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On This Day … 21 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1948 – Władysław Witwicki, Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist (b. 1878)[25].

Władysław Witwicki

Władysław Witwicki (30 April 1878 to 21 December 1948) was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland.

Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of cratism, theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów–Warsaw school.

Background

Władysław Witwicki was the fifth child of Urszula Witwicka, born Woińska (niece of the Metropolitan Archbishop of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Lviv, Łukasz Baraniecki), and Ludwik–Filip Wasylkowicz Witwicki, as well as father of Janusz Witwicki, the creators of the Plastic Panorama of Old Lviv.

He graduated from the University of Lviv, was a student of Kazimierz Twardowski. He also studied at the University of Vienna (under the direction of Alois Höfler) and at the Leipzig University (under the direction of Wilhelm Wundt). He lectured at the University of Lviv and became a professor at the University of Warsaw (1919-1948).

Works

Witwicki is the author of the first Polish textbooks on psychology. He also collaborated with other philosophers. For instance, he worked with Bronisław Bandrowski to develop a model of psychology based on Franz Brentano’s theory on phenomenology. It included an analysis of Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Content and the Phenomenon of Thinking.

In the comments to his own translation of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark – Dobra Nowina według Mateusza i Marka (The Good News according to Matthew and Mark) – Witwicki challenges the mental health of Jesus. He attributed to Jesus subjectivism, increased sense of his own power and superiority over others, egocentrism and the tendency to subjugate other people, as well as difficulties communicating with the outside world and multiple personality disorder, which made him a schizothymic or even schizophrenic type (according to the Ernst Kretschmer’s typology).

3MDR & PTSD: Breaking Through Avoidance & Increasing Engagement

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Research Paper Title

Perceived treatment processes and effects of interactive motion-assisted exposure therapy for veterans with treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: a mixed methods study.

Background

A novel intervention, Multi-modular motion-assisted memory desensitisation and reconsolidation (3MDR), aims to reduce avoidance and improve engagement for patients with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) who did not sufficiently respond to previous treatments. It has been found to effectively reduce PTSD symptoms for veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD. Symptomatic measures alone might not capture all treatment effects, and addition of qualitative outcomes may provide deeper understanding of treatment processes and treatment-induced changes.

The purpose of this was to study the perspectives of veterans with treatment-resistant PTSD on 3MDR treatment processes and effects and explore the relation of their experiences to PTSD symptom improvement.

Methods

A convergent parallel mixed methods design was applied. For the qualitative part, open-ended question interviews were conducted until data saturation was reached (N = 10). Thematic analysis, rooted in grounded theory, was performed. Quantitative data included pre- to posttreatment responder status based on a structured clinical interview for PTSD.

Results

Treatment processes endorsed by the veterans were engaging, regulating distress, feeling supported, facing traumatic memories, allowing emotions, associating, and disengaging from trauma. In terms of effects, veterans reported positive changes following 3MDR, including openness, new learning, self-understanding, closure, and reintegration. High comparability across themes was observed for responders and non-responders, except for the themes closure and reintegration, which were reported more often or more in depth by responders.

Conclusions

Veterans indicated 3MDR treatment processes that complied with its aims of breaking through avoidance and increasing engagement, thereby facilitating traumatic memory retrieval and processing. However, this did not necessarily translate into PTSD symptom improvement for all veterans. Walking towards trauma-related pictures was highlighted as unique component of 3MDR and connected to specific treatment processes and effects. Positive changes following 3MDR were experienced outside the domain of PTSD symptom improvement, implicating that 3MDR may beneficially impact veterans beyond symptom changes alone.

Reference

van Gelderen, M.J., Nijdam, M.J., Dubbink, G.E., Sleijpen, M. & Vermetten, E. (2020) Perceived treatment processes and effects of interactive motion-assisted exposure therapy for veterans with treatment-resistant posttraumatic stress disorder: a mixed methods study.

On This Day … 20 December

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People (Births)

  • 1917 – David Bohm, American-English physicist, neuropsychologist, and philosopher (d. 1992).

