Links are at the end.
Carmen pointed out to me that Eli Lilly apologized, on Twitter, for having been impersonated by a Twitter account which tweeted that insulin was now free.
No word on whether Lockheed Martin apologized for their own impersonator’s stock-tanking statement that the weapons dealer was halting sales to countries with bad human rights records, including the U.S. (Here’s yet another recap of the festivities.1)
10,000 brains in a basement
CNN went big with a story on Denmark’s brain collection,2 which is housed in a basement at the University of Southern Denmark after being transferred from the Risskov Psychiatric Hospital. The brains, all 9,479 of them — initially; a few disappeared in transit, which we don’t want to dwell on — were culled from patients who died in psychiatric hospitals during a 40-year period dating from the end of WW II.
Like so many places, Denmark was also grappling with mental illness. Psychiatric institutions had been built across the country to provide care for patients. But there was limited understanding of what was happening in the brain. The same year peace came to Denmark’s doorstep, two doctors working in the country had an idea.
When these patients died in psychiatric hospitals, autopsies were routinely performed. What if, these doctors thought, the brains were removed – and kept?
Thomas Erslev, historian of medical science and research consultant at Aarhus University, estimates that half of all psychiatric patients in Denmark who died between 1945 and 1982 contributed – unknowingly and without consent – their brains. They went to what became known as the Institute of Brain Pathology, connected to the Risskov Psychiatric Hospital in Aarhus, Denmark.
Doctors Erik Stromgren and Larus Einarson were the architects. After roughly five years, said Erslev, pathologist Knud Aage Lorentzen took over the institute, and spent the next three decades building the collection.
The publicizing of the collection in the late 1980s led to a decades-long ethics contretemps pitting those who wanted to study the brains against those who thought the lack of consent to the preservation dictated that they should be disposed of by burial or other respectful means. As you will have immediately deduced, the former prevailed.
The brains were identified by name and diagnosis, which is the hook on which the story hangs. Journalist Lise Søgaard went searching for the story of her great aunt, who was institutionalized at 14 and died at 24 during a time when mental illness was a muted affair.
In the search for what happened to her great aunt Kirsten, Søgaard realized there were clues all around her. But piecing together what exactly had happened to her grandmother’s sister was slow, filled with dead ends and false starts.
Yet she was enthralled, and began officially reporting her journey for Kristeligt Dagblad, the Copenhagen-based newspaper where she worked – eventually bringing it to light in a series of articles.
At one point, Søgaard decided to focus on a single word her grandmother had told her, the name of a psychiatric hospital: Oringe.
“I opened my computer and I searched for ‘Oringe patient journals,’” she said. After putting in a request through the national archives, “I got an email that said, ‘Okay, we found something for you, come have a look if you want.’ … I felt this excitement … like, she’s out there.”
And out there she was. It’s a fascinating if unsettling story.
Peripheral to it is a 2012 study in which “roughly 40% of Danish women and 30% of Danish men” were found to have received mental health treatments, and that “that same year, less than 15% of US adults received mental health services.”
The disparity there is not due to Denmark’s apocryphal Shakespearean gloom; the country ranked second on last year’s Happiness Index, barely lagging Finland.3 The United States ranked 19th, and has a per capita suicide rate more than 50% higher than Denmark's.4
Instead, it’s a combination of stigmatizing mental illness; policies which can exacerbate or incubate mental health disorders; and policies which create a shortfall of mental health providers, all of which yr. editors have recently written about.
A Danish doctor remarked that the percentage of Danes treated by mental health professionals has undoubtedly gone up since the 2012 study; here, however, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), more than 150 million people live in mental health provider deserts, and fewer than half of the people documented to have mental health issues have received treatment for them.5
The U.S. has about 30 health care professionals per 100,000 people. France, Canada and Germany have about 60% more than we do; Switzerland more than double; Australia more than triple; and the Netherlands quadruples our percentage.6
Along with having more mental health providers available, almost all of the countries surpassing us have comprehensive social welfare systems that work to reduce the social and economic stresses Americans routinely face. So we’re much better at creating and exacerbating mental health disorders and much worse at treating people who have them.
A friend of ours who labors in that field is worried that states with severe shortfalls will increasingly license people who don’t have adequate experience to safely practice, and perhaps even resort to referring prospective clients to apps rather than humans. This is something yr. editors are looking at, and which was glancingly touched upon in a recent Washington Post story on the therapist shortage.7
Try using apps such as BetterHelp and Talkspace to engage with a licensed therapist while you wait to see one in person.
Or, if you prefer the self-help route, apps such as Insight Timer, Calm and Headspace offer things such as guided meditations aimed at reducing stress and anxiety, which some experts say can be beneficial regardless of where you are on your therapeutic journey.
…
Carmen Grant, a licensed clinical social worker in Ramona, Calif., said she recommends self-help books or workbooks, which work well for motivated people, written by mental health professionals.“I would stay away from self-help books that aren’t written by therapists only because that’s just the person coming from their own experience, and people aren’t all the same,” she said.
The same goes for other self-help tools.
Schettino said you have to be “a little bit savvy” to make sure those books, apps and chats are based in science.
As the story notes, using non-human apps and self-help materials is the province of self-motivated patients, which of course excludes many people with mental health issues. If you can’t get out of bed or you’re drowning in anxiety, you won’t be evaluating books and apps for their scientific rigor.
Spiritualized, “Ladies and gentlemen we are floating in space;” The Bluetones, “A New Athens” and “The Bluetones.”
That, comrades, is all we got. Be well, get well, take care.