 1143 01:02:38 --> 01:02:41 You can actually measure the fear physiologically. 1144 01:02:41 --> 01:02:45 All right, so you caffeine overdose or whatever. 1145 01:02:45 --> 01:02:47 You have this unpleasant experience. 1146 01:02:47 --> 01:02:50 Now you're in that environment again sometime later and you 1147 01:02:50 --> 01:02:53 have the experience again because it's a conditioned 1148 01:02:53 --> 01:02:56 response now, no caffeine involved. 1149 01:02:56 --> 01:03:01 You come to the reasonable, if perhaps unconscious, conclusion 1150 01:03:01 --> 01:03:08 that what makes me nervous is being outside in public 1151 01:03:08 --> 01:03:10 or being on shaky bridges or whatever. 1152 01:03:10 --> 01:03:13 Then you get step three, which is again learning theory kind 1153 01:03:13 --> 01:03:15 of stuff like Thorndike's Law of Effect. 1154 01:03:15 --> 01:03:22 You start doing things to avoid this punishment, right. 1155 01:03:22 --> 01:03:25 You're going to avoid the aversive stimulus. 1156 01:03:25 --> 01:03:29 So you can get secondary symptoms to the panic, like a 1157 01:03:29 --> 01:03:36 fear of open spaces, let's say, because you've now, perhaps 1158 01:03:36 --> 01:03:39 completely unconsciously, concluded, "If I go out in 1159 01:03:39 --> 01:03:41 public, the sky is so big. 1160 01:03:41 --> 01:03:42 I feel so small. 1161 01:03:42 --> 01:03:44 I get panicky. 1162 01:03:44 --> 01:03:46 And so now I'm not going to go outside." 1163 01:03:46 --> 01:03:50 And so what you end up with is the possibility that the 1164 01:03:50 --> 01:03:53 clinical thing that you see, what you get in your office if 1165 01:03:53 --> 01:03:57 you're the clinician, is somebody who says, "I have, you 1166 01:03:57 --> 01:04:00 know, I have uncontrollable panic when I'm outdoors. 1167 01:04:00 --> 01:04:03 This is crippling my life because I don't go out 1168 01:04:03 --> 01:04:07 anymore." And what this may be is a cascade of events coming 1169 01:04:07 --> 01:04:11 from some sort of an initial physiological issue that you 1170 01:04:11 --> 01:04:15 then learned about, if you like, using the laws of animal 1171 01:04:15 --> 01:04:20 learning, in ways that that don't work well. 1172 01:04:20 --> 01:04:22 Well, what are you going to do about it? 1173 01:04:22 --> 01:04:24 Well, one thing you might do about it if you believed that 1174 01:04:24 --> 01:04:28 there was a significant learning component here is to 1175 01:04:28 --> 01:04:32 use learning theory kinds of things to treat it. 1176 01:04:32 --> 01:04:36 Now if it turns out that there really is a chemical imbalance 1177 01:04:36 --> 01:04:39 and every time the chemicals go out of whack, you feel 1178 01:04:39 --> 01:04:41 panicked, you might want to do something about the chemicals. 1179 01:04:41 --> 01:04:44 But if you've got one of these situations where the person has 1180 01:04:44 --> 01:04:49 basically scared themselves into maladaptive behavior, 1181 01:04:49 --> 01:04:52 you've now got to un-scare them. 1182 01:04:52 --> 01:04:53 So what are you going to do? 1183 01:04:53 --> 01:04:56 One of the standard techniques for these sort of disorders 1184 01:04:56 --> 01:04:59 would be desensitization methods. 1185 01:04:59 --> 01:05:01 Is it Barlow who was doing this? 1186 01:05:01 --> 01:05:04 1187 01:05:04 --> 01:05:07 So one of the versions -- you can imagine -- I did a 1188 01:05:07 --> 01:05:09 version where you became scared of the outside. 1189 01:05:09 --> 01:05:13 Another version is you have a panic attack in an enclosed 1190 01:05:13 --> 01:05:15 space and you become very nervous about enclosed spaces. 