Mental Health
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Cash shortfall hits mental health services.
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Cash shortfall hits mental health services Country United Kingdom Date 12 August 2003 Mental health services face significant financial pressures and are failing to deliver improvements for users despite mental health being a top three health priority for government, it was warned, writes Katie Leason. The warning came after research showing that 22 out of 45 trusts, which provide specialist adult mental health services had seen a reduction in their funding in 2002-3. The combined reduction amou ...
XFL Team Name Angers Mental Health Group
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Tuesday February 6 5:54 PM ET By Suzanne Rostler NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - A national medical organization is calling on the Memphis Maniax football team--part of the new XFL (news - web sites) football league--to change its name, charging that the team demeans people with mental health disorders and contributes to cruel stereotypes. The group is also asking the United States Army to withdraw their advertising support for the league, which is jointly owned by World Wrestling Federation Enterta ...
Mental health poor in rural Utah
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And doesn't look too great in urban Utah either. Mental-health problems 'severe' in rural Utah By Carey Hamilton The Salt Lake Tribune CEDAR CITY -- Imagine this scenario: A farmer in Box Elder County is close to losing thousands of acres of land that have been in his family for three generations. Alfalfa, sugar beets and cattle aren't bringing in enough money to make a profit or even keep his debtors at bay. Seeing no other way out, he slams his pickup head-on into a tractor-trailer so his fami ...
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ScienceDaily: Brain Holds Clues To Bipolar Disorder Science Daily — Looking into the brain is yielding vital clues to understanding, diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder, according to findings being presented today at the Seventh International Conference on Bipolar Disorder. Two studies, featured in a press briefing held June 7, have helped to identify novel pathways and markers for diagnosis and treatment of the disease.
The first study, presented by Husseini K. Manji, M.D., chief of the Laboratory of Molecular Pathophysiology at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), suggests that bipolar disorder arises from abnormalities in neuronal plasticity cascades – the complex machinery inside of nerve cells that regulates numerous processes inside the body. Using animal and cellular models, Dr. Manji and colleagues at NIMH showed that disruptions in these pathways resulted in many of the core symptoms of bipolar disorder and explained many other observations about ...
Mental Health Net Web Sites Serve Up Dangerous Eating Disorders Advice Parents often fail to recognize children's use of harmful venues for weight-loss tips. ADHD Children at Risk for Delinquency, Substance Abuse Children with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are more likely to have delinquency and substance use problems later on than other children their age, researchers report in the August issue of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry . Familial Aggregation Seen in Bipolar Disorder Parents of children with narrow phenotype bipolar disorder ...
Essay The Long Term Effects of Bullying "The old saying, 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never harm me' is more or less exactly backwards. For the most part, physical damage sustained in a fist fight heals readily, especially damage that is sustained during the resilient childhood years. What is far more difficult to mend is the primary wound that bullying victims suffer which is damage to their self-concepts; to their identities. Bullying is an attempt to instill fear and self-loathing. Being the repetitive target ...
Schizophrenia, Depression & Bipolar Disorder - Mental Health Detecting multiple genes, each contributing only a small effect, requires large sample sizes and powerful technologies that can associate genetic variations with disease and thereby pinpoint candidate genes from among the many genes that are expressed in the human brain. And even after human disease vulnerability genes are found, sophisticated tools will be needed to find out what activates them, what brain components they code for, and how they affect behavior. The prospect of acquiring such molecular ...
Linkage-disequilibrium studies in isolated populations capitalize on the likelihood that the susceptibility genes for a particular disorder probably came from one or a few founding members. Whether the isolation is geographic or cultural, there are fewer individuals in the community's genealogies and therefore fewer variations of the disease genes within the population. This limited variation makes the search easier. In addition, the groups of markers that surround each of these susceptibility genes are likely to have the same limited variation, which further simplifies identification.
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Left-handedness and your health Being a left-handed only caused me a couple of problems. One, from first grade all the way through college there were NO left handed desks. Remember the desks that provided a comfortable place to rest your writing arm? Lefties don't. Second it was harder to learn to knit;not impossible just a little harder. Because lefties learn how to try a little harder.... Posted By Julie : 10:15 AM ET
My left handedness made playing video games a lot easier for the longest time. But now with the Wii, many games are being made for the right hander in mind, forcing me to keep my right arm at attention as I blast away foes or swing my sword. This does not mean I will become average at games. I will excel, us southpaws have always been able to overcome the dasterdly methods of the right hand majority. Posted By Daniel Ewald : 10:17 AM ET
Veterans Sue Government Over Mental Health Services The lawsuit, which was filed by Veterans for Common Sense and Veterans United for Truth, seeks to be a nationwide class-action suit on behalf of an estimated 320,000 to 800,000 post-9/11 vets with post-traumatic stress disorder, which is commonly known as PTSD. The groups sued the department in federal court in San Francisco. Melissa Kasnitz, an attorney with Disability Rights Advocates, said that "instead of living up to this motto, the VA is abandoning disabled veterans and following a path that will lead to broken lives, homelessness and staggering social costs." ...
