Providentia

Bogus Psychology Instructor Sentenced for Bizarre Fraud

A woman posing as a professor of psychology has been jailed for conning prospective students out of almost £8,000 in tuition fees.    52-year-old Jacqueline Crane of Cornwall, U.K. pleaded guilty to charges of fraud, benefit fraud and perverting the course of justice relating to an 18-month course that she started in May, 2012.   Claiming to have a doctorate in psychology from Plymouth University, Crane tricked seven mature students to pay as much as £2,000 apiece for training that would supposedly qualify them as counselors.  

Even after her arrest, Crane's con artistry continued.   She invented fake children to claim benefits and forged sick notes from a doctor to keep from going to court.  These notes reportedly showed that she had "life-threatening conditions" to explain her absence from court. According to the testimony presented by her former students in court, Crane recruited them by showing them false pictures of her in a graduation cap and gown.   In the program itself, she often set bizarre tasks such as climbing trees, taking candlelit baths, cycling in the rain, and starting random conversations with complete strangers.   One of these students, 35-year-old Jessica Brewster, told reporters at the Daily Mail that there were hints from the beginning that something was wrong. 

"One of the girls kept pointing out that there were spelling mistakes on these slides and asking where she had got them from.  Jacqui didn't like that," Brewster said.    The truth only came to light after her students examined old exam papers and found that Crane had substituted one of them for an actual exam.  She was arrested after the students filed a complaint.

Crane has been sentenced to twelve months for the fraud against her students and another three months for perverting the course of justice and benefits fraud.  The sentences will run consecutively.   In handing down this sentence, Judge Simon Carr said that her scam was "a fantasy from beginning to end." He also said: "You prepared a significant amount of bogus course material to defraud a series of students into the belief you were running a counselling course" and that the money the students spent to improve their education has been "completely wasted."  

Though her lawyer argued in court that Crane had been a fantasist since childhood and accept responsibility for her actions, her students said that her sentence should have been longer. 

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The "Paying it Forward" Principle

We are constituted so that simple acts of kindness, such as giving to charity or expressing gratitude, have a positive effect on our long-term moods. The key to the happy life, it seems, is the good life: a life with sustained relationships, challenging work, and connections to community.  Paul Bloom

Of all the positive emotions that humans experience, it's gratitude that seems to play the strongest role in fostering how we interact with other people.  Defined as "the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness," gratitude can be reflected in many different ways.   Showing kindness towards someone in a social situation not only helps ensure that act of kindness will be reciprocated, but it can also make people more inclined to "pay it forward" and help someone else entirely.  

According to the "find, remind, and bind" theory of gratitude first proposed by psychologist Sara B. Algoe, gratitude plays a role in cementing the social bonds we have with other people.   As one example, feeling grateful to someone for a kind act causes us to have more powerful feelings about that person and want to spend more time with him or her.    This leads the one receiving the act of kindness more inclined to interact socially with the benefactor and increase the likelihood of developing a high-quality relationship.   Algoe even suggests that gratitude can alter our basic perception of other people, whether it be a total stranger or someone with whom we already have a strong relationship.  Being grateful makes us feel more inclined to pay that favour back, either directly or indirectly.  

Gratitude is also the cornerstone of most world religions.  Gratitude to God is the central theme of many Christian, Jewish, and Islamic prayers and is viewed as a valuable human trait in Buddhist, Hindu, and Native American Spiritual traditions as well.   Not only is gratitude deemed to be essential to being a good human being, but being called an ingrate is regarded as offensive in just about any society.

Still, gratitude is not the same thing as indebtedness, in which people feel that they are obliged to repay the favour, either through financial compensation or some other material benefit.  In many cases, this feeling of indebtedness often makes people uncomfortable enough to want to avoid the person they feel they owe while gratitude makes us more likely to seek out their benefactor and spend time with them.  This is a critical difference. 

But there is another kind of behaviour that is often linked to gratitude:  mimicry.   People who feel grateful for a kind act tend to mimic the behaviour of their benefactor.   This kind of mimicry can either be deliberate, because they see their benefactor as a good role model, or they can be completely unaware that they are doing it.   Research into the kind of behavoural mimicry linked to gratitude suggests that it helps build a stronger relationship between grateful people and their benefactors since it reinforces the positive feeling that can lead to friendship.

A new research study published in the journal Emotion takes a look at behavioural mimicry and  gratitude.   Written by Lile Jia and a team of fellow researchers from the National University of Singapore, the study used 101 university students (55 female) who were seen in the National University's psychological laboratory where they took part in a series of experiments.  

In the first phase of the experiment, students were given an opportunity to win chips and, apparently because of random chance, would wind up with fewer chips than another subject (actually a researcher posing as a subject).  This was followed by a gratitude condition in which the researcher passed on a large number of chips to the subject, along with a written note that said, "I saw that you didn’t get a lot in the last few rounds. That must have been a bummer.”  This made it appear that the research was trying to help the subject.   In the non-gratitude condition, the subject received the same amount of chips though it appeared to be due to random chance.

