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#mentalhealth

214 posts196 participants33 posts today

Kasa - that's our daughter - has been here for the afternoon.
She brought this lino cut she did at a tutorial session yesterday evening - I've been inspired to have a go myself!

She also cooked a really good meal for us all - pasta with chicken & ham in a cheese sauce.
She's back down the M1 now on the way back to the hospital.

Here's hoping for good news this week because the ward is starting to affect her mood.

On message for cuts Streeting writing people off himself.Not an expert just sometime with too much power doing PMs bidding. Spoke differently 5 years ago. Any principles then?

#mentalhealth #welfarecuts
BBC News - Mental health conditions are overdiagnosed, Streeting says
bbc.com/news/articles/cd7ejvr3

Health Secretary Wes Streeting
www.bbc.comMental health conditions are overdiagnosed, Streeting saysWes Streeting says too many young people are "being written off", as he defends upcoming welfare reforms.

Mental health conditions are overdiagnosed, Streeting says:
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd7ejv

Absolutely fuming!

There are lots of people suffering without help because of the stigma around mental health. By effectively saying that people diagnosed with mental health are on the scrounge, the mental health crisis will worsen.

But I don't think that the red-Tories really give a fuck.

Health Secretary Wes Streeting
BBC NewsMental health conditions are overdiagnosed, Streeting saysWes Streeting says too many young people are "being written off", as he defends upcoming welfare reforms.

Labour Party targeting people with mental health issues for more cuts, just evil.

Nothing less of a military draft, dragging the most vulnerable to indenture service knowing they're the most likely to be exploited without much protections.

Wes Streeting: there is overdiagnosis of mental health conditions

Imagine the level of self confidence you need to have to have a degree in history and say such a thing.

Wes Streeting should resign. He is no position to make such a statement as Health Secretary and he should be rebutted by the GMC right away.

theguardian.com/politics/2025/

The Guardian · Wes Streeting: there is overdiagnosis of mental health conditionsBy Jessica Elgot

Speaking of mental health, I can highly recommend playing Wanderstop.

It's really great, cozy and wholesome. And it definitely hits the spot for people suffering from burnout. I can relate so much to the protagonist. 😅

The soundtrack is also extremely good.

questlog.app/games/wanderstop

Questlog.appWanderstop - Game detailsFrom the creator of The Stanley Parable and The Beginner’s Guide comes Wanderstop, a narrative-centric cozy game about change and tea.

DATE: March 16, 2025 at 06:00AM
SOURCE: PSYPOST.ORG

** Research quality varies widely from fantastic to small exploratory studies. Please check research methods when conclusions are very important to you. **
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TITLE: Twin study suggests rationality and intelligence share the same genetic roots

URL: psypost.org/twin-study-suggest

A recent study involving twins has shed new light on the relationship between intelligence and rational thinking. The findings indicate that the ability to make rational decisions, often seen as a separate skill, is actually very closely tied to general intelligence. In fact, the study suggests that being irrational, or making illogical choices, might simply be another way of measuring lower intelligence.

Rationality, in this context, means making good decisions based on logic and available information, avoiding common pitfalls like jumping to conclusions or being swayed by gut feelings when they are wrong. Some experts believed that rationality was a unique skill, distinct from intelligence as measured by standard intelligence tests. They proposed that rationality involves a special ability to override our initial, intuitive thoughts and engage in more analytical thinking. This “rational mindset,” they argued, might be missed by traditional intelligence tests.

Others, however, suspected that rationality and intelligence were more closely related, with rational thinking simply being a natural outcome of higher intelligence. To explore this question in depth, Professor Timothy C. Bates of the University of Edinburgh decided to investigate the genetic basis of both rationality and intelligence.

“If ‘rationality is what IQ tests miss,’ then this would be very important,” Bates told PsyPost. “It would imply that a lot of decision making is unrelated to cognitive ability and that we need new tests to prevent and understand some of our most egregious mistakes. So it seemed important. And we could use twins to test this in ways not used before.”

To examine the roots of rationality and intelligence, Bates turned to the Brisbane Adolescent Twin Study. Twins provide a unique opportunity to tease apart the influence of genes and environment on various traits. Identical twins share nearly all of their genes, while fraternal twins, like regular siblings, share only about half. By comparing how similar identical twins are to each other compared to fraternal twins in a particular trait, researchers can estimate how much of that trait is influenced by genetics.

Bates analyzed data from 1,570 individuals, including both identical and fraternal twins. All participants completed tests designed to measure both their general cognitive ability and their cognitive rationality. Cognitive ability was measured using a combination of tests that assessed vocabulary, numerical reasoning, and the ability to identify patterns in sequences of letters and numbers. These types of tests are commonly used to gauge different aspects of intelligence.

Cognitive rationality was assessed using a specific test known as the Cognitive Reflection Test. This test presents individuals with problems designed to trigger an intuitive but incorrect answer. For example, one question asks: “A bat and a ball together cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?” The intuitive, quick answer is 10 cents, but the correct answer, requiring a bit more thought, is actually 5 cents. The Cognitive Reflection Test uses several such questions to see how well people can resist misleading intuitions and arrive at the logically correct answer.

The results showed that both intelligence and rational decision making were strongly influenced by genetic factors. Bates was surprised by “the strength of the heritability of rationality: It is really a great little IQ test!”

In addition, when Bates tested whether there was a separate factor that could account for rational thinking in addition to intelligence, he found that this extra factor did not improve the explanation of how people performed. Instead, the same general mental capacity that drove vocabulary and puzzle-solving also accounted for performance on the rational decision making test. Both sets of scores loaded heavily on a single shared factor. This supports the view that rational thinking is not a separate ability but is actually an indicator of broader cognitive skills.

Bates outlined four key takeaways: “1) We found that irrationality, far from being what IQ tests miss, is one of the best IQ tests available. 2) We found that irrationality, far from being unrelated to genetics and more of a mindset, is among the most heritable of psychological traits. 3) Irrationality is making mistakes which are unnecessary: wrong decisions when we have all the information we need, and some simple logic means there is no reason for the error. We found that realizing what information is available, and applying some simple logic, is almost all of the cause of cognitive irrationality. 4) Cognitive ability explained nearly all of cognitive irrationality, and much of the overlap was genetic.”

Although the study featured a large sample of twins and made use of widely accepted methods to measure intelligence and rational decision making, there were some limitations and open questions for future research. The measure of rational thinking used only a few items and might not capture every aspect of how people make decisions in real-life contexts. Different tests, especially those involving larger sets of problems, could confirm or refine the results. It would also be useful to see how these findings play out in childhood and adolescence, as well as in different cultural settings. Future work could look for influences from personality traits, learning experiences, or motivational factors that might add further detail to how intelligence and rational decision making interact.

“It would be great if rationality research unified with intelligence research,” Bates said. “We have, it turns out, been working on the same problem, in the case of intelligence research for a century, so there’s a lot, I think, that might be of use for other fields.”

The study, “Cognitive rationality is heritable and lies under general cognitive ability,” was published in the journal Intelligence.

URL: psypost.org/twin-study-suggest

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PsyPost · Twin study suggests rationality and intelligence share the same genetic rootsBy Eric W. Dolan

I'm often at a loss for words for things happening inside my body. Physical things, emotional things. I wish I could express them to you but I've not figured out how. I feel hope and despair at once. I feel alienated and overwhelming compassion for people. The words I use juxtapose them but inside me they are one. What should I call these things?
(We can talk about physical stuff another time.)
@actuallyautistic #actuallyautistic #feelings #mentalhealth #buddhism (?) #alexithymia (?)