1191 01:05:15 --> 01:05:18 You won't go into elevators and stuff like that. 1192 01:05:18 --> 01:05:22 I can't remember if it was Barlow -- I got a feeling it 1193 01:05:22 --> 01:05:27 was -- whose technique for -- there are a variety of ways of 1194 01:05:27 --> 01:05:30 using learning theory to get around this. 1195 01:05:30 --> 01:05:32 One is the kinder, gentler one. 1196 01:05:32 --> 01:05:34 So you come to me. 1197 01:05:34 --> 01:05:37 You say, "I'm really afraid of being in enclosed spaces." 1198 01:05:37 --> 01:05:43 You say, "OK" -- the first cure out in this field that you've 1199 01:05:43 --> 01:05:46 come to, that I'm using for my doctor's office at the 1200 01:05:46 --> 01:05:49 moment -- "Imagine that you're in a space. 1201 01:05:49 --> 01:05:50 Can you deal with that?" 1202 01:05:50 --> 01:05:52 "Oh, it's making me nervous, but, yeah, OK, I can 1203 01:05:52 --> 01:05:53 deal with that." 1204 01:05:53 --> 01:05:55 "OK, now we'll go to 10-250. 1205 01:05:55 --> 01:05:57 It's a big enclosed space. 1206 01:05:57 --> 01:05:59 And then we'll go to a smaller room and a smaller room. 1207 01:05:59 --> 01:06:04 And eventually we'll put you in a closet for a while. 1208 01:06:04 --> 01:06:06 And you'll discover -- what you'll do is un-learn 1209 01:06:06 --> 01:06:08 the response, in effect. 1210 01:06:08 --> 01:06:12 You'll learn nothing bad happened to me." 1211 01:06:12 --> 01:06:18 And this behaviorist sort of therapy does work to break up 1212 01:06:18 --> 01:06:21 these sorts of behaviors in many cases. 1213 01:06:21 --> 01:06:25 I think it's Barlow who has been advocating a much less 1214 01:06:25 --> 01:06:27 kinder, gentler version, which is to shut 1215 01:06:27 --> 01:06:29 people in car trunks. 1216 01:06:29 --> 01:06:32 1217 01:06:32 --> 01:06:34 So none of this business of doing it gradually. 1218 01:06:34 --> 01:06:37 This is known in the trade as flooding. 1219 01:06:37 --> 01:06:41 You just take the -- the guy says, "You know, I think if 1220 01:06:41 --> 01:06:45 I'm in an enclosed space, I'm going to die." 1221 01:06:45 --> 01:06:46 "All right. 1222 01:06:46 --> 01:06:46 Boom. 1223 01:06:46 --> 01:06:48 You dead yet? 1224 01:06:48 --> 01:06:48 No. 1225 01:06:48 --> 01:06:49 OK. 1226 01:06:49 --> 01:06:50 You're cured. 1227 01:06:50 --> 01:06:50 Good. 1228 01:06:50 --> 01:06:50 Out." 1229 01:06:50 --> 01:06:53 Well, it's not quite that simple, but the basic idea is 1230 01:06:53 --> 01:06:58 that if you have a patient who can actually deal with this, 1231 01:06:58 --> 01:07:02 that you can basically speed up the therapy rather dramatically 1232 01:07:02 --> 01:07:06 by not moving gradually to -- this is used for all 1233 01:07:06 --> 01:07:08 sorts of phobias. 1234 01:07:08 --> 01:07:13 So, scared of snakes, you know, you're pathologically 1235 01:07:13 --> 01:07:14 scared of snakes. 1236 01:07:14 --> 01:07:19 OK, what we'll do is first we'll show you -- so the two 1237 01:07:19 --> 01:07:21 versions are desensitization and flooding. 1238 01:07:21 --> 01:07:24 The desensitization story would be: 1239 01:07:24 --> 01:07:25 "We'll show you pictures of snakes." 1240 01:07:25 --> 01:07:27 "Ooh, I hate it. 1241 01:07:27 --> 01:07:27 I hate it." 1242 01:07:27 --> 01:07:27 "Are you dead?" 1243 01:07:27 --> 01:07:27 "No." 1244 01:07:27 --> 01:07:33 "Oh, OK." So now we'll go to the zoo. "And see that 1245 01:07:33 --> 01:07:34 snake cage way over there? 1246 01:07:34 --> 01:07:34 Are you dead yet?" 1247 01:07:34 --> 01:07:35 "No." 1248 01:07:35 --> 01:07:36 "OK, let's get closer. 1249 01:07:36 --> 01:07:37 OK, that's a snake, right. 1250 01:07:37 --> 01:07:38 OK, now you're going to get in with him. 1251 01:07:38 --> 01:07:39 Yeah." 1252 01:07:39 --> 01:07:39 "Aah." 1253 01:07:39 --> 01:07:40 All right. 