Tag: psychology

Crisis Chat Observations: “You’re Very Aware”

One of the frustrating things about depression (and other mental illnesses, but I spend the most time talking to depressives) is that… well, actually there’s a lot of frustrating things.  One is that finding good medical professionals is hard, finding good mental health professionals is harder because personality fit is more important, and depression takes out exactly the systems you would use to seek and evaluate treatment.   Even if you have no other obstacles (financial, social, transportation…), it is still really hard to find a medic taking new patients, make an appointment, keep an appointment, and follow up on what the provider tells you to do.

But the frustrating thing about depression I was thinking of when I started this post is that even when you do all of those things, treatment can take a while to work.  Typical protocol is to give an anti-depressant six weeks to work, and the first one may do nothing, or have intolerable side effects.  The STAR*D protocol study, which tested an algorithm for finding anti-depressants that worked for individual patients, found a 70% success rate over four months- excluding the 42% who dropped out.  Therapy can take years, and there’s often a painful period before it starts to help.*  Some people I talk to at crisis chat need help getting into treatment.  Others are doing everything I could possibly recommend to them- psychiatrist, therapy, social support, a list of self-care activities of which crisis chat is neither the first or last on the list- and are still miserable.

At least for the teenagers**, the most helpful thing I have found to say in this situation is the truth: you are doing everything right, and it is deeply unfair that it takes so much time to bear fruit.  Crisis chat is deliberately not an affirmation on demand service because generic cheerleading is emotionally draining for volunteers and even if they specifically request it, visitors tend to reject it as insincere- but if I see something someone is doing that will be long term helpful to them, or that they are especially good at, I will tell them.  I don’t give the same ones every time and I don’t make up things to make people feel better, I only say something if I see a genuine skill. This isn’t cheerleading or attempting to logic them out of depression so much as it is giving an objective, informed eye to people who know their brain is unreliable reporters but don’t know what specifically it is lying about.

I thought of this while reading Brute Reason’s Case for Strength Based Diagnosis.  Mental health treatment right now is all about the things you are bad at.  The strongest counter force is the pop culture romanticization of depression and bipolar disorder, which is not helping. But I could see it as very helpful to hear “the same gene that contributes to your depression also contributes to your high intelligence, and you can use that intelligence to fight depression”.  This seems like another problem caused by trying to use the same system for “accurately describe patient state to patient”, “accurately describe patient state to another practitioner” and “tell insurance why they should give you money.”

*When I’m detailing treatment options to crisis chat visitors I often make a point of mentioning CBT as something that isn’t a drug, works fairly quickly and doesn’t involve dwelling on pain.

**Adults tend to be more pessimistic, and I have no way of knowing if it’s because they’ve actually been depressed for 20 years straight or because their liar brain is telling them so.

The Kitten Pain Scale

I very briefly flirted with Quantified Self and then jumped off the bandwagon because it was making my personal signal:noise ratio worse.  But my neuroendodontist* has given me several drugs, and he wants to know how they work.  Allow me to give you a brief list of things that make measuring this difficult

  • Treatments are all on varying schedules- some daily, some daily with a build up in blood stream leading to cumulative effects, some as needed to treat acute pain, some on my own schedule but hopefully having longer running effects.  Some are topical and some are systemic.
  • I have several home treatments like tea and castor oil.  I’m not going to not take them in order to get more accurate assessments of the drugs, both because ow and because pain begets pain.
  • Taking treatments as needed + regression to the mean = overestimate of efficacy.
  • Pain is affected by a lot of non drug things: sleep, stress, temperature, how ambitious I got with food, amount of talking, number of times cat stepped on my face in the night, etc.
  • We are hoping some of these drugs will work by disrupting negative feedback loops (e.g. pain -> muscle tension -> pain), which means the effect could last days past when I take in.  In the particular case of doxepin it might have semi-permanent effects.
  • Or I could develop a tolerance to a drug and my response to a particular drug will attenuate.  That is in fact one reason I was given so many choices as to medication: to let me rotate them.
  • We have no idea how these drugs will interact with each other in me.  We barely have an idea how the interact in people in general.
  • If I believe something will help my pain will lessen as soon as I take it, long before it could actually be effective.  Not because I’m irrational, but because my brain reinforces the self-care with endorphins, which lessen pain.
  • At the same time, having more pain than I expected to feels worse than the exact same pain level if it was anticipated.
  • Side effects: also a thing.

