Mental Health

By Tom McLaughlin A growing number of adolescents are going untreated for major depression nationwide over the past several years, warranting enhanced educational, policy, and service capacity efforts, according to a new Rutgers University–Camden study. Females, older adolescents, and those from single-mother households may be at greatest risk of depression among adolescents ages 12 to 17 nationwide, says Wenhua Lu, an assistant professor of childhood studies at Rutgers University–Camden, who conducted the study. “Data also shows that adolescents with less authoritative parents are especially susceptible to major depression and less likely to receive treatments and medication,” says Lu. The Rutgers–Camden researcher examines the national trends in the prevalence, risk factors, and treatment of depression among adolescents, and investigates disparities in their mental health service use in the United States, in her new study to be published in the January 2019 issue of the American ...

Despite the suffering caused by bipolar disorder – also known as manic depression –  a significant minority of patients actually want to keep it because of the creative highs it gives them, according to new research from University of Manchester psychologists. In the online survey of 103 people, 26 of them would want to keep their Bipolar Disorder –  in which they experience deep depression but at other times euphoria. TV personality Stephen Fry’s own experiences were highlighted in his 2006 documentary ‘ The secret life of a manic depressive ’.Of  the people he interviewed with the condition, most, he said, would not ‘ push a button’  to remove their Bipolar Disorder Like Fry’s documentary, The Manchester study showed that people who see bipolar disorder as part of their personal identity, were less likely to want to fully recover from it. Yet, unlike the observations of Fry, the majority of respondents in the Manchester study (77 of them) did want their disord...

There’s nothing like quick escalation, especially in the form of song. From fighting through the clouds of depression to waking up in bed alone after a gratifying ménage à trois, ROLE MODEL —real name— Tucker Pillsbury holds our hands through a day and a night in his shoes. Simple stripped down and pleasant in its delivery, ‘six speed’ is a well-written song with complexity and profundity of thought. The part of the track that split me in half were his lines about pretty people. Please, I am no psychotherapy expert or psychologist, but I think the small groups of people with symmetrical faces and undeniable beauty, suffer from irregular pressures the everyday person may never experience. Here’s why, and I think we see a form of it everyday online whether a celebrity or a beautiful person is involved. An ordinary person usually thinks a famous, rich or a stunning person is without problems and carefree. I’m sure media has a huge responsibility in that, but if they ever look like the...

As we near the end of November and officially approach winter, it’s important that we consider the seasonal blues that causes our moods to drop with the temperature. The sun is setting earlier, the snow is falling and leaves are hanging on to their last hope. For some of us, this is the most beautiful time of the year, but for others, the fall and winter can really begin to take a toll on our minds. By this time every year, many of us have already began to experience symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder with Seasonal Patterns. Changes in mood, feeling tired, and high calorie cravings are some of the obvious signs to look out for. Major Depressive Disorder with Seasonal Patterns (formerly known as Seasonal Affective Disorder, or SAD) can really cause our moods to drop with the temperatures. According to the DSM V, a general diagnosis can be characterized by a person experiencing recurrent episodes of depressed moods in late fall and winter. These moods typically alternate with period...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] Features associated with synchronized TMS outcomes in MDD | Depression and Anxiety    MD Linx Internal Medicine Article: Predictors of response to synchronized transcranial magnetic stimulation for major depressive disorder. https://ift.tt/2Q2SPdi

BATH — Steuben County is in the middle of reassessing its health priorities for the future, as it puts together a new Community Health Improvement Plan. The 2016-2018 plan focused on reducing childhood obesity and smoking rates and increasing access to treatment of chronic diseases. A meeting with program partners next month will measure progress and begin the formation of a new plan for 2019-2021. A report outlining progress in 2017 is posted at the Steuben County Public Health website. However, missing from the current community plan is expanding mental health access. Many counties named it as their top priority in their last round of plans. Lorelei Wagner, the Steuben County Public Health Community educator, attributed its failure to appear as a top priority to a lack of public input and the delegation of responsibilities that puts mental health services under the purview of the Department of Community Services. "For the last (plan) it was included as well, but because of...

