A Necessary Evil? Modelling Depression in Rodents As we move on in the modern age we grow and learn many things about science- we discover new things, new solutions to old problems and help people get better- these are the main focus of medical science. This broad field of medicine also includes disease or disorders related to the human brain. But before any drug that works effectively on any disease regarding the human brain is put into the market, it goes through a battery of tests. One of the most important being- testing it on animals, majorly rodents. Testing it on mammals is important so as to figure out the effect and efficiency of the drug on the mammalian brain, but at what price? Researchers use rodents- most commonly mice or rats, as the proverbial sacrificial lambs. These drugs and the tests have a huge possibility of killing the rodents, but we still continue doing it- this has been accepted as a necessary evil, but the question remains in many minds- what ...

Akanksha Mete On any college campus, or a corner of the internet dominated by teenagers and twenty-somethings, phrases like "Please just kill me," or "I really want to die," abound. Dark humour has gained widespread popularity with the teen and young adult demographics, specifically in the form of memes. Internet memes are virally-transmitted concepts, usually in pictorial form, intended to be funny. Therefore, they have two key elements: virality, and humour. On Instagram, searching for "#suicidememes" yields over hundred thousand results. The Google searches for "suicide memes" have increased roughly by an average of 1000 % since 2008. Temporally correlated to global socioeconomic instability and decline, suicide memes are a 21st century manifestation of "gallows humour", meaning cynical humour that arises from traumatic or stressful situations. Suicide memes are immensely popular because they represent a collective loss of fai...

Bhavya Dixit Marilyn Monroe, Anthony Bourdain, Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Robin Williams, Chester Bennington are names we are all familiar with due to different as well as similar reasons. All of these are celebrities who are known to have committed suicide and their stories stirred a lot of media coverage. However, a number of times this coverage can take forms of sensationalizing and glorifying suicides. For instance, in 1774, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Man Werther, a novel where the hero commits suicide due to a failed love affair, was banned in many European locations. It was perceived as responsible for cluster suicides in Italy, Leipzig, and Copenhagen (Stack, 2003). Werther effect also known as Copycat Suicide is a term given to such suicide contagions. This blog aims to view how impactful celebrity suicides and media’s coverage of the same are, in inducing imitative suicides. Scrutinizing on two different cases of celebrity suicides will give a better insight into what...

Kashish Janiani Most of us are well aware of the correlation between diet and physical health. However, we fail to realise how nutrition affects our mental health. We fail to recognise that our eating habits are part of the jigsaw in prevention of poor mental health. Based on investigations between nutrition and brain functions related to mental health, from the 1970s, alternative medicine and nutritionists have long accepted the relation between mood and food (Zepf, 2015, p. 19). However, it seems that the field of nutritional psychology - one that acknowledges the mind-body connect, is finally gaining traction. (Seligman 2018)  To begin with, it is important to understand what consists of a ‘good’ versus a ‘bad’ diet. A ‘good,’ healthy diet consists of loads of fresh vegetables, fruits, wholegrains, nuts and limited processed foods. In contrast, a ‘bad,’ unhealthy diet is high in saturated fats, sugar and processed foods (Marx, 2016, p. 428). A study of over 12,000 ...

Yashant Sharma Clinical Psychology 25 October 2019 Podcast review on Suicidality and Minutes from Grey’s Anatomy We often see how people usually think of suicidal states as a phase of mental stage, where one attempts to take of their lives intentionally either from blunt physical means lie cutting or slitting, or through arbitrary means such as overdose on drugs, alcohol or other substance abuse. It has been argued that it is only the mental stress that forces someone into the phase of self-harm, but in this paper I argue that it is purely based on environmental factors, and sometimes very minuscule stimuli induced in the environment can affect someone’s capacity to give up on ones’ own life. I will also bring in examples from daily life  where people who undergo immense physical pains like amputations or losing a body part that messes up with their psyche and might induce a feeling of self harm. It is often argued in clinical / abnormal psychology books that suicidal...

Aradhya Sharma With more than 300 million people affected by depression and 800 000 deaths due to suicide every year, it is important that clinicians continues to study different types of treatment programs that may be more effective, especially for patients that don’t find psychotherapy and anti-depressants helpful. One such alternative treatment that is understudied is hypnotherapy. Although there have been a few psychologists in the past that have promoted the use of hypnosis to facilitate therapy, its credibility has always been questioned by the scientific community, however, what if this alternative treatment actually has something to offer?  Hypnosis, simply put, is a trance-like state of focus accompanied by the enhanced capacity to relax and respond to suggestions. The American Psychological Association describes hypnosis as a cooperative interaction in which the participant responds to the suggestions of the hypnotist (Cherry, 2019). Hypnosis is a very effectiv...

Tanya Battiwalla While it is said that mood disorders are diverse in nature, they often have overlapping symptoms. These overlapping symptoms act as a blurry line between the disorders, making it difficult to diagnose the patient. This blog will discuss a few types of mood disorders and some of their symptoms, and will explore the aspect of overlapping symptoms leading to the difficulty in diagnosing. Mood disturbances commonly involve a depressive episode and/or a manic episode. In the former, a person has markedly low mood and might have negative thoughts or feelings. They experience a loss of interest in pleasurable activities, and possible changes in their eating and sleeping habits. In manic episodes, an individual may show symptoms such as elevated and euphoric mood. They may have outbursts of extreme irritability or violence when someone goes against their plans or desires. Other symptoms might include inflated self-esteem and high productivity. (Butcher, 2017) ...

Svasti Dutta (Trigger warnings: depression, suicide) Also: spoiler alert! Josh Thomas’s Please Like Me is one of few shows in mainstream media that takes care not to glamourize mental illness and suicide. An important storyline in the show is that of the protagonist’s mother, Rose, who attempts to take her life in the very first episode. As we follow the show over the next few seasons, we accompany her through therapy and a stay in a mental health facility, peppered with multiple suicide attempts. It’s in the penultimate episode of the fourth season that she kills herself. In spite of her history of mental illness, her suicide came completely out of the blue for her family. In the episode prior, her son and ex-husband had a conversation about how she seemed happier than she’d ever been, and how they thought that she was in a good place. It seems surprising that her family didn’t notice any warning signs leading up to her suicide; hence, the aim of this blog post is to ana...