Symptoms – Book and Author News https://bookandauthornews.com Literature in The News Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:43:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=7.0 ‘Badass’ Salman Rushdie says he doesn’t have PTSD symptoms after 2022 attack | Salman Rushdie https://bookandauthornews.com/badass-salman-rushdie-says-he-doesnt-have-ptsd-symptoms-after-2022-attack-salman-rushdie/ https://bookandauthornews.com/badass-salman-rushdie-says-he-doesnt-have-ptsd-symptoms-after-2022-attack-salman-rushdie/#respond Mon, 03 Nov 2025 11:43:46 +0000 https://bookandauthornews.com/badass-salman-rushdie-says-he-doesnt-have-ptsd-symptoms-after-2022-attack-salman-rushdie/ Salman Rushdie says he has been free of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder despite almost dying from being stabbed during an attempted assassination in 2022, prompting his therapist to humorously conclude that it’s because the famed novelist is a “badass”. Rushdie shared the lighthearted anecdote during an interview aired Sunday morning by CBS News […]

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Salman Rushdie says he has been free of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder despite almost dying from being stabbed during an attempted assassination in 2022, prompting his therapist to humorously conclude that it’s because the famed novelist is a “badass”.

Rushdie shared the lighthearted anecdote during an interview aired Sunday morning by CBS News in which he discussed his new fictional story collection titled The Eleventh Hour – while also revisiting the attack at a literary gathering in western New York state that left him blind in his right eye.

The interviewer, Martha Teichner, told Rushdie that she was struck by how he seemed neither bitter nor angry about the stabbing that ultimately resulted in a lengthy prison sentence for his convicted attacker. She said: “Most people would say … this is a clear recipe for a life with PTSD,” yet he had published a 2024 memoir about the assault – Knife – and now had followed up with The Eleventh Hour.

“Well, I do have a therapist, and I asked him at one point to list for me the symptoms of PTSD,” Rushdie replied, in his characteristically soft-spoken tone. “And I said, ‘But I don’t seem to be having those symptoms, so what’s wrong with me?’

“And he said, ‘Well, it’s because you’re a badass – that’s the technical term.’”

The attack on the Indian-born British American author occurred more than 35 years after he was first subjected to a death warrant, or fatwa, by Iranian religious leaders who were upset at his depiction of Islam in his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses.

Rushdie was on stage lecturing at the Chautauqua Institution amphitheater when Hadi Matar – aiming to fulfill the fatwa – stabbed him in the head, neck, torso and left hand, resulting in critical injuries to his right eye, liver and intestines. The damage to Rushdie’s right eye was permanent and left him unable to see out of it, even as he substantially recovered from many of the other wounds.

Matar was found guilty in February of attempted murder and later received a 25-year prison sentence. He was also sentenced to seven years for wounding the moderator of Rushdie’s lecture, Ralph Henry Reese.

On Sunday, Rushdie made clear that Matar’s actions did indeed change some aspects of his life. A notable one is that previously he refused to read books on computer tablets – but does so now.

“I do find that I use iPads in a way that I never used to … because there’s light” on their screens, Rushdie said. “I can adjust the size of the type. I never read a book on an iPad, but now I do.”

He also said that “for public facing things there has to be security in a way that there wasn’t” in the years before his stabbing by Matar.

Rushdie has been a naturalized US citizen since 2016, the year Donald Trump won the first of his two presidencies. After Trump’s second presidency began in January, his administration has sought to deport as many immigrants from the US as possible.

Teichner asked Rushdie if the feeling he had when he became an American citizen had “become fractured or altered based on what’s happened since, both in public life in the [US] and to you”.

Rushdie acknowledged it was “a hard time in America” before adding: “If you think of countries as people, there is their better self and their less good self. And it would be nice if this country were to remember its better self.”



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]]> https://bookandauthornews.com/badass-salman-rushdie-says-he-doesnt-have-ptsd-symptoms-after-2022-attack-salman-rushdie/feed/ 0 Noninvasively Stimulating Deep Brain Areas to Treat Depression Symptoms https://bookandauthornews.com/noninvasively-stimulating-deep-brain-areas-to-treat-depression-symptoms/ https://bookandauthornews.com/noninvasively-stimulating-deep-brain-areas-to-treat-depression-symptoms/#respond Fri, 07 Jun 2024 20:50:25 +0000 https://bookandauthornews.com/noninvasively-stimulating-deep-brain-areas-to-treat-depression-symptoms/ June 5, 2024 • Research Highlight Changes in brain activity are known contributors to the risk for depression. Can altering the activity between brain areas also offer a treatment for this common but serious mood disorder? A neuroimaging study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health explored whether a brain stimulation therapy known as […]

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• Research Highlight

Changes in brain activity are known contributors to the risk for depression. Can altering the activity between brain areas also offer a treatment for this common but serious mood disorder?

A neuroimaging study funded by the National Institute of Mental Health explored whether a brain stimulation therapy known as repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) could target regions deep in the brain via their surface connections. The study offers new evidence that stimulating deeper brain areas can reduce depression symptoms and identifies a possible target for improved depression treatment.

What area of the brain did the researchers look at?

Researchers led by Desmond Oathes, Ph.D. , and Kristin Linn, Ph.D. , at the Center for Brain Imaging and Stimulation (CBIS)  at the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine studied an area of the brain called the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex, or sgACC.