“I think I feel better when I take this one” was not going to cut it.

Then there was the question of how to measure pain.  Ignoring the inherent subjectivity of pain, neuralgia is a weird beast.  I already hate the 1-10 pain scale because pain has threshold effects and is exponential.  I could create a single pain number at the end of the day, but my pain is not constant: it spikes and recedes, sometimes for reasons, sometimes not.  What I would ideally like to track is area under the curve of pain**, but that requires polling, which would create horrible observer effects.  If I ask myself if I’m in pain every 15 minutes, I will increase my total pain level.  I could poll less often, but the spikes are random and short enough that this was not going to be accurate enough to evaluate the treatments.  I could count pain spikes, but that ignores duration.  Determining duration requires polling, so we’re back where we started.  I could deliberately poke a sore spot and see how bad the resulting pain is, but

  1. Ow
  2. A treatment that doesn’t affect sensitivity but does keep me from spontaneously feeling pain because the nerve is bored is a success.  If we wanted me to be numb we would do that.

It’s just really hard to measure something when your goal is for it to be unnoticeable, and measuring it creates it.

So I came at it from the other side.  What happens when pain is unnoticeable?  I enjoy life more and I get more things done.  Could I measure that?  Probably.  They have the bonus of being what I actually care about- if something left me technically in pain but it no longer affected my ability to enjoy or accomplish things, that would be a huge success.  If something took away the pain but left me miserable or asleep, it is not solving my actual problem.**

So one metric is “how much I get done in a day”.  Initially this will be the first number between 1 and 10 that I think of when I ask the question at the end of the day, but I’m hoping to develop a more rigorous metric later.  You’d think enjoyment of life couldn’t ever be rigorously measured, since it’s so heavily influenced by what is available to me in a given day, but I say that brave men can make it so.  And so I introduce to you: the kitten pain scale.  Kitten videos vary a little in quality, but I think my enjoyment of any single video reflects my internal state more than it does the video. Three times a day (shortly after waking up, shortly before screen bed time, and sometime mid-day that can vary with my schedule but must be selected ahead of time to avoid biasing the data), I will watch a cute kittens video and record how much I enjoy it.  The less pain I am in the more I should enjoy the video.  This will give me a (relatively) standardized measure of pain without risking inducing it.

This is still not what you would call a rigorous study.  An individual choosing what to take among known options never will be.  But I seriously think the kitten pain scale could be a contender to replace the stupid frowny faces.  My first draft is available here.  Right now it’s set to measure over the course of a day, because that’s the scale I expect from these meds, but you can add bonus measurements at set times after taking meds if you like.

Possible additions: cups of tea drunk in day.  Right now that seems like too much work to measure, but when tea is available it’s a pretty good indicator of how much pain I’m in.

*I am still angry that I know what that is, much refer to one using possessive case.  But given that, I am extremely grateful I live within biking distance of a world class research facility in the discipline.  Even if the physical facility could be a case study in how economic insulation leads to bad user experience.

**This is why none of my treatment options are opioids.  Strong ones technically reduce pain, but they also leave me miserable.  The fact that some people take them for fun is all the proof of human variability I could ever need.

Adventures in Podiatry and Neurology

WARNING: THIS ONE IS GRAPHIC EVEN BY MY STANDARDS.  NEEDLES, PAIN, AND TOENAILS.