In the mimicry task that followed, subjects were briefed on a new task along with either the researcher who had given them the chips or a neutral confederate.  While carrying out the experimental task (discussing a picture that was shown to them), the confederate would perform specific behaviours such as rubbing the neck or knee.   The subjects were monitored on a video camera to see if they mimicked the other person's movements during the task.    In the debriefing that followed, subjects were questioned to ensure that they had no suspicions about what the experiment was actually about.

Results showed that participants in the gratitude condition were more likely to copy the body movements of the confederate who helped them than the non-gratitude participants.   There was no sign of mimicry aside from what occurred with the benefactor-beneficiary pair    This finding seems to support the find, remind, and bind theory of gratitude by showing that mimicry, whether conscious or unconscious, is an important step in building a quality relationship with someone to whom people feel grateful. 

Although this is an artificial experiment that attempts to replicate something that mostly occurs outside the laboratory, the study does seem to highlight that unconscious mimicry is strongly linked to gratitude, even though previous research has mostly focused on how gratitude affects conscious behaviour.  Still, more research needs to be done to see if this kind of mimicry can make people more likely to do kind acts for strangers as well.

Along with being highly prized, gratitude has also been linked to mental health and well-being.   Positive psychologists have increasingly viewed gratitude as something that needs to be encouraged to help boost our sense of optimism and happiness.   As this new research study shows, feeling grateful can have a farmore profound impact on how we behave than we can even realize. 

Of all the positive emotions that humans experience, it's gratitude that seems to play the strongest role in fostering how we interact with other people.  Defined as "the quality of being thankful; readiness to show appreciation for and to return kindness," gratitude can be reflected in many different ways.  Showing kindness towards someone in a social situation not only helps ensure that act of kindness will be returned, but it can also make people more inclined to "pay it forward" and help someone else entirely.  

According to the "find, remind, and bind" theory of gratitude (link is external) first proposed by psychologist Sara B. Algoe, gratitude plays a role in cementing the social bonds we have with other people. As one example, feeling grateful to someone for a kind act causes us to have more powerful feelings about that person and want to spend more time with him or her. This leads people receiving the act of kindness to be more inclined to interact socially with their benefactor and increases the likelihood of developing a high-quality relationship. Algoe even suggests that gratitude can alter our basic perception of other people, whether it be a total stranger or someone with whom we already have a strong relationship.  Being grateful makes us feel more inclined to pay that favour back, either directly or indirectly. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

The Heroin Miracle (Part Two of Two)

Continued from Part One

We will likely never know how much heroin Bayer actually produced or how much of a profit they made from this wonder drug of theirs.   Some available data suggests that they were producing about a ton of heroin a year by 1899 and transporting it to twenty-three countries.   Heroin was available in cough drops, tablets, in liquid form, etc.   To be fair, Bayer never advertised heroin to the public but, then again, they didn’t need to.   The advertisements aimed at physicians ensured that patients eventually got the word about this marvelous new product.

During the sixteen years that followed its release, heroin was available just about everywhere.  Not only could it be bought over the counter at any corner pharmacy, it could be purchased by mail order as well.   The Bayer brand name was something any drug purchaser could rely on and the concept of “drug addiction”, if it was considered at all, was largely confined to “hard drugs” such as opium. 

But the honeymoon didn’t last long as far as heroin was concerned.  While one doctor, A. Morel-Lavallee suggested in 1902 that heroin could be used to “demorphinize” morphine addicts, other doctors began reporting cases of heroin withdrawal in the medical literature.  Despite efforts to present heroin as a “non-addictive” pain reliever, it quickly proved to be nothing of the kind.   If anything, heroin addiction appeared even worse than with morphine. 

Perhaps more than in any other country, the heroin epidemic hit the United States especially hard.  Though other countries such as Canada, Great Britain, and Germany had federal laws to control dangerous pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Constitution placed medical regulation almost exclusively under state control.   While many states had laws in place requiring heroin, cocaine, or morphine to be only available by prescription, bypassing the laws proved to be as simple as crossing state lines to get access to these same drugs with little hassle. 

By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, heroin’s addictive potential became all too apparent.   In New York City, the first case of heroin addiction was admitted to Bellevue Hospital in 1910 and by 1915, there were more than four hundred.   A 1912 news story I found reflected this growing mistrust.   “Heroin, which is derived from morphine, is so frequently employed in the treatment of various diseases that the question of formation of habit from its use is a serious one.”  The article goes on to warn that even physicians appear likely to underestimate the addiction risks of heroin and often prescribed it freely without monitoring whether patients were becoming addicted.    

According to the Psychiatric Bulletin of the New York State Hospitals, most of these new addicts being seen in Bellevue were gang members who treated it as a recreational drug.   The Tenderloin district of New York became a major hub of the underground heroin trade with “snuffing” (taking in heroin nasally by inhaling) becoming increasingly popular among drug addicts.   Though medical doctors and anti-drug activists were warning that a new epidemic of heroin abuse was on the rise, police and prosecutors were still limited by what they could do about it.