Located in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the sgACC is important for regulating difficult emotions like sadness and anxiety and has been linked to the risk for depression and other mood disorders. It is part of an emotion-related brain network that includes other sites in the prefrontal cortex. In previous studies, people with depression were more likely to improve if rTMS was applied to prefrontal sites highly connected to the sgACC, spotlighting that connection as a promising target for rTMS treatment.

How did the researchers treat depression?

artist depiction of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation

Illustration of rTMS.

rTMS is a precise and noninvasive brain stimulation tool used to treat depression and other mental disorders. Brain stimulation therapies can play a critical role when other depression treatments like medication and therapy have not worked.

rTMS can only directly stimulate the outer layers of the brain. However, brain regions are highly connected, allowing them to support complex functions like emotion. It also suggests that reaching deeper brain areas, such as the sgACC, might be possible by stimulating surface areas linked to them. To accomplish this, researchers have used imaging techniques like functional MRI (fMRI) to guide rTMS to deeper subcortical brain regions.

In a prior study , the research team used rTMS to successfully target the amygdala—a deep brain area linked to anxiety and fear. However, the antidepressant effects of rTMS are not fully understood, and researchers have yet to determine the brain areas to target for the greatest clinical improvement.

What did the researchers do in this study?

Thirty-six adults (18–54 years) diagnosed with depression and not taking any psychiatric medications participated in this study. In an initial session, the researchers used fMRI to map each participant’s connection from the prefrontal cortex to the sgACC. They used that data to determine the exact stimulation site for each participant’s rTMS treatment to target their sgACC.

All participants then completed three days of rTMS treatment sessions. Before and after treatment, participants completed a short round of rTMS, followed by single pulses of TMS during an fMRI brain scan. Taking the unique step of stimulating the brain with TMS while fMRI data were being recorded allowed the researchers to capture the brain’s response to rTMS and how it changed during treatment.

Clinicians also rated participants’ depression symptoms before and after the rTMS sessions to determine if their symptoms improved and, if so, whether that improvement was related to their sgACC response.

Image 1: Illustration of brain with blue and red circles to indicate functional connectivity peaks to the sgACC and amygdala, respectively, for individual participants. Image 2: Two rTMS coils connected to the front of the brain to indicate where they were applied to target the sgACC and amygdala.

Image 1: Circles represent regional functional connectivity peaks for individual participants using their baseline fMRI brain scan to guide where the rTMS coil was placed. Image 2: Coils indicate the scalp locations where the rTMS was applied. S is the subgenual cingulate target. A is the amygdala target. Credit: Oathes et al., Nature Mental Health.

Did the rTMS treatment change the sgACC response or depression symptoms?

The researchers successfully used rTMS to stimulate the sgACC via its connections to surface brain areas. This finding indicates that fMRI can be used to guide rTMS to deeper brain regions.

After the 3-day rTMS treatment, participants’ depression symptoms improved by 34%, and their anxiety symptoms improved by 32%. This change in symptoms corresponded to changes in sgACC activity, establishing a therapeutic role for rTMS in treating depression through this pathway.

Importantly, the change in depression symptoms was predicted by the initial sgACC response to TMS in the scanner. Participants with a stronger negative sgACC response to rTMS at pre-treatment went on to have a larger decrease in depression symptoms at post-treatment. The pre-treatment sgACC response was not related to the change in anxiety symptoms, suggesting the specificity of this pathway to depression.

A larger improvement in depression symptoms was also associated with a more positive (indicating a weaker) post-treatment sgACC response. Consistent with previous studies, the researchers propose that a weakening of the connection from the prefrontal cortex to the sgACC had a beneficial effect on depression symptoms in this sample of adults with the disorder.

What do the results of this study mean?

This study offers critical insight into how rTMS engages neural circuits in the brain to contribute to depression improvement, emphasizing an important link between the location of brain stimulation and the change in depression symptoms. Notably, the researchers targeted and modulated the depression-related brain circuit using a safe, noninvasive means in both fMRI and rTMS.

According to the researchers, the findings are some of the strongest evidence to date that subgenual connectivity in the brain is a marker of antidepressant response. The identified pathway from the sgACC to the prefrontal cortex responded to rTMS and provided fast-acting relief from depression symptoms. Incorporating fMRI-based brain mapping into rTMS sessions could make it possible to map outer brain areas accessible by rTMS to then stimulate deeper regions underlying depression and other disorders. This could eventually lead to more personalized or effective treatments for many mental disorders.

Although still preliminary, the possible clinical implications of this study are broad. A next step for the researchers is to replicate the findings in larger clinical trials of diverse people with and without depression and in people diagnosed with other mental disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Knowing that numerous brain areas and networks play a role in the clinical effects of rTMS, the researchers also plan to examine other brain areas to enhance the treatment and better understand when, how, and for whom rTMS works best.

Reference

Oathes, D. J., Duprat, R. J.-P., Reber, J., Liang, X., Scully, M., Long, H., Deluisi, J. A., Sheline, Y. I., & Linn, K. A. (2023). Non-invasively targeting, probing and modulating a deep brain circuit for depression alleviation. Nature Mental Health, 1, 1033–1042. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44220-023-00165-2 

Grants

MH120811 , MH116920 , MH109991 



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