Recently I learned toenails aren’t supposed to be under the skin of your foot and hurt constantly; this is an ingrown toenail and it’s a solvable problem.  By “recently” I mean a year and a half ago, but a little pain when I flexed my toes in a shoe did not seem as important as the pain in my mouth or my inability to digest food, so I only got around to seeing a podiatrist now.  If you develop an ingrown toenail there are home treatments to coax it better, but if you’ve always had it the cure is a little more drastic: they cut off the bit of the nail that has grown under the skin and cauterize the nail bed so it never grows back. If you are curious, here’s a video of the actual medical procedure:

The worst part is the lidocaine injection. There’s a topical anesthetic, but they root the extremely thin nail around under your skin in order to find the nerves and inject directly over them. The podiatrist will describe it as slightly painful, but they are lying, and it will make you doubt them when they promise the rest of the procedure is painless. That part turned out to be true: with enough lidocaine you genuinely can’t feel them slip the scissors/pliers under the nail bed, or the burny stuff*, unless you are a freak who processes -cain very quickly, in which case they will give you more and it will stop hurting.  But the anesthetic injection was pretty brutal.

That is not actually the interesting part. In between the lidocaine and the scissors/pliers, they test your numbness with what looked like a large blunt toothpick. My podiatrist, which more flourish then was strictly necessary, brought it down from a great height onto my toe.

I screamed.

Then I realized it didn’t hurt at all. My brain had combined the memory of the painful needles and the visual information about incoming sensation and preemptively sent a scream response before it noticed I couldn’t feel anything. I never had quite that strong a reaction again, but there was an extremely weird dissonance as I watched something I knew should hurt, yet got only vague reports of pressure from the area.

This works in reverse too.  Phantom limb syndrome is a condition in which people missing a limb (even one they never had) experience excruciating pain where their brain thinks that limb should be.  One of the only effective treatments is mirror therapy, where a mirror is used to simulate the appearance of the missing limb, and somehow the brain goes “oh, I guess it’s fine.”  This clip from House is not quite as accurate as the matrixectomy one (mirror therapy rarely involves kidnapping), but the science is sound.

The lesson here is that even something that feels incredibly simple and real, like pain, is in fact an artifact of post-processing on several different inputs.

*Dr. Internet says phenol but I could have sworn it started with an M. In my defense, he gave me the proper name after the needles bit and I was fuzzy.

Depression as a false negative

Slate Star Codex points out that rates of suicide and depression are weirdly terrible metrics for how good a society is.  I wonder if some of that is a definitional effect.  Depression is more or less defined as occurring for no reason.  If you have a reason for sleeping poorly and feeling unable to do everyday things (e.g. fibromyalgia), you’re diagnosed with that instead.  As society gets worse, people who were chemically destined to be depressed are given reasons to be sad, and so stop contributing to the depression statistics.

This is related to but slightly distinct from the idea that depressed people are less likely to commit suicide when conditions are objectively miserable than when they are good because bad conditions leave room for hope in a way good conditions don’t.  That is about individuals specific reaction to their depression.  My hypothesis is about how the number “% depressed” is measured.

Of course, my suggestion doesn’t account for increased suicide rate.  The expectations hypothesis does account for that.  One other factor I think may be in the mix is coping mechanisms.  Before the AIDS cocktail, someone noticed AIDS patients actually got better when co-infected with another virus.  The reason turned out to be interferon, an intercellular signal to ramp up anti-viral defenses.  HIV didn’t trigger it, or didn’t trigger it enough, but when another virus did the resulting interferon protected from HIV as well as the original virus.  Maybe external bad events trigger coping mechanisms in a way depression doesn’t, and they incidentally fight depression.  This could be true even if  “coping mechanism” just means disassociating until things get better.

What doctors can learn from day care workers

So if being fat is bad for people, than doctors should tell them not to be fat, right?  Or at least tell them to eat vegetables and hit the elliptical, right?

Well, maybe.  But sometime around age two humans realize that they are independent beings who do not physically have to do everything an authority tells them to do.  Unfortunately, most doctors’ patients are over the age of two, and those that aren’t have their own issues.

vomiting baby
They’re gross

Telling people to do things they already know they need to do has mixed results.  Scott Alexander suggests alcoholism could be decreased by as much as 13% if doctors would spend five minutes telling alcoholics it was bad for them.  What this doesn’t capture is how lectures change the doctor-patient relationship.  It is very difficult to give a non-judgmental lecture when your billing model gives you 10 minutes per patient.  Patients might avoid or delay visits for problems- alcohol related or not- in order to avoid the lecture.  This is a pretty big issue with overweight patients, and apparently without upside: patients lectured by their doctors are more likely to attempt weight loss but no more likely to achieve it.

