Free Republic

Men and women think and act differently, and now that’s a government-approved fact. The National Institutes of Mental Health, a federal agency with a budget of just under $1.5 billion, paid for a study to determine if men’s brains and women’s brains are wired differently. They might well have also studied whether men can give birth, or women can father children. This study, while good for the researchers who got to look at nearly 1,000 brain scans of men and women, and write scholarly papers based on their observations, contributed to the sum total of human knowledge in this way:...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) is distancing itself from the the American Psychiatric Association and its upcoming Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). While they acknowledge that the goal of DSM "is to provide a common language for describing psychopathology" they are no longer convinced that approach has value if we are going to solve 21st century cognitive science problems.  It is, paraphrasing the statement  of Thomas R. Insel, M.D., Director of the National Institute of Mental Health, more of a dictionary than a manual.  He uses the term "Bible" instead of 'manual' but I would...

Not all of the hundreds and hundreds of $billions our rulers have been looting from future generations and flushing away in the name of "stimulus" has been as flagrantly wasted as the $30 million spent to enhance the living conditions of rodents in Nancy Pelosi's district. For example, $800,000 was spent teaching Africans how to wash their genitals: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals...

The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), a division of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), spent $823,200 of economic stimulus funds in 2009 on a study by a UCLA research team to teach uncircumcised African men how to wash their genitals after having sex. The genitalia-washing program is part of a larger $12-million UCLA study examining how to better encourage Africans to undergo voluntary HIV testing and counseling – however, only the penis-washing study received money from the 2009 economic stimulus law. The washing portion of the study is set to end in 2011... Because AIDS researchers have been...

(CNSNews.com) - The federal government has spent $550,496 on a project that involved conducting “focus groups and in-depth interviews” with American long-haul truck drivers to learn about their sex lives in order to assess their risk of contracting HIV or other sexually transmitted infections. The project has failed to find any instances of HIV among the truck drivers studied. “Several international studies have documented substantial levels of sexual risk behaviors and high rates of STI and HIV amongst long-distance truck drivers living in diverse settings including India, Bangladesh, South Africa and Thailand,” says the abstract for the grant published by...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Workers with depression stay home sick more often than healthy colleagues, even when their disease is treated, according to a Thomson Reuters report released on Tuesday. The report, commissioned by drug maker Sanofi Aventis, suggests that employers would benefit from better treatments of their workers for depression. Depression is the leading cause of disability among Americans aged 15 to 44, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. "Even when depressed patients are treated with antidepressants, there are substantial productivity losses. Therapies that can better manage depression may provide opportunities for savings to employers," the Thomson Reuters...

Arlington, VA (AHN) - Mental health experts are recommending the reclassification of prolonged bitterness as a mental disorder. They are proposing the inclusion of post traumatic embitterment disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders for the fifth edition due for publication in 2012. The mental ailment is described is a pathological reaction to one negative life event like conflict at work, being laid off, divorce, ailment or separation in which the victim views the event as unjust and a violation of his basic belief and values. Dr. Michael Linden, the German psychiatrist who named the behavior, explained...

An influential psychiatrist who was the host of the popular public radio program “The Infinite Mind” earned at least $1.3 million from 2000 to 2007 giving marketing lectures for drugmakers, income not mentioned on the program. The psychiatrist and radio host, Dr. Frederick K. Goodwin, is the latest in a series of doctors and researchers whose ties to drugmakers have been uncovered by Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. Dr. Goodwin, a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health, is the first news media figure to be investigated. Dr. Goodwin’s weekly radio programs have often touched on...

Scientists trying to link schizophrenia to a few, common genetic mutations may be missing an important cause of the disease. New research suggests that rare mutations--sometimes so infrequent that they occur in just a single family or individual--can significantly boost schizophrenia risk. Researchers suspect that these variants will prove to have effects on key aspects of brain development. Schizophrenia afflicts about 1% of the overall population, but a much higher proportion of homeless people and prison inmates. The disease has a strong heritable component, but researchers have struggled to find the genetic culprits. The working hypothesis has been that the...

How schizophrenia develops: Major clues discovered Findings may lead to better medications to correct gene-related problem Schizophrenia may occur, in part, because of a problem in an intermittent on/off switch for a gene involved in making a key chemical messenger in the brain, scientists have found in a study of human brain tissue. The researchers found that the gene is turned on at increasingly high rates during normal development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain involved in higher functions like thinking and decision-making – but that this normal increase may not occur in people with schizophrenia. The...

