Privacy versus student health, campus safety

Today's Wall Street Journal includes an article entitled "Bucking Privacy Concerns, Cornell Acts as Watchdog."

The Virginia Tech shootings have moved campus safety to the top of university administrators' priorities.

Is Cornell creating a safe environment, or an environment of busy-bodies? Maybe a little of both, but there's not doubt the new approach has helped some students. Here are some excerpts from the article:

For 19 years as a custodian at Cornell University, Sue Welch has been taking out the garbage and mopping the floors of residence halls. Recently, she added a new responsibility: trying to prevent student suicide.

Ms. Welch noticed during a recent semester that she was repeatedly having to clean up after a particular student's apparent bouts of nausea, and told her supervisor she feared the young woman had an eating disorder. The supervisor told the residence-hall director, who encouraged the student to go to the university health center. Counselors there arranged for her to get treatment for bulimia nervosa. Ms. Welch credits the training sessions that she and other custodians attended on how to spot students with mental-health problems....

[Cornell University's] "alert team" of administrators, campus police and counselors meets weekly to compare notes on signs of student emotional problems. People across campus, from librarians to handymen, are trained to recognize potentially dangerous behavior. And starting this year, Cornell is taking advantage of a rarely used legal exception to student-privacy rights: It is assuming students are dependents of their parents, allowing the school to inform parents of concerns without students' permission....

By 2002, the executive director of Cornell's health center, Janet Corson-Rikert, began making mental health a communitywide responsibility. The 1999 shootings at Columbine High School had shocked educators into recognizing the danger of failing to spot troubled students. Like most colleges, Cornell was starting to see more students enrolled with severe mental-health problems, as reduced stigma and improved medications allowed more of them to reach college. The counseling center was often overwhelmed with demand for appointments.

Dr. Corson-Rikert asked Dr. [Timothy] Marchell [director of mental-health initiatives] and others to build a network to train people to notice problems and give them ways to report them, while still respecting student privacy. An advisory council on mental-health strategies made up of Cornell staff, faculty and student leaders had its first meeting in early 2004, and members had a realization: In school post-mortems after tragedies, "each person knew pieces of the story but no one saw the whole picture," says Dr. Marchell. "If they had shared the information, maybe we could have intervened."

Dr. Marchell spoke with several suicide-prevention organizations, who pointed the school to a surprising model: the Air Force.

In the 1990s, the service decided to try to reduce suicides by airmen and studied each case for warning signs. They learned to look at behavior changes, discipline problems and poor performance ratings as possible indicators of depression. Four-star generals began to talk publicly about mental illness and encourage all service members to watch for warning signs. Each member of the Air Force is now given training in detecting depression and other mental disorders. The Air Force's protocol is one of few suicide-prevention programs proven effective: The average annual suicide rate dropped by a third, from 13.5 per 100,000 people to 9.9.

Books I'm reviewing for real publications

I'm reviewing The Book of Vice: Very Naughty Things (And How to do Them), by NPR's Peter Sagal, for DoubleThink, the quarterly magazine published by America's Future Foundation in D.C. The review should appear in the Winter 2008 edition. You can visit the magazine's Web page at http://www.affdoublethink.com/. AFF also has an online-only publication called Brainwash, which you can find at http://www.affbrainwash.com/.

I'm also reviewing a slightly denser book: Brain, Mind, and Human Behavior in Contemporary Cognitive Science: Critical Assessments of the Philosophy of Psychology, by Jeff Coulter and Wes Sharrock. This review will appear in the March 2008 edition of Appraisal: The Journal of the Society for Post-Critical and Personalist Studies. You can visit the SPCPS Web site at http://www.spcps.org.uk/.

Meanwhile, at LiturgicalCredo.com, I will soon post a book review of Praying with Beads: Daily Prayers for the Christian Year by Nan Lewis Doerr and Virginia Stem Owens.

Neurofeedback gets into the toy market

Just as my family has become convinced of the value of neurofeedback, the science behind it is being used to create a new generation of toys -- perhaps the most "interactive" toys ever.

My wife, daughter, and I have have benefited from sessions with neurofeedback, a clinical process that trains the mind to rewire itself to overcome attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, anxiety, and a host of other struggles. When an individual has one of these problems, it is sometimes due to a clustering of the brain's electrical patterns in one area, rather than a more typical distribution. These electrical patterns are observable through electroencephalographic brain imaging.

I was skeptical when my wife and daughter began going to neurofeedback sessions, but then I observed their progress. I especially considered my daughter's progress, and figured a six-year-old couldn't be faking consistent improvements in emotional stability and comprehension of her school work.

My daughter sometimes watches movies during neurofeedback sessions. With gentle clips on her ears and a sensor on her head (attached with a conductive medical paste), she relaxes and focuses on the screen. When her attention laps or she tenses up, the movie frame might shrink, or the sound might stop. She learns how to focus and relax, reinforcing the accompanying electrical patterns in the brain, thus keeping the full movie experience. In my experience, I usually have a video-game style image of a race car on a track. The more focused and relaxed I am, the faster the car goes around the track.

Lately I've been seeing news articles about NeuroSky, a California company that is tapping the brain's electrical waves to control toys. This one is from News.com.au:

In California, a life-sized Darth Vader stalks the beige cubicles of a Silicon Valley office, complete with ominous black mask, cape and light sabre.

It isn't a man in a silly costume. It's a prototype, years in the making, of a toy that incorporates brain wave-reading technology.

Behind the mask is a sensor that touches the user's forehead and reads the brain's electrical signals. It then sends them to a wireless receiver inside the sabre which in turn lights up when the user is concentrating.

The player maintains focus by channelling thoughts on any fixed mental image or by thinking specifically about keeping the light sword on. When the mind wanders, the wand goes dark.

Engineers at NeuroSky have big plans for brainwave-reading toys and video games.

(Read the full story at http://www.news.com.au/entertainment/story/0,23663,21711660-7486,00.html?from=public_rss .)

The psychologist we see for our sessions said many in the U.S. medical community remain skeptical of the clinical value of neurofeedback.

However, an article in the January 2007 edition of the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry said that studies have shown that neurofeedback has produced "performance improvements in real-life conditions," as well as "improved cognitive and behavioral variables" in children with ADHD. The article was written by researchers at two Germany universities.

For my own testimony, I'll just say my organizational abilities are improving and my ability to focus on my studies (without my mind wandering) has improved.

-Colin Burch