Genetic link between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder?

July 3, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 2 comments

Some interesting news from the geeks in white coats suggests there may be a common genetic basis for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Three different international studies investigated the genetic basis of schizophrenia by pooling their analysis of about 15,000 patients and nearly 50,000 healthy subjects to find that thousands of tiny genetic mutations – known as single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) – are operating in raising the risk of developing the illness.

Each mutation on its own increased the risk of developing schizophrenia by about 0.2 per cent but collectively they were found to account for at least a third of the total risk of developing schizophrenia. The condition is known to have a strong inherited component, accounting for about 80 per cent of the total risk, but it is also influenced by upbringing and environment.

However, one of the most surprising findings to emerge from the three studies was that the same array of genetic variations in SNPs was also linked with bipolar disorder, a discovery that is at odds with the orthodoxy in psychiatry stating that the two conditions are clinically distinct, the scientists said. The findings are a milestone in the understanding of both schizophrenia and manic depression – also known as bipolar disorder – which could eventually lead to new ways of either preventing or treating conditions that cause untold human misery and cost the NHS hundreds of millions of pounds each year.

Mr Ian tends to have more of an interest in these things than me, but if it leads to new treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar, then it’s exciting news.

The sham of self-regulation

July 2, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 3 comments

This entry is part 7 of 7 in the series Regulation of Psychotherapy

(This is a guest post by Howard Martin, the original complainant in the Derek Gale case. His previous guest post, describing the experience of bringing Derek Gale before the Health Professions Council, can be found here.)

Having a female client simulate masturbation with a cushion while also doing so yourself. Pressuring clients to strip naked in front of the therapy “family”. Having clients provide pornographic videos and then pressuring the “family” to watch them en masse. Photographing female clients topless while on holiday with them and also having them pose half naked for so called art therapy. Punching a female client in the stomach during a singing lesson. Repeated, consistent and demeaning verbal abuse. Running a charity to screw more money out of your clients’ employers. Grabbing a male client by the crotch and attempting to kiss him. Attending client parties in nothing but your underpants and a jacket. Impersonating a mentally ill person while out shopping with your clients. Stealing milk from the local supermarket to impress your clients. Making malicious complaints to the police about complainants. Having bank accounts in another person’s name. Recommending a divorce lawyer to clients who turns out to be nothing more than a friend who is a legal secretary. Claiming to be a world renowned psychotherapist at the cutting edge of the profession and describing yourself as “something of a guru in the world of psychotherapy” when you have no qualifications whatsoever.

Welcome to the world of Gale that the HPC hearings barely touched on. For various reasons some allegations were dropped from the original HPC list. Others never appeared due to them requiring the criminal rather than civil burden of proof as they would constitute criminal acts. It is important to have the flavour of these allegations so that there is no doubt as to the sort of behaviour that the self regulation cabal are condoning and protecting with their claims that they are the ones best placed to deal with the likes of Gale.
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Psychologists join the HPC register

July 1, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 2 comments

This entry is part 6 of 7 in the series Regulation of Psychotherapy

Today the Health Professions Council opened its register to psychologists. Some members of the psychotherapy profession may be horrified by the same thing happening to psychotherapists and counsellors, but the mental health charities Mind and WITNESS are dead in favour. Their press release is as follows:

Patients will continue to be unprotected if statutory independent regulation is not extended to counsellors and psychotherapists, according to leading national charities Mind and WITNESS. On the day that psychologists are to be regulated by the Health Professions Council (HPC), the charities welcome the advancement and urge counsellors and psychotherapists to follow suit.

Psychological therapies remain one of the least regulated areas of mental health practice in the UK, currently anyone can set themselves up as a counsellor or psychotherapist, without formal training or need to join a professional organisation. There is no single body to monitor malpractice and numerous complex complaints systems make it difficult for patients to take up claims. The Government has promised HPC regulation for psychotherapists and counsellors by 2011 but there remains some professional opposition to the plans.
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Caption Competition: Psychotherapists

June 27, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 24 comments

This entry is part 14 of 14 in the series Caption Competitions

You know what? We haven’t done a caption competition for bloody ages. Time to remedy that. This caption competition takes the theme of psychotherapy, as that’s what’s been exercising our brains lately.