By 1914, the crackdown on heroin and cocaine really began with the passing of the Harrison  Narcotic Tax Act.   Mainly focusing on opium and cocaine, the Act basically imposed taxes on the sale and import of opium and other narcotics.   Despite being called a tax act, it was anything but since the lawmakers who drafted the legislation were basically hoping to end rampant drug abuse in the United States.  With the end of World War I, international agreements were made part of the Treaty of Versailles and forced all participating nations to pass their own drug laws.

Despite the Act, doctors were still free to prescribe heroin and morphine to their patients.   Unfortunately, the Act also banned doctors from prescribing narcotics for people who admitted being addicted.    By 1919, all addicts were essentially transformed into criminals since they could no longer get their drugs legally.   To deal with this new demand, a black market for drugs began to flourish, especially in Eastern cities such as New York drugs that were either stolen from legitimate companies or smuggled in from other countries were available.   While the government tried cracking down on drug smuggling, dealing with legally available narcotic drugs was often a nightmare for everyone involved. 

Doctor Alexander Lambert, professor of medicine at Cornell University and noted substance abuse expert warned in 1924 that heroin was a “vice of the underworld” and that most of the heroin addicts he saw were young men between the ages of seventeen and twenty-five.   Not only was heroin easy to get but drug dealers made enormous profits by “cutting” their products with other chemicals that resembled heroin enough to fool customers into thinking that they were buying pure heroin (criminals weren’t obliged to follow the Pure Food and Drug Act).   

It was during the early 1920s that many drug users supported their habit by collecting scrap metal from junkyards to sell for drug money (which is what earned them the name of “junkies”).   There was also a sharp rise in violent crime due to the need for money to buy drugs though not enough to justify the hysteria about narcotics that was brewing at the time.

The fact that this was the same era that saw the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment and the rise of Prohibition is probably no coincidence.   Alcohol had long been a target by organizations such as the Women’s Christian Temperance Union for its perceived role in corrupting impressionable young people and undermining public morality.  As well, the rising animosity towards racial minorities that led to stricter immigration laws keeping out “undesirables” such as Chinese and East European refugees was often linked to fears of the “Yellow Peril” and the opium that transformed them into drug-crazed fiends.   That many of those same gang members who used heroin often belonged to these despised minorities was hardly overlooked.  

Along with newspaper stories describing alcoholics who ruined their lives and the lives of people around them, there were also stories about the dread Dope Fiends who stalked “normal” people and threatened society itself.    The true king of yellow journalism was, of course, William Randolph Hearst, “Citizen Kane” himself.    Long an advocate of using fear to sell papers, Hearst latched onto any new trend he could find.  Whether it was denouncing the “Yellow Peril” (fear of orientals), the “Red Peril” (fear of communists), or “voodoo satanic music” (jazz), Hearst’s editorials were there to feed the terror of the American people.

During the 1920s and 1930s, Hearst’s editors relentlessly promoted the idea that Drugs = Violent Crime.  Along with familiar narcotics such as opium and cocaine, heroin and cannabis were particularly singled out.   Heroin, since it was regarded as just another form of opium, and cannabis due to its Hispanic associations.  Even the name “marijuana” (Mexican slang for the plant) was promoted by Hearst as a way of slandering Mexicans.  Usually just called cannabis or hemp, it says a lot about the power of Hearst’s editorials that just about everyone began calling it marijuana as a result of his influence. 

With anti-drug rhetoric such as this dominating the debate over drugs such as heroin and morphine, it’s hardly surprising that the political climate was shifting towards more draconian laws.  With the end of Prohibition in 1933, newspapers and conservative lawmakers needed a new cause and the anti-drug era truly began.

Remember Bayer?  Though heroin would never be as profitable as they originally hoped,  they continued to produce it until 1913.   Heinrich Dreser terminated his association with Bayer a year later and moved to Dusseldorf to found his own pharmacological academy.    Despite rumours that he was a heroin addict as well, he seemed to live his final years in comfort, courtesy of the fortune he had made from both heroin and aspirin.   He died in 1924, the same year that the U.S. banned heroin completely.   

Ironically, Dreser died of a stroke, something that might have been avoided if he had known to take an aspirin a day as patients at risk are advised to do nowadays.   While aspirin continues to be sold worldwide with new applications being discovered each decade,  Great Britain remains the only country in the world to allow heroin for treating chronic pain (95 percent of all medically prescribed heroin is sold there).   But heroin’s popularity as a street drug remains greater than ever.   With millions of heroin users worldwide and  billions being spent on anti-drug policies, the miracle drug that Dreser and Bayer gave the world is still changing lives. 

Just not in the way they had originally hoped.

Surviving the Essex Disaster (Part 3 of 3)

Continued from Part 2

By February 6, Captain Pollard and the three seamen with him were in a desperate situation. The last of their food was gone and starvation seemed certain. The youngest crewmember, Charles Ramsdell, then suggested that they draw lots to see who would be killed so that the others could eat.  While not unheard of in other cases of survival at sea, the idea was especially repugnant to the Nantucket crewmen, most of whom were Quakers. George Pollard initially rejected Ramsdell`s suggestion, he eventually reconsidered when one of the other survivors, Owen Coffin (who also happened to be his cousin), urged him to change his mind. They cut up a piece of paper and placed the scraps in a hat to choose who would die.

