Tag: brain info

Effects of pollution on mood – Mad in America

Air pollution has a history of going unnoticed or underestimated in its capacity to cause harm. However, a recent study by Teng Yang and colleagues published in JAMA Psychiatry brings attention to the potential danger of air pollutants as exposure becomes increasingly likely, especially for minority groups and low-income families.

“In this cohort study of 389,185 participants, estimated joint exposure to multiple air pollutants was associated with increased risk of depression and anxiety,” the authors write. “Air pollution is increasingly recognized as an important environmental risk factor for mental health. However, epidemiologic evidence on long-term exposure to low levels of air pollutants with incident depression and anxiety is still very limited.”

Common Air Pollutants Connected to Depression and Anxiety

www.madinamerica.com/2023/03/common-air-pollutants-connected-to-depression-and-anxiety/

Watch your mind 🙌

“Watch your mind. Without training it may run away and leave your heart. Do not hold regrets. Cut the ties you have to failure and shame. Let go the pain you are holding in your mind, your shoulders, your heart, all the way to your feet. Let go the pain of your ancestors to make way for those who are heading in our direction. Ask for forgiveness.”- Joy Harjo (U.S. poet laureate)

Mad in America- Rights Get Stomped on – Mine Were

“Psychiatric practice is too often violating human rights, too often incapable of understanding the suffering of people.”

www.madinamerica.com/2023/01/oaks-interviews-benedetto-saraceno/

Faulty Reasoning turned ADHD into a Disease

In a new article in Frontiers in Psychiatry, researchers explain the four strategies used to erroneously conflate the construct of “ADHD” with a medical disease. According to the researchers, the label of ADHD is merely a description of children’s behavior, but the way it is usually discussed “reifies” it—or assumes that description is an objective fact with explanatory power.

“The descriptive classification Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is often mistaken for a disease entity that explains the causes of inattentive and hyperactive behaviors, rather than merely describing the existence of such behaviors,” they write.

Why is this distinction so crucial? The researchers explain:

“The errors and habits of writing may be epistemologically violent by influencing how laypeople and professionals see children and ultimately how children may come to see themselves in a negative way. Beyond that, if the institutional world shaped to help children is based on misguided assumptions, it may cause them harm and help perpetuate the misguided narrative.”

When the complexity of human experience is reduced to a label, other explanations and possibilities are eliminated, and potentially harmful interventions go unchallenged. This is even more problematic, they write, with a contested category like ADHD, which has been disavowed by the very people who created the construct in the first place, such as Allen Frances and Keith Conners.

The Faulty Reasoning That Turned ADHD Into a Disease

a www.madinamerica.com/2023/01/faulty-reasoning-turned-adhd-disease/