In this TED talk, Thomas Goetz talks about a study of dental patients (no cite, unfortunately) that found that scaring them had no effect, but patients’ belief in their own ability to floss had a large one.  It’s impossible for me to separate my personal experience from this data.  Multiple dentists and hygienists told me my pain was my fault for terrible oral hygiene, and if I brushed and flossed it would go away.  This turned out to be untrue on a couple of levels.  The pain was caused by structural damage and internal infection, which may have been made incrementally worse by oral plaques but wasn’t caused by it.  And I was actually brushing pretty regularly, it just wasn’t do anything.  Then I started treating a completely unrelated digestive problem, and suddenly my teeth were cleaner.  I didn’t even tell my dentist anything had changed, she asked spontaneously.  So I guess, yeah, patients belief in their own ability to effect change matters, and if they don’t believe it, maybe consider that they’re correct and investigate why.

But let’s go one step farther.  Crum and Langer did an interesting experiment on two groups of hotel maids.  Both were told exercise is good for you.  One was given additional information about the intensity level of the work they did all day, and told just by going to work they were exceeding the surgeon general’s RDA of exercise.  Four weeks later, the informed group was slightly thinner (they even checked body fat %.  I am so pleased) and had lower blood pressure .  Not astoundingly lower(10 points on diastolic BP), but it was only four weeks, and a pamphlet is even less work than a doctor lecture.

This suggests that one of the more helpful things public health officials can do is reinforce the good things people are already doing.  You did a stretch?  Hurray for you.  Check parking lot twice before accepting a far out spot?  Still counts.  It would not shock me if part of the health improvements attributed to standing desks turned out to be simply a halo effect of feeling like you made a healthy choice.  Which coincidentally is how you turn a two year old into a civilized human being.

Review and Science: Thomas Was Alone

Humans have an amazing ability to ascribe intention and emotion when logic tells us there could not possibly be any, a fact demonstrated most succinctly by this clip from Community

but proven somewhat more rigorously by An experimental study of apparent behaviour (PDF), in which experimental subjects were asked to watch and describ a short film showing some shapes moving around.  If you would like to play along at home, I’ve embedded the video below.

The first subject group (n=34 undergraduate women) was given no instruction beyond “describe what happened in the movie.”  Exactly one subject described it in purely geometric terms.  Two others described the shapes as birds, and the rest described them as humans.  19 gave a full story.  The stories people told  (in this treatment and another where subjects were primed to view the shapes as people) had a shocking amount in common, suggesting there was something innate in the interpretation.*

My point is, humans will bond with anything.  In many ways it’s easier to bond with/project onto simple objects than actual humans or almost humans.  This can be used to great effect in art, to evoke desired emotions without all the messiness of using real people.  A simple example is an extremely short, simple game whose name I’m not going to tell you, because it would bias your experience of it.

Did you play it?  The game’s name is Loneliness.  Can you guess why?

I like to think the shunned little square from Loneliness grew up in to be Chris in Thomas Was Alone, a game about rectangles making friends.  Thomas Was Alone‘s premise sounds kinds of dumb: it’s a puzzle platformer with some narration ascribing emotions to the rectangles you solve puzzles with.  But it pulls this off so masterfully I actually bought branded merchandise of it, which is something I can’t say about a single other game.  The story is genuinely sweet, but the real skill is in how the puzzles reinforce it.  Each rectangle has slightly different skills, some more useful than others.  Chris is a shitty jumper whose initial story revolved around resenting the better jumper, and who is nothing but dead weight in the first puzzles (the other rectangles could get through without him, but he could not with them) suddenly becomes indispensable, I felt pride and relief.

TWA starts out a little slow.  If you want to play, finish the first world before deciding whether to continue or quit.  But I highly recommend it both as an interesting example of human psychology, and as a piece of happy art, which I don’t think we see enough of.