As it happened, Owen Coffin was the one picked although Pollard offered to take his place. They then drew lots to see who would shoot Chase. It was Charles Ramsdell, his best friend. While Ramsdell refused to follow through, Coffin insisted that the lot had been fair and that he was ready to die. The execution went through as scheduled. As for Owen Chase and the survivors in the first boat, the same harsh decision to resort to cannibalism fell to them when one of their survivors, Isaac Cole, died on February 8. After a day of deliberating, they butchered the body and ate it. Chase would later write that there was “no language to describe the anguish of our souls in this dreadful dilemma”.   Not only had they resorted to eating a crewmember to survive but it seemed certain that any one of them would be next. 

As for the survivors on Owen Chase’s ship, they  were on the verge of giving up completely although they continued on their course.   Their unexpected rescue by the English whaleship Indian, eighty-nine days after their ordeal began, must have seemed like a dream. As they pulled their small boat  alongside the ship, all that Chase could say when the Indian’s captain hailed them was  “Essex..whaleship…Nantucket”.   When Captain William Crozier saw the state of the three survivors, he burst into tears.  Too weakened to climb aboard on their own, the Indian’s crew hauled them up and carried them to the captain’s cabin. As he regained his strength, Owen Chase was astonished to discover that they had successfully traveled 2,500 miles over open sea and had managed to remain on course the entire way. Strangely enough, the tiny whaleboat that had carried them so far and which was being towed behind the Indian, was lost in a storm just a few days after the rescue.

The boat carrying George Pollard and Charles Ramsdell (the only two left) managed to stay on course  as well even though the last of their food was gone. The only thing preventing starvation were the remaining bones of their crewmates which they cracked open for the marrow. Too weak to maintain a proper watch, they were hardly aware of the Nantucket whaleship Dauphin which picked them up on February 23.   For the Dauphin’s crew, the sight of a whaleboat with two nearly-dead men surrounded by numerous human bones must have seemed nightmarish. In the numerous stories later spread about the Essex survivors, the most ghoulish detail was that they had been found “sucking the bones of their dead mess-mates, which they were loath to part with”.

Like the other survivors, Pollard and Ramsdell were lifted on board and carefully nursed back to health. Making a rapid recovery, George Pollard described his experiences in complete detail (including the murder of Owen Coffin). One captain hearing the story, Aaron Paddack, was moved enough to write down Pollard’s story which he called “the most distressing narrative that ever came to my knowledge”.    While the five Essex survivors were safe, the legacy of what they had been forced to do to survive would haunt them for the rest of their lives. Even after they arrived in the Chilean port of Valparaiso, Chase and his fellow survivors made no attempt to keep their cannibalism a secret. After a few days of recovery in Valparaiso, the three men were transferred to the U.S. frigate, Constellation and placed under the care of the ship’s doctor who oversaw their recovery.

The captain and crew of the Constellation were so horrified by their skeletal appearance that they took up a collection for them. Along with the money raised by the Constellation as well as funds donated by American and British citizens living in Valparaiso, more than five hundred dollars were collected for the Essex survivors. But their ordeal wasn’t over yet.  Three months of starvation had damaged their bodies profoundly and their recovery would be slow. Not long after they arrived in Valparaiso, Chase and the others were astounded to learn from another whaling ship that Pollard and Ramsdell had survived as well. Finally, on March 17, the whaleship Two Brothers arrived in Valparaiso and the five survivors were reunited for the first time since their boats had become separated.

Although Pollard suffered an immediate relapse after arriving, he and the others kept their promised to the survivors who had remained behind on Henderson Island. They were later found, alive but dehydrated by an Australian trading vessel at the request of the Constellation’s commander.   As for the final whaleboat that had become separated from the others, the survivors on board were never seen again although a whaleboat containing four skeletons would be found on a distant island years later. The remains were never positively identified.

News of the Essex disaster reached Nantucket before the survivors did. Although Pollard and Ramsdell were initially listed as the only survivors, the fact that there were several other survivors was slim consolation to the families of the ones who had been lost. The grim details of their ordeal, including the cannibalism, made for an awkward homecoming for the survivors.     George Pollard had the most difficult time of all. When he finally reached Nantucket, two months after the others, he had to explain the loss of the Essex to the ship’s owners (as captain, he had primary responsibility for his vessel). He also had to face his own aunt, the mother of Owen Coffin. Not surprisingly, she never spoke to him again after he brought her son’s last message to her.

The rest of the closely tied Nantucket community rallied around Pollard and the other Essex survivors who were eventually allowed to get on with their lives. George Pollard impressed his fellow seamen enough with his courage to be offered the captaincy of a new ship, the Two Brothers and set sail just three months after returning to Nantucket.    In 1823, Pollard’s new ship struck a coral reef and sank although there was no loss of life this time. Due to his reputation for bad luck , no shipowner would ever trust him with another command. He eventually lived out his days as a night watchman in Nantucket. The other survivors didn’t make out any better and most of them had to sign on to new ships just to support themselves (the loss of the Essex had left them almost penniless).

