The rise of Mad Studies

http://goo.gl/xHgr3i

Mad studies is an emerging, interdisciplinary field, mainly in the social sciences and humanities, that expresses a radical new voice in academe about madness. Ms. Voronka often speaks to academics and professionals about mad studies and says she expects most listeners to be steeped in 150 years of psychiatric biases about madness, or as a colleague puts it, “clogged with sanism.”

After Ms. Voronka finished, Jennifer Poole, an associate professor in Ryerson’s school of social work, defined sanism for the audience this way: “A belief system that makes it okay to pick on, make fun of, discriminate, reject, silence, discredit, pathologize, de-centre, kindly undermine and commit violence against the mad. Sanism is an oppression, it is the reason for stigma, and it can happen even with the best of intentions.”

That day, the audience was receptive to the definition and presenters. Instead of asking “patronizing” questions about people with mental illnesses, such as “Why do they go off their meds?”, this audience focused on how to create safe environments and better supports for students, faculty and staff. In Ms. Voronka’s opinion, this was progress.

Mad studies is based on a simple idea: listen to mad people and look at madness from their points of view. More than 10 years ago, Ryerson’s school of disability studies and York University’s graduate program in critical disability studies pioneered mad studies. It’s not yet a program, but a series of courses that deconstructs medical models of “schizophrenia,” “psychosis” and madness in general and puts them in historical context. The courses look at different concepts of madness, surveying social, medical, political, economic, cultural and religious factors that influenced madness from ancient times to the present.

Being moody may help us adapt to change

http://goo.gl/l0sbZR

According to the new theory, as people learn from experiences that are colored by their mood, their expectations come to reflect not only the reward associated with each particular state (such as each stock), but also recent changes in the overall availability of reward in their environment. In this way, the existence of mood allows learning to account for the impact of general environmental factors.

"This effect of mood should be useful whenever different sources of reward are interconnected or possess an underlying momentum," says one of the study's lead authors, Eran Eldar of University College London. "That may often be the case in the natural as well as in the modern world, as successes in acquiring skills, material resources, social status, and even mating partners may all affect one another."


Online cognitive behavioural therapy benefits people with depression, anxiety

http://goo.gl/EExOzk

The review looks at recent, high quality studies and the growing body of literature on smartphone and tablet applications for mental illness. Some studies showed that patients who used Internet-delivered CBT had better outcomes than placebo controls and equal or better outcomes than those with traditional in-person cognitive behaviour therapy. These outcomes were seen in patients with depression, as well as those with physical illnesses such as cancer and multiple sclerosis.

"There is as much evidence for cognitive behavioural therapy as there is for medications to treat mild and moderate depression, as well as evidence that they have a synergistic effect," says Dr. Gratzer. "In other words, for the hundreds of thousands of Canadians struggling with depression, Internet-assisted cognitive behavioural therapy offers a cost-effective and empowering way of accessing an important treatment."

Patients may participate in online therapy whenever and wherever they like, which provides the anonymity that may help depressed or shy patients who are reluctant to speak to a health care professional.


Limitations of Genetic Research in Psychiatric Illness

A dense, long, but important summary of the limitations and complexity of the scientific genetics of mental illness...

http://goo.gl/lJx6qJ 

There are many reasons for the limitations of genetic research in psychiatric illness.

The complexity of the genetic processes is much greater than previously thought. Mutations are most often in the large regions of regulatory DNA. Regulatory RNAs produced in one spot can, in fact, influence many different genes in different location and in different ways. Studies with cancer show that not one, but many mutations are necessary to create specific cancerous cells. And these mutations are different in each individual, which makes treating cancer much more complex. This same situation may be occurring with a psychiatric illness where multiple different mutations are needed to produce an illness and each case might be different.

Even more significant, perhaps, is the fact that genetic networks have multiple layers of regulation that are only vaguely understood. These layers all operate simultaneously and interact in unknown ways. The shapes of DNA have great impact. The place of the DNA in the nucleus is a factor. Tags on both the histones and the DNA itself are critical in determining which DNA can be used in specific circumstances. Many different epigenetic tags have now been described for both histones and DNA. Research shows that alternative RNA splicing is greatly enhanced in humans and in particular in the human brain. It is now clear that RNA alternative splicing produces a large number of unique proteins that have been instrumental in the development of the human brain. Also, there are many thousands of other factors, both proteins and RNAs that regulate all aspects of the DNA transcription and RNA translation process.


Early life stress and adolescent depression cause impaired development of reward circuits

http://goo.gl/loajPL

Early life stress is a major risk factor for later episodes of depression. In fact, adults who are abused or neglected as children are almost twice as likely to experience depression.

Scientific research into this link has revealed that the increased risk following such childhood adversity is associated with sensitization of the brain circuits involved with processing threat and driving the stress response. More recently, research has begun to demonstrate that in parallel to this stress sensitization, there may also be diminished processing of reward in the brain and associated reductions in a person's ability to experience positive emotions.

"Our analyses revealed that over a two-year window during early to mid-adolescence, there was an abnormal decrease in the response of the ventral striatum to reward only in adolescents who had been exposed to emotional neglect, a relatively common form of childhood adversity where parents are persistently emotionally unresponsive and unavailable to their children," explained first author Dr. Jamie Hanson.

