Category: Medical anthropology

Autism, Depression and The Body

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchMental disorders such as depression and autism are generally viewed in one of two lights, either as something neurological or something psychological.  Cultural anthropology obviously has greater affiliation with the psychological side, and biological anthropology with the neurological.  The same split is true in psychiatry, ably demonstrated by Tanya Luhrmann’s Of Two Minds, which, to radically simplify, describes the fight between talk-therapists and pharmaceutical-dispensers.  (Still, at least this anthropologist wishes Luhrmann had gone beyond ethnographic description of fields to tackle the same problem that both anthropology and psychiatry embody—bridging the nature/nurture or biology/culture split.)

 But is this way of dividing things, an enculturated mind versus an epigenetic brain, an accurate description?  Recent research suggests no. 

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Drugs and Biosociality

By Daniel Lende 

There’s an article in the NY Times today, “Drugs Offer No Benefit in Curbing Aggression, Study Finds.”  Here’s the lead-in: “The drugs most widely used to manage aggressive outbursts in intellectually disabled people are no more effective than placebos for most patients and may be less so, researchers report.” 

What’s particularly interesting are quotes from the article such as “the message to doctors should be, think twice about prescribing, go with lower doses and monitor side effects very carefully…  Or just don’t do it. We know that behavioral treatments can work very well with many patients.” 
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Repressed Memory

Blogging on Peer-Reviewed ResearchIn the January-February issue of Harvard Magazine, there is a short piece on “Repressed Memory: A Cultural Symptom?”  The basic point: some “neurological” symptoms are cultural.  Harrison Pope, co-director of the Biological Psychiatry Lab at McLean Hospital, posted a $1000 bet that no one could identify a “case of dissociative amnesia in any work of fiction or nonfiction prior to 1800.”  The exception was found—a 1786 opera—and the $1000 dolled out.  But that only helped prove the researchers’ premise: unlike some other neurological phenomena, repressed memory appears to be a culture-bound syndrome.  (What’s also impressive is that these are hard-core neuroscientists arguing for this…)

 For example, accounts of hallucinations and depression appear in the world’s literature for hundreds of years.  But the development of amnesia after a serious traumatic event, such as being raped or witnessing the death of a friend, appears to be a phenomena developed initially in modern Western culture and then imposed on the brain.    Continue reading “Repressed Memory”

Marian Radke-Yarrow

I think some of you might appreciate this short piece, The Anthropological Psychologist, on Marian Radke-Yarrow, who pioneered the studies of parenting and depression.  What I find striking is her longitudinal work and her use of observation and description to reach her conclusions.  She passed away this past year. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/30/magazine/30Radke-t.html

neuroanthropology and race- getting it straight

This is a response to the post by Doublehelix re: races and human biology emerging out of Daniel Lende’s post on IQ and environment..  The issue of human biological units and intelligence/cognition is very old and seems to keep appearing despite serious problems in the way the positions are most commonly framed.  This is a core factor in discussing neuroanthropology.  It is extremely important to realize that if you are going to use race as a biological unit then you must define it!  I would like to ask Doublehelix to present a definition of human groups that are consistently identifiable by a set of biological characteristics that separates them from other such groups.  There is no argument that human populations, both regional and meta-populations, vary in a number of biological characteristics.  However, are these evolutionary units or of evolutionary relevance?  Are there functional differences across human groups (once you are able to define what you mean by group).

Discovering shared frequencies of alleles in regional and meta-populations is expected via standard models of gene flow.  However, globally humans break the standard models of gene flow by their very low inter-population variation relative to species wide variation (not to discount the reality of a lot of variation across the geographical distribution of our species and huge inter-individual variation)…Doublehelix uses the Risch and other  articles to refute this, but ignores all of the work by many, many others (see below for a sample) that discuss and explain why one might see clustering of some allelic variation as associated with geography, and what that might or might not mean in an evolutionary sense. We are well beyond Lewontin 1972…  Allele frequency clusters are not races or even biological units…the association of function with specific distributions of frequency patterns of various alleles can and should be done, but has to be done with extreme care and we must play by the biological rule book.  If you are comparing biological units they must be biologically, not socially, defined.

The statement “As for the notion that race is not supported by biology, I ask: Why do races differ so profoundly in so many different characteristics, such as IQ, lactose tolerance, the resistance to malaria, skin and hair color, the effectiveness of certain drugs?” is rooted in a severe simplification…for example, lactase production is widespread across 100s of human populations with peaks in Northern European, east African and even middle eastern populations…so what does it say about race?  Malaria resistance via one of the 5 sickle cell mutations occurs with high frequencies in West Africa, but also South West Asia and the Middle East?  What race is that?   Hair color ands type are widely distributed…but not markers of unity…for example if having tight curly black hair unified groups then populations in Papua New Guinea and Nigeria would be linked…they are not.  As for drug differences, this is a very important and complex area of investigation where we actually see some amazing integration of social, physiological and contextual patterns (see recent BiDil research) but not clear patterning of socially defined races as showing any specific identifiable bio-based markers.

 

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‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health’

One of my preferred news compilation websites, Alternet.org, just published a piece, originally from the UK Independent (I believe), on the relation of emotions, personal interactions, and similar ‘moods’ on health. Anastasia Stephens, in the article, ‘How Your Mood Affects Your Health,’ runs through in very cursory fashion a whole host of research on the effects of things like laughing, stress, arguments, and crying on the human immune systems, healing, and the like.

The article has a lot of fun little research summaries, unfortunately, without links to the actual research reports or anything deeper about the studies. But there’s warnings about how arguing affects healing:

A half-hour argument with your lover can also slow your body’s ability to heal by at least a day. In couples who regularly argue, that healing time is doubled again. Researchers at Ohio State University discovered this by testing married couples with a suction device that created tiny blisters on their arm. When couples were then asked to talk about an area of disagreement that provoked strong emotions, the wounds took around 40 per cent longer to heal. This response, say researchers, was caused by a surge in cytokines — immune-molecules that trigger inflammation. Chronic high levels of these are linked to arthritis, diabetes, heart-disease and cancer.

Or another personal favorite:

Scientists at the University of California have discovered that laughter relaxes tense muscles, reduces production of stress-causing hormones, lowers blood pressure, and helps increase oxygen absorption in the blood. Cardiologists at the University of Maryland Medical Center found laughing can actually reduce the risk of heart attack by curbing unwanted stress, which can destroy the protective lining of blood vessels. A good giggle also burns calories since it’s possible to move 400 muscles of the body when laughing. Some researchers estimate that laughing 100 times offers an aerobic workout equivalent to 10 minutes on a rowing machine or 15 minutes on an exercise bike.

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