People (Deaths)

  • 1984 – Stanley Milgram, American psychologist and academic (b. 1933).

David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm FRS (20 December 1917 to 27 October 1992) was an American scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.

Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality – that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of “implicate” and “explicate” order. He also believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are.

Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontology. Due to his Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

Bohm’s main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete.

Stanley Milgram

Stanley Milgram (15 August 1933 to 20 December 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Centre, until his death in 1984.

His small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyse the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.

He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.

On This Day … 19 December

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – William Schutz, American psychologist and academic (d. 2002).

People (Deaths)

  • 1915 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist (b. 1864).

William Schultz

William Schutz (19 December 1925 to 09 November 2002) was an American psychologist.

Biography

Schutz was born in Chicago, Illinois. He practiced at the Esalen Institute in the 1960s. He later became the president of BConWSA International. He received his PhD from UCLA. In the 1950s, he was part of the peer-group at the University of Chicago’s Counselling Centre that included Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Elias Porter. He taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and was chairman of the holistic studies department at Antioch University until 1983.

In 1958, Schutz introduced a theory of interpersonal relations he called Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO). According to the theory three dimensions of interpersonal relations were deemed to be necessary and sufficient to explain most human interaction: Inclusion, Control and Affection. These dimensions have been used to assess group dynamics.

Schutz also created FIRO-B, a measurement instrument with scales that assess the behavioural aspects of the three dimensions. His advancement of FIRO Theory beyond the FIRO-B tool was most obvious in the change of the “Affection” scale to the “Openness” scale in the “FIRO Element-B”. This change highlighted his newer theory that behaviour comes from feelings (“FIRO Element-F”) and the self-concept (“FIRO Element-S”). “Underlying the behaviour of openness is the feeling of being likable or unlikeable, lovable or unlovable. I find you likable if I like myself in your presence, if you create an atmosphere within which I like myself.”

W. Schutz authored more than ten books and many articles. His work was influenced by Alexander Lowen, Ida Pauline Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais. As a body therapist he led encounter group workshops focussing on the underlying causes of illnesses and developing alternative body-centred cures. His books, “Profound Simplicity” and “The Truth Option,” address this theme. He brought new approaches to body therapy that integrated truth, choice (freedom), (self) responsibility, self-esteem, self-regard and honesty into his approach.

In his books one encounters the concept of energy cycles (e.g. Schutz 1979) which a person goes through or call for completion. The single steps of the energy cycles are: motivation – prepare – act – feel.

Schutz died at his home in Muir Beach, California in 2002.

Influences

While teaching and doing research at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and other institutions, Schutz focused on psychology but also studied philosophy – in particular, the scientific method, the philosophy of science, logical empiricism, and research design (with both Hans Reichenbach and Abraham Kaplan). He also worked with Paul Lazarsfeld, the well-known sociologist and methodologist and Elvin Semrad, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and clinical director in charge of psychiatric residency training at the Massachusetts Mental Health Centre. For Schutz, Semrad was a key figure, “a brilliant, earthy psychoanalyst who became my main mentor about groups.”

An avid student, Schutz also learned T-group methodology (“T” for training) at the National Training Laboratories (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, psychosynthesis, a spiritually oriented technique involving imagery, devised by an Italian contemporary of Freud named Roberto Assagioli, psychodrama with Hannah Weiner, bioenergetics with Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos, Rolfing with Ida Rolf, and Gestalt Therapy with Paul Goodman. In his own words, “I tried everything physical, psychological, and spiritual – all diets, all therapies, all body methods, jogging, meditating, visiting a guru in India, and fasting for thirty-four days on water. These experiences counterbalanced my twenty years in science and left me with a strong desire to integrate the scientific with the experiential.”

Alois Alzheimer

Aloysius Alzheimer (also known as Alois Alzheimer; 14 June 1864 to 19 December 1915) was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of “presenile dementia”, which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer’s disease.