November 29, 2018 Share this content: Medical students experience a significantly elevated risk for depression, suicidality, and burnout during their education, even if they matriculate in relatively good health. Medical students experience a significantly elevated risk for depression, suicidality, and burnout during their education, even if they are in relatively good health when they enroll in medical school. 1 In a perspective article published in the New England Journal of Medicine, investigators described their success in implementing mental health services for enrollees. 2 Jordan F. Karp, MD, and Arthur S. Levine, MD, of the University of Pittsburgh Department of Psychiatry, shared details of the University's “dedicated medical student mental health care team.” The team is financially supported by the medical school to provide mental health care for all students: 560 medical students and 360 graduate students. The budget provides the staff psychiatrist with 30% salar...

GERING — For the past six months, former consumers at the Panhandle Health Group have successfully transitioned to services at the Community Action Partnership of Western Nebraska. CAPWN is one of several organizations around the Panhandle who have been working to accommodate consumers after PHG closed its doors on June 30. The majority of the services PHG provided were picked up by CAPWN, which also has the capabilities to provide a wide range of other services, including dental and medical services. From PHG, CAPWN has taken on intensive outpatient services, outpatient substance abuse services, continuing care, medication management, mental health services, the crisis line and several other services. “The crisis line is the big one people don’t know we have,” said Gage Stermensky, director of behavioral health. Several providers from PHG were hired at CAPWN and brought many of their consumers with them. With the new mental health services available, CAPWN has received a mix of ...

TEMPO.CO , Jakarta - A mental health doctor at the Soeharto Heerdjan Mental Hospital (RSJ) said that long-term pornography addiction can affect behavior disorder and can result in severe mental disorder. The Head of the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Installation at Soeharto Heerdjan Mental Hospital, Dr. Suzy Yusna Dewi Sp.KJ (K)., said that short-term pornography addiction to children can cause behavior disorder. “Pornography damages brain function which results in behavior and emotional disorders. Over time, it will cause brain structure disorders and brain damage,” Suzy said. Suzy said a patient in Soeharto Heerdjan Hospital, who was still in junior high school, threatened to upload a pornography video of himself and his girlfriend on social media to silence his girlfriend. The immoral act that was actually done at home and has been repeated many times began with the patient’s addiction to pornographic content he often saw. “This is included as a mental disorder and t...

It has been well-documented that college students experience high levels of mental health problems. And a number of risk factors for mental health problems have been identified, including family histories of mental illness, personality tendencies toward neuroticism , stressors involving finances, academic performance and living arrangements, unhealthy life styles and substance misuse, poor coping, minority status and perceptions of mistreatment and others. These make sense given our understanding of how depression and anxiety develop. But a vulnerability factor that has not received much attention in the literature is choice of major. Do the various college majors differ in terms of how vulnerable individuals are to experiencing mental health problems? Sarah Ketchen Lipson and colleagues used the data from the large Healthy Minds Study and compared college majors on prevalence of mental health problems and treatment utilization. They found significant and substantial differen...

Alkermes Plc ALKS, -3.06% announced positive results Thursday for a trial of its ALKS 3831 treatment for schizophrenia. The Phase 3 trial dubbed Enlighten-2 was designed to evaluate the treatment's favorable weight profile compared to olanzapaine, an antipsychotic agent that has been shown to be effective in treating the disease, but limited in clinical use because it causes patients to gain a lot of weight. ALKS 3831 met its primary endpoint of lower weight gain from baseline at six months. The company is now planning to submit a New Drug Application to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in mid-2019. "Significant unmet patient need remains in schizophrenia despite the number of treatment options available. A new agent that offers the robust efficacy of olanzapine but with a favorable weight profile that stabilizes within weeks of treatment initiation would be an important and differentiated addition to the treatment armamentarium for schizophrenia," said Christoph C...