Owen Chase, desperate to support his family, put out a book about the Essex sinking which came out within a few months of his return. The mostly ghostwritten book presented Chase in as positive a light as possible and George Pollard felt particularly insulted over how he had been portrayed. The rest of the Nantucket community hated the book as well and Chase was obliged to sign on to a new ship well away from Nantucket.    He eventually e stablished himself as a successful sea captain with a reputation for fearsomely hunting the whale that had sunk the Essex. Although all of the survivors were able to return to their regular lives eventually, the trauma of what they had faced haunted them for the rest of their lives. The story of the Essex sinking and the plight of its survivors became a maritime legend for the rest of the 19th century.

Although Nantucket’s whaling industry wouldn’t survive more than a few decades after the Essex sinking, Owen Chase’s book and the accounts of the other Essex survivors would have a major impact on literature. Edgar Allen Poe based his 1837 short story, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym on the Essex sinking.   The most literary work based on the Essex disaster was by Herman Melville who served on the whaleship Acushnet with Owen Chase’s son. Inspired by the story of Chase’s survival and his quest to find the rogue whale responsible for destroying his ship, Melville wrote his own 1851 classic, Moby Dick  (he based his Captain Ahab character on Chase).

While Melville’s book was a financial and critical failure during his lifetime, Moby Dick has ensured a form of immortality for the Essex seamen and helped keep their story alive.   More recently, Nathaniel Philbrick won the 2000 National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.   His gripping book brought the Essex disaster to life for a new generation of readers and is currently in development for a movie adaptation starring Chris Hemsworth.

Whether Hollywood can do justice to the full story of the Essex disaster remains to be seen...

Aging, PTSD, and Disasters

Natural disasters are associated with catastrophic losses. Disaster survivors return to devastated communities and rebuild homes or relocate permanently, although the long-term psychological consequences are not well understood. In an article published in Aging and Mental Health, the authors examined predictors of psychological outcomes in 219 residents of disaster-affected communities in south Louisiana. Current coastal residents with severe property damage from the 2005 Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and exposure to the 2010 British Petroleum Deepwater Horizon oil spill were compared and contrasted with former coastal residents and an indirectly affected control group. Participants completed measures of storm exposure and stressors, religiosity, perceived social support, and mental health. Results showed that non-organizational religiosity was a significant predictor of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions. Follow-up analyses revealed that more frequent participation in non-organizational religious behaviors was associated with a heightened risk of PTSD. Low income and being a coastal fisher were significant predictors of depression symptoms in bivariate and multivariate models. Perceived social support had a protective effect for all mental health outcomes, which also held for symptoms of depression and GAD in multivariate models. The authors conclude that people who experienced recent and severe trauma related to natural and technological disasters are at risk for adverse psychological outcomes in the years after these events. Individuals with low income, low social support, and high levels of non-organizational religiosity are also at greater risk. Implications of these data for current views on the post-disaster psychological reactions and the development of age-sensitive interventions to promote long-term recovery are discussed.

For the abstract

"Affectionless Psychopath" Back in Jail after Violating Probation

A BC woman convicted in 2012 for the bizarre killing of a family dog and cat has been rearrested for breaching the conditions of her probation.  

25-year-old Kayla Bourque has been charged with three counts of violating probation after police discovered that she was "possessing a device capable of accessing the Internet, accessing the Internet and accessing social networking sites."   Due to fear relating to public safety, Bourque's stringent probation conditions banned her from any contact with children or internet use. 

A former psychology and criminology student at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, Bourque was originally arrested after a teaching assistant informed campus security about her violent fantasies.   These included her reportedly tellling a fellow student that she wished to learn to "get away with murder."   A search of her room turned up a mask, a knife, a syringe, and a video of her torturing and killing the dog and cat belonging to her family in Prince George, British Columbia. 

Police later found that Bourque had posted profiles on several goth sites listing her fascination with necrophilia and erotophonophilia (erotic preference for killing).     Despite public safety concerns, she only received nine months in prison and three years of probation.    Following her release in early 2013, police issued a rare public alert due to concerns over a potential escalation of her violent history.   The public notice issued by the B.C. Ministry of Justice stated that Bourque "has an escalating criminal history. She has offended violently against both people and animals and is considered high risk to reoffend."  

Described as an "affectionless psychopath" by one psychiatrist, Bourque has been diagnosed as  a sexual sadist with antisocial personality disorder who has expressed no remorse for her actions.  Having spent her first eight months in a Romanian orphanage, she has admitted to having violent fantasies from an early age.  She also confessed to injuring other children at school and summer camp. 

While she was in her teens, she wrote a violent story as a class assignment and told counselors that she was thinking of killing someone at school.  After being admitted to a psychiatric ward, she later encouraged two others to help her  strangle a 12-year-old patient.    Charged with attempted murder, she received two years of probation though one psychiatrist argued that she would require supervision for the rest of her life.

Her 2012 conviction led to a nine-month jail sentence (with two months taken off for time served) and three years of probation.  This included over forty conditions including a lifetime ban against owning animals.   Though she appealed many of these conditions, the original probation order still remains.