Early Life and Education

Aloysius Alzheimer was born in Marktbreit, Bavaria on 14 June 1864, the son of Anna Johanna Barbara Sabina and Eduard Román Alzheimer. His father served in the office of notary public in the family’s hometown.

The Alzheimers moved to Aschaffenburg when Alois was still young in order to give their children an opportunity to attend the Royal Humanistic Gymnasium. After graduating with Abitur in 1883, Alzheimer studied medicine at University of Berlin, University of Tübingen, and University of Würzburg. In his final year at university, he was a member of a fencing fraternity, and even received a fine for disturbing the peace while out with his team. In 1887, Alois Alzheimer graduated from Würzburg as Doctor of Medicine.

Career

The following year, he spent five months assisting mentally ill women before he took an office in the city mental asylum in Frankfurt am Main, the Städtische Anstalt für Irre und Epileptische (Asylum for Lunatics and Epileptics). Emil Sioli, a noted psychiatrist, was the dean of the asylum. Another neurologist, Franz Nissl, began to work in the same asylum with Alzheimer. Together, they conducted research on the pathology of the nervous system, specifically the normal and pathological anatomy of the cerebral cortex. Alzheimer was the co-founder and co-publisher of the journal Zeitschrift für die gesamte Neurologie und Psychiatrie, though he never wrote a book that he could call his own.

While at the Frankfurt asylum, Alzheimer also met Emil Kraepelin, one of the best-known German psychiatrists of the time. Kraepelin became a mentor to Alzheimer, and the two worked very closely for the next several years. When Kraepelin moved to Munich to work at the Royal Psychiatric Hospital in 1903, he invited Alzheimer to join him.

At the time, Kraepelin was doing clinical research on psychosis in senile patients; Alzheimer, on the other hand, was more interested in the lab work of senile illnesses. The two men would face many challenges involving the politics of the psychiatric community. For example, both formal and informal arrangements would be made among psychiatrists at asylums and universities to receive cadavers.

In 1904, Alzheimer completed his Habilitation at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, where he was appointed as a professor in 1908. Afterwards, he left Munich for the Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University in Breslau in 1912, where he accepted a post as professor of psychiatry and director of the Neurologic and Psychiatric Institute. His health deteriorated shortly after his arrival so that he was hospitalized. Alzheimer died three years later.

Auguste Deter

In 1901, Alzheimer observed a patient at the Frankfurt asylum named Auguste Deter. The 51-year-old patient had strange behavioural symptoms, including a loss of short-term memory; she became his obsession over the coming years. Auguste Deter was a victim of the politics of the time in the psychiatric community; the Frankfurt asylum was too expensive for her husband. Herr Deter made several requests to have his wife moved to a less expensive facility, but Alzheimer intervened in these requests. Frau Deter remained at the Frankfurt asylum, where Alzheimer had made a deal to receive her records and brain upon her death.

On 08 April 1906, Frau Deter died, and Alzheimer had her medical records and brain brought to Munich where he was working in Kraepelin’s laboratory. With two Italian physicians, he used the staining techniques of Bielschowsky to identify amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles. These brain anomalies would become identifiers of what later became known as Alzheimer’s disease.

Another hypothesis offered by Claire O’Brien was that Auguste Deter actually had a vascular dementing disease.

Findings

Alzheimer discussed his findings on the brain pathology and symptoms of presenile dementia publicly on 03 November 1906, at the Tübingen meeting of the Southwest German Psychiatrists. The attendees at this lecture seemed uninterested in what he had to say. The lecturer that followed Alzheimer was to speak on the topic of “compulsive masturbation”, which the audience was so eagerly awaiting that they sent Alzheimer away without any questions or comments on his discovery of the pathology of a type of senile dementia.

Following the lecture, Alzheimer published a short paper summarising his lecture; in 1907 he wrote a larger paper detailing the disease and his findings. The disease would not become known as Alzheimer’s disease until 1910, when Kraepelin named it so in the chapter on “Presenile and Senile Dementia” in the 8th edition of his Handbook of Psychiatry. By 1911, his description of the disease was being used by European physicians to diagnose patients in the US.

