Childhood Loneliness Linked to Later Psychosis | Hacker News Reader

Childhood Loneliness Linked to Later Psychosis

neurosciencenews.com

82 pointsbookofjoe73 comments

> In an observational, case-control study, researchers assessed loneliness in children with the question “Have you ever felt lonely for more than 6 months before the age of 12”

Doesn't sound like they "assessed loneliness in children". I thought this would be one of those longitudinal studies where subjects are given a survey while young and then the researchers come back to check on them later in life.

Also, no links to any version of the paper. What a pain.

>Original Research: The findings will be presented at the 32nd European Congress of Psychiatry [April 6-9, 2024]

Yeh, very weak test of loneliness. Small sample size as well.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizotypy is the dark matter of mental health. Unfortunately it has been crowded out by absolutely every other possible explanation of why some people don't fit in.

TFA does seem to draw an arrow loneliness->psychosis, but as the headline only stated 'linked' I had initially thought of the obvious connection in the other direction: "being the weird kid"->loneliness.

(Donald Knuth, a man known for deep —and sometimes obscure— interests, spoke of "finding his tribe" upon encountering CS in the 1960s. Did God create the discipline for Don?)

I see the connection of (1) 5-10% of people are born with the genetic predisposition of schizotaxia, (2) most of those people are going to experience negative social learning that leads to the schizotypal personality organization, (3) 100% percent of people who develop schizophrenia spectrum disorders were born with schizotaxia, perhaps 10% of them will go on to develop serious psychosis. I think what they are observing is the co-occurrence of (2) and (3)

See

https://www.amazon.com/Loners-Life-Path-Unusual-Children/dp/...

and

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...

The latter book is a bit controversial because it sees schizotypy as "you have it or you don't have it" and there are many reasons to believe it is dimensional as pushed here

https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-dimensions-Advances-Mental...

but the dimensional team can't tell compelling stories around the practical psychopathology the way Lenzenweger does. Notably Bleuler, who named schizophrenia, found that the parents and family of schizophrenics were a bit "odd" and socially withdrawn more than 100 years ago.

It irks me that you can find just a handful of conference proceedings on a condition which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S and that both ADHD and Autism have boomed in popularity because they both are associated with expensive or addictive treatments. Since nobody has a way to monetize schizotypy (if anything antipsychotic drugs could make you more unhinged) there is no budget to popularize it.

It's false to characterize ADHD medication as "addictive". At prescription-level dosages, this just isn't true, and despite a lot of misinformation from scaremonger writers who illegally tried their roommate's Adderall in college and thought they got high because their heart was racing, the folks that truly benefit from such meds actually experience the effects in quite the opposite way, because it provides a major calming effect on the mind of many people who have ADHD.

Amphetamines are addictive, regardless of dosage.

As a person with bad ADHD and years of experience on and off adderall, I have no clue how anyone can claim that the stimulant ADHD meds don’t genuinely get you high. They indeed are not physiologically addictive, but can be easily relied upon mentally because of how good they feel.

I’m blown away by these responses. I took adhd meds and did not get a whiff of a high, but chocolate and even maca I can detect as getting me high.

Now I wonder if people with adhd with different etiology are just “treating” it by getting high.

Caffeine is really something, particularly if you don't use it every day. It's the substance that I've experienced the worst dependence and had the hardest time kicking.

Caffeine can really be something. It can also be... basically nothing for folks. I am very curious to know if there are larger studies that can quantify some of this. And I emphatically do not mean that some people have tolerances to it. Though, I do expect that a large enough dose will impact anyone.

I suspect it is a lot like catnip. I think most people that have had cats have had situations where one of the cats just does not care about the stuff. At all. Versus many cats that get quite an extreme reaction to it.

Really? First off, are they the stimulant variety? Secondly, was the dosage pretty low? Honestly that is nuts to me; I can’t imagine getting no whiff of a high without taking such a low dose that the meds do nothing.

Yes, really. It's pretty clear that a lot of people with ADHD have a specific physiology that processes drugs like Adderall very differently.

People wouldn’t be snorting adderall recreationally if it didn’t get you high

People have different brain chemistries.

The people snorting it to get high are not the same people taking a prescribed dose and going back to sleep (a common ADHD experience).

Many/most folks with ADHD end up having issues skipping doses.

One friend (into recreation drugs) took 40mg of Adderall and was wired for a day and a half.

Another (prescribed) took 80mg of Adderall and calmed down enough to take a nap.

There is no one single human wiring.

I only know what I know from a podcast but I think that has a lot more to do with your liver and its enzyme profile than your brain. I know someone who took 90mg a day (I assume it’s higher now) just as a clinical dose - they’ve probably never experienced a recreational dose because it would probably be an obscene-looking amount. THC is like this, too, when ingested. Some people can eat 100mg and barely get a buzz but that dose would knock most people out. Inhalation is a different story - baseline tolerance from person to person doesn’t vary nearly that much (from what I’ve seen) and as far I know the difference is that the liver doesn’t come into play since cannabinoids cross the blood brain barrier on their own.

