Mental Health Quiz: Test Your Knowledge

Every year, NAMI San Diego hosts a holiday pot luck dinner and annual meeting. For last night's gathering, I put together a quiz night and acted as quiz master. I compiled questions in eight categories. These are the questions I read out in the mental health category. Let's see how you do. Answers and commentary further below ...

1 What did John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and LBJ have in common?

2 The Priory of St Mary of Bethlehem, founded in 1247, later to become Bethlehem Royal Hospital for treating lunatics, is more commonly known by this name.

3 Hippocrates and the ancient Greeks referred to “the four humors” or "temperaments". One of them literally means "black bile." Name the temperament.

4 What did Christopher Columbus, Michelangelo, and Isaac Newton have in common?

5 Emil Kraepelin back in the early 20th century described a condition he called “dementia praecox." Today, we know dementia praecox by this name.

6 Between 1907 and 1939, more than 30,000 individuals with mental illness in the US were subjected to this procedure.

7 The 1949 Nobel Prize in Medicine went to António Egas Moniz for developing this treatment for the mentally ill.

8 NAMI was founded by parents who got sick of being blamed for their kids' mental illness. Psychiatry even had a label for these horrible parents. Name the label.

9 Robert Spitzer, the most influential psychiatrist you never heard of, is the man responsible for the modern version of this text, which we quote from all the time.

10 Eric Kandel, Arvid Carlsson, and Paul Greengard shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in medicine for their discoveries concerning "signal transduction in the nervous system." This is a fancy name for brain cells talking to each other. What's the scientific name for brain cell?

Answers

1 US Presidents with mood disorders. (A Duke University study reports that nearly half of the US Presidents had something diagnosable.)

2 Bedlam.

3 Melancholia. (The other three: Choleric, Phlegmatic, and Sanguine.)

4 Bipolar. (That's right, world. We give you the gift of civilization and how do you thank us? You marginalize us. Sorry we couldn't find America sooner for you, by the way.)

5 Schizophrenia. (Dementia praecox suggested a steadily deteriorating brain, but we know recovery is possible.)

6 Sterilization. (Those with mental illness were deemed a menace to the gene pool.)

7. The prefrontal lobotomy. (Some 40,000 lobotomies were performed in the US.)

8. Schizophrenogenic. (The label is as stupid as the reasoning behind it.)

9. DSM - Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. (A piece of fiction put out by the American Psychiatric Association.)

10. Neuron. (I have a theory that neurons only work with coffee. I hope I don't have to share my Nobel Prize money with anybody.)