For any parents reading this and wondering if their kid is affected, I highly recommend reading up on PANS and PANDAS. Watching our happy, healthy kid change before our eyes with sudden-onset OCD, vocal and motor tics, terrible mood lability and sleep issues, and other strange symptoms like handwriting regression was heartbreaking. His doctor suggested it was Tourette’s and I happened to notice that his symptoms incl…
Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
111–120 of 245 posts
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#112Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not eating and getting low blood sugar can much more simply answer the question of "Do I have free will, or am I a subject of my internal chemical reactions". You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your actions.
> You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your actions. I'll respond in a way that I hope is clear and relatively objective. This will take the form of an "if-then" claim nested within another "if-then" claim. IF a person (1) accepts philosophical materialism, but (2) remains agnostic as to quantum effects at macro scale THEN then the following response follows logically: It depends what you mean by "yo…
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your actions. I'll respond in a way that I hope is clear and relatively objective. This will take the form of an "if-then" claim nested within another "if-then" claim. IF a person (1) accepts philosophical materialism, but (2) remains agnostic as to quantum effects at macro scale THEN then the following response follows logically: It depends what you mean by "yo…
Note that non-material causes can be just as deterministic (if not more so) as matter. Logic and math are physical but not material, for instance.
Logic and math are neither physical, nor material, nor causal.
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#115So I'm unclear based on the article and some other reading around, can a strep test detect PANDAS, at least in some cases?
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#116> Dr Pittenger says it is now clear that covid-19 infections can trigger psychosis, fatigue and other neuro-psychiatric symptoms. A misbehaving immune system is thought to be the culprit. The idea that schizophrenia may, at least sometimes, likewise be an auto-immune disorder is also under investigation. Until I got long covid(generally recovered now after 2 years), I couldn't comprehend this idea. I felt like I was…
Basically they were looking for risk factors but also to predict who might actually develop the disease imminently among those at risk, because if you monitor folks at risk, folks who might have subclinical symptoms, and can know who is going to have a psychotic break, you can manage and control it and have much better outcomes.
The largest predictive factor of folks who were at increased risk of developing schizophrenia is if they have a family history of it as I recall. Stress, in a variety of forms, is also a big factor.
However the reason I write is because I remember that late fall and winter conception of the individual has been shown to create a small but statistically significant increase in the likelihood of developing the disease. It's unclear exactly why, but one theory is that increased risk of viral infection for the mother during certain stages of pregnancy may be a factor.
Teasing apart these sort of facotrs, even to the extent possible often requires complex multivariate analysis of general and clinical populations and either time based or retrospective analysis of risk factors. Even then the mechanisms are fairly opaque.
Covid infection may lead to increased understanding of psychotic and subpsychotic disorders, but it's more likely to simply complicate any analysis; just teasing apart the actual effects of the disease and the stress that results from the social changes necessary to contain it, in terms of development of mental illness, may not be fully possible.
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Our medical system where we rely on individual doctors for primary care is really flawed but it's better than any alternatives that we have (or that we can afford anyway) The US one I presume? Says who? Based on what metric? We can, and other countries have, do much better. That this parent "is “exhausted” by years spent campaigning to get doctors to take the illnesses seriously" doesn't say much. It's not like she…
which countries have a different system than individual doctors for primary care, and how is it better?
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nerd-sniped: Free will is an incoherent idea. We don't choose our preferences, which dictate our choices. (And even supposing you can choose a preference, that's only due to the preexisting desire to have such a preference. Turtles all the way down.) What would an unconstrained choice even be? Just random, arbitrary? That doesn't sound "free" either.
> We don't choose our preferences As a doxastic voluntarist, I reject this notion entirely.
Do you hold such a view as a first principle? Or did you arrive at it via consideration of other factors?
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#119> Dr Pittenger says it is now clear that covid-19 infections can trigger psychosis, fatigue and other neuro-psychiatric symptoms. A misbehaving immune system is thought to be the culprit. The idea that schizophrenia may, at least sometimes, likewise be an auto-immune disorder is also under investigation. Until I got long covid(generally recovered now after 2 years), I couldn't comprehend this idea. I felt like I was…
Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Note that non-material causes can be just as deterministic (if not more so) as matter. Logic and math are physical but not material, for instance.
> Logic and math are physical but not material, for instance. Logic and math are neither physical, nor material, nor causal.
One can _test_ a set of statements to see if they are valid logical deductions from another set of statements. Even if true, this does not mean that the deducible statements are _caused_.
In some cases, that statement from above (the deduced one) might be 'realized' (noticed by people) before its premises are!
We might even be able to logically prove it is true without the other set of statements! Why? There are multiple logical paths (not always mapping to reality) that _could_ prove a particular statement.