November 27, 2018 Share this content: Investigators examined motion-processing deficits in the etiology of schizophrenia and attenuated psychosis. Impaired motion processing in patients with schizophrenia is associated with deficits in cognitive and emotion detection processes, per study data published in The American Journal of Psychiatry . Patients with schizophrenia (n=63) and patients with attenuated psychosis (n=32) were recruited from the Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research and the New York State Psychiatric Institute at Columbia University in New York City. Healthy volunteers of similar age to the schizophrenia group (n=44) and healthy volunteers of similar age to the attenuated psychosis group (n=23) were recruited from the surrounding communities. Continue Reading Below Participants responded to 3 visual simulation paradigms: behavioral, electroencephalogram (EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) methods. For the behavioral motion disc...

Your brain is always working. Even as you’re lying still, thinking of nothing in particular, blood is rushing oxygen to different areas of your brain, creating a network of activity. Through brain imaging, researchers can watch this resting activity rise and fall in different regions. Some areas will fluctuate together, like pairs of dancers moving to the same beat. These patterns of synchronized activity form what researchers refer to as resting state networks, said  Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli , a neuroscientist at Northeastern. “It has turned out that these are very informative and can predict things like clinical outcome.” Resting state networks can vary from person to person. In a study  published earlier this month, Whitfield-Gabrieli and her colleagues found that one particular pattern may be an early sign of schizophrenia. Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli has found that a particular pattern of brain activity may be an early sign of schizophrenia. Photo by Adam Glanzman/Northe...

November 27, 2018 Share this content: The risk for very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis increases with age, migration, and traumatic life events. The risk for very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis increases with age, migration, and traumatic life events, according to an epidemiologic study published in  Schizophrenia Bulletin . Researchers analyzed data from the Psychiatry Sweden database to create a cohort of individuals aged 60 years or older. The study researchers then followed the participants until immigration, psychotic disorder diagnosis, death, or the end of the follow-up time frame and identified the prevalence and potential risk factors of very late-onset schizophrenia-like psychosis. Data on general demographics, gestational risk exposure, region of birth, socioeconomic status, social isolation, and death of a partner or child were collected from several databases, including Longitudinal Integration Database for Health Insurance and Labour Market St...

BATH — Steuben County is in the middle of reassessing its health priorities for the future, as it puts together a new Community Health Improvement Plan. The 2016-2018 plan focused on reducing childhood obesity and smoking rates and increasing access to treatment of chronic diseases. A meeting with program partners next month will measure progress and begin the formation of a new plan for 2019-2021. A report outlining progress in 2017 is posted at the Steuben County Public Health website. However, missing from the current community plan is expanding mental health access. Many counties named it as their top priority in their last round of plans. Lorelei Wagner, the Steuben County Public Health Community educator, attributed its failure to appear as a top priority to a lack of public input and the delegation of responsibilities that puts mental health services under the purview of the Department of Community Services. "For the last (plan) it was included as well, but because of...

Homeless, bewildered, miserable, addicted and sometimes violent: The ranks of the mentally ill are swelling, and many New Yorkers come face to face with the crisis on a daily basis. Behind it lie policy failures half a century in the making. Prior to the 1950s, our public mental-health system was composed almost exclusively of massive psychiatric institutions run by state governments. The facilities were often overcrowded, and the patients neglected and abused, which led to that approach being phased out beginning in the 1970s. In its place came outpatient-oriented mental-health care, the model we’re familiar with today; only a very few traditional psych institutions were left standing. The shift is often referred to as “deinstitutionalization.” Most New Yorkers are familiar with this history. What’s less known is that deinstitutionalization continues to this day. Under the “Transformation Plan” for New York state’s Office of Mental Health, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration has c...

LINCOLN, Neb. (KOLN) - The holidays are a happy time for many but for some, they can be challenging. Lincoln Police say every Winter they see an increase in mental health related calls and this year has been no different. When Winter rolls around, the 911 Dispatch Center lets their employees know- a tough time is coming. Every year around the holidays LPD sees a large increase in the number of mental health calls, specifically from those who are suicidal. "The people that work here we let them know what to expect. That this is common for these types of calls to increase this time of year, and really just to keep in check of your own emotions and dealing with that in the healthiest way possible,” said 911 Dispatcher, Brandi Villamonte. Villamonte says from her experience, the increase has to do with cold weather, people staying in and stressing about the holidays. "I think really one of the biggest influences of these types of calls are certainly these family gatheri...

