“You’re 40, happily married – and then you meet your long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn’t fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it’s a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last month, a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister – but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology? ” Guardian/UK

“Characters from Irish soap operas and The Simpsons have been used in ESRC-funded research into how we get to learn people’s faces.

Observations during the 1970s of witnesses mis-remembering unfamiliar people from crime scenes has led to a lot of investigation into face recognition over the years. Today’s rapidly increasing use of CCTV images makes the subject as topical as ever.

Previous research has shown that comparing images of unfamiliar faces to see whether they show the same person is highly prone to error, even when the pictures are high quality and the faces are shown at the same time to avoid relying on memory. By contrast, recognising familiar faces can be highly accurate, even when the image quality is extremely poor.

The aim of a new study led by Professor Vicki Bruce, now at Edinburgh University, was to investigate how faces become familiar to us.” EurekAlert!

“Language can help to shape the way we think about the world. Richard Dawkins welcomes an attempt to raise consciousness about atheism by co-opting a word with cheerful associations“:

My favourite consciousness-raising effort is one I have men tioned many times before (and I make no apology, for consciousness- raising is all about repetition). A phrase like ‘Catholic child’ or ‘Muslim child’ should clang furious bells of protest in the mind, just as we flinch when we hear ‘one man one vote’. Children are too young to know their religious opinions. Just as you can’t vote until you are 18, you should be free to choose your own cosmology and ethics without society’s impertinent presumption that you will automatically inherit your parents’. We’d be aghast to be told of a Leninist child or a neo-conservative child or a Hayekian monetarist child. So isn’t it a kind of child abuse to speak of a Catholic child or a Protestant child? Especially in Northern Ireland and Glasgow where such labels, handed down over generations, have divided neighbourhoods for centuries and can even amount to a death warrant? Guardian/UK

New York Times commentary by Dr. Peter Kramer, psychiatrist and author of Listening to Prozac: Patients are beginning to treat depression with respect. Whether their doctors are ready to do so is less clear.

… A study in the current issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association finds that almost six in 10 Americans who suffer depression seek treatment in a given year. A decade ago, the figure was one in three.

But the researchers found that only about 40 percent of patients received what standard guidelines consider ‘minimally adequate medical treatment.’ Those criteria call for a month of antidepressants monitored in four office visits or eight half-hour counseling sessions.

There is a long tradition in general medicine of ignoring or undertreating depression. But a second article in JAMA suggested reasons that the pattern may change. That report described the largest study of psychotherapy ever conducted, sponsored by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute.

The study is a response to evidence, developed over the past decade, that depression, like diabetes and hypertension, is a risk to the heart. By middle age, studies show, depression triples or quadruples the risk of cardiac death. The most acute danger comes in the wake of heart attacks. After a first attack, depression raises the risk of recurrence dramatically. NY Times

Kramer discusses the intimate relationship — probably far more complex than you would have expected — between depression and cardiac disease in some detail. Antidepressants likely reduce cardiovascular morbidity and mortality by a combination of mechanisms both related to and distinct from their antidepressant actions.

Quite rightly. But, on the other hand, at this year’s American Psychiatric Association annual meeting, I noticed a new marketing trend in the big pharmaceutical companies’ exhibit booths. And, whenever I notice a new marketing trend in pharmaceuticals, I assume it has much much more to do with preserving or enlarging profits than with scientific accuracy… Increasingly, the promotional gospel is that depression is a systemic disease rather than simply one of the mind. Emphasizing its connection with bodily fatigue, chronic pain, gastrointestinal distress, immune dysfunction, cardiovascular effects etc., while probably scientifically accurate, seem to serve primarily profit-making goals for their manufacturers by enhancing the likelihood that an antidepressant will be prescribed in a given instance.

As I have often written here, for the past several decades they have attempted, and largely succeeded, in enlisting internists and other primary care specialists as prescribers of psychoactive drugs, displacing mental health specialists to the detriment of the patients and then ignoring the contribution of that trend to the adverse outcomes. This effort will be facilitated if non-psychiatric practitioners are persuaded to conceptualize their patient’s depression as a physical disease, and if they can envision prescribing an antidepressant as potentially addressing their patients’ vague bodily complaints they find so vexing and time-consuming a part of a primary care practice.

