Images of Suicidal Thoughts

[n2doc]

Analysis by Tracy Staedter | Fri Apr 23, 2010 09:46 AM ET

I was watching TV the other night, when a commercial came on for the medication Cymbalta. I wasn't paying that much attention, but my boyfriend chimed in and said, "Why would anyone take a pill for depression when one of the side effects is suicide?"

Indeed. Research shows that a small percent of depressed patients develop thoughts of suicide while taking drugs known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), which are the most commonly prescribed drug for depression.

And to make things worse, there's no way to predict or test whether an antidepressant drug is making a patient better or worse.

But researchers at UCLA are working to change that. Aimee Hunter, an assistant research psychologist, and her colleagues used a skull cap that contains electrodes and is worn over the head to monitor patients on SSRIs. The electrodes are basically sensors that pick up the electrical activity of neurons firing in the brain.

Hunter and her team wrote a computer program that reads the electrical activity and then translates them into a map of the brain to show researchers where the activity is coming from.

see links for more

http://news.discovery.com/tech/images-of-suicidal-thoughts.html

http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/25171/?ref=rss&a=f




Suicidal thoughts: This image shows brain activity measured using quantitative EEG (blue indicates a decrease in activity, red an increase). Patients who experienced suicidal thoughts at any time during the eight-week study showed a sixfold greater drop in brain activity within 48 hours of beginning treatment (top) compared to patients who showed no increase in suicidal thoughts (bottom).
Credit: UCLA Laboratory of Brain Behavior and Pharmacology

[NV Whino]

1. Fascinating

Does this mean that one has to run around wearing a metal skull cap?

[UndertheOcean]

2. SSRI are weird , basically , you get worse on them at the beginning before you get better

my experience is you need to wait at least a month before you decide if treatment is working or not.

[Duer 157099]

3. QEEG - awesome, I want one

I've thought for many years that this is exactly the path that needs to be explored, the functional imaging of the brain for more accurate diagnoses and treatments. I'm so glad whenever I see further research in this area.

In the study, some subjects who were on placebo had increased suicidal ideation, and yet their QEEG scans did not show the difference that subjects on treatment showed. This means there's an important distinction between suicidal ideation that is CAUSED by the treatment (or at least, correlated with) compared with non-SSRI-induced thoughts.

Fascinating, just fascinating.

[Chemisse]

4. I think the suicidal thoughts on SSRIs are different

They are more like impulses that seem to come out of the blue, not necessarily related to the person's mood at the time. The person suddenly has a strong urge to steer herself off the road while driving, for example, and has to struggle to keep control of her actions.

So I think it makes a lot of sense that they should show up differently in brain images than the ideas of suicide that depressed people experience.

Really interesting.

[RagAss]

5. Tryptophan !

[flow_urgirl]

6. Depression is a book term not a definition of how I view others

Personally I don't believe in limiting terms such as depression. I see a person as an individual. I think they have a positive potential, and gifts that they are not using to get themselves around the self that doesn't want to do anything. Or that thinks of death a lot, and the actual death needed is a death of their ways, not their life. they need to kill themselves off yet it is taken to be a thing to do physically. Thus they must need something to enable that state to be on a different level so it does not become an interaction with others as communication tied in with the body.

Or as an action or indeed the other way of inaction.

Action is needed - do nothing. Action is needed - do nothing. Action is needed - do something, don't know how, need to die = suicide.

And also if the medication is just given - insert medication here - and then walk away from it richer as a dispenser of medicine, without much human interaction, then it is far more likely to increase apathy in society as it is in itself apathetic and unhuman to treat people for their life to get better asap as if their troubles are similar to a cut on the surface of the skin. Medicated people getting worse are they? Why is that then? Look at the way they are treated!!!! Blame the medication again and it will seem so wrong for humanity to continue to be exsting as part of the natural earth in rightful interaction with the harmonious peace of nature. It is the people who create it wasting billions of dollars on mind..the mind does not exist for the state of the companies pockets or for the authorisation of the government to be controlling the state of another humans life and body!!!