Contemporaries

American Solomon Carter Fuller gave a report similar to that of Alzheimer at a lecture five months before Alzheimer. Oskar Fischer was a fellow German psychiatrist, 12 years Alzheimer’s junior, who reported 12 cases of senile dementia in 1907 around the time that Alzheimer published his short paper summarizing his lecture.

Alzheimer and Fischer had different interpretations of the disease, but due to Alzheimer’s short life, they never had the opportunity to meet and discuss their ideas.

Among the doctors trained by Alois Alzheimer and Emil Kraepelin at München in the beginning of the XXth century were the Spanish neuropathologists Nicolás Achúcarro and Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora, two distinguished disciples of Santiago Ramón y Cajal and members of the Spanish Neurological School. Alzheimer recommended the young and brilliant Nicolás Achúcarro to organize the neuropathological service at the Government Hospital for the Insane, at Washington D.C. (current, NIH), and after two years of work, he was substituted by Gonzalo Rodríguez Lafora.

Other Interests

Alzheimer was known for having a variety of medical interests including vascular diseases of the brain, early dementia, brain tumours, forensic psychiatry and epilepsy. Alzheimer was a leading specialist in histopathology in Europe. His colleagues knew him to be a dedicated professor and cigar smoker.

Death

In August 1912, Alzheimer fell ill on the train on his way to the University of Breslau, where he had been appointed professor of psychiatry in July 1912. Most probably he had a streptococcal infection and subsequent rheumatic fever leading to valvular heart disease, heart failure and kidney failure. He had not recovered completely from this illness.

He died of heart failure on 19 December 1915 at age 51, in Breslau, Silesia (present-day Wrocław, Poland). He was buried on 23 December 1915 next to his wife in the Hauptfriedhof in Frankfurt am Main.

On This Day … 18 December

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People (Births)

  • 1884 – Emil Starkenstein, Czech pharmacologist, co-founded clinical pharmacology (d. 1942).

People (Deaths)

  • 1990 – Joseph Zubin, Lithuanian-American psychologist and academic (b. 1900).

Emil Starkenstein

Emil Starkenstein (18 December 1884 to 06 November 1942) was a Czech-Jewish pharmacologist and one of the founders of clinical pharmacology. He was killed in the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp along with a few hundred refugees from Amsterdam after an incident in which a Dutch Jew resisted a Nazi patrol.

Emil Starkenstein was born in the Bohemian (now Czech) town of Poběžovice, (Ronsperg) to Jewish German parents. The family had many members who became local physician. Starkenstein researched and published a family tree in 1927 which traced his family roots as far back as 1350 and included such figures as R. Benjamin Wolf (1777-1851), R.Eleasar Löw, R. Moses Isserles (1520-1572), and several in the Katzenelbogen line, including R.Saul Wahl Katzenelbogen who, according to the glossary of the family tree, ‘became king of Poland for one night after the death of Stephen Bathory.

He was a professor at Charles University in Prague until the 1938 German occupation of Czechoslovakia. He continued his work as a refugee in the Netherlands. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1939, Starkenstein was confined to an area in Amsterdam with other Jews, where they were forced to wear yellow badges and banned from civil service employment. He was arrested and deported in 1941, via Prague and Terezin, to Mauthausen concentration camp. His wife and daughter survived in hiding in The Netherlands, and after the war his wife Marie (née Weil) donated his extensive collection of papers (more than 20,000 items) to the Czechoslovak state. In 2002, these papers were finally deposited in the archives of Charles University in Prague. In addition to the scientific papers, Starkenstein had one of the most impressive pharmacological libraries ever assembled. Before he was killed in the Nazi concentration camps, his family agreed to sell the collection to rare book dealer Ludwig Gottschalk, but when Gottschalk faced deportation to the camps himself, he secreted the library in several locations in the Black Forest and went into hiding. After the war, he reassembled the Starkenstein books and for nearly half a century sold items from the collection under the name Biblion, Inc., in Forest Hills, New York. A portion of the library was purchased by the LuEsther T. Mertz Library of the New York Botanical Garden. These 147 volumes, dealing primarily with the medicinal uses of plants, are identified by Starkenstein’s bookplate.

