Psychiatry and Buddhism trending as China seeks inner peace

Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2015-05-13

Xinli001's internet radio page. (Photo/Xinli001.com)

China has seen a surge in the number of people seeking inner peace, leading to soaring demand for psychiatrists and reviving interest in Buddhism, according to Guangzhou's Southern Weekly.

After three decades of rapid economic growth that have made China the world's second-largest economy, happiness has now become a popular topic, the paper said.

"No matter what, Chinese people do not live happily," said Xiao Zeping, the superintendent of the Shanghai Mental Health Center, at an annual applied psychology conference held in Guangzhou in March.

Li Yan, the head of the psychiatry and sleeping disorder department at Guangzhou Hospital of Traditional Chinese Medicine, said the number of visits made by patients to the department rose from 7,000 in 2005 to 50,000 last year.

"The incidences of depression, anxiety disorder and schizophrenia in China are higher than the global average," she said.

This has led to the rapid growth of the self-help industry in China. Psychology information website Xinli001 has seen its number of registered users grow to 9.31 million since being launched four years ago.

Urbanization is blamed for people's unhappiness, with Wuhan University professor Huang Yongming arguing in a study that pollution and food safety issues are the main sources of people's misery.

Oxford University clinical psychology professor Mark Williams also said that Chinese people desperately want to find a way to maintain inner peace at a time of rapid change and regular anxiety.

Buddhism has become the top choice for most people, the newspaper said, citing government data that showed the number of Buddhist venues growing from 13,000 in 1997 to 33,000 in 2013.

Chinese people have also become interested in meditation, the newspaper said.

Over 100 temples across China hold meditation camps every year, and a group of executives including Huayi Brothers chair Wang Zhongjun and Tsingtao Brewery chair Jin Zhiguo, who went to business school together, traveled to Taiwan to practice meditation at the Fo Guang Shan monastery in May 2014.

Gong Jun, a professor at Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, said the number of applicants to the Institute of Comparative Religious Studies has also increased in recent years.

When China's president, Xi Jinping, said in February that people having spiritual beliefs will give better hope for the nation and strength to the country, it was also interpreted by religious groups as progress.

Wang Zuoan, head of China's State Administration of Religious Affairs, also urged media outlets in February not to avoid religious issues, which were deemed sensitive in the past, because religion has been recognized as a force that helps build a peaceful society.

Reincarnation: Dr. Brian Weiss And Oprah Discuss Angels, Animals And The Afterlife (VIDEO)

The Huffington Post, OWN, 07/01/2013

Past-life regression expert and former skeptic Dr. Brian Weiss has devoted the last several decades of his career as an Ivy League-trained psychiatrist to exploring reincarnation and the afterlife. Now a believer, Dr. Weiss says that the people who have loved you on this earth are called master teachers -- and can be viewed as angels after they pass. This is a sentiment that resonates with Oprah, who recently spoke with Dr. Weiss about everyday angels on an episode of "Super Soul Sunday."

"I always say to people when they lose someone, 'Now you have an angel you can call by name,'" Oprah says.

The comment sparks Dr. Weiss to share a story from his book Miracles Happen about a grieving woman whose late husband sent her and her two sons a message about the other side. "[The deceased man] had become their angel or their spiritual guide," Dr. Weiss says.

Humans aren't the only ones who cross over, Dr. Weiss says. Our pets do, too. For Oprah, who lost her beloved dog Sophie, the spiritual connection to a pet is something she understands profoundly.

"I was really deeply grieving the loss of Sophie," Oprah says of her dog's passing. "I allowed myself to do that for a period of time and then moved into the space of knowing that, just like all other beings, she was a spirit. A sweet little spirit."

This understanding elevated Oprah's already deep connection with Sophie to a surprising new level. "When I allowed the sweet spirit of her to be present with me, I actually moved into a space where I am closer to her -- makes me want to cry -- I am closer to her now than I could have been when she was still in the body," Oprah says.

"Love and life never stops. It never ends," Dr. Weiss says. "It doesn't end with the death of the physical body."

"When you lose someone... the essence of that person, the heart, the love of that person... I find, become more powerful because you are infused with that energy and that spirit in a way that you couldn't haven't been before," Oprah says.

"Energy doesn't have boundaries the way we think," Dr. Weiss agrees. "These spiritual contacts are very real, very important. And that should be nurturing to everybody, to heal hearts, to heal grief... We're always going to be reunited, but even before that, they're still with us."

