AKA, Why I Don’t Watch Or Read The “News” Pt. 1679

“What a coincidence!”

Via Disinfo

— By Akira The Don on Thursday, March 21st, 2013

Intergalactic planetary high five to Timothy O’Briant for sending this amazing artwork in, along with this note:

Hey, first met you at Morrison con this past year and since then I’ve really enjoyed listening to your music.  At the con you where wearing a tie dyed unicorn t-shirt so I thought it would be awesome to draw a unicorn wearing an Akira the Don shirt.  Hope you like it.  Later

I DO LIKE IT DUDE IF IT WAS MADE OF OIL I WOULD PUT IT IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM. I mean, fuck, that unicorn is wearing a flipping Life Equation shirt. Amazing.

Check out more FANARTS over here and send me your artworks by the magic og EMAIL and it will be added to the WALL OF FAME.

Meanwhile I just went to see Warren Ellis do some talking at Foyles courtesy of Simon Spurrier (who writes this ace thing) and hooked up with LE MUIR and professional comics legend talk curator (and occasional Daily Mail scribe) Sam Leith and former Vertigo bod Tim Pilcher AND IT WAS VERY FUN. Charlotte was saying I don’t go out enough so I did, just like that. BOOM! I HAVE THE POWER TO GO OUT! WANNA GO OUT? HOLLA AT ME! I AM A PARTY PERSON! OH YEAH!

I missed a lot of Dr Ellis’ talk cos i found out about it in a very last minute fashion, but I did catch him musing on how he only really sees the mistakes in his old stuff and can often not bear to read stuff he did as recently as yesterday for that reason, which is pretty much how I tend to feel about my own shit, so that was encouraging.

Incidentally I forgot to ask Warren Ellis how the fuck he maintains such a high level of grade A digital output whilst still writing comics and books and movies and shit, but I forgot, so I guess I’ll have to KEEP ON TRYING TO FIGURE IT OUT FOR MYSELF.

Ale Jaca Est.

Oh yeah, my olympic construction site neck injury came back, heres my PAIN FACE:

— Wednesday, February 27th, 2013

Amazingly, on the day Big Narstie came round to visit this week Hercules shat his #PAIN onesie. HISTORICAL SHIT!

Included special secret Akira The Don x Big Narstie music preview…

WOOOOOOOOOOAH!

I HOPE YOU ARE HAVING A WONDERFUL DAY! HOW’S YOUR NAN?

PAX!

@!

— Friday, February 22nd, 2013

From Smithsonian:

One of the chief arguments for the legalization of medicinal marijuana is its usefulness as a pain reliever. For many cancer and AIDS patients across the 19 states where medicinal use of the drug has been legalized, it has proven to be a valuable tool in managing chronic pain—in some cases working for patients for which conventional painkillers are ineffective.

To determine exactly how cannabis relieves pain, a group of Oxford researchers used healthy volunteers, an MRI machine and doses of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana. Their findings, published today in the journal Pain, suggest something counterintuitive: that the drug doesn’t so much reduce pain as make the same level of pain more bearable.

“Cannabis does not seem to act like a conventional pain medicine,” Michael Lee, an Oxford neuroscientist and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “Brain imaging shows little reduction in the brain regions that code for the sensation of pain, which is what we tend to see with drugs like opiates. Instead, cannabis appears to mainly affect the emotional reaction to pain in a highly variable way.”

As part of the study, Lee and colleagues recruited 12 healthy volunteers who said they’d never used marijuana before and gave each one either a THC tablet or a placebo. Then, to trigger a consistent level of pain, they rubbed a cream on the volunteers’ legs that included 1% capsaicin, the compound found that makes chili peppers spicy; in this case, it caused a burning sensation on the skin.

When the researchers asked each person to report both the intensity and the unpleasantness of the pain—in other words, how much it physically burned and how much this level of burning bothered them—they came to the surprising finding. “We found that with THC, on average people didn’t report any change in the burn, but the pain bothered them less,” Lee said.