Joseph Zubin

Joseph Zubin (09 October 1900 to 18 December 1990) was a Lithuanian born American educational psychologist and an authority on schizophrenia who is commemorated by the Joseph Zubin Awards.

Life

Zubin was born 09 October 1900 in Raseiniai, Lithuania, but moved to the US in 1908 and grew up in Baltimore. His first degree was in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in 1921, and he earned a PhD in educational psychology at Columbia University in 1932. In 1934 he married Winifred Anderson (who survived him) and they had three children (2 sons, David and Jonathan, and a daughter, Winfred). At his death on 18 December 1990, he had seven grandchildren. In addition, his great-grandson is Adam Chapnik (he/him/his), counsellor of the Abbey (he/him/his) Unit at Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wildwood Camp.

Honours

Zubin was President of both the American Psychopathological Association (1951-1952) and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1971-1972) and received numerous awards for his work.[2] In 1946 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

Deployment-Related Stress & Support Needs

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Research Paper Title

“This is not your Life…and it becomes your Life”: A Qualitative Exploration of Deployment-related Stress and Support needs in National Guard and Reserve spouses who are Mothers of Young Children.

Background

The adverse effects of deployment-related stress (DRS) on military service members, spouses, and children are well documented.

Findings from a recent Consensus Report on Military Families by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (2019) underscore the priority of gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the diversity of today’s military families and their needs and well-being.

While social support is generally regarded as helpful during times of stress, it has not been studied extensively in National Guard/Reserve spouses who are parents of young children.

Methods

This qualitative study of 30 women examines the unique ways in which DRS affects women who are National Guard/Reserve spouses and mothers of young children, as well as the processes through which they encountered support to manage these stressors.

Salient themes spanned experiences involving deployment cycle phases of separation and reintegration and included both anticipated and unanticipated changes in family-related division of labour, dynamics, and communication patterns.

These were complicated by geographic, social, and cultural isolation and misguided efforts to support spouses initiated by civilians.

Conclusions

Women managed these stressors primarily through seeking, acquiring, and repurposing existing sources of informal social support for themselves and formal supports for their children, with varying degrees of success.

Reference

Ross, A.M., DeVoe, E.R., Steketee, G., Spencer, R. & Richter, M. (2020) “This is not your Life…and it becomes your Life”: A Qualitative Exploration of Deployment-related Stress and Support needs in National Guard and Reserve spouses who are Mothers of Young Children. Family Process. doi: 10.1111/famp.12622. Online ahead of print.

On This Day … 17 December

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People (Births)

  • 1930 – Dorothy Rowe, Australian psychologist and author (d. 2019).
  • 1931 – James McGaugh, American neurobiologist and psychologist.

Dorothy Rowe

Dr. Dorothy Rowe (née Conn; 17 December 1930 to 25 March 2019) was an Australian psychologist and author, whose area of interest was depression. Born; Newcastle, NSW. Died Sydney, NSW.

Rowe came to England in her forties, working at Sheffield University and was the head of Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology. In addition to her published works on depression, she is a regular columnist in the UK.

She spent her time working with depressed patients and, through listening to their stories, came to reject the medical model of mental illness, instead working within personal construct theory. She believes that depression is a result of beliefs which do not enable a person to live comfortably with themselves or the world. Most notably it is the belief in a “Just World” (that the bad are punished and the good rewarded) that exacerbates feelings of fear and anxiety if disaster strikes. Part of recovering is accepting that the external world is unpredictable and that we control relatively little of it.

In July 1989, Rowe made an extended appearance on the British television discussion programme After Dark alongside, among others, Steven Rose, Frank Cioffi, The Bishop of Durham and Michael Bentine.

The BBC were required to apologise to Dorothy Rowe in 2009 after the production editing of her radio interview misrepresented her views on the impact of religion in providing structure to people’s lives.

