On the couch

If you do happen to be interested in my ramblings about brain plasticity, you can listen to the author being interviewed on Radio National, All in the Mind, here. Part 1 and 2 are perhaps more interesting and less scientific than the spiel about stem cells, and Part 2 is Norman Doidge alone.

Here is an interesting little snippet from the transcript about the proliferation of drugs being used to treat mental disorders from Part 1 (whoever writes up these transcripts needs some grammar lessons - I have added my own punctuation so it makes sense):

Jeffrey Schwartz: ... They took this notion from the 60s, which was clever when they came up with it in the 60s, 'for every twisted thought, a twisted molecule', it was a clever little aphorism you know, 40 something years ago, but they took it so literally that it became a dogma that was genuinely nihilistic and destructive to the notion of people having a will and people having capacity to change their conscious awareness and change their brain in the process. Because if you believe that every twisted thought is really just a twisted molecule, then you're going to have exactly what did happen, which is you're going to end up wanting to use mechanical means to treat mental disorders. And the predominant use of drugs in psychiatry is, I think, as anybody who is not really making his or her living off prescribing those drugs, and even many of the people who do, now acknowledge, that it has gone way overboard.

And in further explanation of that, this is Norman Doidge from Part 2:

Norman Doidge: ... And one of the most exciting and important things about this work is people have often thought that real treatments are always biological and involve drugs etc, and that talk therapy is just that—just talk, mere talk. But we now have really important work of psychoanalytic therapies — cognitive behaviour therapy, inter-personal therapy which kind of grows out of psychoanalytic therapy — which shows that patients come in with brains in certain states of wiring and after these interventions their brains are rewired.

So psychotherapy is every bit as biological as the use of medicines and I would say, in a certain respect, more precise at times. Now look I use medications from time to time, I never give medication without giving psychotherapy. The Canadian health care system allows me to do that but I think that's really, really important because medications basically bathe every cell in your brain at once. And in that sense, on that level, they're a blunt instrument. Now there are times when they have very, very important results, I'm not saying that anyone should go off their medication and all that kind of thing, the reductionist approach ... but one of the things we've learnt is that if you look at the letter A and then you close your eyes and think of the letter A, many of the same circuits are activated. And if you're hurting and talking with your therapist about that, those circuits are activated at that point and that provides a point of entry. And when therapy is working it's like a microsurgical intervention on precisely the circuits that have to be changed.