The drugs do work
I found Clare Wilson’s feature on the treatment of schizophrenia very interesting (8 February, p 32). I have lived with the illness for more than 30 years. Rather than being forced to continue antipsychotic medication once I was discharged from hospital, I made a rational and I think well-thought-out decision to do so. The more recent antipsychotic drugs have fewer side effects than the older ones.
Although the article was balanced, there is something about a discussion of the treatment of mental illness that can prompt black-and-white thinking. This was true of the debate about care in the community versus hospital care, and is also the case when discussing the merits of drug therapy versus talking therapies. It is a combination of both treatments, with antipsychotics used sparingly, carefully and sensibly, that has worked best in my case. The article didn’t mention art therapy, which has also helped.
When somebody has been sectioned under the Mental Health Act, then yes there are circumstances where they can be forced to accept drug therapy. But the great majority of people with schizophrenia, like myself, aren’t forced to take medication. The delusions and hallucinations associated with the condition, as the article makes clear, are extremely distressing. I am thankful that, for me, drug therapy has been one of the important factors in controlling these symptoms and allowing some quality of life.
Edinburgh, UK
Smoke on the water
I read your article on the impact on health of the recent floods in Bristol, UK (22 February, p 7), and was reminded of a day in 1968 that no one who lived or worked in the city will forget. I was working in Bedminster, in one of the low-lying areas. It rained so much in one day that by the following morning, the place where I usually parked my motorbike was a metre deep in water. All around that area were the cigarette and cigar factories of Imperial Tobacco. As the previous day’s output was so contaminated by either rainwater or foul water, it was condemned and disposed of at the local tip.
Subsequently, as TV news footage at the time showed, scores of people invaded the tip intent on picking up as many cigarettes as they could, often coming to blows. The council quickly had to organise large bulldozers to bury the cigarettes deep in the tip.
Perhaps the use of contaminated tobacco products contributed to the level of ill health identified in the study.
North Nibley, Gloucestershire, UK
Wet future
Adam Corner’s excellent article identified the psychological and cultural challenges to enabling a rational discussion on climate change (22 February, p 28). But he mistakenly suggested that the message for communicators to send is “that more flooding is on the way for the UK if ambitious action on climate change is not forthcoming”.
Sadly, even if we were to curtail carbon emissions immediately, the planet would still get warmer due to lags in the climate system. The message is therefore more complicated and challenging. We need to invest significantly in climate adaptation to deal with the increased extreme weather the world will face over coming decades. And unless we cut carbon emissions substantially and rapidly, the weather may get so extreme that adaptation is no longer possible.
York, UK
Slug appeal
I fully support Lachlan Jones’s comments on the conservation of oft-ignored creepy crawlies (15 February, p 34). These often dull, brown, tiny and secretive critters should receive at least as much attention as the more charismatic species. After all, their place at the bottom of the ecological web means they support those more “attractive” species above. Sadly, though, they don’t have the same appeal as a pretty bird or butterfly.
One reason is that birds, butterflies and mammals have considerable aesthetic appeal: we love colour and form. Vision is our main sense, and our large brain’s cortex devotes 30 per cent of itself to dealing with vision processing, hence our focus on the charismatic species.
Hurstpierpoint, West Sussex, UK
Cull disgust
I have spent some time thinking about a response to your reporting of the culling of Marius the giraffe (15 February, p 7). Make no mistake, animal rights protesters were not the only people to be dismayed by this action. I am not an animal rights protester, nor are most of my friends and acquaintances, yet we all felt this action was barbaric and morally repugnant. Many zoos, for example, were publicly critical at the seeming lack of compassion. Marius’s subsequent public butchering was little short of an obscenity given the outcry about his death.
It would be nice if you got off what I am beginning to see as your high horse (giraffe?) and became more aligned to what I suspect are the opinions of your readers.
Welford, Northamptonshire, UK
Robot rescue
In order to reduce flooding, Hannah Cloke at the University of Reading, UK, suggests that we need to slow down the rate at which water enters our rivers (15 February, p 6). Perhaps the development of robot tractors, which 快猫短视频 has reported on over the years, could provide part of the answer.
Modern farming involves large fields, which has reduced the capacity of our agricultural land to absorb water and has accelerated soil erosion, silting up our rivers and land drains. We should consider replanting hedges to return to the smaller, more sheltered fields of the early Victorian era, but use teams of robot tractors instead of labour-intensive horse-drawn ploughs.