James McGaugh

James L. McGaugh (born 17 December 1931) is an American neurobiologist and author working in the field of learning and memory. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow and founding director of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Career

McGaugh received his B.A. from San Jose State University in 1953 and his PhD in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. He was briefly a professor at San Jose State and then did postdoctoral work in neuropharmacology with Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Bovet at the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá in Rome, Italy. He then became a professor at the University of Oregon from 1961 to 1964. He was recruited to the University of California, Irvine, in 1964 (the year of the school’s founding) to be the founding chair of the Department of Psychobiology (now Neurobiology and Behaviour). He became dean (1967-1970) of the School of Biological Sciences and Vice Chancellor (1975-1977) and executive Vice Chancellor (1978-1982) of the university. In 1982, he founded the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and remained director from 1982 to 2004.

Early Research Findings

McGaugh’s early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) demonstrated that memories are not instantly created in a long-term, permanent fashion. Rather, immediately after a learning event, the memory is labile and susceptible to influence. As time passes, the memory becomes increasingly resistant to external influences and eventually becomes stored in a relatively permanent manner, a process termed memory consolidation. McGaugh found that drugs, given to an animal shortly after a learning event, influence the subsequent retention of that event. The concept of such “post-training” manipulations is one of McGaugh’s greatest contributions to the field of learning and memory because it avoids many potential confounds, such as performance effects of the drug, that may occur when a drug or other treatment is given prior to the training.

Over the ensuing decades, McGaugh and his research colleagues and students extended the findings into a long-term investigation of emotionally influenced memory consolidation. As most people realise, they have stronger memories for long-ago events that were emotionally arousing in nature, compared with memories for emotionally neutral events (which may not be remembered well at all). McGaugh’s research examined how emotional arousal influences memory consolidation. In particular, he has found that stress hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, mediate much of the effects of emotional arousal on subsequent retention of the event. These hormones, in turn, activate a variety of brain structures, including the amygdala, which appears to play a key role in modulating memory consolidation. The amygdala, when activated, influences a variety of other brain structures, including the hippocampus, nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus that process different aspects of memory. It is through this “orchestration” of brain structures that memories are eventually formed and stored, though the exact nature of memory storage remains elusive.

Does VRET & ARET Work as a Treatment for PTSD?

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Research Paper Title

Efficacy of immersive PTSD treatments: A systematic review of virtual and augmented reality exposure therapy and a meta-analysis of virtual reality exposure therapy.

Background

Virtual reality exposure therapy (VRET) and augmented reality exposure therapy (ARET) are digitally assisted psychotherapies that potentially enhance posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) treatment by increasing a patient’s sense of presence during exposure therapy.

This study aimed to systematically review current evidence regarding the efficacy of VRET and ARET as PTSD treatment.

Methods

A systematic electronic database search, a systematic quality assessment and two meta-analyses were conducted in accordance with PRISMA guidelines.

Results

Eleven studies on the efficacy of VRET for PTSD (n = 438) were found, but no studies on the efficacy of ARET. The majority of VRET studies were of a low quality and had heterogeneous results. Meta-analyses showed VRET outperformed waitlist control (standardised mean difference -0.64 (95% CI -1.05 to -0.22)) while no significant difference was found between VRET and active treatment conditions (standardised mean difference -0.25 (95% CI -0.77 to 0.27)).

Conclusions

VRET was superior to waitlist control groups and as effective as other psychotherapies. However, the results showed considerable heterogeneity due to the low number of studies and variety of VRET methods. VRET may be an effective alternative to current treatments and shows promise for the treatment of PTSD patients that have not responded to previous treatment.

Future research should focus on high quality RCTs, including information on side effects and adverse events, with sufficient numbers of participants.

This study recognises a research gap regarding the efficacy of ARET, while it may have potential for PTSD treatment.

