Latest news with #DiagnosticandStatisticalManualofMentalDisorders
Los Angeles Times
a day ago
- Health
- Los Angeles Times
RFK Jr. is dismantling trust in vaccines, the crown jewel of American public health
When it comes to vaccines, virtually nothing that comes out of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s mouth is true. The man in charge of the nation's health and well being is impervious to science, expertise and knowledge. His brand of arrogance is not just dangerous, it is lethal. Undermining trust in vaccines, he will have the blood of children around the world on his hands. Scratch that. He already does, as he presides over the second largest measles outbreak in this country since the disease was declared 'eliminated' a quarter century ago. 'Vaccines have become a divisive issue in American politics,' Kennedy wrote the other day in a Wall Street Journal essay, 'but there is one thing all parties can agree on: The U.S. faces a crisis of public trust.' The lack of self-awareness would be funny if it weren't so tragic. Over the past two decades or so, Kennedy has done more than almost any other American to destroy the public's trust in vaccines and science. And now he's bemoaning the very thing he has helped cause. Earlier this month, Kennedy fired the 17 medical and public health experts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices — qualified doctors and public health experts — and replaced them with a group of (mostly) anti-vaxxers in order to pursue his relentless, ascientific crusade. On Thursday, at its first meeting, his newly reconstituted council voted to ban the preservative thimerosal from the few remaining vaccines that contain it, despite many studies showing that thimerosal is safe. On that point, even the Food and Drug Administration website is blunt: 'A robust body of peer-reviewed scientific studies conducted in the U.S. and other countries support the safety of thimerosal-containing vaccines.' 'If you searched the world wide, you could not find a less suitable person to be leading healthcare efforts in the United States or the world,' psychiatrist Allen Frances told NPR on Thursday. Frances, who chaired the task force that changed how the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM, defines autism, published an essay in the New York Times on Monday explaining why the incidence of autism has increased but is neither an epidemic nor related to vaccines. 'The rapid rise in autism cases is not because of vaccines or environmental toxins,' Frances wrote, 'but is rather the result of changes in the way that autism is defined and assessed — changes that I helped put into place.' But Kennedy is not one to let the facts stand in the way of his cockamamie theories. Manufacturers long ago removed thimerosal from childhood vaccines because of unfounded fears it contained mercury that could accumulate in the brain and unfounded fears about a relationship between mercury and autism. That did not stop one of Kennedy's new council members, Lyn Redwood, who once led Children's Health Defense, the anti-vaccine group founded by Kennedy, from declaring a victory for children. 'Removing a known neurotoxin from being injected into our most vulnerable population is a good place to start with making America healthy again,' Redwood told the committee. Autism rates, by the way, have continued to climb despite the thimerosal ban. But fear not, gullible Americans, Kennedy has promised to pinpoint a cause for the complex condition by September! Like his boss, Kennedy just makes stuff up. On Wednesday, he halted a $1-billion American commitment to Gavi, an organization that provides vaccines to millions of children around the world, wrongly accusing the group of failing to investigate adverse reactions to the diptheria vaccine. 'This is utterly disastrous for children around the world and for public health,' Atul Gawande, a surgeon who worked in the Biden administration, told the New York Times. Unilaterally, and contrary to the evidence, Kennedy decided to abandon the CDC recommendation that healthy pregnant women receive COVID vaccines. But an unvaccinated pregnant woman's COVID infection can lead to serious health problems for her newborn. In fact, a study last year found that babies born to such mothers had 'unusually high rates' of respiratory distress at or just after birth. According to the CDC, nearly 90% of babies who were hospitalized for COVID-19 had unvaccinated mothers. Also, vaccinated moms can pass protective antibodies to their fetuses, who will not be able to get a COVID shot until they are 6 months old. What else? Oh yes: Kennedy once told podcaster Joe Rogan that the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic was 'vaccine-induced flu' even though no flu vaccine existed at the time. He also told Rogan that a 2003 study by physician scientist Michael Pichichero, an expert on the use of thimerosal in vaccines, involved feeding babies 6 months old and younger mercury-contaminated tuna sandwiches, and that 64 days later, the mercury was still in their system. 'Who would do that?' Kennedy demanded. Well, no one. In the study, 40 babies were injected with vaccines containing thimerosal, while a control group of 21 babies got shots that did not contain the preservative. None was fed tuna. Ethylmercury, the form of mercury in thimerosal, the researchers concluded, 'seems to be eliminated from blood rapidly via the stools.' (BTW, the mercury found in fish is methylmercury, a different chemical, which can damage the brain and nervous system. In a 2012 deposition for his divorce, which was revealed last year, Kennedy said he suffered memory loss and brain fog from mercury poisoning caused by eating too much tuna fish. He also revealed he has a dead worm in his brain.) Kennedy's tuna sandwich anecdote on Rogan's podcast was 'a ChatGPT-level of hallucination,' said Morgan McSweeney, a.k.a. 