In addition to facilitating the shift of antidepressant prescribing to non-psychiatric practitioners, this emphasis on depression as a physical ailment can be expected in a similar manner to shift the overall response to depression toward the medication solution and away from non-medical solutions such as psychotherapy… or simply adequate time and attention in the busy internist’s schedule.

I am not suggesting that Kramer is a knowing tool of the pharmaceutical industry. But if the zeitgeist is changing we ought to recognize the full range of contributing influences.

“United States military commanders say foreign fighters are being actively recruited by loyalists to Saddam Hussein to join the resistance against American forces in Iraq, posing a new challenge to efforts to stabilize the country.” NY Times Several comments. First of all, this is predictable spin from an administration that wants to cast Iraq as part of a global terrorist conspiracy against us and is turning its sights to Syria, Iran and other demonized Islamic regimes. And, furthermore, it is an argument that clings to the pitiful fiction that we have ‘liberated’ the country and that, left to its own sentiments without the influence of ‘Baathist’ and “fundamentalist’ agitators, the Iraqis would be fawning all over their country’s liberators rather than killing them at an average rate of one American soldier a day NY Times.

Secondly, why in the world would we be surprised that our actions in Iraq recruited legions to the global fight against the American infidels or that they have failed to cease hostilities with the fall of Baghdad? Given that they had no loyalty to Saddam per se in the first place? Shouldn’t an effective American occupation have anticipated the need to close the porous boundaries if (as Maj. Gen. William Webster, deputy commander of the allied land command, is quoted as saying in a recent interview) “you have got Baath Party and regime loyalists west and northeast of the city who are calling buddies in foreign countries and getting fighters to come across the border” ?

“Why are we even bothering to keep looking for those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? At this point, what difference does it make whether we find them or not? Trying to find them serves two ostensible purposes: One is to prevent them from being used, and the other is to settle the argument about whether they exist. But neither purpose really applies any longer.” — Michael Kinsley, Slate

Kinsley argues that the people who would care that we were lied to about the justification for the war are already convinced. The bulk of the American public do not need proff, giving Bush a pass on this one. Even the administration has been retreating from the pretext, now saying the war was justified on purely humanitarian grounds.

I do differ from Kinsley on his other point, which is the irrelevancy of stopping any existing weapons from being used. He argues that without Saddam Iraq is not the rogue state we have to fear most, and there are other dangerous states out there more prone to use WMD against the civilized world. Now, I don’t believe the weapons were ever there, but if they were this argument would not hold water. Given the chaos that reigns in Iraq under US occupation, finding any WMD would matter not so much because there are government elements that represent a threat as because of the risk of diversion to unscrupulous — or even merely ignorant — elements. How can this risk be ignored given the (underreported) story last week from the Iraqi nuclear power facility at xxxx that radioactive uranium unguarded by occupying forces was dumped out onto the ground so the looters could use the barrels for food storage?

Kinsley’s essay veers off in a different direction, however, after considering these points. He wonders, as has been one of my recent preoccupations, why Americans are so ready to believe in WMD. I do agree that the phrase itself has become an incantation (‘”Weapons of mass destruction” are to George W. Bush what fairies were to Peter Pan. He wants us to say, “We DO believe in weapons of mass destruction. We DO believe. We DO.” ‘). Because he believes the debate is irrelevant, he is amazed how rarely people say they don’t know whether Iraq had WMD, the only correct answer. He seems to fault the confident naysayers like myself along with the credulous swallowers of every Bush lie, before wandering off into some unintelligible meditation on how many martinis it takes a pundit to form an opinion and how certain one has to be to believe anything. I suppose his point is to criticize pundit culture, but is he talking about the standards we ought to apply to political commentators or to the rest of us? It is a different but no less opinionated conceit, in a sense, to be the pundit of radical skepticism; I’m not sure the resurrection of the Know-Nothing Party is the answer for the crisis in political polarization in the U.S. today.

“You’re 40, happily married – and then you meet your long-lost brother and fall passionately in love. This isn’t fiction; in the age of the sperm donor, it’s a growing reality: 50% of reunions between siblings, or parents and offspring, separated at birth result in obsessive emotions. Last month, a former police officer was convicted of incest with his half-sister – but should we criminalise a bond hardwired into our psychology? ” Guardian/UK