Because Celebrity Health Week was winding down, we didn’t have Saturday Sanity last Saturday.
Let’s see if we can get caught up, shall we?

This week at Mental Health Notes, I spent most of my time trying to get away from the topic of celebrities. I shared with you a study regarding the aroma of coffee and your brain, talked about the governor of Virginia’s decision to take a mentally ill inmate off death row, updated you on Pfizer’s defense of Chantix, discussed a study involving heavy marijuana use and brain size, and discussed another study involving the similarities in the brains …read more

Mary Jane and the Brain are making the news again.
According to an Australian study, people who heavily smoke marijuana for a long period of time are not only putting themselves at risk for the onset of psychosis and schizophrenia-like symptoms and lung cancer, but they’re also putting two important parts of their brains at risk for shrinkage.
The hippocampus, which regulates memory and emotion, and the amygdala, which plays a role in fear and aggression, were both smaller in the men who smoked “at least five marijuana cigarettes daily for on average 20 years.”
These men also earned lower scores during verbal …read more