PsyDactic

Send us a Text Message.

You may have heard that Dr. Google now has some serious competition. It comes from artificial intelligence. Chat GPT is a text generating program that was trained to respond to prompts from users like you and me. What will it say to our psychiatry patients? I gave it some prompts to find out.

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com.
References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com. All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else. We reserve the right to be wrong. Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

Send us a text

In 2012 the Supreme Court heard two related cases involving adolescents convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole because of mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines in their states. One of the boys, Evan Miller along with an accomplice, had beat a man unconscious with a baseball bat after a fight that ensued when the man awoke to find Miller robbing him. Miller and his friend then decided to set fire to the home to cover up the evidence. This resulted in the man’s death. The second petitioner, Kuntrell Jackson, had accompanied two other boys to a convenience store in order to rob it. During the robbery, one of the boys, not Jackson, shot and killed the clerk.
Both boys were convicted and were sentenced according to minimum sentencing guidelines to life in prison without parole. The decision that the court was asked to make was not whether the boys should have been convicted, but instead, whether the sentencing guidelines that resulted in them being given life without parole constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com.
References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com. All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else. We reserve the right to be wrong. Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

Send us a text

The thalami are bilaterally symmetrical structures in the subcortical part of the brain that are cradled by the basal ganglia. They are major hubs of pretty much everything your brain does and all of the sensory information coming into the brain with the exception of smell.

More primitive models of the brain visualized it as a bunch of relatively isolated modules, each specialized to perform a single task when queried and able to send that information to wherever it should go. More modern ideas propose a more integrated picture, with various regions of the brain contributing to a more diffuse process through parallel connections with other network communities and hubs. It appears that nearly every integrated process in the brain is influenced at some level by thalamic modulation. You could characterize the Thalamus as a brain wide gateway to the cortex, modulator and mediator of inputs, coordinator of feedback, relay between higher cognitive areas, manager of brainstem nuclei, and facilitator of attention.

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com.
References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com. All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else. We reserve the right to be wrong. Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

Send us a text

In this episode, I introduce a diagnosis that is not a diagnosis. By that, I mean that it is a condition that we may find our patients in, but it is not considered to be a diagnosis by itself, like major depressive disorder or schizophrenia are considered to be diagnoses. I am talking about catatonia, a condition characterized by either a lack of interaction with the world or as purposeless interaction with the world.

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com.
References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com. All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else. We reserve the right to be wrong. Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.

Send us a text

The Narrative Fallacy describes our tendency to find meaning, connections, and causal relationships where they do not necessarily exist. In this episode, Dr. O'Leary had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Alexey Tolchinsky.
He recently published a paper called “Narrative fallacy and other limitations of psychodynamic case formulation.” Dr. Tolchenski did not invent the idea of the Narrative Fallacy, but he is working to apply this idea to his own clinical practice. We could all benefit from recognizing the ways that Narrative Fallacy plays out in our lives. The great thing about these ideas is that they are so generalizable. The Narrative fallacy is not limited to medicine or science, but can be applied, for example in how we explain to ourselves why our neighbor seems to hate us.
Tolchinsky, A. (2023). Narrative fallacy and other limitations of psychodynamic case formulation. Practice Innovations.
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/znxs5

Please leave feedback at https://www.psydactic.com.
References and readings (when available) are posted at the end of each episode transcript, located at psydactic.buzzsprout.com. All opinions expressed in this podcast are exclusively those of the person speaking and should not be confused with the opinions of anyone else. We reserve the right to be wrong. Nothing in this podcast should be treated as individual medical advice.