"Importantly, we further showed that this decrease in ventral striatum activity predicted the emergence of depressive symptoms during this key developmental period," he added. "Our work is consistent with other recent studies finding deficient reward processing in depression, and further underscores the importance of considering such developmental pathways in efforts to protect individuals exposed to childhood adversity from later depression."


How to Get Super Better

http://goo.gl/fUQOwg

In 2009, while game designer Jane McGonigal was writing her first book, Reality Is Broken, she hit her head. The concussion didn’t heal. A month later, she was still plagued by intense physical discomfort and was told to avoid reading, writing, video games, alcohol, and caffeine. She became depressed and anxious, and had suicidal thoughts for the first time in her life.

By then, McGonigal had been researching games, and how the skills they build can help improve our real lives, for nearly a decade. She realized she ought to put her findings into practice. She designed a recovery game called “Jane the Concussion Slayer,” which involved recruiting allies (her sister and her husband) and identifying “bad guys” (symptom triggers) to avoid, “power-ups” (little boosts, like eating walnuts) to seek out, and quests to complete. That game became SuperBetter, which invites players to choose a specific challenge to overcome and, in the process, develop “gameful” abilities.

McGonigal’s new book, SuperBetter: A Revolutionary Approach to Getting Stronger, Happier, Braver, and More Resilient, takes readers through the game, as well as research supporting its efficacy and the theory behind it. We spoke by phone about games’ benefits and limitations, how playing games affects the brain, and what she’s using SuperBetter to tackle now.


What It’s Like Having PPD As A Black Woman

http://goo.gl/19DJnA

Years before I knew I could even have children, my mother called me a name I’d heard many times growing up. Crybaby. It was during a nasty argument where I’d decided to open up about my feelings but was unable to express myself. I stammered through hyperventilating breaths. My body boiled, and I wasn’t so much as mad, but hysterical. I panted and kept saying, “Come on, Ma. Come on, Ma,” a mantra pleading for understanding. She finally stopped me, called me a crybaby, and said, “You sound like a white woman.”

I imagine she saw me as some frantic white lady, head shaking, a mass of hair whipping my face, screaming with black mascara bleeding down my cheeks. My mother’s words slapped the nonsense out of me, reminded me of that board called “pride” strapped to my back — to most black women’s backs — that helps me to sit up when I feel like slouching.

These women didn’t tell me about postpartum depression, never mentioned the baby blues. They didn’t warn me about the anxiety, insomnia, or evil thoughts. They didn’t tell me how to get over it or offered an ear. My worries or well-being wasn’t important, and really, no one talks about mental instability in the black community. The idea of seeking treatment never crossed my mind. I wasn’t some hysterical white woman with the privilege to lie in bed for days crippled by my emotions. There was nothing wrong with me, and besides, black people don’t do therapy.

Thousands Of Soldiers With Mental Health Disorders Kicked Out for 'Misconduct'

http://goo.gl/tVI9BM

The U.S. Army has kicked out more than 22,000 soldiers since 2009 for "misconduct," after they returned from Iraq and Afghanistan and were diagnosed with mental health disorders and traumatic brain injuries. That means many of those soldiers are not receiving the crucial treatment or retirement and health care benefits they would have received with an honorable discharge.

The Army has taken these actions despite a 2009 federal law designed to ensure that troops whose mental illness might be linked to the wars aren't cast aside.

That's the finding of a joint investigation by NPR and Colorado Public Radio that listened to hours of secret recordings, looked at hundreds of pages of confidential military documents and interviewed dozens of sources both inside and outside the base.


Clasado and University of Oxford demonstrate latest series of effects of advanced prebiotic on neuro-inflammation and anxiety in pre-clinical study

New biome research every day, it seems.....
http://goo.gl/dz4y2Q

It is the first study to demonstrate that a prebiotic can have a modulatory role in neuro-immuno processes as well as reversing anxiety induced by inflammation. It also shows that the beneficial effects of Bimuno on brain health and emotions are also exerted via a combination of the immune system and a key receptor in the brain, a serotonin receptor. This provides further evidence of the link between the immune and central nervous systems (CNS) in the development of anxiety and other stress related disorders. Previously, probiotics have demonstrated positive effects on the CNS, behaviour and the immune system, but these effects had never been demonstrated with a prebiotic within a single study.

The agent promoting acute inflammation (LPS) in mice induced, as expected, sickness behaviour with lower locomotor activity within the first 6 hours compared to the control group. Acute inflammation also induced anxiety 24 hours later, paralleled by significant increases in the brain, in pro-inflammatory cytokines and in a serotonin receptor. These receptors play a key role in the brain-gut axis, brain development and neuro-psychiatric disorders. Bimuno reduced post-inflammation anxiety 24 hours post-LPS injection while the brain inflammation observed in the control group was normalised in the Bimuno group. The effects of Bimuno were mediated by an action on the immune system and brain chemistry, via a reduction in the key pro-inflammatory cytokine IL-1 beta release and by an impact on the serotonin receptor 5HT2A.