Shadow Syndromes: People with Mild Forms Of Serious Disorders
By John J. Ratey, M.D.

[quote]Neuropsychiatry has undergone a major conceptual shift since the 1960s. In those days everyone was speculating about
neurotransmitter levels in mental illness. (Neurotransmitters are the chemicals, like dopamine and serotonin that carry
messages between the brain's nerve cells). Researchers focused upon neurotransmitters---or, rather, the breakdown
products of neuro- transmitters that can be found in blood and urine---because, given the technology of the day that was
what they could study. Blood, urine, spinal fluid: these were the substances researchers could actually collect and
measure. We could not look inside the skull.
The advent of the brain scan changed everything. Brain scans allow neurologists to move inside the skull: to look at the
brain's structure and watch the brain in action as it processes thoughts and emotions. We now have available anew echoplanar
magnetic resonance imaging technique that can capture an image of the brain changing every twenty-five
milliseconds. In the words of Dr. Joel Yager of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute, soon we wíll actually be able to watch
the "mind boggle."
Thus far, this approach has been enormously fruitful. Alan Zametkin of the Natíonal Institute of Mental Health has
discovered certain areas of the brain involved in attention deficit disorder, areas that appear to be metabolizing glucose
too slowly compared to normal brains; others have found the areas affected in obsessive compulsive disorder---areas
which, in this case, appear to be metabolizing glucose too quickly.

Read more @ http://www.bbbautism.com/pdf/article_47 ... dromes.pdf

Out of the Shadows

[quote]A leading psychiatrist contends that many of the problems we've always blamed on character flaws may be due to mild versions of full-blown mental disorders.

Read more @ http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles ... he-shadows

The Shadow Syndromes - by John Ratey

"Quirks and Oddities May Be Mild Forms of Psychiatric Illness"

A Review by JANE BRODY

[quote]They may sound like nothing more than personality quirks -- a working mother who is competent and controlled at her job but explodes at home when small things go wrong or a computer programmer who is the ultimate loner, sitting hunched over his terminal night and day.

One woman could never see long projects through to their end. Instead of setting reasonable goals and meeting them, she would jump into a project with both feet only to find her initial energy and enthusiasm fading before she completed it when a new project captured her attention.

One man was obsessively concerned about his body, always scanning it for signs of trouble. When something does happen, he cannot stop thinking about what it may mean. As a child, he was obsessive about sports activities: "I wouldn't just pitch one hour a day; I would stand in front of a wall and make 5,000 pitches, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m."

But, in fact, each of these people was eventually found to be suffering from what Dr. John J. Ratey, a psychiatrist, has named "shadow syndrome," a mild form of a well-recognized neuropsychiatric disorder like depression, attention-deficit disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, mania or autism.

Ratey, who is executive director of research at Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts and is affiliated with Harvard Medical School, said a person with shadow syndrome might have three or four symptoms of a recognized disorder that was usually defined by 10 or so symptoms. That person may have serious difficulties meeting life's challenges but never know why. More often than not, his clinical experience has shown, such people blame themselves for their social, academic and professional faílures.

Millions of these people are "falling between the cracks," said Dr. Michael Liebowitz, a psychiatrist at the New York State Psychiatric Institute at the Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons. "Yet their symptoms warrant fixing. They can be very distressing, even disabling."

Read more @ http://www.nldlíne.com/ratey.htm