Reference

Eshuis, L.V., van Gelderen, M.J., van Zuidan, M., Nijdam, M.J., Vermetten, E., Olff, M. & Bakker, A. (2020) Efficacy of immersive PTSD treatments: A systematic review of virtual and augmented reality exposure therapy and a meta-analysis of virtual reality exposure therapy. Journal of Psychiatric Research. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2020.11.030. Online ahead of print.

What are the Correlates of Suicidal Ideation & Behaviours Among Former Military Personnel Not Enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration?

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Research Paper Title

Correlates of Suicidal Ideation and Behaviours Among Former Military Personnel Not Enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration.

Background

The current study sought to explore suicidal concomitants, both demographic and psychological, among former military personal.

Methods

The sample included 645 veterans who are at increased risk for suicide but have not yet pursued Veterans Health Administration (VHA) services.

Results

Descriptive statistics revealed that these veterans are primarily young Caucasian males who served in the US Army.

In terms of psychological characteristics, the current sample reported clinically significant levels of depression, post-traumatic stress, and insomnia.

Furthermore, respondents acknowledged use of various substances and high levels of perceived burdensomeness and thwarted belongingness.

Conclusions

The demographic and psychological makeup of the researchers sample was somewhat similar to that of VHA-connected veterans except that their sample was slightly more educated and reported less physical pain.

Reference

Raines, A.M., Allan, N.P., Franklin, C.L., Huet, A. Constans, J.I. & Stecker, T. (2020) Correlates of Suicidal Ideation and Behaviors Among Former Military Personnel Not Enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration. Archives of Suicide Research. 24(4), pp.517-533. doi: 10.1080/13811118.2019.1660286. Epub 2019 Dec 2.

On This Day … 15 December

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Events

  • 1973 – The American Psychiatric Association votes 13-0 to remove homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders, the DSM-II.

People (Births)

  • 1911 – Nicholas P. Dallis, American psychiatrist and illustrator (d. 1991).

People (Deaths)

  • 2005 – Heinrich Gross, Austrian physician and psychiatrist (b. 1914).
  • 2010 – Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, American psychoanalyst and theorist (b. 1940).

Nicholas P. Dallis

Nicholas Peter Dallis (15 December 1911 to 06 July 1991), known as Nick Dallis, was an American psychiatrist turned comic strip writer, creator of the soap opera-style strips Rex Morgan MD, Judge Parker and Apartment 3-G. Separating his comics career from his medical practice, he wrote under pseudonyms, Dal Curtis for Rex Morgan MD, and Paul Nichols for Judge Parker.

Born in New York City, Nick Dallis grew up on Long Island. He graduated from Washington & Jefferson College in 1933 and from Temple University’s medical school in 1938 and married a nurse, Sarah Luddy. He decided to specialize in psychiatry, and after World War II, started a practice in Toledo, Ohio. Allen Saunders was chair at the time of the local mental hygiene centre that invited him there, and in his autobiography, he recalled that Dallis approached him, as a well-known comics writer (Steve Roper and Mike Nomad, Mary Worth), about “his desire to write a comic strip, one tracing the history of medicine. I told him that, commendable as his idea was, such a feature would not succeed. Readers want entertainment, not enlightenment. But a story about a handsome young doctor’s involvement with his patients might be a winner.”

Heinrich Gross

Heinrich Gross (14 November 1915 to 15 December 2005) was an Austrian psychiatrist, medical doctor and neurologist, a reputed expert as a leading court-appointed psychiatrist, ill-famed for his proven involvement in the killing of at least nine children with physical, mental and/or emotional/behavioural characteristics considered “unclean” by the Nazi regime, under its Euthanasia Programme. His role in hundreds of other cases of infanticide is unclear. Gross was head of the Spiegelgrund children’s psychiatric clinic for two years during World War II.

A significant element of the controversy surrounding Gross’ activities is that after the children had been murdered, parts of their bodies, particularly their brains, were preserved and retained for future study for decades after the murders. It was only on 28 April 2002 that the preserved remains of these murdered children were finally buried.

