The Mental Health Social Worker

People around the world are living longer but with higher levels of sickness and disability, according to the largest ever study of the global burden of disease. The analysis, published in The Lancet, shows high blood pressure, smoking and drinking alcohol have become the highest risk factors for ill health. Read the rest of this entry »

A new study suggests same-sex marriage may boost mental health. Gay, lesbian, and bisexual people who are married have significantly lower levels of psychological distress when compared to their non-married counterparts, according to a study published in the American Journal of Public Health. The data comes from the 2009 California Health Interview Survey, which includes data from more than 47,000 hetero- and homosexual men and women, ages 18 to 70. The study found that psychological distress was not significantly distinguishable among people in legally recognized same-sex or heterosexual relationships.  There were, however, big differences in well-being between gay, lesbian, and bisexual men and women who were married and those who were not in any sort of legally recognized union. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on the legality of same-sex unions. (ABC News, 12/13/12)

One quarter of cardiac arrest survivors suffer long-term psychological problems such as anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and depression, according to a recent review. Researchers say the problems are under-diagnosed and doctors have few standards for identifying who is at risk. Cold therapy, which can protect the brain for a time, and implanted defibrillator devices, which can re-start an arrested heart, have helped to lower the death toll from cardiac arrest, but little is known about what mental and emotional scars may linger among survivors. Researchers reviewed 11 studies published between 1993 and 2011 that looked at mental health issues following cardiac arrests experienced outside of a hospital and found problems plaguing anywhere from 15 percent to 50 percent or more of patients. Months to years after surviving cardiac arrest, about one-third of patients were depressed and nearly two-thirds were experiencing anxiety. PTSD symptoms were common, affecting 19 percent to 27 percent of survivors. (Reuters, 12/13/12)

Large majorities of older Americans with who have depression, anxiety, or other mental health disorders are receiving treatment that does not meet evidence-based standards, according to a national survey of Americans 65 and older. The survey, conducted by the John A. Hartford Foundation,  found that 46 percent of people currently receiving treatment say their provider did not follow up with them within a few weeks of starting treatment to see how they were doing – a critical component of effective care. Among all respondents, very few understood the health risks of depression: only one out of five had heard that depression is believed to double an individual’s risk of developing dementia and only one in three knew it can double the risk of heart disease. (News-Medical.net, 12/13/12)

A specific pattern of neuronal firing in a brain reward circuit instantly rendered mice vulnerable to depression-like behavior induced by acute severe stress, a study supported by the National Institutes of Health has found. When researchers used a high-tech method to mimic the pattern, previously resilient mice instantly succumbed to a depression-like syndrome of social withdrawal and reduced pleasure-seeking – they avoided other animals and lost their sweet tooth. When the firing pattern was inhibited in vulnerable mice, they instantly became resilient. Read the rest of this entry »

A drug that works through the same brain mechanism as the fast-acting antidepressant ketamine briefly improved treatment-resistant patients’ depression symptoms in minutes, with minimal untoward side effects, in a clinical trial conducted by the National Institutes of Health. The experimental agent, called AZD6765, acts through the brain’s glutamate chemical messenger system. Read the rest of this entry »

Ingrained habits in rats can be quickly broken—and reestablished—by targeting and switching off a specific site in the brain’s prefrontal cortex using a technique known as optogenetics, according to an NIMH-funded study published November 13, 2012, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Read the rest of this entry »

WASHINGTON—Teens who participate in after-school arts activities such as music, drama and painting are more likely to report feeling depressed or sad than students who are not involved in these programs, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

This is the first study to find that young people’s casual involvement in the arts could be linked to depressive symptoms, according to the researchers. The article was published online in APA’s journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts^®. Read the rest of this entry »

Suicide rates in the United States rose sharply during the first years of the recession, researchers report. They also said political leaders should do more to protect Americans’ mental health during tough times. The report, which appears in the journal The Lancet, finds that the rate between 2008 and 2010 increased four times faster than it did in the eight years before the recession. The rate had been increasing by an average of 0.12 deaths per 100,000 people from 1999 through 2007. In 2008, the rate began increasing by an average of 0.51 deaths per 100,000 people a year. Without the increase in the rate, the total deaths from suicide each year in the United States would have been lower by about 1,500, the study said. Every rise of 1 percent in unemployment was accompanied by an increase in the suicide rate of roughly 1 percent, researchers found. A similar correlation has been found in some European countries since the recession. (The New York Times, 11/4/12)

A genetic marker previously identified as associated with smoking may also be linked to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), according to a new study. Researchers from McGill University in Montreal performed family-based association tests on 454 children (aged 6 to 12 years) with ADHD to investigate five top single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in different genes that are highly associated with different dimensions of smoking behavior in relation to ADHD. Published online in the Archives of Disease in Childhood, the study found that one SNP correlated significantly with overall ADHD diagnosis. (HealthDay News, 10/31/12)

People with schizophrenia are likely to live a significantly longer life if they if they take their antipsychotic drugs on schedule, avoid extremely high doses and also regularly see a mental health professional, according to new research. Published in Schizophrenia Bulletin, the study found that in patients who had 90 percent or better compliance with their medication schedules, the risk of death was 25 percent lower, compared to those who were less than 10% compliant. They also noted that taking medication did not increase the risk of death and there was a trend toward reducing the mortality rate. The researchers analyzed data collected between 1994 through 2004 on 2,100 adult Maryland Medicaid beneficiaries with schizophrenia. (ScienceBlog, 11/1/12)

Sixty-four percent of students who experience mental health problems in college end up withdrawing from school, a new national survey shows. Conducted by the National Alliance on Mental Illness, the survey found that most of the students who withdrew because of mental health problems suffered from depression, bipolar disorder or Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Forty-five percent of them did not receive academic accommodations (such as tutoring, books on tape, lower course loads or help communicating with professors). However, it is unclear whether they requested those services and half did not seek mental health services, sometimes because they were unaware of them. Thirty-eight percent of all respondents, regardless of whether they dropped out, said they did not know how to access accommodations. (Inside Higher Ed, 10/30/12)

The brain holds in mind what has just been seen by synchronizing brain waves in a working memory circuit, an animal study supported by the National Institutes of Health suggests. The more in-sync such electrical signals of neurons were in two key hubs of the circuit, the more those cells held the short-term memory of a just-seen object. Read the rest of this entry »

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Chronic stress during pregnancy negates benefits that the brain bestows on mothers and may explain why depression hits women after childbirth, a new study asserts. The study found that rat mothers showed an increase in brain cell connections in the regions linked with learning, memory and mood. Conversely, the brains of mother rats stressed twice daily throughout pregnancy did not register this increase. The stress negated the brain benefits of motherhood, causing the stressed rats’ brains to match brain characteristics of animals that had no reproductive or maternal experience. The stressed rats also had less physical interaction with their babies than did unstressed rats, a behavior observed in human mothers who experience postpartum depression. (UPI, 10/14/12)

The National Institutes of Health plans to invest more than $90 million over five years, contingent upon the availability of funds, to accelerate the development and application of single cell analysis across a variety of fields. The goal is to understand what makes individual cells unique and to pave the way for medical treatments that are based on disease mechanisms at the cellular level. Supported by the NIH Common Fund, NIH plans to support 26 awards as part of three initiatives of the Single Cell Analysis Program (SCAP). Read the rest of this entry »

Extreme weight gain associated with taking an antipsychotic medication may be linked to certain genetic variants, according to a study published in the September 2012 issue of the Archives of General Psychiatry. Read the rest of this entry »