The Telegraph reports that earlier this week in Australia, doctors at Royal Children’s Hospital announced that they’d diagnosed the first case of so-called “climate change delusion.” Doctors Robert Salo and Josh Wolfe say a 17-year-old male had refused to drink any water out of eco-guilt—he believed his water consumption would cause the deaths of millions of people.
The story seems almost too outrageous to be true, but some blogs and newspapers have jumped on the “Al Gore is literally driving people crazy” angle, and blamed media coverage of global warming for this Australian’s mental condition. The scapegoating seems reminiscent of the story last month about the pregnancy pact at a Massachusetts high school (which was a hoax), when culture warriors were quick to blame films like Knocked Up and Juno for supposedly glamorizing pregnancy or single parenthood. So far, however, we haven’t heard anyone blame this young man’s affliction on the anti-consumption message of Wall-E.
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Lots of people use their cars to express themselves, whether it be through political bumper stickers, Darwin Fish metal decals, or novelty mud flaps. However, if you use your vehicle to tell the world your opinions, you might also be more likely to use it to show the world your anger, according to Colorado State University researchers.
In a survey of aggression on the highway, a team of scientists led by William Szlemko found that people who had personalized their cars were 16 percent more likely to engage in road rage. In fact, Szlemko says, decals correlated with aggressive driving more than any other factor, including how nice a car the person drove. And the number of added decals was the key factor, not their content. So someone who coated the back of their Geo Prism with stickers promoting indie bands and world peace was statistically no less likely to go ape on the highway than a driver who adorned their full-sized pickup with misanthropic messages like this, this, or this.
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Despite recent reports of blogging’s potential deadliness—which turned out to be, shall we say, a tad overblown—millions of hooked bloggers can attest that writing about stressful or painful experiences online can be deeply cathartic, helping them find self-expression, common ground, and connections with others. Now, researchers are pinpointing the ways in which journaling on the Internet is good for your mental health. Scientific American reports that neuroscientists have begun examining the effects blogging has on the brain, while a recent study in The Oncologist found that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing (though not necessarily on the Internet) just before treatment fared markedly better than patients who didn’t.
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Given that the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field comes in pretty handy for pigeons, it’s worth asking: Can humans sense it too? Oleg Shumilov of Russia’s Institute of North Industrial Ecology Problems set out to answer this question, as Catherine Brahic reports in the New Scientist. After examining the planet’s geomagnetic field activity from 1948 to 1997, he found that it peaked consistently three times a year: March through May, July, and October. A little cross-checking on the data revealed that those time periods coincided with the peaks in the number of suicides in Kirovsk, a city of around 30,000 people in the cold depths of northern Russia.
Thanks to the handy rule of correlation vs. causation, Shumilov’s discovery is a long way from providing definitive evidence that human sensitivity to magnetic field activity equals greater numbers of suicides at certain times.
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The AP reports that the lower house of the French parliament has passed a bill that would criminalize the “public inciting of extreme thinness.” This controversial (and totally unprecedented) law is aimed straight at the fashion industry—designers, magazines, and advertisers in particular—which has long genuflected before the image of über-skinny models as a beauty ideal. (more…)
Articles about Internet addictions have been popping up (online) for a while now—along with advertisements for 12-step recovery programs—but the “disease” at first seemed tongue-in-cheek (and, actually, it was). Then, like so many mental illnesses these days, it became over-hyped. The would-be condition didn’t even make it into the DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders IV)—the Bible of the mental health world—which includes everything from narcissism to 14 types of anxiety disorders.
But now Oregon Health Sciences University Psychiatrist Jerald Block wants to make sure Internet addiction gets some recognition. In an editorial in the March edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry, he argues that it should be included in the next edition of the DSM, due out in 2012, and laid out the standards of this deadly (no, really) new affliction. If you meet the following criteria, you too might be addicted to the internet: (more…)