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Can Healthy Living Reduce Cancer Risk? (Part Two of Two)

Continued from Part One

Here are some more things that have been linked to cancer risk:

Physical inactivity

About 15 percent of Americans are sedentary (inactive) while an additional 38 to 40 percent fall below recommended guidelines for healthy physical activity.  Prolonged sitting has been linked to chronic medical problems, not to mention a shorter lifespan.  Of course, physical activity also decreases as we grow older and can also become linked with other risk factors such as smoking, poor nutrition, and substance abuse.  All of which can lead to an increased risk for different types of cancer.

For people who do exercise however, the health benefits can be enormous.  Three to four hours a week of moderate to vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise can reduce the risk of breast cancer by 20 to 40 percent and colon cancer by 40 percent.   People who are active are also 20 percent less likely to develop lung cancer and 30 percent less likely to develop endometrial cancer. 

Still, encouraging people to stay active isn't easy.  Though school-based programs to encourage young people to stay fit have been reasonably effective, programs to get older adults to become active are not as successful.  For people recovering from a heart attack  there are cardiac rehabilitation programs that can teach good exercise habits, including aerobic exercise, but many adults tend not to bother with such programs without a serious health scare to motivate them.  

Still, one promising approach that seems to work is the "buddy system."   Having family members or friends agreeing to exercise together helps prevent backsliding and can make exercise more enjoyable as well. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

 

 

 

The Heroin Miracle (Part One of Two)

It seemed like such a good idea.

By the late 19^th century, the pharmaceutical industry as we know it today was being born.   Instead of crude preparations taken directly from plants, chemists were learning to use applied chemical analysis to purify and refine the chemical ingredients found in nature.  This meant that these plant-derived drugs could be modified to form new molecules that might produce drugs that were faster and more effective than anything that had been used before.

This new era had actually began in 1805 when German pharmacist, Friedrich Serturner first synthesized morphine, the main active ingredient of opium.  By developing better ways of mass-producing morphine, a German pharmacy owned by the Merck family became one of the first pharmaceutical giants which, in turn, inspired other companies to do the same.

One of these new pharmaceutical companies was founded in 1863 by German industrialist Friedrich Bayer.   Though Bayer had made his fortune by developing and manufacturing new cloth dyes made from coal-tar, the changing economy meant that Bayer’s company needed to diversify its product line.  Investing in pharmaceutical research made good business sense and Bayer’s chemists soon went to work finding new drugs for various medical ailments.   In many ways, Bayer and its dynamic new CEO Carl Duisberg would reinvent the pharmaceutical industry and lead to the creation of what we now call Big Pharma.

Among the many new products discovered by the hundreds of chemists working in Bayer’s newly expanded laboratories included various drugs for anxiety, sleep, anti-arthritis medication, drugs for treating tuberculosis, and even a sugar substitute (Sycose).   But Duisberg and his chemists knew that the big profits lay in new pain remedies.  Everyone experienced pain, whether in childbirth, during surgery, after injuries, or simply through the diseases of old age.  Relieving pain had always been one of the big drivers for medical innovation.

While Merck and other companies owned the patents for morphine and the other big opium derivative, codeine, growing concerns about addiction associated with laudanum, codeine, and morphine inspired Bayer to launch the search for a non-addictive pain reliever.   A pain remedy that could be freely sold or prescribed by doctors without worrying about drug dependency became the Holy Grail of pharmaceutical research and Bayer was hardly the only company searching for it.   Eager for new products to sell, Bayer hired talented chemist, Heinrich Dreser (1860-1924) to head up their pharmaceutical laboratory.    

After years of research and false starts, 1897 proved to be a banner year for the Bayer company.  In that year, Heinrich Dreser and his chemists produced two pain relievers that would transform the world (although in different ways).  Ironically, both products had actually been invented years earlier by other chemists though they had been largely ignored until Dreser’s laboratory rediscovered them.  The first of these pain relievers was derived from the salicylic acid found in meadow sweet and willow bark and had actually been discovered by a French chemist years before.  When one of Bayer’s chemists, Felix Hoffman, learned of this earlier discovery, he then developed a purer refinement method that allowed Bayer to convert it into what would eventually become their most profitable product, aspirin.  As for the second product, diacetylmorphine, it had been discovered in the 1870s by English chemist, C.R.A. Wright though it had remained in obscurity for years until Bayer repackaged it with a new name, heroin.

 This new, improved pain reliever, which he promptly tested on himself and his fellow workers, was so effective that he regarded it as being a “heroic” drug (hence the name, heroin).  He even arranged for heroin to be prescribed to workers at Bayer’s main plant for just about any complaint you could name.  Anyone with a persistent cough, whether it was  janitor, secretary, engineer, or industrial chemist, became part of the first wave of heroin users.

And it worked, at least for a while.  In first presenting his discovery to the Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in 1898, Dreser declared it to be a cough, chest, and lung remedy for treating painful respiratory diseases.   In a pre-antibiotic era, pneumonia and tuberculosis were deadly diseases and the only real treatment doctors could provide involved prescribing narcotics to help patients sleep.