Okay, fine, I don’t see enough of because I’m a severe subscriber to the dark and edgy trend.  But that just makes Thomas Was Alone more impressive.

*Attenuated by the fact that women attending college during WW2 is a narrow subset of the population.

r/fatlogic endorses creationism

Normally when I’m investigating something I like to read well regarded books on both sides, in the hopes that the ignorance will cancel out.  Finding a suitable counterpoint to Health At Every Size is hard, because its opposition is “everyone in the world”, and there has been no selective pressure to elevate the actual science away from the shame and aesthetic preferences.

For example, I spent a little bit of time on r/fatlogic which, as decisions go, was not my best ever.   r/fatlogic frames itself as a criticism of horrible “fat logic”- things like “700 pounds is no less healthy than 200 pounds.  Possibly healthier.”  This is not a great start.  I have a deep personal understanding of how frustrating it is when people are wrong, but I have found I am happier and a better person when I say “yup, wrong”, and then move on with my day.  For the truly awful I might e-mail a friend making fun of it (thanks, Rachel!).  Forming a whole club around criticizing people, especially people that are already having a pretty tough time in life, is bad for everyone.

r/fatlogic is even worse than that, because it has an extraordinary case of the cowpox of doubt.  Wrong people keep insisting body fat is independent of calories consumed and exercise?  Well then body fat must be solely dependent on calories consumed and exercise, and anyone who suggests it is affected by anything else is a fatty fat fathead making excuses for their fat.  They are literally denying  the possibility of individual variability in the translation of external environment into physical state.  For bonus points, they invoke “but thermodynamics”, which is the same argument creationists use against evolution itself.

Here I tried several ways to explain exactly how wrong they were and how that was terrible, but then I decided to take my own advice and stop before I endorsed the hollow Earth theory.  My current contender for an opposition book is Good Calories, Bad Calories, but I’m open to suggestions.

Today in Bad Infographs

The Washington Post has a cool infograph showing the results of a racial Implicit Association Test by state.  I have a couple of problems with it.

First, the population sample is composed of people who went out of their way to take the test on the website, which is a long way of spelling “the population sample is invalid”.  Second, the volume of use of implicit association in psychology seems to be driven more by a compelling story of what it means and psychologists’ sheer joy at having a thing they can measure, in a short lab test, with numbers and everything, than any actual evidence that the story is true.

But those are objections I would bring up to any presentation of this data.  What is bothering me about this infograph in particular is a new and exciting variant on misleading axis choice.  The Post chose blue to represent a lower IAT score (which, if implicit association’s claims are correct, means being less racist) and red to be a higher one. The lowest values are a darker blue, the higher a darker red, with a neutral value being white.  At this point, blue and red are so tightly associated with Democrat/liberal and Republican/conservative that I think using them for anything else is manipulative.    But having white as a middle color also strikes me as weird.  Wouldn’t an even mix of the two be purple?

Worse, the “neutral” color does not rest on a score of 0, because that is the lowest score on the IAT.  Instead white represents a score of 0.402, which is almost but not quite the middle of the range of state averages (0.341-0.456) It was chosen because it was the IAT score of the median state, Michigan.  The overall effect is that a casual reading of the infograph would lead to conclude southeast and eastern states are racist and New England and northwest states are anti-racist.  In fact, if you treat IAT score as a quantity, the most racist state is about 33% and 10 percentage points more racist than the least racist one.    We don’t know what that corresponds to in actual behavior- does 10pp translate to a 1% difference in likelihood of hiring a black person, or 50%?- but that makes the color choices more misleading, not less.

Why Jezebel is Wrong that Cats Don’t Care About You.

Jezebel has a post titled “Why House Cats Generally Don’t Care (About You)“, in which they assert that cats don’t care about humans because they’re so close to wild cats.  Where do I start with this?

