Description: There is an opioid overdose epidemic in North America. In 2017, 4,000 people in Canada and 72,000 people in the United States died of opioid overdoses. I don’t know what you have been hearing or reading about what is behind these astonishing and terrifying numbers, but there is a lot to consider and a… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Clinical Neuropsychology
Autism, Epilepsy, and catnap2: Possible New Undertsandings
Description: Consider this well supported research finding. One third of individuals diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are also diagnosed with epilepsy. Epilepsy is the unregulated firing of neurons in the brain, sometime limited to small brain areas (petite mal seizures) and sometime spreading throughout the entire brain (grand mal seizures). Folks with ASD are… Read more »
Aging Brains: Fewer Neurons or Other Things?
Description: What were you told about the cells in the human brain and aging? That our neurons die off as we age and are not replaced? That we have the most neurons we are ever going to have at birth and things go downhill from there? Well if so, it may be time to rethink… Read more »
Treating PTSD: Something About Horses
Description: Two posts ago I talked about and posted links to a general article about PTSD – about its signs and symptoms and about its treatment, in general terms. In that article the two main approaches to treatment were described as medication and talk therapy. Both approaches most certainly fall in the domains of accepted… Read more »
PTSD: What is it and How New is It? (it goes WAY back)
Description: You have most certainly heard of PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). PTSD is listed as a diagnostic option within the area of the 5th edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in the section containing Anxiety disorders (many disorders are grouped based on common presenting symptoms rather than underlying neuropsychological commonalities (though there are… Read more »
Do Antidepressants Work? Not a simple question
Description: Antidepressants work wonderfully well in the treatment of the symptoms of depression, right? They have saved us from having no treatment that works or from resorting to ECT (Electro-Convulsive Shock Therapy), right? Well, if you believe these statements to be true then you have been paying attention to what the general media has had… Read more »
Searching for the Origins of Schizophrenia
Description: Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the population and while there are treatments that can be partially effective there is no real cure. An understanding of the origins of schizophrenia, of how it emerges, could move us towards earlier identification and could suggest new treatment avenues. As it has been discussed in our textbooks, schizophrenia… Read more »
Baby Strokes: Plasticity and Hemispheric Shifts in Loction of Function
Description: Two questions before we get into this topic. First, who has strokes? Second, if someone has a massive left hemisphere stroke what will likely happen to their spoken language abilities? Old people and language will suffer right? Well, not entirely. You see, infants, and in fact, newborns (about 1 in 4000) can have strokes…. Read more »
Forensic Neuropathology and Forensic Psychology: Searching for the Whys of heinous behavior
Description: When individuals do horrible things we, of course, want to know why they did what they did. We want to know if there was something specifically wrong with them and, in particular, we want to know if there was either something that could or should have been done to prevent the person doing what… Read more »
Executive Functions in Alzheimer’s: Brain Pacemakers Might Help
Description: Alzheimer’s main impact is on peoples’ memories, right? Well, we can debate the depth of impact of the various features of the disease but it is the case that more than memory is affected. Specifically, the array of frontal lobe functions involving various aspects of what is called Executive Function (thinking, reflecting, planning and… Read more »
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