Word: continuum
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Rather, Hyman argued that many mental illnesses are problems that lie along a continuum from normal and functioning to disordered and tragic. To the annoyance of some old-fashioned DSM defenders, he made the case that the DSM should regard mental illness as "continuous with normal": less like leukemia and more like hypertension. You don't get diagnosed with hypertension until you meet a cutoff point for high blood pressure that takes into account other extenuating factors: your age, for instance, or the conditions under which the blood-pressure reading is taken. Depression should be the same...
...continuum model like the one Hyman proposes could help solve this problem by recognizing that people aren't always one thing or another. They're sometimes just a little depressed or a little anxious. To avoid medicalizing normal stress, the DSM-V would set a cutoff point within the spectrum. Of course, determining the right cutoff point for the DSM's 350 illnesses would take an enormous research effort, one that has begun for some disorders like depression but probably hasn't even been thought about for rare problems like sexual sadism...
Other attendees at the APPA conference indicated that the new DSM will almost certainly adopt a continuum model for mental illnesses. But don't be surprised if the book doesn't come out as scheduled in 2012. If the three-day conference came to any solid conclusion, it was that toting up all the ways our minds can fail is a lot harder than, say, explaining why your appendix might burst...
...booze wears off. Generally speaking, on the upward slope, alcohol has a stimulating effect - "social lubrication," says Nixon. But on the down slope, as the alcohol is metabolized, its effects are more sedating. To measure the relationship between people's actual and perceived impairment along this continuum, researchers tested subjects twice, at 25 min. and 75 min. after they'd begun drinking. The two motor-skills tasks used to measure actual impairment were akin to connect-the-dots, but slightly more complicated. The first test simply required participants to draw lines between numbered dots in order; the second required them...
...other words, ovens and alginates exist on the same technological continuum, and the public wouldn't be so put off by avant-garde techniques if it understood the true nature of this relationship. Impeding that realization, however, is the movement's unwieldy name. "Molecular gastronomy sounds scary," said Harold McGee, who writes regularly on the science of cooking for The New York Times, and, along with physicist Davide Cassi, also participated in the panel. "If it were called something else, it wouldn't make you think there's something there you don't know or can't trust...