Is attempted suicide an offense?

The English poet William Ernest Henley wrote: “I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.” However, Hamlet's dilemma of “to be or not to be” faces many a soul in times of distress, agony and suffering, when the question asked is “to die or not to die”. If the decision were to die and the same is implemented to its fructification resulting in death that is the end of the matter, the dead is relieved of the agony, pain and suffering and no evil consequences known to our law follow. But if the person concerned were unfortunate to survive, the attempt to commit suicide becomes punishable with imprisonment and fine under Section 309 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC). Petitions have assailed the validity of Section 309 IPC praying time and again to declare the section void. On the other hand, euthanasia and physician assisted suicide have become prominent public issues in many countries over the past few years. Several countries or regions of countries have debated legislation on euthanasia and/or physician assisted suicide. Although there is growing public acceptance of physician-assisted deaths all over the world, many professional organizations remain opposed to it. Most of the debates on the issue are usually framed as issues of morality while many basic empirical questions remain unanswered. This paper attempts to examine the causes and consequences of attempted and completed suicide.     

Bilingualism and Lexical Representation

Forty-eight Hindi-English bilinguals completed two blocks of trials where each trial involved presentation of a letter string requiring a lexical decision. In the first block subjects were exposed to 22 words and 11 non-words in either English or Hindi. In the second block the original words were repeated in either the same language or in the alternative language. In this block the old (repeated) words were mixed with 22 new words, and 22 non-words. Twelve subjects were included in each of the four groups given by the factorial combination of blocks and languages. Reaction time in the lexical decision task was facilitated when words were repeated in the same language (109 and 125 ms in the English-English and Hindi-Hindi groups respectively), but little or no facilitation was observed in the inter-lingual conditions (-22 and 23 ms in the Hindi-English and English-Hindi conditions respectively). The results support the view that lexical representation in bilinguals is language-specific.     

The role of fear-relevant stimuli in visual search: a comparison of phylogenetic and ontogenetic stimuli

It has been argued that phylogenetic fear-relevant stimuli elicit preattentive capture of attention. To distinguish between fear relevance and time of appearance in evolutionary history, the authors compare phylogenetic and ontogenetic fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli in a visual search task. The authors found no evidence for a special role of phylogenetic fear-relevant stimuli; it seems that fear relevance in general is more important than is the evolutionary age. The pattern of results indicates that attention toward threatening stimuli is mainly affected by a late component that prolongs the disengagement of attention.     

Mending the Broken Frame: Self-Narration in a Constructionist Framework

The communal construction of mental illness makes recovery a daunting challenge since society largely perceives the psychiatrically ill as ??deficient??. Not only does one have to deal with the illness itself, one additionally has to deal with the perpetual stigma associated with the labeling, increasing the personal consequences of these illnesses. In my own journey through mental illness, I have repeatedly tried to construct for myself those structures which would help me become stable and empower me from within rather than rob me of my sense of self. This paper is a small expression of that narrative.     

Impaired associative taste learning and abnormal brain activation in kinase-defective eEF2K mice

Memory consolidation is defined temporally based on pharmacological interventions such as inhibitors of mRNA translation (molecular consolidation) or post-acquisition deactivation of specific brain regions (systems level consolidation). However, the relationship between molecular and systems consolidation are poorly understood. Molecular consolidation mechanisms involved in translation initiation and elongation have previously been studied in the cortex using taste-learning paradigms. For example, the levels of phosphorylation of eukaryotic elongation factor 2 (eEF2) were found to be correlated with taste learning in the gustatory cortex (GC), minutes following learning. In order to isolate the role of the eEF2 phosphorylation state at Thr-56 in both molecular and system consolidation, we analyzed cortical-dependent taste learning in eEF2K (the only known kinase for eEF2) ki mice, which exhibit reduced levels of eEF2 phosphorylation but normal levels of eEF2 and eEF2K. These mice exhibit clear attenuation of cortical-dependent associative, but not of incidental, taste learning. In order to gain a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms, we compared brain activity as measured by MEMRI (manganese-enhanced magnetic resonance imaging) between eEF2K ki mice and WT mice during conditioned taste aversion (CTA) learning and observed clear differences between the two but saw no differences under basal conditions. Our results demonstrate that adequate levels of phosphorylation of eEF2 are essential for cortical-dependent associative learning and suggest that malfunction of memory processing at the systems level underlies this associative memory impairment.