Tag: Psychological Research

Project: MK-Ultra

The US has at times done some amazingly callous things to its citizens….the studies done at the Tuskegee Institute comes to mind…..but there is another that was equally as diabolical.

The CIA conducted several different studies into mind control in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s……the worse was the Project:  MK-Ultra…..

MK-Ultra was a top-secret CIA project in which the agency conducted hundreds of clandestine experiments—sometimes on unwitting U.S. citizens—to assess the potential use of LSD and other drugs for mind control, information gathering and psychological torture. Though Project MK-Ultra lasted from 1953 until about 1973, details of the illicit program didn’t become public until 1975, during a congressional investigation into widespread illegal CIA activities within the United States and around the world.

https://www.history.com/topics/history-of-mk-ultra

Victims of the CIA’s project are banding together and planning a class action lawsuit……but nothing can regain the mental health that this program destroyed……

Survivors and families of those who were affected by Project MK-Ultra, also called the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) mind control program, administered at McGill University’s Allan Memorial Institute in Montreal are preparing a class-action lawsuit against the Quebec and federal governments because of what they alleged had been done to them five decades ago.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), more than forty Canadians for the first time gathered at a Montreal condo over the weekend to share their disturbing stories about how MK-Ultra destroyed their lives.

“The government should offer an apology and there should be recognition of the injustice that was done,” says Gina Blasbalg, who unknowingly became a patient at the Allan Memorial Institute in her teens in the 1960s.

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-05-22/their-lives-were-ruined-victims-cia-mk-ultra-brainwashing-plan-class-action-suit

Some history of the CIA…..is not always as forthcoming as we would like.

Time On The Virtual Couch

Disclaimer:  I personally think that shrinks are a waste of time and money….a good bartender is more accurate and profound than any shrink I have ever met.  I am sure that they may have helped someone out there but in my situation they were useless…if not worse.

With that said there is a news piece swirling around the net about our fearless leader, DJ Trump…..and his mental status.

The story is about the “Goldwater Rule”……(how many of you went…HUH?)

The Goldwater rule is the informal name given to Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association‘s (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics,  which states it is unethical for psychiatrists to give a professional opinion about public figures they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements.

Now that you are caught up on the “rule” let us continue……

A psychiatric group has told its members they’re not obligated to adhere to something called the “Goldwater Rule,” which has long prevented members of the profession from commenting on the mental health of public figures. The American Psychoanalytic Association emailed its members this month to that effect, though the Atlantic explains it wasn’t so much a change in policy as a reminder that the Goldwater Rule is not officially part of the group’s ethical guidelines. One thing of note: This APA has 3,500 members, but the larger American Psychiatric Association, with 37,000 members, still has the rule in place. The development comes amid lots of chatter about President Trump’s behavior, which is “so different from anything we’ve seen before” in a president, a past leader of the smaller APA tells STAT. Coverage:

  • Milestone? The move “represents the first significant crack in the profession’s decades-old united front aimed at preventing experts from discussing the psychiatric aspects of politicians’ behavior,” writes Sharon Begley at STAT. In a statement, however, a spokesperson emphasized that the group isn’t encouraging members to go against the Goldwater Rule, notes Time. It’s just that “we don’t want to prevent our members from using their knowledge responsibly,” adds the former leader.
  • Still opposed: The American Psychiatric Association reiterated that its own policy is unchanged. In March, the group formally reaffirmed its view that it’s unethical for doctors to speculate on the mental health of a person they haven’t personally evaluated. The full policy is here.
  • ‘Gag rule’?: Last week, Dr. Leonard Glass of Harvard wrote an essay in Psychiatric Times likening the Goldwater prohibition to a “gag rule” and calling it “an unacceptable infringement on my right and duty.” In the essay, he resigned from the American Psychiatric Association.
  • Why Goldwater: In 1964, about 1,200 psychiatrists responding to a magazine survey declared conservative candidate Barry Goldwater unfit for the presidency, explains the Los Angeles Times. He later sued for libel and won, and the larger APA’s ethics board established the rule in 1973.

An expert weighs in: You don’t have to search the topic long before finding someone arguing that Trump has narcissistic personality disorder. Well, the psychiatrist who literally wrote the definition for that disorder wrote a much-publicized letter to the editor earlier this year to the New York Times in which he states clearly that Trump doesn’t meet the criteria. “He may be a world-class narcissist,” writes Allen Frances, “but this doesn’t make him mentally ill, because he does not suffer from the distress and impairment required to diagnose mental disorder.”

Now if you have made it this far…..

If you are a regular reader then you already know that I am by no stretch of the imagination a Trump supporter…..so this conclusion may be a bit of a surprise………

I agree with the “Goldwater Rule”…..there should be NO analysis of the person without a professional visit and then the privacy of the person should be protected.

So these reports are nothing more than a MSM reach for readers…..serves little purpose of good…..it only feeds the innuendos…..

With that said……I do feel that he is NOT a person that should ever have been elected….he is suppose to represent the people of this country and he fails miserably on that front.  I dislike the way he mocks people that is not what a good leader does…..he cannot remember that his stay in DC is about the country not his personal agenda…..I personally feel that he does have some sort of disorder that needs immediate treatment.