So, what are this therapist and client saying to each other?

therapist

THA ROOLZ: Enter your caption entries via the comments thread. One caption per comment – for multiple entries do multiple comments. Vote for an entry as being WIN and not FAIL by clicking on the thumbs-up icon by the side of each comment. The entry with the most points by Friday is declared THA WINNAR OF TEH INTERNETS.

This Week in Mentalists (86)

June 27, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 7 comments

I wanted to be at the Glastonbury Festival this week, but I can’t. Hence I shall re-create the experience by watching it on BBC3 while sitting in my own faeces and ripping up £20 notes.

I’m guessing that not many of the mental health blogosphere have gone to Glasto either, because this is a busy TWIM.

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Red-Hot Liberal-On-Liberal Action

June 26, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 2 comments

And yes, I have indeed been wanting to use that headline for ages.

The reason for the headline is to announced that I’ve got a guest post over on the Liberal Conspiracy website, reporting on the dangers of unregulated psychotherapists.

Question for MN

June 22, 2009 in Help Wanted, Treatment, Waffle by a mental | 4 comments

This entry is part 6 of 6 in the series Ask The Mentalists

(Guest post by A Mental)

I must apologise for this first introduction as not only are there my normal levels of confusion to deal with, but I have also taken my sleepers, which add all sorts of exciting confusion such as voices and people running around fast etc etc. So this may actually make no sense at all. And it may well be long. I waffle. Writing in a succinct manner is not a skill I have ever mastered – my A level English Lit teacher told me so.

Anyway, as you may (or may not) have guessed from my name, I am not an RMN (does the term ‘Mental Nurse’ make anyone else chortle by the way? Mental Health Nurse or Psychiatric Nurse I could understand, but Mental Nurse?? I can just imagine 2 nurses talking ‘So what sort of nurse are you?’ (asks RMN) ‘Oh, I am a Children’s Nurse, I work with children. What about you? Our imaginary RMN replies ‘I am a Mental Nurse. I work with mentals. Does anyone see my point regarding the slightly odd terminology there used in the titles? Or is it just the Zolpidem that makes me find it amusing? Anyway, enough chortling, back to the point, the point’………………………………. Ah yes, the point is I am not an RMN, or any other nursy type, or anyone professionally involved in mental health. I am a patient (refuse to be client - seems linked to prostitution) under MH services, and have been since I was 17, and am now 23 (or will be in a week). I swear this had a point, I haven’t a bloody clue what it was anymore though. So anyway, I just registered my name as ‘a mental’ since we have already established RMNs treat mentals, and there is only one of me, hence the lack of s in my name. Wonderful, you have had to endure a blog about my name. It really was about something else, I promise.
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This Week in Mentalists (85)

June 21, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 4 comments

Apologies for TWIM being a day late. I was a bit lazy busy yesterday.

Anyways, on with what’s been happening in the mental health blogosphere.

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Psychotherapy self regulation – a licence to carry on abusing?

June 19, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 11 comments

This entry is part 5 of 7 in the series Regulation of Psychotherapy

(This is a guest post by Howard Martin. He is a TV producer and was the original complainant in the Derek Gale case.)

The HPC case against Derek Gale has proven beyond reasonable doubt that they can run and manage a very difficult case, over a long period of time, which takes in complex issues of therapy technique and modality in a fair, transparent, reasonable and (above all) independent manner. They have proven that they can separate good practise and client protection from the confusions of what some claim to be good therapy. Some of the HPC panel’s decisions seem to be anomalous, for example, it being considered misconduct to ask a client for business advice but not to have clients completely renovate the therapist’s property including undertaking dangerous and highly specialised tasks such as asbestos removal. But I am sure that in due course these will be sorted out through case precedent.

Although I have never been a client of Gale nor any other psychotherapist in November 2005 (with specialist support) I instigated the HPC case against Gale as a third party complaint. We are very proud of what it has achieved. I would like to thank all those (you know who you are) who have been supportive of us and those who had the courage to make statements and be witnesses against Gale. You may think it bizarre but I would also like to thank Mr Gale himself. If he had not made the decisions he has and had conducted himself in a different manner over the past four years we would not have been presented with such a clear and present opportunity to expose the moribund, arrogant and self interested indulgence of the “independent” therapy community. Thanks to Mr Gale they now have nowhere to run and hide except up their own narcissist arses back out their sanctimonious mouths and into the sunlight of exposure as the hokumists and charlatans many of them appear to be.
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What do we expect?

