Recovery Michigan

Mr. Bush signed up for a drug-treatment program and emerged nine months later determined to stay sober. But the man who ran the house, Yury Baumblit, a longtime hustler and two-time felon, had other ideas.

Mr. Baumblit got kickbacks on the Medicaid fees paid to the outpatient treatment programs that he forced all his tenants to attend, residents and former employees said. So he gave Mr. Bush a choice: If he wanted to stay, he would have to relapse and enroll in another program. Otherwise, his bed would be given away.

“‘Do what you do’ — that’s what he told me,” Mr. Bush recalled.

Mr. Bush, rail-thin with sad eyes, wanted to avoid the streets and homeless shelters at all costs. He turned to his self-medication of choice: beer, with a chaser of heroin and crack cocaine. Then he enrolled in a new program chosen by Mr. Baumblit.

In the past two and a half years, Mr. Bush has gone through four programs, just to hold onto his upper bunk bed.

The second study, published in the journal Psychological Assessment, further investigated these five factors - developing a new screening tool that could be applied to clinical settings.

This research resulted in the UCLA Life Adversities Screener, or LADS - a questionnaire designed to help health care providers offer more accurate stress and trauma treatment.

"Given the utility and ease of use, LADS could be effective as a screening tool to identify ethnic and racial minority individuals in primary care settings who have a high trauma burden, and who need more extensive evaluation," says first author Honghu Liu, a professor in the UCLA School of Dentistry.

"We feel it will capture experiences that could be missed with current screening approaches," Prof Liu adds. "This could optimize affordable care as it strives to improve prevention of mental health problems."

Nearly 3.8 million people per year suffer from a concussion of some kind. Of that selection, post-concussion psychiatric disorders such as depression, irritability and anxiety are not uncommon. These illnesses can be debilitating to patients and families, in addition to the struggles they already face from rehabilitation after injury.

The mechanisms underlying these changes after concussion are not sufficiently understood among scientists, and conventional MRI results in most of these patients are "normal."

However, researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) sought to better medical understanding of psychiatric disorders after injury.

The researchers used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), an MRI technique that measures the integrity of white matter–the brain’s signal-transmitting nerve fibers–to see if injuries to the nerves may be the cause of post-traumatic depression and anxiety symptoms.

The results indicated that there were patterns in the white matter of patients who had depression or anxiety. Compared to the controls, patients suffering from depression had decreased "fractional anisotropy" (FA), a measure of the structural integrity of white matter connections, around an area near the deep gray matter of the brain, that is strongly associated with the brain's reward system.

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And at this moment of pure isolation and terror, I was brought face-to-face with my first healer…not the nurses who stripped me of my dignity and drew ugly pictures of me, not the medical technicians who couldn’t spare a moment to walk a frightened and disoriented patient to a sterile and alienating room. My first experience of healing was meeting my roommate, a woman who taught me that, when presented with a room with no blankets, cups or toothbrushes, one must demand some comfort. One must speak up for one’s soul.

My other healers presented themselves in their own time throughout that long weekend and in forms and expressions one might not find typical outside in the “real” world. My teachers were individuals with mental illness, people who had attempted suicide or violence to another being, people who were suffering incredible personal loss and pain. And each of these individuals offered me an opportunity to heal, in accepting them, and accepting the parts of myself that were also suffering.

In the days of my hospitalization, I was sung to by an 18 year old who had attempted suicide; I was given a book to read by someone in the throes of schizophrenia; I was invited to play cards by a young man who was enduring a 90 day stay in this frightening place. I was given love and comfort by those who were surrounded with so little of their own.

What Happened opens in 1976 with Simone’s performance at the Montreux Jazz Festival, a brittle, brutal hour-long set that’s indelible for all the right reasons—and all the wrong ones. Simone takes the stage looking weary and resigned, a harbinger of her prickly stage demeanor. She pauses between songs to banter with the audience, flitting in and out of coherence so rapidly, her prestissimo piano solos seem sluggish by comparison. She snaps at the audience when they don’t applaud enough and accosts a woman for having the temerity to get out of her seat. But the music is no worse for the wear, a classic example of a stage performance that is both energized and enervated by the performer’s emotional turmoil. Simone had grown to hate her life’s work, and Garbus flashes back to Simone’s early years to examine the path that led to her professional nadir.

Community Access is not a bed-and-breakfast, although it feels like one when you walk through its unmarked door off Second Avenue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Also known as Parachute NYC, this quiet, seven-bedroom facility is one of four publicly funded mental health centers in the city for people on the verge of a mental health crisis.

These respite centers have no medical staff, no medications, no locks or curfews and no mandatory activities. They are secure, welcoming places where people go to escape pressure in their lives and talk to trained “peer professionals” who are recovering from mental illness themselves.

Aside from places like this, New Yorkers battling serious mental illness have little choice but to check in to a hospital or a hospital-like crisis center when their lives spin out of control. Some need to be hospitalized for severe psychosis and depression, but many others end up in the hospital because they have no other options.

Sadly, many families and parents believe that a traumatized individual can move past their trauma if they just ”
let it go” and move on. What they fail to realize is that it is very difficult for someone to just start talking about their history. Some people (including children and teens) need to be emotional or have something trigger a memory or feeling in order for them to open up and start talking. It’s not easy to sit down and begin a conversation with an absolute stranger. The reality is that, while I am a therapist, I am still a stranger.

Scientists once believed that drug addiction was simply a physical craving: Drug addicts who became sober and then later relapsed merely lacked willpower. But that view has gradually shifted since the 1970s.

Today, most experts acknowledge that environmental cues -- the people, places, sights and sounds an addict experiences leading up to drug use -- are among the primary triggers of relapses. It was an environmental cue (a ringing bell) that caused the dogs in Ivan Pavlov's famous experiments to salivate, even when they couldn't see or smell food.

Led by Hitoshi Morikawa, associate professor of neuroscience at The University of Texas at Austin, a team of researchers trained rats to associate either a black or white room with the use of a drug. Subsequently, when the addicted rats were offered the choice of going into either room, they nearly always chose the room they associated with their addiction.

Then one day, the researchers gave the addicted rats a high dose of an antihypertensive drug called isradipine before the rats made their choices. Although rats still preferred the room they associated with their addiction on that day, they no longer showed a preference for it on subsequent days. In fact, the lack of preference persisted in the isradipine-treated group in ways that couldn't be found in a control group -- suggesting the addiction memories were not just suppressed but had gone away entirely.

"The isradipine erased memories that led them to associate a certain room with cocaine or alcohol," said Morikawa.