Link Roundup, listening to Nirvana edition

I fail miserably every time I try to expand my listening tastes into Nirvana's whole catalog. Back in my Baptist brainwashing days, I wasn't allowed to listen to the band with the baby dick on the cover, so I missed the boat the first time around, and in 8th grade when Kurt did his thing, I was largely confused. God, those t-shirts everybody wore were just ugly as hell, and the people that wore them, on average, wore nothing else and stunk of patchouli oil, like about 40% of my high school did anyway.

The only band I'd really effectively sneaked through the decency barrier was R.E.M., just because my parents couldn't understand most of the curse words on Automatic for the People, and if you didn't listen to Nirvana or Pearl Jam in middle school, you just weren't cool (and thus, I wasn't). I only ever bought "Ten" because the girl I wanted in middle school couldn't stop talking about it.

For some reason, R.E.M, Weezer, and Radiohead, the bands I preferred instead, just weren't cool. A friend of mine who went to a local county school was called 'gay' every time he wore an R.E.M. shirt, as we'd largely found the band together (in that, ya know, heterosexual sorta way). So it goes.

So Nirvana is just weird for me. I could probably mention about 15 songs that I thought were all genius, and then anything else I ever hear by them sounds like cats scratching a chalk board. Usually there's some middle ground, but Nirvana for me is either rock-out or suck-out.

1. If benzylpiperazine is going to be the next ecstasy, its really going to have to work on some new nicknames. 'The piper' seems cute. Has anybody heard what this stuff is called on the street? The wiki articles says it's called "The Lovely" or something stupid like that in Canada. They would.
2. Stuff Medicare won't cover: carotid artery stents and vagus nerve stimulators for chronic depression. The article for the latter mentions quite a few reasons why vagus nerve stimulators aren't trusted by the psychiatry community, although its hard to think that the "implantable psychiatrist" approach might not be a valid approach someday.
3. This article suggests that girls abuse prescription drugs more than boys, and then mentions tranquilizers and antidepressants. How the hell do you abuse an antidepressant? It's like trying to abuse bread. Sure, you can make yourself sick by taking a bunch of them, and in the case of TCAs, which are rarely prescribed for adolescents, you could really hurt yourself. But chewing a pencil would be more exhilarating than dropping Prozac on the weekend. Note: I only post this article because it's a great example of the way the media can write something without actually conveying any actual information.
   
4. Penn folk say that psychotherapy can't extend the life of cancer patients. If I track down the pdf, I might plunge into this in a post on its own, since the review flies in the face of about 15 years of assumed truth.
5. Gulf War Syndrome patients have some pretty weird findings on neuroimaging compared to other Gulf War vets without symptoms. Corpus Callosum posts a quote from one of the authors being a good neurologist by frankly criticizing psychiatric illness in general:

   Study coauthor Dr. Ronald Killiany, PhD, from Boston University School of Medicine, told Medscape that these data are an "important first step for Gulf War veterans as well as the scientific community in validating the fact that so-called 'soft' neurological conditions can have a pathological basis."

   Can have a pathologic basis? Those are fighting words.
6. Oxytocin for autism? Stranger things have happened. Here's one of the best quotes I've seen in a long time from a medical journalism article:

   While it is hardly implausible that a hormone involved in orgasm would have positive effects on anyone, these findings of improvement in adults with autism given oxytocin are based on measurable changes in behavior as well as visible changes in their brains as seen through functional magnetic resonance imaging.

   Can't argue with that logic. At least, not without giggling.
   
7. Just a brief overview of bipolar disorder in kids, which may be much more common that thought, especially in those mistakenly diagnosed as ADHD.