Pre-War Career

Heinrich Gross was born in Vienna on 14 November 1915. His parents, Karl and Petronella Gross, were in the wool and knitwear business. His father died before Heinrich was born and his mother placed him in a Catholic boarding school for his early education. He graduated from a public high school in 1934 and received a medical degree in 1939 from the University of Vienna.

In 1932 Gross became a member of the Hitler Youth and joined the Sturmabteilung in 1934. He remained a member throughout the period 1934 to 1938 when these organisations were outlawed in Austria. After Germany annexed Austria in 1938, Gross joined the Nazi Party.

Euthanasia Programme

Euthanasia was commonly practiced long before the infamous Nazi concentration camps. The euthanasia programme was introduced to the German people as an efficient manner to obtain a Master Race for the Nazi people and an economic relief to families. As Nazi popularity grew and the economy still struggling these options were widely accepted by the German people. Am Spiegelgrund was a youth care facility on the grounds of a mental institution. From the years of 1940 to 1945 it was used for mentally handicapped adults or children. During their stay they suffered numerous forms of torture and up to 800 people were murdered there. Gross began in pavilion 15 in November 1940. By 1942 he had killed more children than any other doctor in the hospital. He became the leading psychiatrist and began studying the neurology of mentally handicapped children. With the passing of Aktion T4 the killings increased and Gross began to harvest the brains of his victims for further study. In 1943 Gross was called for military service returning pretty regularly for research until his capture in 1945.

Post-war Career

In the same year of his overturned manslaughter case, Gross was allowed to resume his research at Rose Hill. In 1955, he completed his training as a specialist in nervous and mental diseases and became the head prison doctor or physician in the former Hospital and nursing home Am Steinhof. In 1957 he became the Chief court psychiatrist for men’s mental institutions. There he worked with the justice system in insanity cases and was the main decision maker in all sterilisation cases as well. He got promoted to the management of the “Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for the study of the abnormalities of the nervous system” created specially for him in 1968. Gross worked as a reviewer and for years was considered the most busy court expert in Austria. In 1975 the Republic of Austria awarded him the medal für Wissenschaft und Kunst 1, of which he was stripped of in 2003. In 1975 it was realised that he had been involved in illegal killings during the Nazi occupation of Austria. Gross was stripped of many awards but continued serving as a court expert until he came under investigation in 1997 for nine counts of murder.

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein (09 July 1940 to 15 December 2010) was an American social theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, and a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Wolfenstein graduated with his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Columbia College in 1962. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Wolfenstein received his Master of Arts in political science in 1964 and his PhD in political science in 1965 from Princeton University. Wolfenstein became a professor of political science at UCLA.

He also completed a PhD in psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1984. He was the member of the faculty of the institute from 1988 to 2004. Moreover, he was in private practice from the time he received his degree up to the time of his death.

Wolfenstein worked in the critical theory tradition, with a focus on African American culture and social movements. In his book The Victims of Democracy: Malcolm X and the Black Revolution, he used a theory of the interaction between social classes and psychological groups to analyse white racism and the black liberation struggle. He developed a more general version of this theory in Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (1993) and refined it further through engagement with Nietzsche’s philosophy in Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations (2000). These later works add a concern with gender identity to the earlier agenda. His research is in the area of African-American narrative. A Gift of the Spirit: Reading THE SOULS OF BLACK FOLK (2007) offered a sustained reconstruction of W.E.B. Du Bois’s canonical text. A further study entitled “Talking Books: Toni Morrison Among the Ancestors” was published right before his death.

He was a professor at UCLA. At the undergraduate level, he taught the lower division Introduction to Political Theory, along with Ancient Political Theory, African-American Freedom Narratives, Malcolm X and Black Liberation, Marxist Political Theory, and an occasional seminar on Platonic Dialectic and Spiritual Liberation. At the graduate level, he focused on major works of Du Bois, Foucault, Freud, Hegel, Marx, and Nietzsche, along with the related critical literatures.

His main interests were History of Political Theory, Psychoanalytic Theory and Practice, Critical Theory, Critical Race Theory and Feminist Theory.