Recovery Michigan

Every September, SAMHSA recognizes the achievements of the recovery community through National Recovery Month. BRSS TACS is pleased to offer the following Recovery Month resources and event information for you to share with your colleagues, families, and friends:

• "Preventing and Addressing Homelessness among People with Mental and/or Substance Use Disorders" is a webcast SAMHSA produced as part of the Road to Recovery radio and television series. Click here to view it listen to the audio recording, or to download the transcript.
   
• SAMHSA's Recovery Month toolkit features banners, logos, flyers, and other shareable media to help you promote recovery awareness. The toolkit is also available in Spanish.

• The National Recovery Month calendar provides a national listing of local events, including walks, rallies, runs, concerts, documentary viewings, and other activities. You can search by state, type of event, or keyword. Add your event to the calendar to help publicize it and to help demonstrate the scope of the National Recovery Month Celebration.

• View videos of people sharing their recovery journeys and read recovering people's stories via the Recovery Month Webpage and YouTube channel. If you would like directions on how to submit your own story, please click here.

• You can view, share, follow, and contribute to the Recovery Month Facebook group.

Along with helping us process emotions, EMDR can help build up positive memories, experience, thoughts, and feelings. We call this resourcing, and use imagined or real resources to cultivate feelings of peace, nurturing, protection, and wisdom. In addition to and as part of processing negative experiences, it is crucial to cultivate the positive, sometimes the opposite of what occurred in the experience of trauma.

"Many patients said when they did seek help, many medical staff harboured negative attitudes, anger, or irritation towards patients who have attempted suicide," she said.

Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows suicide rates in Australian have increased, up from 2,132 in 2009 to more than 2,500 in 2012.

More than 60,000 Australians make a suicide attempt each year.

"Many health professionals are committed to providing good care to those experiencing mental illness and suicidal thoughts," Dr Shand said.

"Nevertheless, they work within a health system which is under stress and where staff are increasingly stretched in their efforts to meet the expectations of the system and their patients."

Abusive relationships often involve deep psychological ties and habitual living that's hard to escape. But one of the other key hurdles to leaving an abusive partner is the real, physical work of packing up and getting out.

A California moving company says it will help you do that. For free.

Central Coast–based Meathead Movers, a company founded in 1997 by student athletes, this week said it has partnered with domestic violence-prevention nonprofit Good Shepherd to help move people out of such situations.

"Meathead Movers will work directly with the nonprofit to identify the abusive situations and provide moving services at no cost," a spokeswoman says. "Not only do these services help the victims of domestic abuse but they directly impact Meathead employees — consisting of predominantly young men who believe that real men don’t hit women, real men help those in need."

Results from a new survey found that almost all people diagnosed with depression (99%) have experienced at least one symptom of cognitive dysfunction during an episode of depression. Furthermore, the survey indicates that these symptoms can have an enormous effect on an individual's working life; with one in six of those suffering from cognitive dysfunction in depression reporting that symptoms have caused them to lose their job (15%).* Cognitive functions influence every aspect of our lives and are responsible for how we learn, remember, problem-solve and make decisions. Those who suffer from cognitive dysfunction will experience problems in these essential brain-based skills, which will impact upon their education, work, and personal life.^[i]

The survey, written in collaboration with Depression Alliance and funded by Lundbeck Ltd., set out to explore the impact of cognitive dysfunction on everyday lives of British adults diagnosed with depression. The most common cognitive symptoms reported by patients were difficulty concentrating (91%), slowed thought processing (84%) and difficulty with planning and organising (79%). Although these findings indicate that cognitive dysfunction impacts the vast majority of those suffering from depression, only half of those surveyed said that they had ever been asked about their cognitive symptoms by a healthcare professional (HCP) (50%). As improving cognitive symptoms during an episode of depression can significantly improve the chance of a functional recovery from depression, these results suggest a large number of patients could be missing out on treatment for an incredibly important aspect of their disorder.^[ii],[iii]

It can be challenging to separate an individuals performance from a mental health condition. Even when a manager is trying to “do the right thing,” there is a temptation to over-focus on the mental health issue rather than actual job performance. Often, employers make assumptions about what an employee with a mental health disability is, or is not, capable of. This can have a limiting effect on the careers of people with known mental health disabilities, and could lead to charges of discrimination. Employers need to be cognizant of whether they are giving employees with known disabilities opportunities to advance or receive training and challenging assignments, or if they are letting an employee’s mental health disability stand in the way of obtaining those opportunities.

So what are effective accommodations for individuals with mental health conditions? That is a question that requires a dialogue between the individual and the employer. An accommodation may just mean offering flexibility in schedule or workplace. Accommodations are not one-size-fits-all and the needs of an individual change over time so revisiting and updating accommodations may be necessary. Demonstrating creativity, flexibility, a willingness to listen, and commitment to implementing the accommodation in a timely manner can help to build trust between the individual and the manager. In some cases, accommodations for people with mental health disabilities are not much different than what other employees may ask for (flexible workplace policies, schedules, etc.). In fact, 95 percent of requests for accommodations come from people without disabilities. Engaging in an ongoing, interactive process in a cooperative way helps alleviate the potential for an unsatisfactory result.

Because of oxytocin's role in social behaviour, researchers have explored the possibility of administering the hormone for the treatment of mental illness. As oxytocin is a relatively large molecule, it has trouble crossing the barrier between the brain and circulating blood. Thus, researchers have administered oxytocin to patients through the nose as this route offers a direct pathway to the brain that bypasses this barrier.

However, researchers have a poor understanding of how oxytocin reaches and affects the brain. The most effective dose for treatment has also received little research attention.

Professor Ole A. Andreassen and his research team have collaborated with OptiNose on a project that evaluated two different doses of oxytocin and on how they affect the way in which social signals are perceived.

Sixteen healthy men received two different doses of oxytocin, along with placebo. Volunteers were also given an intravenous dose of oxytocin, for a comparison of the effects of oxytocin in circulating blood. The research showed that only those administered a low dose of oxytocin experienced an effect on how they perceived social signals.

Professor Ole A. Andreassen explains:

"The results show that intranasal administration, i.e. introducing oxytocin through the nose, affects the function of the brain.

As no effect was observed after intravenous treatment, this indicates that intranasally administered oxytocin travels directly to the brain, as we have long believed. The fact that we have shown the efficacy of a low dose of oxytocin on social perception is even more important.

A dose that is lower, but that still influences behaviour, will entail a lower risk of affecting other regulatory systems in the body. Very high doses of oxytocin could, in fact, have the opposite effect on social behaviour."

The scientists also discovered that individuals with larger nasal cavities had a stronger response to a low dose of oxytocin.