Considering that heroin is more fast-acting and potent than even morphine (because it passes through the blood-brain barrier so readily), heroin was widely hailed as a valuable tool for medical doctors.  Dreser also proudly announced that the lethal dose for heroin was far higher than for morphine or codeine which made overdoses far more unlikely  You can likely guess how much clinical testing the new drug received from the fact that Bayer released it for commercial use in that same year. 

To spread the word about their new product, Bayer  advertised their new drug in English, Italian, French, German, Russian, and as many other languages as they could arrange.   In an ingenious marketing ploy, Bayer released what would be informally known as the “Bayer Bible” which was printed by Bayer and sent to every medical doctor in Germany.  The book contained descriptions of all medications then in use (with Bayer’s own products being prominently displayed.    Released along with the introduction of aspirin and heroin, the book also included circulars for doctors to request free samples.   It would be so effective that many other pharmaceutical companies later did the same.

Along with the marking came new medical research (mostly conducted directly or sponsored by Bayer) showing that heroin could be used instead of codeine and morphine with none of the unpleasant reactions associated with those other drugs.  In the United States alone, there were more than a dozen studies published between 1900 and 1901 reporting favourably on this new wonder drug.  

Though one doctor noted ominously that heroin dosages needed to be increased over time to make sure that it remained effective, the prospect of a non-addictive alternative to morphine (emphasis mine), was viewed with considerable enthusiasm by the drug-buying public.  Bayer even offered a children’s version of heroin to be used with a doctor’s prescription.  Pharmacies would provide heroin over the counter to anyone asking for it while doctors prescribed it freely to their patients, usually without any kind of follow-up to see if addiction problems developed.

Newspaper stories describing this new wonder cure were certainly enthusiastic enough.   One story I found in a Phoenix, Arizona paper dated February 14, 1900 appeared to have been largely based on a press release provided by Bayer.   It described heroin as “a substance that seems to possess all the soothing principles of morphine while, at the same time, as a medicine, it is unaccompanied by the evil consequences that makes that drug a curse.”  The article goes on to describe the various beneficial qualities of heroin including its ability to “deaden sensibility without causing mental exaltation.   In this latter respect it differs entirely from morphine which acts first as a stimulant and then may put the patient to sleep.   Heroin has no after effects.  It leaves no trace behind.”   Not only did patients tested with heroin overcome their violent coughing fits, but they were put to sleep with only small doses of heroin and, the article concludes, “the sleep seemed to do them good.”    

With this kind of publicity, it hardly seems surprising that doctors and their patients would be eager to give heroin a try.  By 1906, heroin was included in the American Medical Association's Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry annual “New and Non-official Remedies” list which described it as safe to use in  small doses.  In that same year, the “Materia Medica” released by Squibb declared heroin to be a “as a "remedy of much value. It is also used as a mild anodyne and as a substitute for morphine combating the morphine habit." 

In the meantime, Bayer was busy advertising their two new wonder products, aspirin and heroin.  In much the same way that you can buy aspirin in any pharmacy or corner store today, that was how easy it was to buy heroin to treat any ache or pain imaginable.  After all, Bayer had already established itself as a trustworthy company producing safe and effective medicine, how could anything sold under the Bayer label be unhealthy? 

Continue to Part Two

Surviving The Essex Disaster (Part 2 of 3)

Continued from Part 1

While traveling several thousand miles in three twenty-five foot boats was frightening, it wasn't completely unprecedented.  After the Bounty mutiny thirty years previously, then-Lieutenant Bligh and his fellow crew members traveled more than four thousand miles in a similar sized longboat and the Essex survivors were confident in their ability as seamen.  The remaining supplies were split three ways with seven in two of the boats and six in the boat commanded by Owen Chase (which was in poorest shape).   Captain Pollard and Matthew Joy commanded the other two boats.  Since they did not have enough navigational equipment to go around, the three boats stayed together as much as possible.  Along with the natural fear over their situation, the men were plagued by posttraumatic flashbacks over the loss of the Essex as well as tobacco withdrawal (Nantucket sailors were rarely without a plug of tobacco at their disposal).  Although they were able to carry on three-way conversations among the boats to relieve the boredom, this would change with time.   Navigation was also difficult since they had no accurate chronometer to track longitude (they were still too rare in 1819 to be included on Nantucket sea voyages).    All that remained was using "dead reckoning" using the ship's compass and estimating the ship's speed by a variety of clumsy methods.  While that worked well enough for Bligh, Captain Pollard was not as competent. 

Despite several near-calamities, including the need for frantic repairs on Chase's boat (which was the leakiest of the three), the ships remained together for seven days.  Then, following a bizarre incident, Pollard's ship was attacked by a killer whale.  While the orca was successfully driven off, Pollard's ship began taking on water although they managed to repair it.   As the weeks went on, their situation became increasingly desperate.   Although they were still able to eat their bread, which had been damaged by seawater, the salt remaining in the bread aggravated their thirst.   They were forced to drink the blood of the tortoises they had on board to supplement their scant water supply.  Collecting rainwater using their sails was no solution since the sails were so saturated with sea salt that it only made their thirst worse.   Miraculously the three boats managed to stay close together despite the horrendous bad weather they encountered.   