1254 01:07:40 --> 01:07:42 "But I'm not dead." 1255 01:07:42 --> 01:07:45 And the flooding technique is "You're afraid of snakes? 1256 01:07:45 --> 01:07:47 Boom. 1257 01:07:47 --> 01:07:49 See those boas? 1258 01:07:49 --> 01:07:49 Are you dead?" 1259 01:07:49 --> 01:07:50 "Yes, actually." 1260 01:07:50 --> 01:07:54 [LAUGHTER FROM AUDIENCE] 1261 01:07:54 --> 01:08:02 So, anyway, the point from the panic attack example is that 1262 01:08:02 --> 01:08:06 it's possible that what you're seeing as the clinical entity 1263 01:08:06 --> 01:08:13 is a dance between physiology and learning, in effect, and 1264 01:08:13 --> 01:08:16 that what you learn -- and that a mode of treatment 1265 01:08:16 --> 01:08:19 would be to unlearn. 1266 01:08:19 --> 01:08:22 Now, let's take another example which I did put on the 1267 01:08:22 --> 01:08:24 handout, which is obsessive compulsive disorders. 1268 01:08:24 --> 01:08:27 1269 01:08:27 --> 01:08:32 Obsessive compulsive disorders are, well, there's the 1270 01:08:32 --> 01:08:37 obsessive part and there's the compulsive part. 1271 01:08:37 --> 01:08:42 The obsessive part refers to obsessive thoughts. 1272 01:08:42 --> 01:08:48 What gets you into treatment is not some sort of obsessive 1273 01:08:48 --> 01:08:51 thought that "I love him. 1274 01:08:51 --> 01:08:52 I really love him. 1275 01:08:52 --> 01:08:53 Oh, I love him a lot. 1276 01:08:53 --> 01:08:54 Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. 1277 01:08:54 --> 01:08:56 I can't help but think about him." Yeah, it's a little 1278 01:08:56 --> 01:08:58 obsessive, but tough. 1279 01:08:58 --> 01:09:03 It's "Every time I look at him, I want to rip his guts out. 1280 01:09:03 --> 01:09:07 I'm imagining the knife." You know, or something. 1281 01:09:07 --> 01:09:10 It's disturbing thoughts that somehow won't get 1282 01:09:10 --> 01:09:11 out of your brain. 1283 01:09:11 --> 01:09:16 That's the sort of obsession that people seek treatment for. 1284 01:09:16 --> 01:09:22 And compulsive behaviors are behaviors where -- everybody 1285 01:09:22 --> 01:09:23 has some degree of this. 1286 01:09:23 --> 01:09:29 How many people here have left their room, gotten halfway down 1287 01:09:29 --> 01:09:33 the hall, said "Did I really lock it?", and gone 1288 01:09:33 --> 01:09:35 back to check? 1289 01:09:35 --> 01:09:37 Everybody does that sometime. 1290 01:09:37 --> 01:09:41 Or did I turn the stove off or something like that. 1291 01:09:41 --> 01:09:45 That's normal on compulsion land. 1292 01:09:45 --> 01:09:48 And almost always you have locked it, right? 1293 01:09:48 --> 01:09:51 Because the time you didn't lock it is the time you don't 1294 01:09:51 --> 01:09:55 go back to check, and somebody steals all your stuff. 1295 01:09:55 --> 01:09:56 Very annoying. 1296 01:09:56 --> 01:09:59 I donated a laptop to the criminal elements 1297 01:09:59 --> 01:10:00 doing exactly that. 1298 01:10:00 --> 01:10:01 Very annoying. 1299 01:10:01 --> 01:10:09 But anyway, if you have to go and, you know, get down 1300 01:10:09 --> 01:10:12 the hall, "Did I lock it? 1301 01:10:12 --> 01:10:14 Yep, it's locked. 1302 01:10:14 --> 01:10:19 Did I lock it?" You've got to do that forty or fifty times 1303 01:10:19 --> 01:10:22 and you can't get on with your life, literally. 1304 01:10:22 --> 01:10:25 You can't get to the next event in your life. 1305 01:10:25 --> 01:10:29 That's a compulsion that is likely to lead you to want 1306 01:10:29 --> 01:10:31 to do something about it. 1307 01:10:31 --> 01:10:36 It's interesting that these are compulsions -- rather like 1308 01:10:36 --> 01:10:39 there are similarities in people's narrative dreams -- 1309 01:10:39 --> 01:10:46 that compulsions seem to be drawn from a limited vocabulary 1310 01:10:46 --> 01:10:47 of candidate compulsions. 