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"The Complex Soul" – June 30, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) - New

"Do Animals Reincarnate?" - NOV 22, 2010 (Kuthumi channelled by Lynette Leckie-Clark)

"THE THREE WINDS" – Feb 23-24, 2013 (Kryon Channelling by Lee Carroll) (Subjects: Humanity, Home - other side of the veil, Wind of Birth - Birth, Wind of Existence - Life, Wind of Transition - Death) - (Text version)

'Fifth of adolescents' hear voices

Google/UKPA – Apr 12, 2012 

Hearing voices can affect more than a fifth of young adolescents, a psychiatry study has found.

Hearing voices can affect up to a fifth

 of young adolescents, according to

a new psychiatric study

Researchers discovered auditory hallucination has an impact on 21% to 23% of children aged between 11 and 13 in Ireland.

More than half of those who heard voices - 57% - were also found to have a psychiatric disorder following clinical assessment.

Nearly 2,500 children, aged between 11 and 16, were assessed four times for the study, funded by the Health Research Board (HRB).

Lead researcher Dr Ian Kelleher revealed auditory hallucinations can vary from hearing an isolated sentence now and then to hearing conversations between two or more people lasting for several minutes.

"It may present like screaming or shouting and other times it could sound like whispers or murmurs," said Dr Kelleher, of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland (RCSI). "It varies greatly from child to child, and frequency can be once a month to once every day."

The study showed auditory hallucinations stop for many children as they get older, with 7% of older adolescents (aged 13-16) hearing voices. However nearly 80% of the teens who continued to hear voices also had a psychiatric disorder, linking auditory hallucinations and serious mental illness.

The research has been published online by the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Professor Mary Cannon said it suggests hearing voices seems to be more common in children than was previously thought."In most cases these experiences resolve with time," the HRB clinician scientist at the RCSI and Beaumont Hospital said. "However, in some children these experiences persist into older adolescence and this seems to be an indicator that they may have a complex mental health issue and require more in-depth assessment."

Dr Kelleher said hearing voices could be a "blip" on the radar that does not turn out to signify any underlying or undiagnosed problem.

Scientists: True love can last a lifetime

(CNN) -- Love's first blush fading? Lost that loving feeling? Love is not all around?

 

Scientists have used brain scans to study how long love lasts between couples.

 

Sick of cliches?

 

Take heart, scientists have discovered that people can have a love that lasts a lifetime.

 

Using brain scans, researchers at Stony Brook University in New York have discovered a small number of couples respond with as much passion after 20 years together as most people only do during the early throes of romance, Britain's Sunday Times newspaper reported.

 

The researchers scanned the brains of couples together for 20 years and compared them with results from new lovers, the Sunday Times said.

 

About 10 percent of the mature couples had the same chemical reactions when shown photographs of their loved ones as those just starting out.

 

Previous research has suggested that the first stages of romantic love fade within 15 months and after 10 years it has gone completely, the newspaper said.

 

"The findings go against the traditional view of romance -- that it drops off sharply in the first decade -- but we are sure it's real," said Arthur Aron, a psychologist at Stony Brook, told the Sunday Times.

 

Is depression good for you?

By Tom Geoghegan, BBC News Magazine

Pills aren't the answer to helping many people recover from depression, says a report out this week. But there's growing evidence that gloominess could be a positive experience.

What depressed the cavemen? It may strike us as a particularly modern malaise for a time-poor, fast-paced society but a new reappraisal of depression suggests it has always been around.

A leading psychiatrist says that depression is not a human defect at all, but a defence mechanism that in its mild and moderate forms can force a healthy reassessment of personal circumstances.

Dr Paul Keedwell, an expert on mood disorders at the Institute of Psychiatry, argues all people are vulnerable to depression in the face of stress, although to varying degrees, and always have been.

The fact it has survived so long - and not been eradicated by evolution - indicates it has helped the human race become stronger.

"I have received e-mails from ex-sufferers saying in retrospect it probably did help them because they changed direction, a new career for example, and as a result they're more content day-to-day than before the depression."

One woman left an abusive relationship and moved on, he says, and might not have done if depression had not provided the necessary introspection.

Similarly, unrealistic expectations are revised when depression sparks a more humble reassessment of strengths and weaknesses.

In Britain one in four men and one in five women are estimated to suffer depression during their lifetime, and one in 20 suffers it at any one time.

Creativity

Dame Kelly Holmes has spoken in the past about how the depression she suffered in 2003 made her a stronger person, a year before her double-gold performance at the Olympics. Alastair Campbell has said it was the making of him.