By December 9, Pollard was able to estimate that they had traveled more than 1100 miles but that they were no closer to South America than before.  Amazingly, Pollard, Chase and Joy decided to stick with the original plan rather than trying for the nearer islands despite their desperate plight.   As supplies ran short, they cut back to the bare minimum and severe starvation and dehydration began setting in.   Discovering that the barnacles attached to the bottom of their boats were edible bought them some time, but not much.  Ironically, the trained seamen were unable to catch enough fish to feed themselves since that part of the Pacific was unusually free of any sea life except for sharks and dolphins that always stayed out of reach. 

Although  various symptoms associated with severe dehydration and malnutrition are now recognized by modern medicine, the Essex survivors had no guide to what was happening to them.  Their hair began falling out in clumps, their eyes sank into their skulls, they became delusional, and almost unrecognizable.   

They were preparing themselves to die when they stumbled across an island on December 19.   The island, which is now known as Henderson Island, was only a relatively short distance from Pitcairn Island where they might have been saved.  Unfortunately, Pollard and Chase failed to recognize this.  All that mattered was that the island didn't have a good water source which made their situation more desperate than ever.   There was some vegetation which helped them fight malnutrition and a trickle of water which helped them rehydrate slightly but the Essex survivors eventually decided to take their chances on the open sea again.   Three survivors balked at the plan and decided to stay on the island in the hope of eventual rescue.  Pollard and the others didn’t object since it meant that their own food supplies could be stretched further and promised to arrange for their rescue if they reached land first. 

After stocking up as much food as they could, the men in the three boats set a course for Easter Island which they hoped would be possible with the water supplies left to them.  They still had their navigational guides but were forced to rely on dead reckoning for navigation.  Unfortunately, bad weather sent them off course for Easter Island and they gave up all hope of getting there.  

On January 10, Matthew Joy died and the other survivors gave him a solemn sea burial.  He would be the first to die since the scarce supplies they had picked up on the island had long since gone.  A few days later, the boats were struck by a massive storm which finally separated the three boats.    By then, the remaining survivors had been at sea for nearly two months after the sinking of the Essex.  With more than a thousand miles left to their planned destination and food supplies being desperately low, Chase would later write that the crew barely had strength "to move about in our boats and slowly perform the necessary labors remaining". 

The severe malnutrition caused them to experience blackouts and impaired cognition.  Tensions grew worse and Chase nearly killed one crewman who had been caught stealing bread.  By January 20, the crewmen in Chase’s boat had resigned themselves to death and one of them, Richard Peterson, refused his daily allowance of bread stating that “It may be of service to someone but can be of none to me”.  It would be the last thing he ever said and he died the following day.  He was given a sea burial just like Matthew Joy. 

As for the other two boats, they were little better off although they managed to stay together.  When one of the remaining crewmen, Lawson Thomas, died on January 20,  Captain Pollard and his fellow survivors were left with a harsh choice: either they starved or they would agree to eat the body.  Stories of shipwreck survivors eating their dead crewmates were common among sailors so the idea wasn’t completely repugnant to them.  Still, it must have seemed ironic that they were forced to become cannibals themselves after deliberating avoiding islands where natives were rumoured to eat people. 

After carefully butchering Thomas’ body (their experience as whalers likely came in handy at that point), they lit a fire on the flat stone at the bottom of the boat and roasted the body parts before eating them.  Since all of the survivors were badly emaciated by then, Thomas’ body likely didn’t produce enough meat to feed the survivors for long.  When another crewman died two days later, he was eaten too.    

For whatever reason, it was the African-American crewmen who were the first to die and be eaten.  While there was no evidence that they were specifically singled out,   only one African-American crewman was left after a few weeks passed.   On January 29,  Captain Pollard and his fellow survivors on his boat realized that the other boat had vanished.  From that point on, they were on their own. 

To be continued.

Bereavement, Creativity, and the Phaeton Effect

A study published in the Journal of Psychohistory explored predictions made from Lucille Iremonger's Phaeton theory (1970), which argues that individuals who show exceptional personal achievement in certain fields frequently have experienced childhoods that were marked by parental loss through death and desertion. Three groups were examined: eminent American writers, presidents of the USA, and the 100 Americans who were judged by Life magazine to have been the most influential in 20th century society. Bereavement was common in the childhoods of these outstanding individuals, but was also high, or even higher, for those individuals who achieved somewhat less eminence (less successful writers, and presidential also-rans). More than half the total set of the presidents and also-rans were orphans. Eminent Americans showed substantial although lower levels of parental loss, and nearly three-quarters had experienced difficult childhoods that were marked by some form of loss. Eminent Americans, like the presidents, tended to be first-borns; they also showed elevated levels of divorce, suicide, and name changing. The results provide support for the Phaeton theory, but suggest that the child's struggle to overcome other losses than bereavement may also promote eminence, as may the presence of significant mentors.

For the abstract