1311 01:10:47 --> 01:10:49 I mean, I'm sure there's one of everything out there, 1312 01:10:49 --> 01:10:54 but there's lots of hand washers, right. 1313 01:10:54 --> 01:10:56 Actually, I can see my hands are covered in 1314 01:10:56 --> 01:10:57 chalk at the moment. 1315 01:10:57 --> 01:10:58 I should go wash them. 1316 01:10:58 --> 01:10:59 But, you know, why do you wash your hands? 1317 01:10:59 --> 01:11:03 1318 01:11:03 --> 01:11:05 Because your mother said so, right, and because 1319 01:11:05 --> 01:11:06 there's germs on them. 1320 01:11:06 --> 01:11:09 Can you see the germs? 1321 01:11:09 --> 01:11:10 No. 1322 01:11:10 --> 01:11:13 So you got to do the act and convince yourself 1323 01:11:13 --> 01:11:14 that you've done it. 1324 01:11:14 --> 01:11:17 1325 01:11:17 --> 01:11:18 OK, hands are clean. 1326 01:11:18 --> 01:11:21 Are they really clean? 1327 01:11:21 --> 01:11:24 I can't tell because there might be germs there. 1328 01:11:24 --> 01:11:24 I'm going to get sick. 1329 01:11:24 --> 01:11:25 I'll wash them again. 1330 01:11:25 --> 01:11:28 If you have to do this so often that your hands are getting 1331 01:11:28 --> 01:11:36 red and raw, that's a compulsion of some sort. 1332 01:11:36 --> 01:11:41 Now, you can treat OCD, as it's known in the trade, in 1333 01:11:41 --> 01:11:42 a number of different ways. 1334 01:11:42 --> 01:11:48 It turns out, for example, that Prozac is good against 1335 01:11:48 --> 01:11:49 obsessive compulsive disorders. 1336 01:11:49 --> 01:11:53 It breaks up the obsession, you know, the obsessive quality 1337 01:11:53 --> 01:11:57 here of this sort of thought that doesn't quite 1338 01:11:57 --> 01:11:58 work for you. 1339 01:11:58 --> 01:12:01 You can imagine that you've got some little circuit in the 1340 01:12:01 --> 01:12:05 brain somewhere that's a little checker. 1341 01:12:05 --> 01:12:08 You know, did I do what I was supposed to do? 1342 01:12:08 --> 01:12:11 And if that goes a little wacko on you, that that's got too 1343 01:12:11 --> 01:12:14 much serotonin or too little serotonin, I suppose, or 1344 01:12:14 --> 01:12:17 whatever, you know, you might end up in a sort of an infinite 1345 01:12:17 --> 01:12:18 loop where, "Got to check. 1346 01:12:18 --> 01:12:19 Got to check. 1347 01:12:19 --> 01:12:20 Got to check. 1348 01:12:20 --> 01:12:23 Got to check." And something chemical that gives 1349 01:12:23 --> 01:12:26 it a kick will help. 1350 01:12:26 --> 01:12:27 OK. 1351 01:12:27 --> 01:12:28 You can treat it that way. 1352 01:12:28 --> 01:12:32 You can also treat it using the same sort of behavioral 1353 01:12:32 --> 01:12:35 techniques that I was just talking about for phobias. 1354 01:12:35 --> 01:12:38 So let's do it for hand washing. 1355 01:12:38 --> 01:12:41 All right, Patient So and So, why do you have to wash? "Well, 1356 01:12:41 --> 01:12:45 I'm just really concerned that my hands are dirty. 1357 01:12:45 --> 01:12:48 1358 01:12:48 --> 01:12:52 When I get dirt on my hands, I get all excited and 1359 01:12:52 --> 01:12:54 [NERVOUS SOUND]." Right. 1360 01:12:54 --> 01:12:54 All right. 1361 01:12:54 --> 01:12:57 So we can do the densitization business or we can do 1362 01:12:57 --> 01:12:58 the flooding business. 1363 01:12:58 --> 01:13:00 In the interests of time, we'll do flooding. 1364 01:13:00 --> 01:13:01 "All right. 1365 01:13:01 --> 01:13:01 See this? 1366 01:13:01 --> 01:13:02 This is dirt. 1367 01:13:02 --> 01:13:06 Put your hands in it." Right. "Are you dead yet?" 1368 01:13:06 --> 01:13:07 "No." 1369 01:13:07 --> 01:13:07 "All right. 