But there are other qualities depression generates, not just resilience, says Dr Keedwell, author of How Sadness Survived.

"Psychological unease can generate creative work and the rebirth after depression brings a new love affair with life."

Aristotle believed depression to be of great value because of the insights it could bring. There is also an increased empathy in people who have or have had depression, he says, because they become more attuned to other people's suffering.

Depression can be traced all the way back to the Stone Age, say Dr Keedwell, when close-knit communities of about 50 people would have identified it quickly. The rest of the group would have rallied round and changes followed, such as a new role for the individual.

Some remote communities are more aware of it. The Banda tribe in Uganda calls it "illness of thought" and those affected are allowed time out from the group, a concession not extended to many with the condition in the UK.

The high and rising incidence in the UK and US - compared to countries like Brazil and Mexico - could be due to the breakdown of family bonds and the fragmentation of society. And compared to past decades, there are increased expectations of success.

Anti-depressants, which were reported this week to have little clinical benefit for many patients, have a part to play, says Dr Keedwell, especially in severe depression. But an individual must address the social or emotional cause either on his own, with a loved one or with a professional.

"Don't beat yourself up about being depressed, in most cases it will run its course provided you take yourself out of the situation that caused it.

"I know that's an easy and glib thing to say, because I'm not a single mum living 12 floors up in a high-rise block. Sometimes it's not easy to escape but that's the fault of society, not the fault of depression."

GWB, not GDP

Politicians have recognised this and happiness is a word that has recently entered the political debate on both sides, with David Cameron saying that improving society's sense of well-being is one of the central political challenges of the times - GWB (general well-being) and not GDP (gross domestic product).

A happiness agenda is a laudable aim but one that is meaningless, says Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, because happiness is not something you can buy in Tesco.

"Everybody's life is full of occasional misery and we are going to suffer. All life ends in grief, unless you are lucky and you and your loved ones all die simultaneously in some plane crash.

"So I applaud the government for trying but I think the happiness agenda can be simplistic. You can't legislate for happiness."

He agrees with Dr Keedwell that depression, however horrible, does imbue people with a useful resource.

"You would never ask for it or want it this way. But people who work through it, with a professional or with friends and family, for those people who have an awful journey, they are better travellers."

But identifying the cause and addressing it is easier said than done, says Stuart Summerfield, 68, from Chesterfield, who has suffered from depression throughout his adult life. Although he believes he has a genetic predisposition to it, he blames its severity on his possessive mother.

She never acknowledged his illness and made it difficult for him to seek help, but her death in 1999 relieved him of caring duties and sparked a recovery. He is now involved in running a self-help group.

Superman

"I don't think that knowing the cause is always the route out. Changing circumstances is a major part of it but it's not always something you can change. Sometimes the big problem is admitting what the situation is."

He concedes it has helped him in some ways because he has a new appreciation of life.

"They say adversity makes you stronger, so I should be Superman by now."

But it is an "awful journey" and not a price worth paying for longer-term gain.

Study: $90 wine tastes better than the same wine at $10

Cnet News, Posted by Stephen Shankland

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

This graph shows the activity in the brain's pleasure center; there's more activity
with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10.
The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine.

(Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher
than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10.

(Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists' notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

"Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer's ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality," the researchers said. "Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."

Orphanages Stunt Mental Growth, a Study Finds

By Benedict Carey, The New York Times

Published: December 21, 2007

Psychologists have long believed that growing up in an institution like an orphanage stunts children’s mental development but have never had direct evidence to back it up.

Now they do, from an extraordinary years-long experiment in Romania that compared the effects of foster care with those of institutional child-rearing.

The study, being published on Friday in the journal Science, found that toddlers placed in foster families developed significantly higher I.Q.’s by age 4, on average, than peers who spent those years in an orphanage.

The difference was large — eight points — and the study found that the earlier children joined a foster family, the better they did. Children who moved from institutional care to families after age 2 made few gains on average, though the experience varied from child to child. Both groups, however, had significantly lower I.Q.’s than a comparison group of children raised by their biological families.

Some developmental psychologists had sharply criticized the study and its sponsor, the MacArthur Foundation, for researching a question whose answer seemed obvious. But previous attempts to compare institutional and foster care suffered from serious flaws, mainly because no one knew whether children who landed in orphanages were different in unknown ways from those in foster care. Experts said the new study should put to rest any doubts about the harmful effects of institutionalization — and might help speed up adoptions from countries that still allow them.

