Neuroanthropology is a collaborative weblog created to encourage exchanges among anthropology, philosophy, social theory, and the brain sciences.
We especially hope to explore the implications of new findings in the neurosciences for our understanding of culture, human development, and behaviour.
If you are interested in joining as an ongoing contributor, please contact Greg Downey at Macquarie University greg.downey@scmp.mq.edu.au.
“Mad Pride” Fights A Stigma by Gabrielle Glaser reports on the frank talk, public exposure, and anti-stigma efforts of people who experience “extreme mental states.” Books like Kay Redfield Jamison’s autobiography of bipolar disorder An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness and movies like A Beautiful Mind on the mathematician John Nash’s schizophrenia have brought mental illness further into the public light. Now a grass-roots movement is going further: “these advocates proudly call themselves mad; they say their conditions do not preclude them from productive lives.”
It is a diverse movement, centered on anti-stigma efforts, on quality of life, and on treatment options.
Members of the mad pride movement do not always agree on their aims and intentions. For some, the objective is to continue the destigmatization of mental illness. A vocal, controversial wing rejects the need to treat mental afflictions with psychotropic drugs and seeks alternatives to the shifting, often inconsistent care offered by the medical establishment. Many members of the movement say they are publicly discussing their own struggles to help those with similar conditions and to inform the general public.
Themes such as creating “a new language that resonated with our actual experiences,” better public and medical recognition of the nature of their problems, and being given the same sorts of leeway and freedoms that “normal” people enjoy are what drive the “mad pride” movement. They are at once post-conventional due to their extreme mental states, with behaviors and subjective experiences that society would rather not see (social denial), and want to express themselves and have others understand–such a basic human desire.
Liz Spikol, a bipolar writer in Philadelphia, is one of the emerging voices through her blog at the Philadelphia Weekly and YouTube videos (”trouble spikol” is a good search term). Here’s one to watch.
Nicholas Kristof recently wrote an editorial about Colombia, free trade, and human rights entitled Better Roses Than Cocaine. He argued there that “Some Democrats claim that they are against the pact because Colombia has abused human rights. Those concerns are legitimate — but they shouldn’t be used to punish people like Norma Reynosa, a 35-year-old woman who just may snip the flowers that go into the Mother’s Day bouquet that you buy.”
He notes, “Colombia’s progress has been immense. Assassinations of union members, while still a problem, have fallen 80 percent since 2002. Last year, the murder rate for union members was 4 per 100,000, reaching levels far below the homicide rate for the general public.”
He finishes by writing, “To their credit, a large group of prominent Democrats from previous administrations have strongly endorsed the trade accord, declaring that it is ‘in both our vital national security and economic interests.’ But the presidential candidates aren’t listening. Democrats instinctively criticize Mr. Bush when he harms America’s standing in the world. That’s easy. But a test of intellectual honesty is your willingness to hold your own side to the same standard and to point out pandering in those politicians you normally admire.”
I have written previously on the controversy over free trade and Colombia. And Kristof’s readers responded in volume to his editorial, so check them out as well—lots of good critique. Finally, there was a video that went along with his stay in Colombia, so from the Bogota savannah landscape to the voices, as well as the coverage of these same issues, I recommend a look:
This past week Eric Asimov’s Wine’s Pleasures: Are They All in Your Head? reigned as the number one emailed article at the New York Times. It’s #3 as I write this, and is quite simply a superb article, wrapping so much into 1700 words. Makes me a little jealous, since it’s a great model for what we do here, both in content and style.
Here’s Asimov’s opening hook, “The mind of the wine consumer is a woolly place, packed with odd and arcane information fascinating to few. Like the pants pocket of a 7-year-old boy, it’s full of bits of string, bottle caps and shiny rocks collected while making the daily rounds of wine shops, restaurants, periodicals and the wine-soaked back alleys of the Internet.”
Asimov then takes on recent reports of wine that reduced it to expectations and over-rated prices—the “normal people like the cheap stuff in blind taste tastes” kind of thing. “In press accounts of two studies on wine psychology, consumers have been portrayed as dupes and twits, subject to the manipulations of marketers, critics and charlatan producers who have cloaked wine in mystique and sham sophistication in hopes of better separating the public from its money.”
Asimov proceeds to do something unusual for most journalists, he digs deeper into the actual data. And what does he find? Significant variation. Sure, novices do like the cheap champagne, but the experts prefer the Dom Perignon. So there is no such thing as the “average oenophile.”