  1. The claim that domestic cats are closely related to wild cats is not backed up by numbers.  Jezebel claims ” house cats may not be that genetically different from wild cats”, citing sister site io9, which in turn cites a summary (warning: PDF) of the base article for its claim that the feline genome is “highly conserved.”  (Jezebel eventually links to the full article, but only the abstract is accessible)
    1. I’m not sure it’s actually wrong to describe an entire genome as highly conserved, but the term is usually applied to specific genes or even gene sequences, not entire genomes.
    2. You know what is a good system for measuring how different two things are?  Numbers.  For example: humans and common chimpanzees share 97% of their DNA.  Eyeballing it, it would not surprise me at all if domestic cats were more related to their ancestral wildcat than humans to chimpanzees.  I don’t see any numbers in either blog post or any of the article summaries I have access to.
  2. Despite numbers being excellent at measuring things, genetic similarity does not correlate very strongly with behavioral similarity.  For a fascinating example of see the fox domestication experiment, in researchers attempted to breed fur-farm foxes for tolerance of humans.  They succeeded in less than 40 years.  

     

     

    1. Domesticated foxes vary from undomesticated fur-farm foxes by only 40 genes.  They tragically don’t give a total gene count, but farm + domesticated foxes different from wild foxes by 2,700  genes, so 40 is almost 0%.  Nonetheless, undomesticated adult farm foxes will either bite your face off or cower from you, and domesticated ones want tummy rubs.

      .  We’ve had thousands of years with cats, we could make them want tummy rubs if we wanted.

  3. Which we have done.  Jezebel seems to be ignoring variation between breeds and individuals.  Certain breeds, like burmese, scottish fold, and Maine coon, really love and orient towards humans.  They don’t have dogs ability to read human facial expressions, but they do seek out their owners for attention, even when no food is on offer.  My cat loves tummy rubs and will fetch his favorite toy, although he has yet to realize people other than me can throw them.
  4. Meanwhile chow chows, one of the earliest dog breeds, possibly originally intended as food, are described as “cat like” because they’re so independent, and need extensive socialization to even tolerate strangers.
  5. Jezebel also comments on cats’ hunting behavior.  What they say is true, but it’s equally true of dogs: domestic and wild, feline or canine, animals have hunting behavior built in but need to be taught to eat what they kill.

And thus concludes your daily dose of Someone Is Wrong on the Internet

Different things for the same name

I’ve picked up enough scientific/medical Latin and Greek that I can often guess what a new term refers to without looking it up. Of course 50% of that comes from knowing “itis” means “inflammation”, but I’ve picked up other terms too.

The problem is that even English -> Science translations are ambiguous. In psychology, “displacement” means redirecting an emotion from the cause to a new target (e.g. you’re mad at your boss so you punch a wall). In the closely related field of animal behavior, displacement means taking the energy of a negative emotion it can’t act on and investing it in something positive (e.g. your cat licking itself after it hears thunder).  Over in physics, it means physically moving something out of the way, which is probably the closest to the conversational definition.

Latin -> Science -> English is even worse. Take parabiosis. It literally translates to “living next to”, which could mean the perfectly reasonable “two species living in very close association with each other, without noticeable benefit or cost to either”. Or it could mean “sewing the circulatory systems of two different animals together so they can share blood forever.” This is useful when you want to test if blood borne chemicals are relevant to a system but have no idea which chemical might be relevant, e.g. testing how aging affects recovery from trauma. AKA Elizabeth Bathory was on the right track.

If you read that and are wondering if you can maintain eternal youth by sewing yourself to a college student, the answer is probably no. The mice must be heavily immunocompromised to avoid mutual destruction via the immune system (although I wonder if this could be combated with cloning.  Hypothetically.). But having discovered that pigeon-rats are a very real possibility, I am excited/afraid to discover what other Simpson’s Halloween episodes we can make real.

On a more serious vocabulary note note, I’ve been using Iodine’s in-browser medical translator, and I’m shocked at how helpful it is.  You wouldn’t think Highlight-rclick-google search is that taxing, but compared to seeing the definition instantaneously and in context, it feels like an enormous waste of working memory.    My only complaints are that it doesn’t autotranslate words in links, which are often exactly the words I want to know the meaning of, and that it’s strictly medical rather than biological, so it skips a lot of basic science words.