“Most of us take it as almost intuitive that being in a family is better for humans than being in an orphanage,” said Seth Pollak, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, who was not involved in the research. “But other governments don’t like to be told how to handle policy issues based on intuition.

Read More ....

Mom: Web hoax led girl to kill herself

Yahoo News

By BETSY TAYLOR, Associated Press Writer

DARDENNE PRAIRIE, Mo. - Megan Meier thought she had made a new friend in cyberspace when a cute teenage boy named Josh contacted her on MySpace and began exchanging messages with her.

Megan, a 13-year-old who suffered from depression and attention deficit disorder, corresponded with Josh for more than a month before he abruptly ended their friendship, telling her he had heard she was cruel.

The next day Megan committed suicide. Her family learned later that Josh never actually existed; he was created by members of a neighborhood family that included a former friend of Megan's.

Now Megan's parents hope the people who made the fraudulent profile on the social networking Web site will be prosecuted, and they are seeking legal changes to safeguard children on the Internet.

The girl's mother, Tina Meier, said she doesn't think anyone involved intended for her daughter to kill herself.

"But when adults are involved and continue to screw with a 13-year-old, with or without mental problems, it is absolutely vile," she told the Suburban Journals of Greater St. Louis, which first reported on the case.

Read More ....

'Sleepless grumps' seen in brain

BBC News

Brain scans can show how the brain gets "tired and over-emotional" when someone is deprived of sleep.

US researchers kept volunteers awake for 35 hours and found huge increases in brain activity when shown images designed to make them angry or sad.

The research in the journal Current Biology points to links between mental illness and sleep problems, they said.

But a British expert said psychiatric problems could not be blamed solely on lack of sleep.

Teams from Harvard Medical School and the University of California at Berkeley used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look at the brains of sleep-deprived volunteers.

This technique lets scientists look at blood flow in the brain in real-time, showing where the brain is most active.

After the volunteers had stayed awake for an extended period, they were scanned while being shown picture cards designed to provoke an emotional response.

Primitive brain

The researchers found that the parts of the brain linked to emotional reactions - the amygdala - showed bigger reactions (over 60% more) to the cards compared with a normally-rested volunteer.

Researcher Matthew Walker said: "The size of the increase really surprised us.

"It is almost as though, without sleep, the brain reverts back to a more primitive pattern of activity, becoming unable to put emotional experiences into context and produce controlled, appropriate responses."

He suggested that the findings might shed light on the connection between sleep and psychiatric disorders.

"Clinical evidence has shown that some form of sleep disruption is present in almost all psychiatric disorders.

"These findings may offer new mechanisms as to why."

Self-aware

In the UK, Professor Jim Horne, of the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, welcomed the research, but said it would be difficult to use it to unravel the relationship between mental health and sleep.

He said: "This is a complex area - the big difference is that people with mental illness might not be aware that they are over-reacting or behaving irrationally, whereas someone with sleep deprivation would be more aware of this overreaction.

"In addition, we know that in illnesses such as depression, actually reducing the amount of sleep can be beneficial in moderation a well-supervised environment."

Professor Derk-Jan Dijk, a sleep researcher from the University of Surrey, described the findings as "interesting".

"While there have been a lot of studies into the effects of sleep deprivation, this is the first to show what is happening in the brain in response to these emotional stimuli."

Outnumbered by opposite sex -- men like it, women feel wary: study

Washington (ANTARA News) - Women feel threatened when outnumbered by the opposite sex, such as in math, science and engineering classrooms, while men enjoy being in a roomful of women, a study published Tuesday showed.

"Walking into a situation in which you sense the possibility of being ostracized or isolated can be quite threatening," said the study, which looked at the effect of so-called situational cues, such as being outnumbered, on women's performance in math, science and engineering courses.

The gender ratio in those classes is "approximately three men to every one woman," said the study, led by Mary Murphy, a psychologist at Stanford University in California.

Published in the October issue of Psychological Science, the study monitored the reactions of a group of advanced students in traditionally male-dominated fields while they watched videos depicting a conference.

In one of the videos, men outnumbered women, while in the other the sexes were equally represented.

The women's heart rates accelerated and perspiration increased when they watched the video in which their gender was outnumbered.

They also reported "a lower sense of belonging and less desire to participate in the conference," the study showed.

And they paid more attention to their surroundings when they watched the video in which women were in minority.

"This kind of attention allocation (to surroundings) would interfere with performance and might help explain the performance gap between men and women in these fields," the study was quoted as saying by AFP.