My Notre Dame students are great! All eight of their group posts are now up. I am so proud of them and the effort that they put into this project.
Already their posts have been read more than 1400 times, and been linked to from sites like Mind Hacks and promoted at del.icio.us and Stumble Upon. I hope to see much more as the word continues to gets out.
The eight posts came out of my class on “Alcohol and Drugs: The Anthropology of Substance Use and Abuse,” and represent the range of perspectives brought to bear on substance use over the course of the semester. Though I guided each group through multiple revisions, each post represents an argument that the students developed on a particular topic.
I started the series off with Stress and Addiction: The Vicious Cycle, which showed how stress and substance use go hand in hand, reinforcing a cycle of addiction.
Fourth came Inequality and Drug Use, providing a clear demonstration on how social status and marginalization feed into worse drug use and even worse outcomes.
The other middle child was Understanding Brain Imaging, a comprehensive presentation of the different imaging technologies used to understand addiction and other mental health problems. Well worth a look!
It’s Our Fault: Denial, Disease and Addiction showed how the social roots of denial and misperceptions about what counts as a disease make for a double whammy against people struggling with alcohol and drug use.
The seventh post was Culture and Learning to Drink: What Age? This one covered debates about the legal drinking age in the United States, with an even-handed consideration of the costs involved and the varied ways we might think more creatively about how better to learn to drink.
Last but most certainly not least, College Drinking: Battle of the Sexes? examined how central gender is to the drinking culture on US college campus, in particular to understanding and doing something about binge drinking.
Drunk- this five letter word has many connotations, ranging in extremes from positive memories to negative stigmas. For men and women, it is one word that has different meanings, from the number of drinks it takes to get drunk to the behaviors men and women are expected to exhibit while drinking. For college women and men in particular, binge drinking is an area in which they relate quite distinctly with alcohol. Gender norms, rituals and relations often lead to, and perpetuate, binge drinking on campuses nationwide.
Many aspects of college drinking are unique. Tailgating is one of them. Where else can you find people drinking excessive amounts of alcohol early in the morning? At big football schools, tailgating facilitates the social learning of binge drinking as a normal and acceptable behavior. The ritualized drinking associated with tailgating is often the first place where students are introduced to binge drinking. It also sets a precedent of drinking enough alcohol to get drunk and stay drunk for an extended period of time.
In the fall, people tailgate every weekend before football games. In the ritual of tailgating, binge drinking as a socially learned experience is evidenced by the fact that students learn to drink from the very alumni whom they are taught to respect and admire. Across the nation, students only need to leave their dorms to encounter the alumni who have been drinking since early morning. Since this is often a student’s first exposure to binge drinking, students may initially be shocked to find huge crowds of people drinking heavily in parking lots and around campus. The immersion in the football culture, which often depends upon tailgates, will soon numb any hesitation or doubts the student may have.
Tailgating perpetuates binge drinking among the general student population, but its significance varies based on gender. During a typical night out, a college student may consume four or five drinks to “pregame” before the actual party has even started. Many students do not realize that this qualifies as binge drinking, and that it impacts women and men differently.
Franz de Waal, the renowed primatologist who has pushed reconciliation and morality alike into our primate past, answered some great questions about life, love, sex and happiness at the NY Times Freakonomics blog.
Here’s a taste about bonobos: “Bonobos often engage in sex with same-sex partners, but they’re not gay in that they also have sex with the opposite sex. They’re ‘bi.’ They seek sex often for social reasons, to reduce tensions, and to form friendships.”
And one of my favorite answers? Building from his work with capuchin monkeys and a sense of fairness, de Waal says, “This holds an important message for American society which is becoming less fair by the day. The Gini-index (which measures income inequality) keeps rising and is now more in line with that of third-world countries than of other industrialized nations. If monkeys already have trouble accepting income inequality, you can imagine what it does to us. It creates great tensions within a society, and we know that tensions affect psychological and physical well-being. Some attribute the dismal health statistics of Americans (now #42 in the world’s longevity ranking) to the social frictions of an unfair society.”
de Waal is also organizing a June 2009 conference called “The Primate Mind: Built to Connect with Other Minds.” My colleague Katherine MacKinnon, a primatologist herself, tipped me off about it. Here’s the blurb: “A high-level international meeting of cognitive ethologists, behavioral biologists, and neuroscientists that will address how the primate (including human) mind relates to other minds through empathy, imitation, and other social cognition.” The best part? It’s in Sicily! (Well, maybe June is hot there, but still, a great place for a conference.)