June 19, 2009 in Work by Catcher | 8 comments

(Guest post by Catcher)

I have been reading most of the posts and associated comments on Mental Nurse for a few months now and thought I would have a crack at a post myself. Those of you expecting learned and referenced elegant prose with perhaps a few allusions to Russian literature thrown in better stop reading now, because what follows is a totally biased and probably opinionated take on “mental health services”. You see the thing is, it is based on my experiences and so it really can’t be anything else.

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Really Angry about this article in the Times

June 16, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 52 comments

(This is a guest post by DeeDee Ramona, originally published here)

I am absolutely raging now, at this article.

This is an article supposedly reviewing a book on mania by a medic who has frequently blew the whistle on shoddy research into psychiatric medication by Big Pharma. All well and good. But that’s not what it is. This article is yet another attack on the mentally ill for taking medication.

It’s a hatchet job, from the arts and entertainment section of the Times – specifically, the Literary Supplement – of the diagnosis of manic depression, done by being quite selective about what is actually mentioned about the book in question.
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Regulation of Psychotherapy – More from its opponents

June 15, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 67 comments

This entry is part 4 of 7 in the series Regulation of Psychotherapy

As I’ve previously stated, I’m strongly in favour of the government proposal for psychotherapists to be regulated by the Health Professions Council. The Derek Gale case (struck off by the HPC as an arts therapist for abuse and misconduct, but able to continue working by simply changing his job title to psychotherapist) shows that this is deeply necessary in order to protect vulnerable people.

Still, I think we need to hear more from those psychotherapists who are campaigning against regulation of their profession. One such opponent is the elpnosis website, which declares the proposed regulation to be a “notably unintelligent and values incongruent move”. Christ, and people say NHS managers need to learn to speak plain English.

The website is…well, it’s pure comedy gold, quite frankly. Not least with its blow-by-blow account of the HPC hearings against Derek Gale.

Scene: the Health Professions Council chamber. A large completely white room. A rectangle of white tables fills most of the space. On them are half a dozen microphones plugged into a court-room style voice recorder. Nearby is a court stenographer’s keyboard. Along one wall are the dozen or so chairs of the public gallery. Narrow white venetian blinds over huge windows hide the backstreet outside. Half of the wall opposite them has a floor to ceiling window onto the corridor. High up in one corner in a tiny brown dome, is a cctv camera. Modern. Featureless. Anonymous. The sun begins to illuminate the back wall but it’s a false promise, a reflection from windows of nearby office block.

Erm quite…
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This Week in Mentalists (84)

June 13, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 4 comments

Morning everyone. Time for This Week in Mentalists.

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Home education – more harm than good?

June 12, 2009 in Work by missdisco | 12 comments

(Guest post by missdisco)

Ministers today unveiled plans for a major toughening-up of the regulation of home education, forcing families who opt out of schooling to register annually with their local authorities, submit learning plans and undergo regular inspections. If they fail the inspections they could be made to send their children to school.

A lot of people, noticeably home-educators, seem to be up in arms about the notion that they may have to register their children as being home-educated and have lesson plans and such examined. A controlling draconian state, big brother blah blah blah.

Some of these people need to just shut the fuck up.

I was home-educated between 1993-2001. It was an appalling experience. My mother was a manipulative bitch, who actually never bothered to teach us at all. It was a whim for her for about a year, but then i think she just lost it and just couldn’t be bothered with anything, except keeping us in the house. As a child i barely left the house except maybe once a week. I didn’t do science, languages, PE, art, music, or anything interesting. My interest in English Literature arose out of being a Manic Street Preachers fan, otherwise i suspect i would have never had that.
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Regulation of Psychotherapy – Who’s Against it

June 11, 2009 in Work by zarathustra | 18 comments

This entry is part 3 of 7 in the series Regulation of Psychotherapy

Last week I posted about the appalling case of Derek Gale, struck off as an arts therapist for rampant misconduct and abuse, but simply setting himself up as a “psychotherapist and counsellor” instead. He can do this because arts therapists are regulated by the Health Professions Council but psychotherapists are not. Anyone can call themselves a psychotherapist, regardless of their qualifications or background.

The government is working to close this loophole, but there’s a campaign mounted to keep psychotherapy unregulated by the HPC. Let’s have a look at who’s doing this and why.

The Coalition Against Over-Regulation of Psychotherapy is petitioning against the proposed legislation. Its list of signatories reads like a who’s who of the chattering classes.

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