1370 01:13:07 --> 01:13:11 How long can you leave them there?" 1371 01:13:11 --> 01:13:15 And you can basically desensitize this feeling 1372 01:13:15 --> 01:13:20 of deep anxiety about not cleaning your hands. 1373 01:13:20 --> 01:13:20 All right. 1374 01:13:20 --> 01:13:23 So that's mildly interesting. 1375 01:13:23 --> 01:13:30 What's interesting, the reason for raising this question or 1376 01:13:30 --> 01:13:35 this example, comes from this nice article, now more than 1377 01:13:35 --> 01:13:37 a decade old, by Baxter. 1378 01:13:37 --> 01:13:44 You can see obsessive compulsive states 1379 01:13:44 --> 01:13:47 in brain imaging. 1380 01:13:47 --> 01:13:50 There are little bits of brain specifically in the caudate. 1381 01:13:50 --> 01:13:53 It doesn't particularly matter for present purposes 1382 01:13:53 --> 01:13:54 where that might be. 1383 01:13:54 --> 01:13:57 But it's overactive. 1384 01:13:57 --> 01:14:00 You look at the brain of an obsessive compulsive sort, and 1385 01:14:00 --> 01:14:03 this little chunk of brain is busy, you know, 1386 01:14:03 --> 01:14:05 just going nuts. 1387 01:14:05 --> 01:14:10 If you give the patients Prozac, that chunk of brain now 1388 01:14:10 --> 01:14:13 doesn't look weird anymore. 1389 01:14:13 --> 01:14:15 It comes into the normal range. 1390 01:14:15 --> 01:14:20 If you'd go and do behavioral therapy on a patient with the 1391 01:14:20 --> 01:14:25 same story, the same piece of brain comes to look normal. 1392 01:14:25 --> 01:14:29 The point here is that you can reach this chunk of the brain, 1393 01:14:29 --> 01:14:32 if you like, either through the brain sort of neurochemical 1394 01:14:32 --> 01:14:36 route, or through the psych behavioral route. 1395 01:14:36 --> 01:14:40 They're not necessarily either mutually exclusive or, you 1396 01:14:40 --> 01:14:44 know, one works and the other doesn't or something like that. 1397 01:14:44 --> 01:14:47 This is a case where you can get to the source of the 1398 01:14:47 --> 01:14:51 problem, at least in a neurolocalization 1399 01:14:51 --> 01:14:52 kind of a way. 1400 01:14:52 --> 01:14:54 You can get to the source of the problem through 1401 01:14:54 --> 01:14:57 either of these routes. 1402 01:14:57 --> 01:15:00 1403 01:15:00 --> 01:15:06 And I suppose the bottom line here is that in disorder after 1404 01:15:06 --> 01:15:12 disorder, what you find is that there isn't just one way of 1405 01:15:12 --> 01:15:17 treating -- one problem is that in most mental illness 1406 01:15:17 --> 01:15:21 situations, there isn't one magic bullet treatment that 1407 01:15:21 --> 01:15:23 automatically works for you. 1408 01:15:23 --> 01:15:27 And then in many of these cases, there are both brain 1409 01:15:27 --> 01:15:31 and mind routes to therapy. 1410 01:15:31 --> 01:15:36 So when you're asking -- when you have like these patients we 1411 01:15:36 --> 01:15:42 were cooking up, when you have a particular patient, there's a 1412 01:15:42 --> 01:15:48 spectrum of choices that might potentially be of some use. 1413 01:15:48 --> 01:15:51 It says on the handout, "What happens when drugs make us 1414 01:15:51 --> 01:15:54 better than we ever were?" That was the example I was talking 1415 01:15:54 --> 01:16:01 about before of Emma, who feels better on Prozac even though 1416 01:16:01 --> 01:16:08 she wasn't technically -- didn't have a reasonable 1417 01:16:08 --> 01:16:11 diagnosis of something being wrong with her. 1418 01:16:11 --> 01:16:13 So we've already talked about that. 1419 01:16:13 --> 01:16:18 So I think I'll quit. 1420 01:16:18 --> 01:16:20 See you next week. 1421 01:16:20 --> 01:16:21