LinkBlog
Cannabis, the mind and society: the hash realities (PDF - free reg. req'd)
The Role of Cognitive and Behavioral Therapies in the Treatment of Insomnia
Have you outsourced your brain?
recommended links
Depression Is Real Coalition
-
ABIL: Agoraphobics Building
Independant Lives -
Agoraphobia and Panic
Disorder Foundation -
Anxiety Disorders Association
of America - Anxiety Network Australia
- Anxiety-Panic.Com
- AnxietyZone
- Army Behavioral Health
- BrainPhysics - OCD
-
Canadian Network for Mood
and Anxiety Treatments - Children of Hoarders
- Choices in Mental Health (UK)
-
Dart Foundation: Gateway to PTSD
information -
David Baldwin's
Trauma Information Pages - EMDR Institute, Inc.
- EMDR Network Japan
- Fear of Flying course (free)
- Healthy Minds
- Information for People with Anxiety Disorders
- Internet Guide to REBT, CBT
- Living with a Brain Disorder
- Morita Therapy
- Mayo Clinic : Depression
- Mayo Clinic : GAD
- Mayo Clinic : OCD
- Mayo Clinic : Panic Attacks
- Mayo Clinic : PTSD
- Mayo Clinic : Social Anxiety
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Medicines.org.uk - Anxiety &
Depression guides - Mind-Your-Mind Canada
- National Center for PTSD
-
National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) - No Such Thing As Crazy
- OCD Action, UK
- OCD Ireland
- Obsessive Compulsive Foundation
- Open Minds, Open Doors
- Out of the silence - site for young people with mental illness
- Paniccure.com
- Partners With PTSD
- Prescription Drug Information
- Psychiatric Service Dog Society
- PsychNews
-
Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy (REBT) - Sane Australia
-
Shyness & Social Anxiety
Service of Australia -
Social Phobia/Social Anxiety
Association - Social Anxiety Support board
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South African Depression &
Anxiety Group - Suicide Prevention Help
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tAPir - the Anxiety Panic
internet resource -
The Panic Center (Free
CBT based programs) - The School of OCD
- UN-WHO Drug Trials Database
- U.S. Army Behavioral Health - PTSD
we support
"just don't smoke"
Yul Brynner
- Menthol cigarettes harder to quit
- Secondhand smoke in cars serious threat to kid's health
- Starting smoking young increases addiction risk
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Smoking doesn't slim girls;
stunts boys' growth - 40 reasons why you should quit smoking
- Pregnant smokers 'prime' their kids to smoke
- Smoking related coronary artery disease quickly reversed if young smokers quit
- Not ready to quit? Try cutting back
- Half smoking again within year of lung cancer surgery
- Cutting back 'compensation' increases toxin load per cigarette
- Tobacco companies upped nicotine level 11% since 1998
- Workplace passive smoke increases lung cancer risk
- Hooked by genes: The DNA sequences cigarette companies love
- Smoking causes long lasting changes to brain's bio chemistry
- Nicotine receptor stimulant trebles the odds of stopping smoking
- Bupropion, nortriptyline double chances of quitting
- Nicotine's powerful role in reinforcing smoking
- Pregnant smokers raise child's risk of stroke, heart attack
- Smoking linked to pancreatic cancer
- Neurobiology of Smokers' Cravings
- 'Low cancer risk' cigarettes as deadly as regular kind
- Quitting reduces lung cancer death risk by 70%
- Fetal nicotine exposure linked to teen attention problems
- Outdoor second-hand smoke exposure can harm
- Response to day's first cigarette predicts ease of quitting
- 'Healthy' children of smoking parents aren't really so healthy
- Children of smokers have up to five times higher levels of a nicotine toxin
- Smoking increases risk of dementia
- Smoking kills even after quitting
- Antenatal second hand smoke exposure increases child's psychological problems
- Smoking could kill 1 billion this century: WHO
- Just 1 cigarette can lead to nicotine addiction
- Smokers less likely to survive early stage lung cancer
- Smokeless tobacco delivers carcinogens more efficiently than cigarettes!
