Brain Wound Eliminates Man's Mental Illness (1988)
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/282899.php
In the SF Bay area, Stanford, UCSF and Kaiser all have very active DBS practices treating a range of conditions.
https://stanfordhealthcare.org/medical-clinics/deep-brain-st...
http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/index.php/deep-brain-stimulatio...
So the point is, read as much as you can, and try to master the OCD like a physic, my phsic told me, you know more than me. though he had 50 years experience.
How this help, after all what you read is going in the brain, after excessive study, your brain would reach a point, where it would be aware, the you have OCD, this is where, the things start to go from good to better.
If you are unable to deep consciousness that you have OCD, it would overcome again and again.
In short, it's the mental illness, and only your brain can fix it. You just need make your brain realize that you have a problem, once the brain deeply acknowledge it, it will fix it.
Once your brain acknowledges, it would a lot easy to shift your focus away.
Shifting focus away from the OCD thought is the key for elimination.
If you get OCD thought shift your focus, but it's easier said than done, you can only do it, once your brain has acknowledged you have OCD. and for that you have to deeply study OCD
http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/151/6/855
Obviously the real story is not as simplistic. Newspapers in 1988 are the same as today, full of just so stories.
That said, the real story is quite interesting and sad if you have access to the article.
I don't think he could have done so well in college if he did not have OCD in the beginning. The OCD got severe so he opted for suicide.
So what is the real lesson here? Let mental illnesses do their thing until they get out of hand? And then perform surgery to remove what made them gifted in the first place so their gifts could reign unfettered?
Or something else? Like incredible powers (mental illnesses) be given incredibly powerful management techniques for restraint. Isn't that how management works with highly talented members who are restrained from going too deep?
Why do you say that?
>So what is the real lesson here? Let mental illnesses do their thing until they get out of hand? And then perform surgery to remove what made them gifted in the first place so their gifts could reign unfettered?
According to the article he seemed to retain whatever "gifts" he may have (had).
It has a decent chance of correcting the targeted affliction, but with destructive side effects often far worse than the original condition. In some rare cases lobotomies successfully treated mental illness without impacting functioning in other ways though, just like what happened here.
> As a last resort, neurosurgeons will occasionally remove part of the left front lobe of the brain, where the obsessive behavior is thought to originate. The operation is probably performed between 10 and 30 times a year in the United States, with mixed results, said Dr. Thomas Ballantine of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
Publication bias[2] is the most charitable explanation, but really it shows that even the New York Times is prone to sensationalism[3]
[1] https://www.braintrauma.org/tbi-faqs/tbi-statistics/
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publication_bias
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensationalism
EDIT: No that does NOT make it interesting. It suggests that it would take order of 1.5 million more brain injuries to reproduce it. Hardly a medical advance.
Which is what makes it interesting, duh!
We don't know what causes OCD (and we knew even less when this kid shot himself in 1983; the paper was not written until 5 years later).
When you get spontaneous remission due to an injury, that is a hint that the damaged region might be important in the disease process.
Unusual cases like these have the potential to rapidly accelerate our understanding of disease, which is why medical journals still publish case reports.
No one is proposing treating OCD with firearms.
But from this one case we can still extrapolate a very useful line of inquiry. It's almost like when you infer a single number in a Sudoku puzzle and the rest of the numbers become obvious after that, like a domino effect.
Wikipedia [1] provides a nice treatment of the rationale for the publication of unusual cases like this one.
In essence, case reports are meant to be a medium for the dissemination of new hypotheses, not a means of testing them.
They are acknowledged to be an extremely biased source of information, which is why they are not included in meta-analyses, and can not be used to support regulatory approval of new therapies. (And also why the lay person should probably ignore them when researching a medical condition.)
In exchange for this bias and unreliability, however, you get a very high sensitivity for rare, 'black swan' type events that may prove informative or thought-provoking, even though they would never amount to a blip in a controlled trial.
I don't know how or whether this particular case report informed research into OCD, but it's easy to imagine researchers following this up by doing lesion studies in animal models of OCD, perhaps leading to experimental deep brain stimulation treatments in humans targeting this region.
The fact that this freak injury would be hard to reproduce, and does not in itself represent a medical advance, is irrelevant (thus why I said you'd missed the point).
Did it need to go out on the AP news wire? No, but it's a compelling (or, OK, 'sensational') human interest story, so it's not too surprising it got picked up.