High-tech Diagnosis Yields Vital Clues Into Mental Illness Launched in April, the Assessment Service provides adults who have behavioral and psychiatric issues with a thorough two-week assessment, including extensive neuropsychiatric testing. The service is designed as one stop for thorough assessment for individuals who are not making adequate progress in other treatment settings, desire a second opinion, require a thorough psychiatric assessment to determine what treatment program may fit their needs or who were referred by their clinician.
Patients in the program also undergo a psychiatric evaluation, extensive neuropsychological testing, psychological testing, psychosocial evaluation, a family system study and a neurological consult. Menninger’s affiliation with Baylor College of Medicine provides patients with access to consultants in neuropsychology and neurology for help with brain disorders such as stroke, Alzheimer's disease, multiple sclerosis and traumatic brain injury.
Always online? Beware of Internet addiction disorder As many as 10 percent of Internet surfers are pathologically addicted to the Web, and although it can disrupt their lives, many doctors and mental health practitioners are unaware of the dangers, according to an article by psychiatrists at the Be'er Ya'acov Mental Health Center and Tel Aviv University. Writing in the latest issue of Harefuah, the Hebrew-langauge journal of the Israel Medical Association, Drs. Pinhas Dannon and Iulian Iancu note that Internet addiction is very similar to other addictions, such as pathological gambling, kleptomania (the uncontrollable urge to steal objects), trichotillomania ...
Blogs
Time to abandon the term mental illness - Brief Article Although nervous system disorders comprise only 1.4% of all deaths, this study estimated that they account for a remarkable 28% of all years of life lived with a disability. Moreover, much of the burden of illness due to road traffic incidents, violence, war, and falls is a consequence of nervous system dysfunction. The president of the World Federation of Neurology, James F Toole, has highlighted brain dysfunction among world leaders as one of the greatest threats to global peace, and therefore the health of populations.
In making their estimates, the GBD researchers took into account that chronic illnesses differ in their impact on people, including the differential impact resulting from the way friends, coworkers, and society at large react and respond to each illness. For example, there is little doubt that people with nervous system disorders are more likely to be subjected to discrimination and stigmatisation than people with, say, disorders of the heart and lung. Employers try to avoid hiring people with a history of nervous system disorders, and otherwise compassionate ...
Eat for mental health: The Brain Diet Eat for mental health: The Brain Diet Posted : Jul 25th 2007 10:15PM by Martha Edwards Filed under: General Health There's lots of talk about doing good things for your heart, but there's another organ that you should be particularly concerned: Your brain. A book called The Brain Diet by Dr. Alan Logan, N.D focuses on keeping your brain healthy, and brings up some shocking facts about the state of our brains these days, including: All mental health disorders are on the rise Hardly any of us are getting enough ...
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NARSAD Announces 2007 Staglin Award For Schizophrenia Research Dr. Sawa recognized in 2005 that a mutant gene dubbed DISC1 — an acronym for “Disrupted in Schizophrenia-1″ — is involved in cerebral cortex development, and at that time proposed that loss of DISC1 function might underlie neurodevelopmental dysfunction in schizophrenia. In more recent work, he has sought to develop a mouse model for schizophrenia that would enable his research team to simultaneously modulate the expression of this and other genes. This is important because prior work has shown that schizophrenia is likely the product of multiple genetic factors and environmental risks.
Using in utero gene transfer, Dr. Sawa and colleagues have already succeeded in suppressing DISC1 in laboratory mice. These rodents showed behavioral deficits relevant to schizophrenia once they reached young adulthood. NARSAD’s Staglin Award to Dr. Sawa will enable him to attempt to develop mice with modulations in multiple genetic susceptibility factors — not only in DISC1 but also, for instance, in a gene called Neurgelin-1. Like DISC1, products of the Neureglin-1 gene are preferentially expressed in pyramidal neurons of the cerebral cortex.
Junkies and victims: addiction and the disease debate Some addicts have more ability to kick the habit than others. Some have more freedom of choice than others. The drug has more effect on some addicts than others. To say "addiction, perhaps more than many other disorders, is amenable to personal choice" is likely true for some subset of the population of addicts and just as likely untrue for some other subset. This fact should be acknowledged and brought into the conversation. Any "one size fits all" policy for addiction will fail ...
July 27, 2007 Junkies and victims: addiction and the disease debate: Slate has an article by a psychologist and a psychiatrist who argue that addiction is not a 'brain disease', contrary to much of the recent rhetoric about drug abuse. This is one side of the debate that is driving our attempts to understand addiction. The 'brain disease' concept (also known as the 'disease model') is one that is often thrown around in debates about mental distress or behavioural problems, but it is far from the neutral, scientific term that many of its supporters might believe. In a sense, every problem ...