- Smoking permanently turns on genes that increase lung cancer susceptibility
- Secondhand smoke a health hazard for pets too
- Hypnosis for smoking cessation sees strong results
- Smoking doesn't burn fat
- Smoking linked to sagging breasts
anti torture campaign
- Torture experts write APA policy
- [APA] still rocked by torture debate
- Petition for psychologists
- AMA president says APA "did not accurately represent our ethical guidelines"
- Psychologists Aiding Torturers
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Annual conference endorses
APA's torture policy :( - Physicians for Human Rights call on Congress to vote No on Military Commissions Bill
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Torture is a Form of Trauma;
Trauma Causes PTSD - Psychoanalysts' association condemns torture use
- Humiliating, inhumane or degrading treatment IS torture
- Two American psychologists accused of war crimes. U.S. DoD investigating.
- DoD report proves psychologists central to POW/detainee abuse (pdf)
- 40 psychologists demand APA change policy on torture (pdf)
- Did the American Psychological Association turn a blind eye to torture for medicine precribing rights?
- Will psychologists still abet torture?
- Psychologist, Author Mary Pipher Returns APA Award Over Interrogation Policy
- Guantanamo Medical Role Likened to South Africa Under Apartheid
Deputy Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Lt. General John (Jeff) Kimmons, has stated that no actionable intelligence had been obtained through abusive interrogation methods in the last 5 years.
monument, Monmouth County
New Jersey.
Enzyme discovery may lead to better PTSD treatments
Rat memory eraser study challenges prevailing theories
A study funded in part by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health has found that chemically blocking an enzyme in a specific area in the brain's cortex, or outer mantle, erases the long-term memory of an aversive event that rats had learned. The erasing occurred even if the blocking agent was administered weeks after the event and appeared to be permanent.
This and related discoveries suggest that the enzyme, known as PKMzeta (PKMζ), may be required for sustaining memories throughout the brain. Most current theories instead hold that long-term memories are encoded as enduring structural changes in the connections between neurons - and thus would not be chemically erasable.
"If PKMzeta gives memories their staying power, it might be an ideal target of new therapies for disorders of memory," suggested NIMH grantee Todd Sacktor, M.D., of the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. "For example, perhaps traumatic memories associated with post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) could be selectively erased by blocking the enzyme. Or perhaps boosting the enzyme action could enhance memory generally for those with mild cognitive impairment."
Sacktor and colleagues Reut Shema and Yadin Dudai, Ph.D., Weizmann Institute of Science, reported on their discovery in a recent issue of the journal Science.
Last year, Sacktor and colleagues showed that PKMζ is required for a process underlying initial formation of long-term spatial memory. Blocking this enzyme in the hippocampus, a memory hub, erased rats' conditioned fear of spaces associated with getting shocked. But little was known about the enzyme's role in the cortex, where most memories are thought to be stored long-term.
To learn more, the researchers conditioned rats to persistently shun the taste of saccharin by pairing it with lithium, which triggers nausea in the animals. But the rats' sweet tooth returned within two hours after the researchers infused a PKMζ-blocking drug called ZIP into the rats' seat of taste memory, known as the insular cortex. ZIP erased the taste aversion even when it was given 25 days after the rats were conditioned. Also, it worked only retroactively - injecting it before conditioning did not prevent the rats from learning the association later, indicating that the drug did not damage the cortex's memory-sustaining capacity. However, all long-term association memories in the affected cortex area were likely erased, according to Sacktor.
Until now, enzyme action was thought to play a major role only in the initial making of memories, allowing structural changes in synapses, the connections between neurons, to handle the task of long-term storage. In an earlier study, Sacktor and colleagues found that PKMζ appeared to work by doubling a type of receptor for the chemical messenger glutamate at synapses. When the enzyme was blocked, the receptors receded, perhaps erasing the memories.
"This provides a clue that the structural changes encoding memories are smaller in scale, more fragile than had been thought, and require continuous enzymatic activity," said Sacktor.
He added that the new findings suggest a possible way to turn to advantage the counter-intuitive, but well documented, phenomenon that a memory becomes more vulnerable to being lost when it is retrieved from long-term storage. If storage requires PKMζ, then blocking the synthesis of specific PKMζ molecules encoding a retrieved traumatic memory might prevent the memory from re-entering long-term storage and relieve PTSD symptoms, suggested Sacktor.
Shema R, Sacktor TC, Dudai Y. Rapid Erasure of Long-Term Memory Associations in the Cortex by an Inhibitor of PKMζ. Science 2007 Aug;317(5840)951-953 [Abstract]