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Combination therapy most effective (Graphs)

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Issues of reliability - Discussion task with quotes from psychologists and frame for structuring essay writing

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Consolidation - first topic

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pictures, diagnostic questionnaires, clinical characteristics

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Old bridging course lessons - videos and discussion activities (Create activity for explanations here too)

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Schizophrenia Intro lessons 1&2 final 2015

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It's not as clear cut as you think - Venn diagram activity
Use internet to research symptoms of the different disorders

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Secret Life Of The Manic Depressive Part

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'Schizo:The Movie' trailer from Time to Change. Not the scary movie you expected? Find out more: http://www.time-to-change.org.uk

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Types of Schizophrenia - A day in the life of (Scary)

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http://www.ihealthmarket.com - A video about the day in the life of a person suffering from Schizophrenia. The video is designed by Janssen, a pharmaceutical company.

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The largest study ever undertaken into the genetic basis of mental illnesses has found more than 100 genes that play some kind of role in the development of schizophrenia - one of the most common of the serious psychiatric disorders.

Scientists believe they are closer than they have ever been to understanding the complex interplay between genes and upbringing that can result in some people being at high risk of developing schizophrenia, which usually strikes in late adolescence or early adulthood.

Schizophrenia affects about one in every 100 people and is marked by hallucinations and delusions where patients hear voices or believe that other people are trying to control or read their minds, causing fearfulness, withdrawal and extreme agitation.

The identification of the precise locations in the human genome that are involved with the illness could lead to both a fundamental understanding of its causes as well aid the development of new treatments or drugs, the researchers said.

The huge international study by the Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium analysed the DNA of about 37,000 schizophrenia patients and compared the smallest mutations to those found in about 113,000 healthy people.

The scientists identified about 128 independent genetic variants at 108 locations on the human chromosomes that contribute significantly to susceptibility to schizophrenia - 83 of these sites have never before been linked to the illness, the scientists said.

"By studying the genome, we are getting a better handle on the genetic variations that are making people vulnerable to psychiatric disease," said Tom Insel, director of the US National Institute of Mental Health, which co-funded the study.

It is estimated that schizophrenia costs the UK taxpayer about £2bn a year in care and treatment, with further unquantified personal costs for patients and family members. The global drugs bill alone is estimated to be £12.5bn a year, not including hospital stays.

Michael O'Donovan, professor of psychiatric genetics at the Medical Research Council's neurogenetics centre at Cardiff University said after years of resistance by some medical professionals to the idea of a genetic basis for schizophrenia, the latest study proves it beyond doubt.

"It is absolutely crystal clear now that genetics is involved in schizophrenia and although the biological implications of the genetics are not yet clear, we're beginning to see patterns emerging from the data," Professor O'Donovan said.

"The big picture is that large collaborations like this into schizophrenia has the capacity to crack the illness open in the same way that similar studies have done to other diseases with a genetic basis," he said.

Some of the genes identified by the study, which is published in the journal Nature, are known to be involved with controlling the production of dopamine, a neurotransmitter in the brain that was long suspected of playing a role in the illness.

Other genes are involved with glutamate, another important neurotransmitter, while a few of the newly identified genes play a role in acquiring immunity to infections, which fits with the idea that exposure to viruses in early life may increase a person's susceptibility to the illness.

Professor O'Donovan said that genes contribute to between about a third and one half of the risk of developing schizophrenia and he would not be surprised if further research involving genome-wide studies reveals up to 1,000 genes that are linked to disease susceptibility.

"The wealth of new findings has the potential to kick-start the development of new treatments in schizophrenia, a process which has stalled for the last 60 years," he said.

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DNA schizophrenia research points at over 100 genes

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The largest study ever undertaken into the genetic basis of mental illnesses has found more than 100 genes that play some kind of role in the development of schizophrenia - one of the most common of the serious psychiatric disorders.

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A trailblazing global scientific collaboration has identified more than 100 spots in human DNA that appear to contribute to the risk of developing schizophrenia, vastly expanding the understanding of the complex genetics behind the disease.

Scientists from more than 30 countries published the findings in the journal Nature on Tuesday, revealing 83 previously unknown genetic markers for the psychiatric condition.