'Dr. Noc,' a scientist with a doctorate in pharmaceutical sciences, focusing on immunology and antibodies. McSweeney debunks the idiotic medical claims of non-scientists like Kennedy in his popular social media videos. Speaking of AI hallucinations, on Tuesday, at a congressional committee hearing, Kennedy was questioned about inaccuracies, misinformation and made up research and citations for nonexistent studies in the first report from his Make America Healthy Again Commission. The report focused on how American children are being harmed by their poor diets, exposure to environmental toxins and, predictably, over-vaccination. It was immediately savaged by experts. 'This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,' Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Assn. told the Washington Post. If Kennedy was sincere about improving the health of American children he would focus on combating real scourges like gun violence, drug overdoses, depression, poverty and lack of access to preventive healthcare. He would be fighting the proposed cuts to Medicaid tooth and nail. Do you suppose he even knows that over the past 50 years, the lives of an estimated 154 million children have been saved by vaccines? Or that he cares? @ @rabcarian
The Star
23-06-2025
- Health
- The Star
Too good to be true ADHD videos on TikTok are often misleading, US study finds.
On TikTok, misinformation about attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be tricky to spot, according to a new study, published this month in the scientic journal PLOS One (published by Public Library of Science, based in California, the United States), found that fewer than 50% of the claims made in some of the most popular ADHD videos on TikTok offered information that matched diagnostic criteria or professional treatment recommendations for the disorder. And, the researchers found, even study participants who had already been diagnosed with ADHD had trouble discerning which information was most reliable. About half of the TikTok creators included in the study were using the platform to sell products, such as fidget spinners, or services like coaching. None of them were licensed mental health professionals. The lack of nuance is concerning, said Vasileia Karasavva, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Canada's University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the lead author of the study. If TikTok creators talk about difficulty concentrating, she added, they don't typically mention that the symptom is not specific to ADHD or that it could also be a manifestation of a different mental disorder, like depression or anxiety. Just because a video or post goes viral doesn't mean it is accurate. "The last thing we want to do is discourage people from expressing how they're feeling, what they're experiencing and finding community online," Karasavva said. "At the same time, it might be that you self-diagnose with something that doesn't apply to you, and then you don't get the help that you actually need." Karasavva's results echo those of a 2022 study that also analysed 100 popular TikTok videos about ADHD and found that half of them were misleading. "The data are alarming," said Stephen P. Hinshaw, a professor of psychology and an expert in ADHD at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in either study. The themes of the videos might easily resonate with viewers, he added, but "accurate diagnosis takes access, time and money." In Karasavva's study, the researchers began by selecting the 100 most viewed videos on a single day in January 2023 and asked two licensed clinical psychologists to review each video. The psychologists were called to assess whether the videos accurately captured the symptoms of adult or adolescent ADHD that are characterised in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which is used by medical professionals in the US to diagnose and classify mental health conditions. If a video's claim didn't match up with the manual, the psychologists then established whether the symptoms in the video better reflected a different type of disorder or something that anyone, including those without ADHD, might experience. Finally, they rated on a scale of one to five whether they would recommend the video to help educate other people about ADHD. One limitation of the study was that it did not rely on a large panel of experts to evaluate the videos. The researchers then asked more than 840 undergraduate students to rate the videos using the same scale used by the psychologists. The study participants who were the most frequent consumers of ADHD-related TikTok content were more likely than the other participants to recommend the top five most reputable videos. But they were also more likely to recommend the bottom five videos. And that was true regardless of whether they had been diagnosed with ADHD or not. Karasavva said this could be because the TikTok algorithm serves videos that are similar to those a person has already watched - and as we come across the same information again and again, it's tempting to think that "all these people can't be wrong." "In the end, you might come to believe things that don't really match up with the science," she said. Notably, the students in the study also vastly overestimated how many people actually had ADHD. In an email, TikTok said that it strongly encourages people to seek professional medical advice if they are in need of support and that the platform directs users to reliable resources when they search for ADHD-related content. The information on TikTok "doesn't always tell you the full story, and it can also lead the loudest voices to be overrepresented,' said Margaret Sibley, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle who was not involved in the study. "People might not be discerning about what aspect of their experience is ADHD versus something else." - ©2025 The New York Times