Huh? Amphetamines are directly absorbed into the brain. That is what Adderall is.

The liver eventually removes them, they aren’t responsible for the effect.

Both of these folks took them in pill form.

Do you mean snorting vs ingesting? Snorting definitely increases uptake yes, but the underlying brain chemistry differences still exist.

Easy to find folks who figured out they were ADHD because they did a line of cocaine and almost fell asleep, for instance.

I was wrong to bring up the blood brain barrier and the liver. My point is that an individual’s enzyme profile* is more relevant to dosing than whether or not they have ADHD, which seemed to me what you were implying here:

> One friend (into recreation drugs) took 40mg

> Another (prescribed) took 80mg

You can take someone undiagnosed with ADHD, give them 80mg and they could possibly not feel a thing. Likewise there are those who are prescribed low doses like 2.5mg.

It’s a pet peeve of mine the myths I’ve seen shared pervasively on SM:

1) getting high from a stimulant doesn’t preclude you from having ADHD. I know this is not what you said but I’ve read comments that literally state if you experience euphoria or other stimulating effects from Adderall, then you couldn’t have ADHD. That’s clearly not how ADHD is diagnosed. Therapeutic dose is all about minimizing those “side effects”

2) that certain people with ADHD cannot experience a stimulant high. That seems extremely dubious to me. Barring a higher dose of amphetamine or more straightforward meth, I’m sure if they can’t get it there then they could from MDA, MDMA, coke, DMT, mescaline, LSD or plain old THC… yes even from a psychedelic it’s a stimulant effect. It’s not the ADHD it’s the personal chemistry

* said enzymes exist in the brain, too, of course, I didn’t know that till I googled more

Edit: typo and format

And you got this.... from a blog post? Or podcast? I forget.

Care to link to any actual studies on this?

Knock yourself out buddy: https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/adderall-stimulants-and-...

Yeah, that's literally useless. Actually support your claims, or be ignored.

Snorting Adderall is hardly using it according to the prescription, which was the point of my post.

I confess I can barely notice when I take my medicine, as far as feelings go. I can barely notice that anything is different, to be honest. I am more patient with people, but if I don't stick to a very regular routine, I will skip them. When I run out, if there is friction to get them refilled, I will go for quite a while without them.

I don't doubt that they impact people in different ways. I also don't doubt that I likely don't notice some of the feelings. Reading things like this post, though, makes me think there is a lot more going on. And I am very hesitant to try and generalize how others react based solely on my reaction.

I can claim it from 16 years on a relatively high dose of Adderall. If you had a different experience, I'm guessing your physiology is different. But a lot of folks with ADHD do not experience a high from stimulants like Adderall.

I've seen promotional material from the stimulant industry that makes it sound that by writing a prescription a doctor is doing some magic transforming a dangerous drug (as it would be to kids who shook you down for your meds) into something health-giving, much like the priest magically transforms bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

Whatever else might be true about those drugs it is true that they are performance enhancing drugs for most people in many respects. There's probably nothing wrong with taking a Dexedrine and taking the day to clean your whole house from top to bottom but taking it for a lifetime is something else.

I have a friend who was one of the earliest adopters of ADHD medication and he gets a bottle of pills each month that looks as much like a small trash can as a large pill bottle and has had his teeth all rot out. He says he can't get anything done without his meds but he can't get anything done with his meds.

I'm certain he has problems of a wider scope than "ADHD" but so long as there is a system to tag kids that don't fit in with a label and that profits from a solution, other diagnoses will be neglected.

_Thought_ they got high? I have ADHD and you still one hundred percent get a high from it. Maybe if you’ve been on it for years it will be hard to notice or you’ll have grown accustomed to it. But c’mon.

In general people with ADHD are dopamine deficient and these drugs actually calm them down... if someone takes more than their effective dose it can.

I was diagnosed by telemedicine with it, tried various doses of bother Adderal and Vyvanse and got fairly upbeat on them even on low doses, so I doubt if I technically have it from a neurochemical standpoint.

When I started taking it I felt relaxed and my mind was quiet.

I would actually fall asleep easier on the meds than without it.

I suppose this can be called a high because marijuana can make you fall asleep too.

Maybe _you_ get high from it. If you do, I suspect it might not be the best meds for you. But I've never gotten high from it.

ADHD meds, while they did give an amazing ability focus that I have never experienced before I took them or after I stopped, were most definitely euphoria-inducing stimulants, and they can most definitely be addictive.

Individual/personal experience doesn’t generalize to all users.