Move America forward or go the Hell away!

Feed The Addiction

Yep, it is the weekend and I have found some cool stuff to post to help you forget all the childish BS from the last week……..

Most Americans have an addictive personality……they get hooked on drugs, booze, internet, porn and a wealth of other fanciful pursuits,,,,but there is something from my youth that I never considered an addictive substance….and it goes so well with a glass of cold milk!

Newser) – You may feel downright criminal the next time you eat an Oreo, and you have a Connecticut College student to thank for that. Neuroscience major Jamie Honohan came up with the idea for a study, which dug into the effects of high-fat and high-sugar foods on the brain. The conclusions: The brain goes wilder for Oreos than for drugs, and the two are equally addictive—at least when it comes to rats. The findings were born out of two tests, as explained by Connecticut College News:

  • In the first, rats were deposited in one of two areas in a maze. On one side they were given a control (rice cakes or saline); on the other, the test subject (Oreos or cocaine or morphine). They were then allowed to scurry to whatever side of the maze they wanted, and the students found that the rats who had been fed Oreos spent as much time on the Oreo side as the rats who had been injected with the drugs spent on the drug side, indicating that the link they made between the “pleasurable effects” of Oreos/drugs and that specific environment was equally strong.
  • If that doesn’t wow you, maybe this will: Another student went on to measure the expression of the protein c-Fos in the brain’s “pleasure center,” and found that “significantly” more neurons were activated in response to Oreos than in response to drugs.

Best side note of the study: Honohan also observed how the rats ate the cookies. “They would break it open and eat the middle first.”

Next they will be telling me that coffee is addictive…..wink…wink.

Is It Really An Addiction?

There are many addictions….like drugs, booze adrenalin and of course that addiction that all men love to hear about….SEX ADDICTION!

It is fought with many different solutions….therapy, hypnosis, drugs (but that could create a whole new set of addictions) and just go about screwing your brains out…..every man looks for that perfect nymphomaniac to keep him smiling for a long time…..but there is a new study and research that may shine some light onto the subject…….

(Newser) – The term “sex addiction” might get tossed around a lot these days as a way to explain some not-so-classy behavior of the Anthony Weiner-Tiger Woods variety, but is it really an addiction on par with drugs or alcohol? The first study to explore brain responses in people who describe themselves as hypersexual suggests otherwise, reports UCLA. Researchers there showed the subjects—39 men and 13 women—sexual images, and discovered that their brains didn’t respond in the same way that, say, a cocaine addict would respond to images of cocaine.

“Most people describe high-frequency sexual problems as an ‘addiction’—that’s how the public and even many clinicians talk about it,” one of the researchers tells Slate. “But this data challenges the addiction model and forces us to reconsider how we think and talk about these problems.” The subjects have higher libidos, or sexual desire, but not necessarily a clinical medical problem. They still need help, but if further studies verify this first one, then the type of help they’ll get will be affected. All of which might be OK, writes Jillian Keenan at Slate. “If we turn every single quirk of human sexuality into a ‘disease,’ after all, then we’re all screwed.” The study is in the journal Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology.

Now I know my loyal readers will an opinion on this turn of events……speak up!

I Swear, Therefore I Am

I see and read a lot of studies on an array of subjects and this one is just plain dumb…..dumb in the sense that it was not needed most people will say that the results are just what the study discovered.

Cut your finger? Hurt your leg? Start swearing. It might lessen the pain.  Researchers from the school of psychology at Britain’s Keele University have found swearing can make you feel better as it can have a “pain-lessening effect,” according to a study published in the journal NeuroReport.

Colleagues Richard Stephens, John Atkins and Andrew Kingston, set out to establish if there was any link between swearing and physical pain.

“Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon,” says Stephens.

Their study involved 64 volunteers who were each asked to put their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice.

They then repeated the experiment using a more commonplace word that they would use to describe a table.

The researchers found the volunteers were able to keep their hands in the ice water for a longer when swearing, establishing a link between swearing and an increase in pain tolerance.

Stephens said it was not clear how or why this link existed but it could be because swearing may increase aggression.

“What is clear is that swearing triggers not only an emotional response, but a physical one too, which may explain why the centuries-old practice of cursing developed and still persists today,” he said.

My first thought was….”Ya Think!”  or a Homer Simpson moment…

All I want to know is where can I get on the list of people getting this grant money to run a study?  I have this idea for the military applications of a frisbee….but I need a grant…please help me out here!

Acts Of Violence

This is just scary stuff.

In the early 1960s, Yale University psychologist Stanley Milgram shocked America when he demonstrated that ordinary people will commit acts of violence that conflict with their personal conscience and moral convictions if instructed to do so by an authority figure.

Now, a replication of that famous experiment is uncovering some of the same findings and controversy.

In the original experiment, Milgram asked ordinary people to administer painful — and in some cases, even fatal — shocks to other people posing as research subjects. The maximum voltage they could administer was 450 volts — enough to cause permanent damage or even death to the study subject.

In reality, the “research subjects” were not receiving any shock. But the act of inflicting harm on another individual was still very much real to the people administering the voltage.

Just watch the news, there is evidence to the conclusions everywhere.