Time of India
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Time of India
Uma Thurman gets nervous eating in front of the camera
Hollywood star revealed that the idea of consuming food on set is something she still gets nervous about. Thurman told the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon: "First of all, you have to do lots of takes. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Second of all, you don't pick what's on the menu, and you have to speak sometimes and swallow, and then you start to worry about choking because you don't want to be chewing when you say that line. " The 55-year-old star discovered her anxiety after filling out a DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, which brought up the issue. She said: "Do you know that eating in front of strangers is one of the questions on the DSM? Do you know what the DSM is? It's like one of these check things that psychiatrists do to find out what your neuroses are." Thurman was determined to be "just fine" after filling out the test, but noted she does get nervous about eating during a scene. However, she thinks a "good eating scene" is one of the main things she still wants to nail on screen, reports The actress added: "A good eating scene should be on my bucket list of stuff I haven't nailed. It's like skinny-dipping or something, like one of those things you know that you haven't done." Despite a filmography boasting of numerous filmmakers over several decades in Hollywood, Thurman previously revealed she was "very nervous" about her role in 2024 drama Oh, Canada! Speaking during a Q+A session at the New York Film Festival in 2024, she said: "I mean, Paul Schrader! I'm a really big fan of Paul Schrader. So to get to contribute, to lend myself to his piece, and get to see him working was a real, real privilege. I was very nervous to meet him, you know, this macho filmmaker [who] made these legendary films." --IANS dc/
The Star
19-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Star
Sabah student's stories on mental health to be published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka
KOTA KINABALU: From a quiet corner of Sandakan town to the national literary stage, Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) student Mohammad Azmir Misnani is proving that even the softest voices can echo powerfully. And Azmir does this through what he does best, his writing. Through a debut short story collection, compiled in a book titled Kelopak Mawar (Rose Petals), Azmir explores deep emotional and psychological themes. The book will soon be published by Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka (DBP) Sabah after earning top honours in the 2025 AdiKarya Penulis Muda competition. Azmir, a final-year student from the Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Heritage, grew up in Batu Sapi, a town better known for its fishing villages than for fiction writers. Yet his collection of stories, written with haunting beauty and psychiatric insight, impressed the jury with its honesty and bravery. 'These stories speak for the ones who suffer in silence. Kelopak Mawar was written for all those whose voices go unheard, those struggling with inner battles no one else sees,' Azmir said, referring to the book's inspiration. What makes Kelopak Mawar especially impactful is how it delicately uses elements from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) as metaphors, creating symbolic characters who reflect different emotional conditions. 'The stories do not diagnose, they resonate. They are not medical, they are mirrors,' he said. Azmir added that the collection was also a form of personal healing: 'I wanted the stories to offer a kind of companionship. When people read them, I hope they'll feel seen. Maybe even comforted. Because sometimes, literature listens when people won't.' UMS lecturer Dr Yusliza Mohd Yusof, who mentored Azmir throughout the AdiKarya programme, described the manuscript as 'poetically brave and unapologetically raw.' 'This is the kind of youth literature Malaysia needs, relevant, sensitive, and aesthetically mature. Azmir's work has the potential to spark a much-needed conversation about mental health among young people,' she said. Azmir is among four UMS student winners selected by DBP Sabah for publication this year under the AdiKarya Penulis Muda initiative, which is aimed at nurturing the next generation of literary voices in East Malaysia. For Azmir, this journey from campus writer to soon-to-be published author is more than a personal milestone, it is a message. 'You don't have to be loud to be heard. You just have to be honest,' he said. And with Kelopak Mawar now blooming into the hands of readers, Azmir's words, once kept quiet, are finally finding their way into hearts nationwide.