It’s useful to be aware of the potential for certain effects and addiction, but this is not an inherent property that impacts all users equally.

May be better to frame this as: depending on your physiology, you may be predisposed to certain effects and/or resulting addiction. Similar things can be said about alcohol/cannabis. Physical or psychological addiction happens, but not all users are susceptible in the same ways.

The newer ADHD meds are not stimulants and are not addictive.

Maybe ADHD has "boomed" in """popularity""" because a disorder that used to be diagnosed as hyperactivity and a deficit of attention actually turned out to be a quantifiable problem with executive function which exists in a known part of the brain, can be quantifiably treated with medication and therapy, and if untreated results in very confusing problems with emotions and motivation for as long as you live.

It's not as if ADHD doesn't exist. I'm speaking off of what was apparently state of the art 10 years ago. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSfCdBBqNXY

I'm hoping today, in a matter of hours, to get prescribed one of these new non-stim drugs, because the stuff described in that video very much matches my experience.

Maybe thinking that ADHD is made up has boomed in popularity because of the South Park and King of the Hill episodes that downplay it. Imagine learning medicine from cartoons.

What are the non-stim drugs being prescribed for ADHD?

Strattera, an SNRI, is one.

A big thing with ADHD is as society optimizes, there's less "unproductive" spaces for people to exist in.

I think of my own experience. I can focus long periods of time on something interesting that solves a problem, but when most work is simply business logic and reinventing the same uninteresting wheel at a desk for 40hrs a week, I feel like a caged animal and cannot focus whatsoever.

The behaviors associated with ADHD are quite literally anachronistic. The ability to take in a lot of stimuli and react on it would have been extremely useful during say, a hunter-gatherer time. Someone to try to figure out what those weird berries are useful for, fiddling with some sticks and ending up with a tool, etc.

We're really not meant to sit around all day being "productive".

I try to tell my wife this all the time. She has ADHD, and possibly only that, but diagnosed with and treated for generalized anxiety and depression at various points. She likes to act like I'm some kind of mentally perfect person and I should breed with someone else because our children shouldn't inherit her traits.

To the contrary, I think those traits need to stay in the human gene pool. I'm extremely well adapted to a predictable, boring, overwhelmingly safe environment, but there is no guarantee the human environment will remain this way. Calling ADHD behaviors anachronistic is probably basically correct, but I think it's important to remember this doesn't mean we'll never again need them. They were adaptive in the past and may again be adaptive in the future. The important thing for humanity overall is to have a wide variety of behavioral traits so we can collectively adapt as needed when circumstances change. We do not want everyone to be perfectly adapted to the exact present moment. That's how extinctions happen.

So you would breed with her out of some enlightened eugenics reasons, then? No matter the potential personal cost to your offspring? How... noble?

I don't think there is any moral problem here. Attraction works in that way to promote variation.*

*The least sexiest way of saying "opposites attract", but I am wearing my HN mask.

What are you getting at with your leading questions? It would be clearer if you just came out and said it.

I don't know why you jump to the extreme of "no matter the potential cost", they absolutely did not say that. They are talking about one specific trait, and think it is acceptable, not making some blanket statement.

They aren't claiming trisomy or Huntingtons is acceptable. ADHD isn't a death sentence and some people benefit from it today.

> most work is simply business logic and reinventing the same uninteresting wheel at a desk for 40hrs a week, I feel like a caged animal and cannot focus whatsoever.

This is how I feel learning this week's popular JavaScript UI framework just to make a button appear on a webpage and handle a click, or here's another generic CRUD operation with a PUT on the controller, how enthralling! And my brain retreats from reality. Like it would rather off itself than take another step.

And I'm not going to medicate that, I don't think it is "wrong" or anything to do with health. It just feels like part of me is speaking. Like my unconscious, or gut, or a combination thereof is signalling that this isn't the place for me. I need to move and spend my energy. Maybe I will quit the industry, or at least move away from webdev.

Could probably extrapolate this experience to school - some kids aren't cut out for sitting still and learning how to factorise quadratics for the 4th time this week. (Speaking for myself again, but I got that the first time, why over and over again?). Thankfully I wasn't in school when medication was fashionable. I pity this generation.

I've only recently had to touch any kind of JS framework in my almost 6 years working. I'm trained far closer to hardware and I love hacking on embedded devices.

I only got medicated as an adult because I'm just not designed to do the same thing day after day. I had a break at work where I was able to design basically a toy for some recruiting. Did the PCB design, firmware, handled manufacturing, designed 3d printed programming jigs, wrote the flashing scripts, etc. All in a span of about 3 months. I was born to prototype widgets and gadgets but society doesn't have a lot of use for that kind of interdisciplinary skillset.

Folks will say "join a startup" but I needed a month to recover from the burnout of that push, so I don't think it'd be healthy for me to go somewhere that expects that LOE year round.

