Apr/May 2018 NSW Branch Newsletter

Let me indulge myself in this last column I write to you as Chair. Actually, some might say I’ve already indulged during these past four years of columns! Having said that, most of the feedback has been complimentary or at least indicating appreciation of being informed by my personal perspective, interest in the content and awareness that advocacy requires strategic tactics.

If you attended the NSW Branch General Meeting in April, you would have heard the NSW committee chairs present their reports and seen reflected in my Branch Committee report a glimmer of how diligently and intensely the B...

Mood Disorders

As Extremes of Normal Emotions

Charles Darwin wrote in 1876:

If all the individuals of any species were habitually to suffer to an extreme degree, they would neglect to propagate their kind; but we have no reason to believe that this has ever, or at least often occurred. Some other considerations, moreover, lead to the belief that all sentient beings have been formed so as to enjoy, as a general rule, happiness. "Everyone who believes, as I do, that all the corporeal and mental organs (excepting those which are neither advantageous nor disadvantageous to the possessor) of all beings have been...

Psychotic Disorders

Schizophrenia

Schizotypal personality disorder:

3.1B-C (By-prod. Sociab. Dis.)

Schizophrenia:

2.1B-D (Environ. Dysreg. Dis.)

A Disorder of Spacing? Stevens & Price (2000) describe schizophrenia as a "spacing" disorder. They argue that the genetic tendency towards schizophrenia evolved in the context of rapid group splitting, group elimination, externally medicated sexual selection, facilitated and contributed to the evolution of language. They suggest that the schizotypal genotype is an adaptation whose function is to facilitate group splitting, achieved by the formation of a subgroup (or ...

Anxiety Disorders

A (Attach. Arch. Disr.)

Bowlby considered care-eliciting, care-giving, competitive power-seeking and cooperating as derivatives and developmental expressions of the affiliation & bonding archetype. Neurotic illness may occur due to deficient parental care frustrating archetypal anticipations, as maturation proceeds through a sequence of innate expectations which the environment either fulfils or fails to meet.

1.1A (Mod. Malf. Dis. / Attach. Arch. Disr.)

Schore (2002) argues that the predisposition for arousal dysregulation under stress in those with anxiety disorders, results from dysregulat...

Stone Age brains in 21st century skulls - Transcript

The original interview was conducted at ABC radio in Melbourne in November 2007, after Natasha Mitchell approached G Galambos and D Wilson after their lectures at a Symposium (they were Co-Chairing) entitled "Evolutionary Psychiatry: Finding the Future in the Past", at the World Psychiatric Association International Congress 2007, Melbourne (Delivered 29/11/2007)

Natasha Mitchell: Front up to your shrink, and you bring a menagerie of hunter gatherers, anteaters and reptiles from your ancestral past with you. Or so Professor Daniel Wilson and Dr Gary Galambos believe. Both clinical psychiatrist...