The Sun
19-06-2025
- Health
- The Sun
Brain degeneration effects of digital addiction
PETALING JAYA: The habit of endlessly scrolling through social media content, especially non-educational or trivial material, is becoming alarmingly common among Malaysians, sparking concerns over a rising wave of internet addiction. Mental health experts warn that the compulsive behaviour, known as doomscrolling and driven by constant exposure to digital media, may take a toll on cognitive health and carry serious, long-term neurological consequences. Malaysia Organisation of Psychospiritual Wellbeing deputy chairman Dr Adnan Omar said internet addiction often begins in the early stages of life, forming during childhood and adolescence when behavioural patterns are still developing. He referred to statistics from the National Health and Morbidity Survey 2022, which revealed that 66.7% of secondary school students exhibited sedentary behaviour, up from 50.1% in 2017 and 47.3% in 2012. 'The Malaysian Youth Index 2020 reported that adolescents spend an average of four to five hours daily on mobile phones and the internet.' 'About 29% of students aged 13 to 17 are already showing signs of internet addiction. That's a significant portion of our youth being shaped by these habits from a very young age,' he said, adding that digital addiction does not develop overnight. 'No one suddenly wakes up addicted. These behaviours evolve gradually, often reinforced by social media algorithms that narrow a user's exposure and stifle broader experiences. 'If a child is constantly fed repetitive or shallow content, they may grow into adulthood with a limited range of interests and diminished curiosity.' He also said the World Health Organisation now recognises internet addiction as a clinical mental disorder under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). He added that the endless supply of online content has made procrastination more prevalent than ever. 'People have always procrastinated, even before the digital era. Back then, it might have meant going for a jog or chatting with a neighbour. But physical activities have limits – time, energy and space. 'The internet doesn't. It's always available, always updating and never runs out. That's what makes it such a powerful enabler of bad habits.' Based on DSM-5 criteria, Adnan said anyone spending more than 21 hours per week on non-essential internet use – not related to work, family or education – could be classified as experiencing clinical addiction. 'This is internationally recognised. Countries such as China and Australia have introduced legislation to limit children's access to the internet.' Beyond emotional well-being, experts also say internet addiction could be quietly impairing how the brain processes, focuses and remembers. Universiti Putra Malaysia consultant neurologist Assoc Prof Dr Abdul Hanif Khan said there is growing evidence linking compulsive smartphone use to reduced attention span, working memory and decision-making capabilities. 'Constant scrolling trains the brain to seek fast, bite-sized information. Over time, it erodes the ability to concentrate, reduces mental clarity and leads to subtle memory lapses. 'These are early indicators of what we call minimal cognitive impairment. If this trend continues, we may see it becoming far more common among Generation Z in the next three decades.' He also said the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the region responsible for impulse control and reasoning, is overstimulated by dopamine surges triggered by constant digital engagement during doomscrolling. He added that symptoms of concern include short-term memory issues, mental fatigue and difficulty focusing or completing tasks. 'These may not directly cause dementia, but once such impairment begins to affect a person's ability to manage money, operate devices or carry out basic responsibilities, we're entering the territory of neurocognitive disorders.' Abdul Hanif also warned about the emotional fallout of excessive screen time, pointing to increased rates of anxiety, depression and sleep disruption. He linked these patterns to overstimulation of the amygdala, the emotional control centre of the brain, which becomes hyperactive due to constant digital input. 'You'll notice how people become restless or anxious when separated from their phones. That's not a coincidence. 'Emotion and cognition are closely linked. If unhealthy internet habits formed in youth go unchecked, they can evolve into serious neurological and emotional dysfunction in adulthood.'