And, with a hattip to My Mind on Books, with recent coverage of Franz, here’s a video of his talk at the Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity conference.
In a 1983 landmark study conducted by Harvard psychiatrist Dr. George Valliant, it was found that young men who grew up in homes where alcohol was forbidden at the dinner table were seven times more likely to become alcoholics. The following year, the United States Congress voted to raise the legal drinking age to 21.
Responsibility is a lesson that all parents want to impart to their children. But because of this federal law forbidding alcohol consumption until the age of 21, most parents fail to teach their children responsible drinking habits. The question becomes, why is drinking different than any other life lesson?
In a New York Times article entitled, Can Sips at Home Prevent Binges? Eric Asimov confronts this very question. With two young boys who are fast approaching adolescence, Asimov discusses how difficult a decision he and his wife face. Should they slowly and responsibly introduce alcohol at the dinner table? Or should they, as the government mandates, forbid alcohol consumption altogether? The answer isn’t a simple one.
After the collapse of Prohibition, nearly all states instituted a minimum legal drinking age of 21. However, by the early 1970’s, twenty-nine states lowered the minimum legal drinking age to 18,19, or 20, while also extending other privileges, like the right to vote, to younger citizens.
In the late 1970s the national mood about teenage drinking underwent a drastic change because of several highly publicized studies that examined the correlation between the younger drinking age and motor vehicle crashes. Teenage alcohol abuse was deemed a devastating problem that corresponded to more traffic injuries and fatalities among America’s youth. The advent of these studies coupled with the nationwide campaign effort by Candy Lightner and her organization, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving) primed the American people for major change in legislation.
By Danny Smith, Jimmy Wilson, Will Yeatman, Rachel Guerrera, and Mark Hinken
It’s our fault. But let’s spread the blame. The burden also lies on the shoulders of the educational community. And society itself. There is a serious misconception that exists. This misconception is that chemical dependence is not a disease. By not recognizing chemical dependence as a disease, society continues to hold harmful stereotypes about alcoholism and drug addiction.
The goal of this blog post is to address this major problem facing drug addicts and alcoholics. Society enables chemical dependence by causing denial. Denial helps create a vicious cycle that traps addicts. They tell themselves they do not have a problem and reject the idea to others that a problem exists.
However, denial is not just prevalent in cases of chemical reliance. It is common in everyday life, seen in issues concerning body image, gambling, sex and social interaction. In these cases, like addiction, denial stems from the social stigmas produced by society.
In today’s culture having a slim and fit body is heavily desired and expected. People who do not conform to the lofty standards set by models and Hollywood elite often feel abnormal and subject to ridicule. As a consequence anorexia, bulimia and dysmorphia have become more common among the current population. However, though these three eating disorders are labeled as real diseases, they are viewed as taboo in society. Therefore, people who suffer from anorexia often deny to others or even themselves that they really have a problem with a serious disease.
US society does not often pair diseases such as anorexia and alcoholism with diseases like cancer and Parkinson’s disease. Yet they are all chronic diseases. If the United States came to view chemical dependence with the same empathy as cancer, we could help eliminate the destructive low self-esteem and denial found in chemically reliant individuals. Read the rest of this entry »
By Chris Dudley, Matt Gasperetti, Mikey Narvaez, and Sarah Walorski
Do you remember the anti-drug public service announcement from the 1980s that showed an egg frying in a hot pan which represented your brain on drugs?
During the 1990s, brain imaging moved beyond fried eggs as computer technology allowed researchers to process large amounts of data required for functional imaging approaches. As a result, the PSA mentioned above no longer provides the most accurate analogy illustrating what happens to the brain when exposed to drugs.
Today, brain imaging research has helped create a sophisticated “disease model” of chemical dependence related to changes in the function of neurotransmitters and receptors in the brain. These circuits are responsible for reward processing, memory and learning, motivation and drive, in addition to control (Nora Volkow describes these circuits in a 2004 literature review).
This particular post focuses on the techniques used most commonly to study the brain’s role in addiction and other mental health problems. We will cover the principle behind each method, advantages and limitations of each, and provide an example of the results that can be obtained.
Beyond the Frying Pan: EEG and CT
Electroencephalography (EEG) and Computed tomography (CT) were two of the first methods used to study the brain. EEG utilizes electrodes placed on the scalp that measure electrical impulses, whereas CT creates a three-dimensional image of the brain with two-dimensional x-rays.
