The Painted Mind

The scientific focus of this book is on the human mind and behavior viewed from an evolutionary perspective. The author is a clinical psychiatrist but his research background ranges from primate ethology to neuroscience, behavioral biology to molecular genetics, and Darwinian psychiatry to evolutionary psychology. Discussion of emotions, cognitive capacities, and behaviors integrates a variety of research and clinical findings that, ultimately, can be reduced to the evolutionary distinction between proximate mechanisms and adaptive functions. An original feature of the book is that it combines science and art. Each chapter is inspired by a painting masterpiece, and a substantial portion of the text is devoted to introducing the reader to the artistic significance of the works and to biographical notes concerning the painters who made them. In addition, each painting is accurately reproduced in a full-page color plate. Description of the evolutionary theories that explain how the human mind works are intermixed with the critical discussion of the perspectives of humanistic disciplines such as philosophy, sociology, religion, or literature. In order to give the reader lively examples of psychological and behavioral patterns, the chapters are filled with stories of people—stories of literary characters, stories of historical characters, and clinical cases.

The New Aspect of Psychotherapy in our Clinical Psychiatric Unit: The Effort it Took to Make it work; and the First Results

IntroductionOur two units take care of a rather big number of people (about 170 000). Various activities are proposed for outpatients and the idea was expressed to initiate art therapy.ObjectivesWe first analysed the possibility of starting this new mediation equally in the two units. A team was formed: a clinical psychiatrist and two registered nurses, one being an art therapist as well. We started this activity with a small group of out patients in April 2016.AimsThe registered nurse – art therapist was provided with appropriate space, art material and furniture by hospital sources. The other unit will send the nurse for training in art – therapy: leave and grant are provided by the hospital. Her project is different and yet complementary.MethodsThe group was validated and evaluated by the art therapist and the psychiatrist. The organization of the activity is left to the art therapist. A questionnaire was filled out by art therapist before beginning the art therapy and at regular intervals.ResultsPatients are engaged by this therapy and come on regular basis. They chose painting to express themselves and leave their productions in the room after they are finished.ConclusionsThe newly opened psychotherapy – art therapy has brought many positive changes in our hospital for working staff as well as for the patients.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.AcknowledgementsWe want to thank the Chiefs of our Department of Psychiatry, Grandin Pascal, MD and Benzaken-Charlier Catherine MD for their acceptance and support of this project.

DMT Gland

With clinical psychiatrist Rick Strassman's DMT: The Spirit Molecule as a vehicle, the pineal gland has become a popularly enigmatic organ that quite literally excretes mystery. Strassman’s top selling book documented ground-breaking clinical trials with the powerful mind altering compound DMT (N,N-dimethyltryptamine) conducted at the University of New Mexico in the early 1990s. Inflected with Buddhist metaphysics, the book proposed that DMT secreted from the pineal gland enables transit of the life-force into this life, and from this life to the next. Since that study, the hunt has been on to verify the organ’s status as the “lightening rod of the soul” and that DMT is the “brain's own psychedelic.” While the burden of proof hangs over speculations that the humans produce endogenous DMT in psychedelic quantities, knowledge claims have left the clinic to forge a career of their own. Exploring this development, the article addresses how speculation on the DMT-producing “spirit gland”—the “intermediary between the physical and the spiritual”—are animate in film, literature, music and other popular cultural artefacts. Navigating the legacy of the DMT gland (and DMT) in diverse esoteric currents, it illustrates how Strassman’s “spirit molecule” propositions have been adopted by populists of polar positions on the human condition: i.e. the cosmic re-evolutionism consistent with Modern Theosophy and the gothic hopelessness of H. P. Lovecraft. This exploration of the extraordinary career of the “spirit molecule” enhances awareness of the influence of drugs, and specifically “entheogens,” in diverse “popular occultural” narratives, a development that remains under-researched in a field that otherwise recognises that oc/cult fandom—science fiction, fantasy and horror—is a vehicle for religious ideas and mystical practices.

Values and values-based practice in clinical psychiatry

Values-based practice is a new skills-based approach to working more effectively with complex and conflicting values in health and social care. This chapter illustrates some of the ways in which combining values-based with evidence-based approaches supports the day-to-day practice of the clinical psychiatrist, particularly in the context of multidisciplinary teamwork.

Behavioural ecology as a basic science for evolutionary psychiatry

To the evolutionarily oriented clinical psychiatrist, the discipline of behavioural ecology is a fertile basic science. Human psychology discusses variation in terms of means, standard deviations, heritabilities, and so on, but behavioural ecology deals with mutually incompatible alternative behavioural strategies, the heritable variation being maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection. I suggest that behavioural ecology should be included in the interdisciplinary dialogue recommended by Keller & Miller (K&M).

The discovery of Alzheimer's disease

On November 3, 1906, a clinical psychiatrist and neuroanatomist, Alois Alzheimer, reported "A peculiar severe disease process of the cerebral cortex" to the 37th Meeting of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tubingen, He described a 50-year-old woman whom he had followed from her admission for paranoia, progressive sleep and memory disturbance, aggression, and confusion, until her death 5 years later. His report noted distinctive plaques and neurofibrillary tangles in the brain histology. It excited little interest despite an enthusiastic response from Kraepelin, who promptly included "Alzheimer's disease" in the 8th edition of his text Psychiatrie in 1910. Alzheimer published three further cases in 1909 and a "plaque-only" variant in 1911, which reexamination of the original specimens in 1993 showed to be a different stage of the same process, Alzheimer died in 1915, aged 51, soon after gaining the chair of psychiatry in Breslau, and long before his name became a household word.

Alan Walker Tyson 1926–2000

Alan Tyson was a musicologist who made an outstanding contribution to understanding issues of authenticity and chronology in the works of Mozart and Beethoven often based on detailed study of the paper used in sketchbooks and manuscripts. Yet he had qualified as a psychoanalyst and clinical psychiatrist, and until 1969, when he obtained a visiting professorship at Columbia University, musicology was only a scholarly hobby. In 1971, Tyson was awarded a Senior Research Fellowship at All Souls College Oxford and thereafter pursued it as a full-time career. He was elected Fellow of the British Academy in 1978. Obituary by Oliver Neighbour FBA.