Word: psychiatrist
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...small subset of these brain chemicals, especially serotonin, evidently serves an entirely different purpose. As Steven Hyman, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, describes it, "These neurotransmitters modulate raw information and give it its emotional tone." Northwestern University psychiatrist James Stockard puts it more poetically: "A person's mood is like a symphony, and serotonin is like the conductor's baton." Other neurotransmitters help us know our stomachs are full; serotonin tells us whether we feel satisfied. Other chemicals help us perceive the water level in a glass; serotonin helps us decide whether we will think...
...1960s, a second class of antidepressants emerged. By tinkering with the chemical structure of antihistamines, a Swiss psychiatrist, Ronald Kuhn, created a drug called imipramine, first of the so-called tricyclic antidepressants. At the time no one had any idea why these medicines worked. Researchers have since learned that they keep excess serotonin and other neurotransmitters from being reabsorbed into the nerve cells they originally came from: same extended neurotransmitter bath as the MAO inhibitors, different mechanism...
...discovered links between serotonin and aggressive behavior. Monkeys with high levels of serotonin by-products in their blood, it turns out, tend to be feistier, and drugs that boost serotonin activity tend to calm them down. The serotonin-violence link appears to hold for humans as well. In 1979 psychiatrist Frederick Goodwin, now at George Washington University, discovered that Navy enlisted men with low levels of serotonin byproducts often had a history of aggression. Subsequent studies discovered similar evidence in Marines discharged for excessive violence, in people who became violent after drinking alcohol and in children who tortured animals...
...made trips to Chile to visit doctors imprisoned due to their human rights advocacy and to El Salvador where she participated in a delegation that looked at various aspects of political conflict," she adds. "In a sense she was using her skills as a psychiatrist and her sense of trauma, but increasingly she and other physicians have become human rights leaders at the forefront of efforts to integrate human rights concerns into education...
...According to Dr. Harold Bloomfield, author of Hypericum & Depression (Prelude Press; $7.95), this pretty yellow-flowered plant is nature's own antidepressant--almost as potent as the prescription drug Prozac but without Prozac's troubling side effects. St. John's wort may not work for everyone, acknowledges Bloomfield, a psychiatrist in Del Mar, Calif. "But to those for whom it does work, it's like a godsend...