In the hour before he was killed, on Sunday, Sept. 3, Dr. Wayne S. Fenton, a prominent schizophrenia specialist, was helping his wife clear the gutters of their suburban Washington house. He was steadying the ladder, asking her to please stop showering debris on his clean shirt; he had just made an appointment to see a patient and wanted to look presentable. She said she would be happy to go along, to help control the patient. It was a running joke between them. For in this part of the country, Dr. Fenton was the therapist of last resort, the one...

A large-scale study of brain development pinpoints the anatomical changes that are linked to IQ.The brains of more intelligent children appear to develop in a characteristic way, growing quickly over an extended period between the ages of 5 and 12. These findings -- some of the most detailed research on brain development and IQ -- resulted from a 15-year study done by the National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH.) The study, which used magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to gain a detailed picture of how the brains of children change over time, found that in kids who did better on standard...

"In Aug., 2003, the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) announced the results of their $1.2 million tax-payer funded study.  It stated, essentially, that traditionalists are mentally disturbed.  Scholars from the Universities of Maryland, California at Berkeley, and Stanford had determined that social conservatives, in particular, suffer from 'mental rigidity,' 'dogmatism,' and 'uncertainty avoidance,' together with associated indicators for mental illness."  (B.K. Eakman, Chronicles, Oct. 2004, pp. 28-29)   As usual with leftists, the true meaning of their words is couched in deceptive code.  When the deceptions are peeled away we discover that ''dogmatism''...

LOS ANGELES — A new study by Harvard University and the National Institute of Mental Health (search) claims that 46 percent of all Americans will, at some point in their lives, develop a mental disorder.

My husband and I were outraged when we read an Associated Press story in the Sept. 11 Register saying that dangerous, highly addictive stimulant drugs, such as Ritalin, have been OK'd by the Food and Drug Administration's Pediatric Committee and will be given to physically normal, healthy children as part of a brain study meant to lead to a definitive diagnosis for ADHD. In the study, led by Dr. Judith Rapoport, "MRIs would be used to reveal if the brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder respond to stimulants in fundamentally different ways than children who are physically normal," a...

He is blond and 3 years old, 33 pounds of compressed energy wrapped in OshKosh overalls. In an evaluation room at Yale's Child Study Center, he ignores Big Bird, pauses to watch the bubbles that a social worker blows through a wand, jumps up and down. But it is the two-way mirror that fascinates him, drawing him back to stare into the glass, to touch it, to lick it with his tongue. At 17 months, after several ear infections and a bout of the flu, the toddler's budding language skills began to deteriorate, his parents tell the evaluators. In the...

Makers of popular antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor have refused to disclose the details of most clinical trials involving depressed children, denying doctors and parents crucial evidence as they weigh fresh fears that such medicines may cause some children to become suicidal. The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills. Although the drug industry's practice of suppressing data unfavorable to its products is legal, doctors and advocates say such secrecy...

Makers of popular antidepressants such as Paxil, Zoloft and Effexor have refused to disclose the details of most clinical trials involving depressed children, denying doctors and parents crucial evidence as they weigh fresh fears that such medicines may cause some children to become suicidal. The companies say the studies are trade secrets. Researchers familiar with the unpublished data said the majority of secret trials show that children taking the medicines did not get any better than children taking dummy pills. Although the drug industry's practice of suppressing data unfavorable to its products is legal, doctors and advocates say such secrecy...

Sudden heart-pounding panic attacks are most likely caused by abnormalities in the brain, new evidence suggests, reinforcing earlier research on animals. People with panic disorder, according to scientists at the National Institutes of Health, have drastic reductions of a type of serotonin receptor, called 5-HT1A, in three areas of the brain. The findings, reported last week in The Journal of Neuroscience, lend credence to the suspicion that serotonin dysfunction plays a role in the disorder. "This provides evidence for what we've been telling patients all along," said Dr. Dennis S. Charney, chief of the mood and anxiety disorders research program...

Congressional investigators call for a new look at funding academic research. An academic study of conservatism that lumped together Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Ronald Reagan, and Rush Limbaugh was funded by federal grants, according to congressional investigators.The study, "Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition," was written by John T. Jost, a professor at Stanford University, Jack Glaser and Frank J. Sulloway, professors at the University of California, Berkeley, and Arie W. Kruglanski, a professor at the University of Maryland. It was published in the American Psychological Association's Psychological Bulletin.Congressional investigators have found that the study was financed by $1.2 million...