This will give us the environmental benefits of Victorian farming while keeping food production costs down. As a bonus, the build-up of water-holding humus in the soil will trap carbon dioxide and reduce the climate change that is aggravating our current flooding problems.
Altrincham, Cheshire, UK
Dementia debate
Mark Cox’s letter about the decline in dementia rates contains the unjustifiably broad statement that high levels of corticosteroids cause the damage in vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s (15 February, p 35). The statement has little meaning, since “corticosteroids” means steroids produced by the adrenal cortex, including adrenal androgens, mineralocorticoids, such as aldosterone, and glucocorticoids, such as cortisol.
I was involved with numerous people given high doses of glucocorticoids as an immunosuppressant or inflammation suppressant, but I never saw one develop dementia or cognitive impairment. High levels of cortisol tend to cause things like insomnia. For example, for 40 years people have searched for a causative link between glucocorticoids and depression, with mixed results.
Sidmouth, Devon, UK
Patently bad
I found David Cooper’s article on changes to European patent law illuminating (15 February, p 32). A question arises that I have never had a good answer to: if the aim is to foster invention, why do patents grant a monopoly, rather than an obligatory licensing fee so that others can use a newly patented idea or invention? If others could legally use an invention and then improve it as they saw fit, that would spawn many more breakthroughs than is likely from a single organisation that is often preoccupied with defending its patent.
What’s more, a small organisation with a great idea has a better chance of getting royalties from Megacorp for using their idea than of being able to prevent Megacorp from stealing it. I believe this approach has been used in the urgencies of wartime and worked out well. Deciding what would be a fair royalty could be tricky, but compromises here should be easier to adjudicate than the black and white of granting a monopoly.
Toronto, Canada
<i>From Frank Fahy</i>
You reported on potatoes genetically modified to resist blight (22 February, p 6). I have been growing the non-GM Hungarian variety Sarpo Mira for the past four years. Even when the potatoes in neighbouring allotment plots had severe blight in 2012, my crop stood strong and green until late in the season. It also withstood attacks by various pests better than most. You may also be interested to learn that there is a Sarpo family research station in Wales which claims to have produced a more tasty resistant strain than Sarpo Mira: I am trying it out this year.
King’s Somborne, Hampshire, UK
Broken hearts
Your thought-provoking interview with cognitive scientist and ethicist Brian D. Earp about a cure for love was good (15 February, p 27), but would have been improved by including a consideration of the various stages of grief: shock, denial, anger, bargaining or negotiation, depression and acceptance.
The lengths of these stages probably depend on a multitude of factors, such as age, health, gender and whether the couple have any children. Earp doesn’t consider at which stage of the cycle “anti-love” pills would be most effective. There is a danger that, taken at the wrong time, they might derail the process.
Name and address supplied
Cave doodles
Various explanations for the abstract patterns of dots and lines that have been found alongside cave paintings (23 November 2013, p 36) have been suggested by your readers. Modern humans also draw random patterns of dots and lines. It’s called “doodling”. I suggest that the cave artist was trying to stay awake during a very boring meeting.
B酶, Norway
Well blended
Mark Turner’s theory that humans differ from animals because they produce new ideas by blending old ones has two important issues (22 February, p 30). First, the capacity to blend ideas appears much earlier in the fossil record than the Upper Palaeolithic. Jayne Wilkins of Arizona State University has shown that hominins seemed to blend sticks and shaped stones into spears at least 500,000 years ago, which would mean that the capacity to blend is older than Homo sapiens. Secondly, Turner’s technological view of blending doesn’t include one of the most common cognitive blends in nature: deception.
Any animal that manipulates others would seem to be blending their own knowledge with the ignorance of others to produce a strategy. This type of blending seems to be widespread among modern primates, indicating that the capacity to blend is wider than Homo sapiens. If blending is older and wider than our species, it cannot qualify as the thing that separates us from animals.
Perhaps what makes blending important isn’t the fact that only we do it, but the fact that we do it so well.
London, UK
No hole
Despite articles by Lisa Grossman (8 February, p 8) and Marcus Chown (p 41) and all other stories about black holes 鈥� there are no holes in the universe. There are irregularities, pits, whirls and so on, but no holes. So I suggest the black hole needs renaming. A black pit, maybe?
Malm玫, Sweden
For the record
鈥� We were out of order to suggest bees, wasps and ants belong to the same family in our article on insect pheromones (25 January, p 17). They all belong to the same order, Hymenoptera.