Men, meanwhile, showed no significant physiological or attention changes when watching either film. In fact, they liked being in a setting dominated by women.

"Women probably feel they really could belong in the environment where there are more women, while men might simply be attracted by the unusual number of women in these settings," said Murphy.

Former Harvard University president Lawrence Summers drew fire two years ago for suggesting "innate" gender differences as a reason for the preponderance of men in leadership roles in math and science.

Bad Marriage, Bad Heart?

Negative Relationships Boost Heart Disease Risk by 34 Percent, Study Shows

CBS News

Oct 8, 2007(WebMD) Marriages and close friendships marked by negativity, such as conflict and adverse exchanges, boost the risk of heart disease, according to a new study.


"Those in a negative relationship were 34 percent more likely to have a coronary event in the 12 years of follow-up," says Roberto De Vogli, PhD, a researcher for the study, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine.

Even after taking into account other factors that could contribute to heart disease, such as depression, men and women with negative aspects in relationships still had a 25 percent increase in heart disease risk over the follow-up period, says De Vogli, an epidemiologist at University College London.

"We found the effect is there not only for married people," he says, but also for unmarried people who have negative relationships with close friends.

Read More ....

Better Bedside Manners

Wednesday, Sep. 05, 2007 By LAURA BLUE, TIME

Every patient wants to find a doctor who listens. But wouldn't it be easier if all doctors were just better listeners?

A new paper in the Sept. 5 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association suggests that it might not be so hard to make it happen: in the first comprehensive study of clinical-skills exams given to doctors, researchers from McGill University in Montreal show that poor scores in the communication portion of the test are highly predictive of which new doctors are likely to clash with patients in the future.

By evaluating communication skills early on, say the study's authors, physicians and academics can better train and select the next generation of medical professionals.

Read More ....

Men think sex, women try to bond when kissing : study

Washington (ANTARA News) - Researchers in the United States have determined what many of us already knew: women think of long-term relationships while kissing, and men think of sex.

"A lot of the findings might seem self-evident but what's self-evident to females is not always to males," Gordon Gallup, an evolutionary psychologist who led the study at the State University of New York (SUNY), told AFP.

Lesser-known phenomena that the researchers hit on in the study, in which 1,041 US university students took part, included the fact that men like their kisses wetter and with more tongue contact than women, and that women place more importance than men on the state of their kissing partner's teeth.

Just over half the men said they would have sex with someone without kissing, compared with 15 percent of the women who took part in the study, which was carried out using "self-reports, not direct observation or experimental manipulation."

The authors of the study explain the findings, and even the act of kissing, in scientific terms that might put off die-hard romantics.

"We see kissing as an evolved courtship ritual. At the moment of a kiss there's a complicated exchange of information -- everything from postural to tactile to chemical cues," Gallup said.

"That information may tap into hard-wired subconscious evolved mechanisms that allow people to unwittingly make reproductive choices that are in their long-term interest."

The researchers found that a bad first kiss can kill a relationship, Gallup said.

"A clear majority of male and female college students said they have been attracted to someone only to find they were no longer interested after the first kiss," Gallup said.

"What that tells us is that a kiss won't necessarily make a relationship, but it can clearly kill a relationship," he said.

The study puts it this way: "Perhaps kissing in these instances may activate evolved mechanisms that function to discourage reproduction among individuals who could be genetically incompatible."

The fact that men show a greater preference for tongue contact when kissing could have its basis not in eroticism -- although the study showed that men found kissing more erotic than women -- but science.

"It is possible that kissing styles that maximize salivary exchange provide subtle information about a female's reproductive status since saliva and breath odor change across the menstrual cycle," it said.

"In addition, male preference for salivary exchange could function to introduce substances such as hormones or proteins into women's mouths that may influence their mating psychology, and even make them more sexually receptive."

In other words, men's pronounced taste for French kissing comes down to them wanting to bed their partner.

Unfortunately for them, the study also found that women are less likely to kiss someone they think is only after sex, and that they "place a greater emphasis on kissing to induce bonding."

Women were also "more likely to initiate kissing after sexual intercourse."

"This supports other findings in showing that males tend to engage in a hasty post-copulatory departure and demonstrate an emotional shift after sexual intercourse to reduce the likelihood of bonding and investment in short-term mating partners," the authors of the study wrote.

Kissing between sexual or romantic partners occurs in over 90 percent of human cultures, according to the study, which was published in the scientific journal "Evolutionary Psychology."