The idea that you will be steadily productive 9-5, 5 days a week, for most months of the year, is a post-Industrial expectation. Our ancestors knew mostly "long" days that ended at 5, followed by "slow" days that ended at 12. And the workdays shrunk in later months because there was less daylight.

I do wonder if that's part of it - some of us aren't built for conventional work cycles, but most people are and it it is something we can't expect to reshape easily.

My source is this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvk_XylEmLo

We aren’t meant to sit around all day writing business logic. Luckily I have the ability to do that, because I’d rather not break my back working construction. So I take my meds and do my job.

> A big thing with ADHD is as society optimizes, there's less "unproductive" spaces for people to exist in.

I don't think it's that black and white, consider how civilization-changes have made more space for "unproductive" people who would previously have been abandoned for the wolves.

ASD adults still have much higher unemployment rates that average

Don't even need a formal diagnosis, autistic traits seem sufficient. I do "well" on autism tests but have no diagnosis, and am unemployed.

Which adhd meds do you have in mind ?

> It irks me that you can find just a handful of conference proceedings on a condition which affects tens of millions of people in the U.S and that both ADHD and Autism have boomed in popularity because they both are associated with expensive or addictive treatments.

Because they are associated with expensive or addictive treatments? That is quite a claim in its own right; I’d argue that ADHD boomed in the US because we now understand how it affects people throughout their lives and it is no longer a ‘little boy’s’ disease.

One implication of your statement is that many (some significant portion) people diagnosed with ADHD shouldn’t have been, and that the reason for this over-diagnosis is drug seeking or pushing behavior.

Because of this implication, groups like the DEA make the manufacturing and distribution of these medically useful medications difficult and paradoxical to what they intend to treat. In some states, the patient with ADHD has to call monthly to get a refill because their provider isn’t allowed to prescribe more than one fill at a time, nor could the provider automatically send out a refill without contact with a patient. It is quite inconvenient for a patient who suffers from what is effectively time blindness.

This also maintains the narrative that the patients are seeking drugs for some form of abuse or diversion, causing the patients to feel like criminals. This is absurd.

So please, stop with this implication.

What does "TFA" stand for?

The Fucking Article. As in RTFM.

Ah. Thank you. What does "RTFM" mean?

Read The Fucking Manual. And did typing that comment really take less time than typing RTFM in your search engine of choice?

Yes, because I didn't have to leave HN to type that comment.

PEBCAK

You don't have a digital Húsvættir to answer questions you speak aloud?

thx; TIL

Is that like a Humane AI pin?

It means "home/house spirit" and from context sounds like they're referring to Google Home or Alexa.

"Read The Fucking Manual". Something you would regularly hear from your BOFH back in the day.

What does "BOFH" stand for?

> The Bastard Operator From Hell (BOFH) is a fictional rogue computer operator created by Simon Travaglia, who takes out his anger on users (who are "lusers" to him) and others who pester him with their computer problems, uses his expertise against his enemies and manipulates his employer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastard_Operator_From_Hell

"Read The Fucking Manual." It was a common phrase earlier in the tech ecosystem when someone would come in and ask simple questions that could be answered by reading the man pages, although it has fallen out of favor because it's perceived as overly aggressive/mean.

Thank you.

Read the fucking manual

It is hard to escape the truth that much of your personal development is either helped or hampered by those crucial early years spend with your parents.

It is obvious from probing family histories of self, family and friends - seeing how the dots join between certain experiences then and certain traits now. The same patterns emerge, and you do wonder how many fewer broken people we would have if parents held themselves to a higher standard.

Then you have to keep going back, as poor parents were likely neglected as children also and so on

Responsibility has to begin somewhere. We cannot give in to passive determinism.

Or you could stop thinking in terms of blame and start thinning in terms of where is best to fix the problem.

You are saying the same thing in two different ways, while doing the same as what you're accusing me :)

Maybe, but this study doesn't seem to establish that.

They've at best established a correlation, but it could also be explained the other way around: people that struggle making human connections have a tendency to develop mental illnesses. Which should be pretty unsurprising to anyone...

I found it weird they didn't match the control group, especially on gender.

Also the number of femaile patients was in the double digits, so it would be interesting to see a larger study to replicate the results.

> The study sample comprised 285 patients with FEP (32.6% female, age 24.50 ± 6.2 years) and 261 controls (48.7% female, age 25.93 ± 5.5 years).

until doctors can treat the brain just like any other organ in the body this is just an educated guess (respectfully I believe in therapy and all that)

The difficulty is in hardware vs. software. You can fix up a failing video card on a computer, but if there is a weird visual glitch that is caused by a deep software bug and you don't have source code or a compiler for it, then you are left with treating symptoms and avoiding conditions that trigger that error.

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