redlightsaber

It's worth noting that increased CFS levels of BDNF are observed with other treatments that are shown effective for depression.

So at the very least it would an extremely poor biomarker for injury. It's likely a biomarker for depression relief efficacy.

I don’t think they mentioned to me anything about permanent brain damage either, but honestly my memory of that time is pretty much toast.

Yes, and it always works like that. It's called anterograde amnesia, and it is not brain damage, let alone a permanent kind of it.

Language matters, and while it's fair for you to having gotten angry over the possibility of you never remembering a few weeks of your life is fair (as I said, this is actually really common), calling it brain damage just muddies the waters to the point that it's not a useful conversation any more.

When you go out drinking and drink so much that you black out for the rest of the night, do you also tend to refer to that episode as "brain damage"? I'm just curious.

Cool ninja-move they did there by trying to frame a likely good biomarker as something bad. But as I said numerous times onthis thread already, they're not trying to fool the scentific community here, only the general population and 12 very important people (the jury).

I think most people absolutely understand where this "hearing hatred" comes from. The point most people try to make is "OK, you can't hear and you're cool with it, but your child doesn't deserve to have that decision taken from him".

Being forced into being deaf from childhood (even if they'd allow him to choose "when he were old enough) is wrong, ethically speaking. It is worse than being raised in a religion a child might not want to practice later on, because "renouncing" a religion is fairly easy. Heck, even being circumcised is comparably "not as bad", because being circumcised doesn't preclude you from being an integral part of the more widespread society your subculture happens to be in. Being forced to remain deaf means you will simply NEVER be able to correctly speak, certainly not as a "native hearer" would. And in some cases, they would simply not learn to (I don't whether in these particualr communities that harbour that resentment towards "hearing people", they at least take their kids to speaking lessons). They learn their language, and later on they learn to read, but if they don't learn spoken languages by hearing it from a young age, thing like grammar and tenses are most often simply never dominated to the extent a "native" does. And this has very real consequences in the "outside world" in terms of finding jobs and such. And no, I'm not talking about "if you act white you'll get a better job"; I'm talking about in very realistic terms not being able to study or become something you genuinely might want to become, like say, a doctor, or a lawyer, or a fireman. Restricting from the get go what you'll be able to become is more akin to keeping your child retarded intentionally (no flaming please, it's an analogy, not saying deaf people are retarded), than bleaching them white when they're black.

Add to that that hearing doesn't really preclude you from either learning sign languages, or in any other way becoming a part of their community (excepting shunning and discrimination), and this whole deal just becomes unnecesarily restrictive, almost like chaining your kid to yourself and your little community for life. Cruel.

I'm curious as to why you believe not forcing medication is being "forward thinking". Surely you realise there are situations and conditions where a patient is quite simply not in contact with reality, and as a result is literally unable to understand what is best for them and their longterm health.

Some of these conditions (say, a psychotic episode in the context of a probable schizoiphreniform-related disorder) are time sensitive, in the sense that the longer it takes you to get out of it, the more negative and residual symptoms you're likely to have, and the harder it'll generally be to get out of it (some very long-term chronic psychoses are virtually untreatable even with the most potent of drugs that we have), making the recovery process after the initial episode much harder.

I also wonder what your thoughts are on the evils/benefits of keeping a patient hospitalised against their will vs forcibly giving them medication; or put another way, how beneficial it'll end up being for the patient when you don't make them take their meds while knowing that in all probability this will ensure they'll be staying hospitalised for longer.

Being a psych resident with a special interest in bioethics, trust me when I tell you that not very many people are more concerned with matters of autonomy and such than I am; but what I have no doubt in my mind about is the need in some situations to simply help people get better, even if it's against their will; helping them, in fact, to be able to regain the control over their own lives.