This indicates that marijuana doesn’t function as a pain killer as much as a pain distracter: Objectively, levels of pain remain the same for someone under the influence of THC, but it simply bothers the person less. It’s difficult to draw especially broad conclusions from a study with a sample size of just 12 participants, but the results were still surprising.

Each of the participants was also put in an MRI machine—so the researchers could try to pinpoint which areas of the brain seemed to be involved in THC’s pain relieving processes—and the results backed up the theory. Changes in brain activity due to THC involved areas such as the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, believed to be involved in the emotional aspects of pain, rather than other areas implicated in the direct physical perception of it.

Additionally, the researchers found that THC’s effectiveness in reducing the unpleasantness of pain varied greatly between individuals—another characteristic that sets it apart from typical painkillers. For some participants, it made the capsaicin cream much less bothersome, while for others, it had little effect.

The MRI scans supported this observation, too: Those more affected by the THC demonstrated more brain activity connecting their right amydala and a part of the cortex known as the primary sensorimotor area. The researchers say that this finding could perhaps be used as a diagnostic tool, indicating for which patients THC could be most effective as a pain treatment medicine.

Read more:

— By Akira The Don on Friday, January 4th, 2013

From Wired:

A controversial change to official psychiatric guidelines for depression has raised fears that grief over the death of loved ones will be classified as clinical depression, turning a basic part of what it means to be human into a recognized sickness.

The change, contained in new revisions to the DSM-5, a set of standards used to categorize mental illness, eliminates the so-called bereavement exclusion, which exempts grieving people from diagnoses of depression for two months unless their symptoms are self-destructively extreme. Under the new standards, depression can be more easily diagnosed just two weeks after a death.

“Virtually everyone who is grieving has milder symptoms of depression. What the bereavement exclusion did is separate the normal responses from the severe ones,” such as feelings of worthlessness or suicidal impulses, said psychiatrist Jerome Wakefield of New York University, who studies bereavement and depression.

“This goes over a line. If you can pathologize this kind of feeling, any kind of suffering can be a disorder. It’s a disagreement over the boundaries of normality,” Wakefield said. “What kind of world do you want to have? One where intense, negative feelings we don’t like are labeled as disorders, or a world where people grieve?”

Defenders of the bereavement exclusion’s removal, officially announced Dec. 1 by the American Psychiatric Association, say worries of pathologized grief are overblown. They argue that though not all grieving is depressive, grief-related depression isn’t fundamentally different from what’s considered normal depression. As a result, they say the exclusion makes it unnecessarily difficult for clinicians to deal with bereaved people who legitimately need help.

“I think a good clinician can separate the two,” said Jan Fawcett, a University of New Mexico psychiatrist and head of the DSM-5 working group that authored the change, of normal grief and clinical depression. “We feel that clinicians have been making this judgment all along.”

The DSM, or Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, represents American psychiatry’s official tool for deciding between mental disorders and normality. First drafted in 1952, it’s now known euphemistically as psychiatry’s Bible, used by doctors, insurance companies, the legal system, and most any social institution that deals formally with mental health.

The DSM has been revised four times since its original publication, with the latest changes developed over the last seven years and culminating in the recent approval. These have been perhaps the most controversial changes ever, partly because they’re the first made in the cacophonous media environment of the internet age, but also because of the changes themselves. New conditions include hoarding, severe pre-menstrual syndrome, binge eating, temper tantrums and everyday forgetting among the elderly. Critics say these represent a tendency in modern psychiatry to medicalize the normal range of human experience.

Far and away the most controversial change is eliminating the bereavement exclusion, which discouraged clinicians from diagnosing as depressed grieving people whose symptoms were actually part of a normal, necessary emotional process, though in other people they’d be considered formal grounds for depression.

[...]

Read the full article at: wired.com

— By Akira The Don on Wednesday, December 12th, 2012

#PAIN! #RAGE! #PATHOS! #VOODOO! BRAND NEW FROM GAGGLE AND ATD COLLABORATOR PAR EXCELLENCE AARON SHRIMPTON! LET US RUMBLE!

— By Akira The Don on Wednesday, December 12th, 2012