As a treatment for severe depression, electroconvulsive therapy (electro-shock treatment) has long been considered a last hope — a treatment which works, but which also brings significant side-effects, especially for memory. New research on a less aggressive alternative, transcranial magnetic stimulation, promises similar effectiveness but without memory impairment.
As Londoners and others up and down the UK remember the terror attacks that took place a week ago tomorrow, the Mental Health Foundation explains how human beings are able to overcome traumatic events, in order to cope and recover. The charity believes that London’s reaction shows that the city’s population is largely in good mental health, with strong community networks and a desire to express its shock and grief without resorting to extreme acts.
The UK Government’s response to the Joint Scrutiny Committee on the draft Mental Health Bill offers some hope but there is a long way to go before Government plans can be made into a workable mental health bill, the Mental Health Alliance said today. The Government intends to press ahead with plans to broaden out powers of compulsion and deny professionals the flexibility they need to offer people the right care and support.
The Percepts and Concepts Laboratory at Indiana University is using simple online interactive games to investigate how people behave in groups. You can play the games with other people or with artificial intelligence bots, while the cognitive scientists collect data and try to develop agent-based computational models of the behaviour.
The US Food and Drug Administration has issued new warnings about possible heightened risks of suicide in adults taking antidepressant medications. The warnings follow the FDA’s decision last year to require drug manufacturers to strengthen suicide warnings included on drug labels.
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