Welcome aboard the Ethics Express! At least, that’s the idea behind the NBC comedy The Good Place, which follows the trials and tribulations of four recently-deceased weirdos in the Good Place (a sort of heaven, with a surprise twist), the Bad Place (a sort of hell), and some spaces in-between. The Ethics Express is also the name of the trolley used by now-reformed Bad Place architect and literal demon Michael (Ted Danson) to bring a philosophical thought experiment to life . In the episode titled “The Trolley Experiment,” Michael gets a kick out of torturing Chidi (William Jackson Harper) by forcing him to decide between killing five people or veering right to kill just one person. A former professor of ethics and moral philosophy, Chidi is basically living out his worst nightmare , but decision-making isn’t only difficult for him in matters of life and death. Chidi, in fact, was cast into the Bad Place because of his rigidity and inability to make any decisions. Throughout the s...

Abdulla* goes to bed every night dreading that knock on the door, a knock he has heard in recurrent nightmares and in stories from neighbours. He expects it can come at any moment. He is an ethnic Uighur and has always called Xinjiang his home. His forefathers lived and toiled atop this land for centuries, which the nascent communist Chinese government annexed in 1949. He is a father of two, a son and a daughter, and a devout Muslim - cautiously performing his five prayers every day behind the veil of secrecy his home temporarily offers him.  In the past months, several of his friends and colleagues have heard that dreaded knock on their doors and in the quiet of the night, disappeared with no trace or warning. Everybody, including Abdulla, knows where they have been taken and kept. But nobody knows for how long they will be held, nor do they know if they'll ever come back home. Most are yet to return, and those who have returned are shells of their former selves, neighbourhood ...

San Antonio —  A San Antonio non-profit theater production company is trying to reach teens through the art of acting. They're performing a play this weekend that tackles everything from to drug abuse to mental illness. It's called "Don't Pity My Party" and it's all about moving forward through very dark days. "You don't have to pity us anymore because we were getting it together," said DeeDee Thompson, founder of Mz. Dee'z Productions. "It may not be what you think but we get into it together from being pitiful to be it fabulous." It's the sequel to the play, "Pity Party" which dealt with the emotional struggles that come with addiction and mental illness. "I've worked with kids for years and I was a troubled kids," Thompson explained. "So, it's like God is making me go back and do what I'm supposed to do." Many of the actors have lived through some of the issues being tackled in t...

Julie Hough can't remember a time when she didn't make art. It started when she was old enough to hold a crayon in her hand, and over time it became a way to deal with her bipolar disorder, lifting her spirits when things felt bleak. "It makes me focus on what makes me happy," said Hough, of Elgin, who these days creates vibrant drawings made of intricate geometric patterns. Hough is among about 20 artists who are clients of Ecker Center for Mental Health in Elgin and will participate in an art show Dec. 1 to Dec. 13 in the gallery of Elgin Artspace Lofts, 51 S. Spring St. in downtown Elgin. All pieces will be for sale. "Some of the stuff is exquisite and some not," said Kay Catlin, events manager for Ecker Center. "But each and every one of them -- whether they colored an outline picture or painted a literal masterpiece -- are quite proud." The agency held a successful fundraiser in September, also at Artspace, featuring clients' work...

Mental illness is a very real problem that affects many aspects of our society. In the United States, as of 2016, an estimated 10.4 million adults suffer from a serious mental illness, such as bipolar disorder or schizophrenia, for which there is no cure. One of the most complex societal aspects affected by mental illness is criminal justice. Some individuals with mental illnesses have a propensity to commit crimes because they have delusions and distorted perceptions of reality, live on the streets, or have drug and/or alcohol addictions. While these individuals should not be excused for committing a crime, they should be afforded an opportunity to have a better life by receiving treatment, rather than going in and out of jail or prison with no hope for the future. By giving these individuals a chance, we make our society a better and safer place—and that’s true for all criminals, not just those with serious mental illnesses. I recently had the opportunity to observe how the ...