"It's the biggest by far in terms of any psychiatric genetic study," said Prof. Jo Knight, a behavioural neuroscientist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto and a contributor to the research.

"This really is the beginning of a group of many, many studies that will produce lots more information about the disease as people drill down into very specific hypotheses and try to test interactions with the environment, or gene-to-gene interactions."

Knight said having any one of the genetic markers for schizophrenia would give someone a "very small" risk of developing the disease, but "the more that you have, the more likely you are." However, since environmental factors still play an important role, such all-out prediction "is still incredibly poor," she said.

"We're not anywhere close to the point where you might say this individual will go on to develop schizophrenia. You couldn't test children with this data and predict an outcome at this point."

150,000 subjects

More than 100 researchers from around the world collaborated in the effort. The study included genetic information from more than 150,000 people - nearly 37,000 of them diagnosed with schizophrenia. Researchers found 108 genetic markers that increase the risk of getting the disease, and scientists say there are still likely more to be found.

Schizophrenia is a debilitating mental disorder often emerging in the teens and early 20s that makes it hard to tell the difference between what is real and not real, and affects about one per cent of the population. The price tag of health care, social costs and lost productivity is estimated at $6.85 billion a year in Canada alone.

The new findings implicate genes expressed in brain tissue, particularly those related to the functioning of neurons and the pathways that enable chemical and electrical signalling between these brain cells, known as synapses.

They also give weight to a theory that genes active in immune-system functioning may also be involved with schizophrenia, suggesting that it could be an autoimmune disease, at least in part.

Scientists had already known that families with autoimmune disorders tend to have higher rates of schizophrenia, and there's been a link between certain viral infections in the second trimester of pregnancy and higher rates of schizophrenia in offspring.

The results are a "big step" toward finding drug therapies, said study lead author Dr. Michael O'Donovan, deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University School of Medicine in Wales. While 108 genetic markers are a lot, the study authors say they tend to implicate a narrower group of biological functions, giving some but not too many hints for scientists to pursue.

Affirms existing theories

Another Canadian contributor to the study said the results show current drug treatments for schizophrenia aren't totally off-base. Prof. Jim Kennedy, Knight's colleague at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, said one of the newly discovered genetic markers for schizophrenia is in an area of DNA that helps code for the brain's dopamine receptors.

"It does provide a kind of independent stamp of approval that the drugs we're approving are not misguided, all these drugs for schizophrenia that bind to these dopamine D2 receptors," Kennedy said - though he acknowledged that the medications are still "by no means ideal" and have many side effects.

Kennedy said other genetic markers uncovered by the new research are involved in the neurotransmitter glutamate, which lends credence to research trying to find a link between glutamate irregularities and schizophrenia.

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Huge genetic mapping study offers new hope on schizophrenia | CBC News

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A trailblazing global scientific collaboration has identified more than 100 spots in human DNA that appear to contribute to the risk of developing schizophrenia, vastly expanding the understanding of the complex genetics behind the disease. Scientists from more than 30 countries published the findings in the journal Nature on Tuesday, revealing 83 previously unknown genetic markers for the psychiatric condition.

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Links to two articles about mis-reporting and lack of causation

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More Buck For Your Bang: People Who Have More Sex Make The Most Money

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A German study has found that people who have the most sex also make the most money, further depressing the world's low-paid plebes who don't get any.

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Links to two articles about mis-reporting and lack of causation

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On Saturday, my Twitter feed alerted me to a totally non-sensationalistic Gawker article called More Buck For Your Bang: People Who Have More Sex Make The Most Money. "Scientists in the adonis-laden European country [Germany] found that people who have sex more than four times a week receive a 3.2 percent higher paycheck than those who have sex only once a week. God forbid you don't have sex at all," writes Max Rivlin-Nadler.

In the comments section (yes, I know I shouldn't read them), aside from unnecessary pictures of scantily clad ladies and older white men in suits, several people hypothesize that causation probably goes the other way: people who make more money are able to have more sex. "People who have the most sex make the most money? Or is it that the people who make the most money have the most sex?" wrote one commenter.

