Medicine and Health Sciences Commons^™

The Brain Scan As Ideograph, Paige Welsh

English (MA) Theses

Medical imaging devices have enabled doctors to render images of the brain without cutting into the body. These images are colloquially called “brain scans.” Through journalism and mass dissemination online, brain scans have become an example of Michael Calvin McGee’s “ideograph,” a language term that subtly takes on outsized political and symbolic meaning to enforce state power. In conversation with theories of new materialism, I situate the brain scan as an ideograph within Jenny Edbauer’s model of rhetorical ecologies. The rhetorical force of the brain scan comes out of a collision between René Descarte’s mind/body dualism, the medical model of …

Examination Of Common And Rare Variant Genetic Architecture Of Psychiatric Disorders, Mohammad Ahangari

Theses and Dissertations

Psychiatric disorders are often heterogenous in their manifestation and genome-wide association studies have identified many common risk variants involved in their polygenic architectures with varying degrees of pleiotropy. In recent years, large-scale biobanks have also begun sequencing the genome of their participants to elucidate the role of rare risk variation in the genetic architecture of complex phenotypes, including psychiatric traits. This dissertation sought to better understand the role of both common and rare risk variation in the genetic architecture of psychiatric disorders with a particular focus on schizophrenia and alcohol problems. In the first three analyses, we focused on characterizing …

Music As A Gateway To Healing Speech Disorders And Mental Health Holistically In The Patient With Aphasia: A Literature Review, Susan Warren

Expressive Therapies Capstone Theses

People with some types of post-stroke aphasia often experience depression as well as loss of speech. Music therapy has unique properties that allow it to be used therapeutically to treat both speech impairment and depression yet it is rarely used to treat both disorders. This literature review seeks to examine the underlying causes for this discrepancy, review methods used by practitioners to treat both disorders and suggest future directions for additional research and implications for the treatment of patients with aphasia who have both language impairment and depression.

Educating Providers To Screen For Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Alyssa Fraino

Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP) Projects

Background: The purpose of this evidence-based change in practice is to increase the knowledge base of psychiatric providers in outpatient psychiatric settings, by educating clinicians regarding the significance of implementing a post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) screening tool during the initial evaluation of patients. This can help to identify patients with PTSD that may not have been identified on initial visit, and may otherwise go unrecognized or untreated for PTSD, without the inclusion of a PTSD screening tool.

Problem: Evidence suggests that PTSD is underreported and overlooked in most populations. However, there is no standardized practice surrounding the routine use of …

An Exploration Of Neuroanatomical Signatures Of Pediatric Bipolar Disorder Using Structural Neuroimaging, Jonika Tannous

Dissertations & Theses (Open Access)

Bipolar Disorder (BD) is diagnosed using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) criteria, which relies heavily on symptomatology. This method, however, lends itself to error due to variance in symptom expression and is further complicated during childhood and adolescence- a period marked by major anatomical and behavioral changes. Therefore, in order to institute early and effective interventions, it is imperative that we develop more objective methods of mood disorder characterization and diagnosis. Two proposed solutions for accomplishing this task include 1) the generation of normative development models to assess BD risk and 2) data-driven clustering of patients based on specific …

Neurocircuits Of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder And Its Dissociative Subtype, Andrew A. Nicholson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

The amygdala and insula are highly implicated in the pathophysiology of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where both have been shown to be hyper/hypoactive in PTSD and dissociative subtype (PTSD+DS) PTSD patients, respectively, during symptom provocation. However, the functional connectivity of individual amygdala and insula subregions have not previously been compared in PTSD, PTSD+DS and healthy controls. In two separate studies, we examined amygdala complex (chapter 2) and insula subregion (chapter 3) functional connectivity patterns using resting-state fMRI. Patients with PTSD and PTSD+DS were found to display unique amygdala complex functional connectivity patterns to prefrontal cortex (PFC) regions involved in emotion …

The Dual Faces Of Misery, Arden Moscati

Theses and Dissertations

Major Depression (MD) and Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD) are psychiatric disorders that arise from dysfunction of the core human capacities for emotion. Sapience is inextricably bound up with the potential for feelings of regret, worry and concern. When these emotions lead to clinically significant impairment or distress, they may result in one or both of the disorders of MD and GAD. The occurrence of MD and GAD in the same person, known as comorbidity, is remarkably high; substantially higher than would be expected by chance.

MD and GAD have been studied since the mid-20^th century, resulting in a substantial …

Science, Symptoms, And Support Groups:Adhd In The American Cultural Context, Kealy D. Fallon

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a cultural analysis of the behaviorally- and psychiatrically-defined disorder ADHD, socio-historically contextualizing it in the United States and exploring ethnographically how people affected by it talk about and organize their experience of its symptoms.