Protocol Psychological Adaptiveness to Critical Events (PACE), 2023, University of Oslo

Sly Saint

Senior Member (Voting Rights)
Psychological Adaptiveness to Critical Events: an introduction to the PACE study

Clinical psychologist and Visiting Fellow Omid V. Ebrahimi discusses his work here in Oxford and the study he co-leads in Norway – one of the largest of its kind globally.

WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE IN OXFORD?
I am currently three months into a visiting fellowship with the Oxford Precision Psychiatry lab, working on understanding individual differences in how symptoms of depression impact each other over time to obtain a more person-specific understanding of major depressive disorder. It is a pleasure to work with Andrea Cipriani and witness at first-hand the extraordinary work conducted by my lab mates. I am greatly appreciative of how my skills are developing here.



WHAT DOES YOUR WORK IN NORWAY FOCUS ON?

I am the co-principal investigator, alongside Sverre Johnson, Asle Hoffart and Marieke Helmich, of the Psychological Adaptiveness to Critical Events (PACE) study. This is a large-scale, nationally representative longitudinal investigation which is set to monitor the mental health of Norwegian adults over the next 15 years, until 2038.

The study aims to examine the impact of personal and contextual events on an (inter)national scale, such as loss, economic recession and infectious disease outbreaks, on the development of common mental health disorders, with a particular emphasis on depression and anxiety.

To date, PACE has recruited more than 15,000 adults, of which 3,500 participate in an ecological momentary sub-study, which involves four daily measurements for 30 days per person, resulting in a total of 420,000 observations across individuals. This makes the PACE study one of the largest investigations of its kind to date, and we are grateful to Modum Bad Psychiatric Hospital for hosting this long-term study.

Psychological Adaptiveness to Critical Events: an introduction to the PACE study — Department of Psychiatry (ox.ac.uk)



(I wonder if anyone has told him..........? although I know there is currently yet another PACE trial on radiotherapy(?))
 
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The numbers of participants preclude obtaining genomic data at the outset?

Or aren't they interested in the bio of the bio-psych-social.

to be fair I thought one big part of the answer was already known to this:

it’s about how well set-up those who go into these ‘critical events’ already are with regards a decent support network (NOT ‘therapy’ just do you have people to lean on who will help and get it)

and

if you are contending with other ‘critical events’ at the same time. Ie there is a limit as to whether any human can do losing their home and a bereavement and eg a change in job at the same time if they’ve only got crap people around them and no one’s going to offer to help sort any of the above just by virtue of it’s more than a one man job to sort enough fast enough to stay afloat.

bit concerned with these things that they often these days don’t separate by these known factors first
 
"Precision Psychiatry"

:facepalm:
Well, they have the location of the brain mostly correct: in the body. That's precise, other than the weird notion of separating it from the body, now that's just not precise at all.

Honestly at this point I'm not even sure if the word psychiatric even means anything other than psychiatrists may be involved, relevant or not. It used to be about behavior, then they realized the brain is where it's all at, not the heart, but it's still become a bunch of legitimate things having to do with the brain, while keeping all the old mysticism derived from behavior alone.

It's completely discrediting how the discipline is defined as dealing with mental health, but they're basically obsessed with us despite having nothing to do with that. Basically they can't even tell where their expertise applies most of the time. And I don't think there's a clearer sign of sham expertise than this.

Almost all the new age stuff about stress and fear and the other weird stuff is firmly in psychology, the only reason psychiatry is involved in this is that it's the origin of the discipline.

There are circumstances where the discipline clearly makes sense, but they're botching everything anyway by always making it about a behavioral reaction, never seem able to think that even minor effects on the brain can have huge consequences. And they still firmly reject the germ theory of disease in most circumstances. They literally made generic worrying worse than a pathogen chewing through parts of our brains and injuring other organs. That's just mindless nonsense.

The more I look at medicine, and the more I see a profession that needs a full reset in how it's defined, its specialties and who is responsible for what. Medicine has the most gigantic "technical debt" of all the expert professions. Just looking at how they stick with old bizarre naming schemes and can't seem able to update even that because the entire training is based on memorization.

And to think that one of the most significant impacts of AI in medicine will be to inject humanity into it. We need machines to get humane treatment and basic competence, free of logical fallacies and irrational beliefs. Absurd disaster.
 
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