The relevant study, " The Effect of Sexual Activity on Wages," (pdf) was published in the Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA, based in Bonn, Germany) Discussion Paper Series. Incidentally, the study is based on a survey of households in Greece, not Germany as the Gawker article states. A disclaimer at the bottom of the first page of the paper states, "IZA Discussion Papers often represent preliminary work and are circulated to encourage discussion. Citation of such a paper should account for its provisional character." So much for that one on the Internet!

The paper, studies the complicated relationship between various behaviors and characteristics-age, amount of sexual activity, personality traits, type of job, health, work experience, and so on-and wages. The author, Nick Drydakis of Anglia Ruskin University in the UK and the IZA, seeks to add to the literature on the correlation of health and well-being with income. He found that a regression model that did incorporate sexual activity levels in addition to health, age, and so on was slightly more accurate at predicting participants' income than one that didn't.

"It is unclear whether this correlation represents a causal relationship," wrote Drydakis in the paper. "In this study, we hypothesised that because the medical and psychological literature suggest that sexual activity is associated with good health, endurance, mental well-being, mental capacities and dietary habits, it could be perceived as a health indicator, which might influence returns to labor market activity....The patterns found in this study strengthen this reasoning," (emphasis mine). It's likely that health influences both sexual activity levels and income, and sex may improve certain aspects of health as well. The causal chain is likely very complicated and filled with loops.

Back in October 2012, Slate posted an article by Daniel Engber that kind of rankled me: The Internet Blowhard's Phrase: Why do people love to say that correlation does not imply causation? I'd like to think that I'm not an Internet blowhard, and I do stay away from the comments sections of most news stories unless I simply can't help myself, but I think articles like Gawker's report on Drydakis's paper are perfectly reasonable places for people to sputter "correlation is not causation."

To some extent, I understand Engber's criticism. A constant chorus of "correlation is not causation" doesn't really do much good, and it does get old. I don't want people to stop doing the studies that find correlation but don't present a causal mechanism, and I don't want news outlets to stop reporting on them. These studies do tell us useful and interesting things, and sometimes they can help us understand possible causal links between behaviors and outcomes. But nuance and skepticism are necessary in reporting and understanding the results of studies like this one.

Articles like Gawker's frustrate me not only because they pander and oversimplify. They also make it far too easy for people like me to roll our eyes, mumble, "Correlation is not causation," and dismiss an entire study as bogus. "Yeh, this seems like one of those studies that was commissioned just to meet publication quotas..." wrote a commenter on the Gawker article.

In fact, the paper is pretty interesting! It's interesting to see what variables Drydakis looked at and how economists go about disentangling mutually influential traits. He also refers to a lot of interesting research on various aspects of the interplay between health, sexual activity, and income. This article isn't the last word in the study of sex and income, and it isn't free from problems; the data set comes from a survey, which is not necessarily reliable. On surveys like this, men often over-report and women often under-report the amount of sex they have. I don't have the full data set, but in the Greek survey, men reported having more sex on average than women, and it's not clear whether or not the discrepancy can be attributed to different sexual behavior in homosexual men and women. (In principle, in a representative sample of people who are remembering and reporting their behavior accurately, heterosexual men should report the same number of heterosexual encounters as heterosexual women do, on average.)

I am also curious about how health problems and disabilities were categorized. The paper indicated that within the group of people who are health impaired, those who had more sex had higher wages. But from the data in the paper, I am not sure whether people with similar disabilities or health problems were compared with each other, or if all of them were lumped into the same group. If people with very different health impairments and disabilities are in the same group, the regression may not be able to separate differences based on sexual activity from differences based on health. Despite these issues, I found the paper much more interesting and robust than I assumed it would be based on the Gawker article.

It's hard to write popular science articles that dive into the subtleties of papers like this one in an easy-to-digest way, but in my opinion, it's worth trying to do. Such articles do a better service to both science and our readers than sensationalistic sound bites that make me glare at my computer thinking, "Correlation is not causation."

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Sex Makes You Rich? Why We Keep Saying "Correlation Is Not Causation" Even Though It's Annoying

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On Saturday, my Twitter feed alerted me to a totally non-sensationalistic Gawker article called More Buck For Your Bang: People Who Have More Sex Make The Most Money. "Scientists in the adonis-laden European country [Germany] found that people who have sex more than four times a week receive a 3.2 percent higher paycheck than those who have sex only once a week.

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Schizophrenia and the Brain

Why do people act the way they do? Why do some people hear and see things that aren't there and others can't hear or see things at all?

Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder that affects about 1% of people. People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions, among other things. Hallucinations involve hearing or seeing things that aren't real, such as hearing voices in your head. Delusions are false beliefs that don't go away, even with evidence that they aren't true. No one knows the cause of schizophrenia, but scientists have found some information on the symptoms of schizophrenia by studying the brains of schizophrenic patients.

Brain Structures

There are several brain structures that are affected in patients with schizophrenia. The prefrontal cortex is at the very front and top of the brain, and it helps people think logically and organize their thoughts.

Many studies have shown that people with schizophrenia have less activity in their prefrontal cortex. This may be one reason that they suffer from delusions; after all, if they aren't using their prefrontal cortex as much as most people, they aren't using the part of their brain that induces logical thinking. Some schizophrenics also suffer from disorganized thought patterns. Since the prefrontal cortex also helps organize thoughts, less activity in that area might be a cause of disordered thinking, as well as delusions.

Studies have also shown that schizophrenic patients suffering from hallucinations show brain activity in the visual and auditory cortices. These areas of the brain process vision and sound information from the eyes and the ears. In schizophrenics, the brain acts the same way whether the patient is seeing or hearing something real or just hallucinating. In other words, the hallucinations are as real to a schizophrenic's brain as reality.

The basal ganglia is located deep inside the brain, and it involves movement and thinking skills. Some studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia have larger basal ganglia than normal people. This might affect the movement patterns of schizophrenics, who often have motor dysfunctions.

Another brain structure that is different in patients with schizophrenia is the amygdala. The amygdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for basic feelings, like fear, lust and hunger. Patients with schizophrenia often have little emotion, and not surprisingly, the amygdala is smaller in people with schizophrenia. After all, if the part of the brain that is in charge of emotions is small, then chances are you won't feel emotions very strongly.

Neurotransmitters

Besides brain structures, there are other differences in the brains of schizophrenics and normal people. Specifically, there are some neurotransmitters that are different in the brains of schizophrenics. Think of neurotransmitters kind of like telephone wires. They are chemicals in the brain that carry messages from one part of the brain to another. That's how the parts of the brain talk to one another.

There are many different neurotransmitters, and they all work in different ways and sometimes in different parts of the brain. Just like some telephone wires stretch all the way around the world, and others only go around the block, some neurotransmitters move between many different parts of the brain, while others stick to just a few specific areas.

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neurobiological model of schizophrenia: brain systems and neurotransmitters - video & lesson transcript | study.com

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Neurobiological Model of Schizophrenia: Brain Systems and Neurotransmitters - Video & Lesson Transcript | Study.com

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Why do people act the way they do? Why do some people hear and see things that aren't there and others can't hear or see things at all? Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder that affects about 1% of people. People with schizophrenia suffer from hallucinations and delusions, among other things.

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CUT IT OUT Discuss psychological explanations for schizophrenia

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CUT IT OUT Outline and evaluate Biological explanations of schizophrenia (8 +16 marks)

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Build it up  psychological therapy for schizophrenia

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Powerpoint on Diathesis - stress

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Content heavy! Plenty of evaluation (too much!)

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Khan Academy - for student reference or use as flip lesson

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schizophrenia (disease or medical condition)

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Schizophrenia treatment | Mental health | NCLEX-RN | Khan Academy

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Visit us (http://www.khanacademy.org/science/healthcare-and-medicine) for health and medicine content or (http://www.khanacademy.org/test-prep/mcat) for MCAT related content. These videos do not provide medical advice and are for informational purposes only. The videos are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.

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Recaps

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Uses the names of different drugs but may be useful for intro...

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Dr. Philip Seeman, C.S.O of Clera Inc. www.clera.com, explains how antipsychotic (principally used for schizophrenia) drugs work.

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Biological explanations

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Psychological explanations

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planning sheet - psychological explanations

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powerpoint including tasks

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SZ Summary Placemat