Recovery Michigan

Lam's situation isn't unique. Millions of young adults have been able to stay on their family insurance plans since that provision of the Affordable Care Act took effect in 2010. But studies show that young people often hesitate to get certain types of medical care, such as mental and behavioral health care, birth control and sexual health screenings, because they don't want their parents to find out through insurance statements.

Now several states are testing ways to solve the problem, but none has a foolproof solution.

"The issue of maintaining confidentiality while a dependent is one that has existed for a long time," says Abigail English, president of the Center for Adolescent Health and the Law, a nonprofit advocacy group. "It's just receiving more attention now, because of the ACA and the increase in the number of dependents."

Medical marijuana for veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has finally been given the go-ahead by the U.S. federal government.

Before full legalization, the federal government has allocated money to researchers to begin testing marijuana for treating military veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Far from a hypothetical move, the study parameters have already been approved by the Department of Health and Human Services as of March 2014. These proposed studies had been opposed by the National Institute of Drug Abuse, until last Wednesday when they finally signed off on the government supplying drug for clinical trials.

The United States government reports that 20% of Iraq and Afghanistan War veterans have experience PTSD. This is a significant rise from the 12% suffering from PTSD after the first Gulf War, according to the Department of Veteran Affairs.

To put that in perspective, 15% of Vietnam vets have been diagnosed as suffering with PTSD at one time or another.

Behavioral health discrimination in health insurance is once again in the spotlight. Health insurance denials for substance use and mental health care in private insurance plans were nearly twice those for other medical care in the last year, according to a report released last week by the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). NAMI is one of our partners advocating for more fair treatment for people living with chronic behavioral health problems.

For years, people with behavioral health issues, their loved ones and advocates have pushed for a more equitable system, one in which substance use and mental health treatment is covered equally, or at parity with, other forms of medical treatment under health insurance plans. This work resulted in the 2008 passage of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act, a federal law requiring many health insurance plans to follow parity rules, meaning that if they offer mental health and substance use disorders benefits, they must cover them equally to other medical benefits. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) has extended these protections to more health plans. New federal regulations were issued in late 2013 for private plans and proposed regulations came out last week for Medicaid.

NAMI surveyed nearly 3,000 behavioral health consumers (thanks to those of you who participated!) and analyzed 84 insurance plans in 15 states. The takeaway? While more consumers than ever should have access to health plans that require behavioral health parity as a result of the ACA and the federal parity law, consumers are often left without the treatment they so desperately need.

In addition to the high rate of substance use and mental health coverage denials, the survey’s highlight other common problems with parity implementation:

• Many insurance networks have far too few substance use and mental health providers
• Discriminatory drug tiering, when insurance companies make medication for certain conditions more costly for the consumer, creates barriers to needed for substance use and mental health disorders
• Consumers do not have enough information about behavioral health coverage to compare health plans and choose a health plan that meets their needs

The team measured the changes of PM-10 week to week. They found that when the amount of PM-10 increased by 37.82㎍/㎥ per week, the suicide rate would also increase by 3.2 percent.

When the concentration of ozone increased by 0.016ppm per week, suicide rates increased by 7.8 percent.

The researchers argued that the studied forms of air pollution negatively affected the functioning of neurotransmitters in the central nervous system. These neurotransmitters were linked to serotonin metabolism.

For some people who survive a near-death experience, whether it’s war or rape or a plane crash, trauma eventually dissipates. But for others, like me, it imprints itself into the neurology permanently. Decades of psychologists and group sessions and yoga and meditation are comforting but don’t necessarily “fix” what has been altered. The nightmares, the long inexplicable crying spells, the tendency to freeze and to go silent without warning, and the rages make you feel as if you’re irreparable. As if you’ll never be normal.

I didn’t start consistently taking medication for my severe PTSD symptoms until my 30s. Despite surviving two suicide attempts by age 22, taking psychiatric medication seemed to go against everything I stood for, and every time I was mandated to take it I eventually let it taper off. There was nothing wrong with me, I thought—there was something wrong with what had happened to me. If I kept fighting, I would eventually cross the line into normalcy. Why should I have to alter my brain chemistry after everything I already suffered? Why should I become a prescription drug zombie just to keep going?

Every third teenager has suffered from one mental disorder and one physical disease. These co-occurrences come in specific associations: More often than average, depression occurs together with diseases of the digestive system, eating disorders with seizures and anxiety disorders together with arthritis, heart disease as well as diseases of the digestives system. These findings were reported by researchers from the University of Basel and the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Their results based on data from 6,500 U.S. teenagers have been published in the scientific journal Psychosomatic Medicine.

The animals were then randomly assigned to receive a commonly prescribed antidepressant, a selective serotoninreuptake inhibitor (SSRI) marketed under the brand name Zoloft, or a placebo once a day for 18 months. The antidepressant was given in a dose comparable to that given to patients.

The monkeys that received the SSRI developed three times the amount of atherosclerosis in their coronary arteries as monkeys given the placebo. In the depressed animals, the amount was even higher - almost six times greater in the SSRI-treated animals than in those given the placebo.

"Our findings suggest that long-term treatment with this drug promotes coronary artery atherosclerosis in non-human primates," Shively said. "This may be clinically significant for people because almost a quarter of middle-aged women in the United States take antidepressants, the most prescribed of which are SSRIs."

Binge-drinking during adolescence may perturb brain development at a critical time and leave lasting effects on genes and behavior that persist into adulthood.

The findings, by researchers at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Medicine using an animal model, are reported online in the journal Neurobiology of Disease.

"This may be the mechanism through which adolescent binge-drinking increases the risk for psychiatric disorders, including alcoholism, in adulthood," says lead author Subhash Pandey, professor of psychiatry and director ofneuroscience alcoholism research at UIC.

Pandey and his colleagues used experimental rats to investigate the effects of intermittent alcohol exposure during the adolescent stage of development.

On-and-off exposure to alcohol during adolescence altered the activity of genes needed for normal brain maturation, said Pandey, who is also a research career scientist at the Jesse Brown VA Medical Center. The gene alterations "increased anxiety-like behaviors and preference for alcohol in adulthood," he said.

The behavioral effects, he said, were due to "epigenetic" changes -- "which previous research has shown can be influenced through environmental substances, including alcohol." Epigenetic changes can be long-lasting or permanent in an individual. Previous studies have shown that some epigenetic changes can be heritable.

“A new mobile game app created by Allegheny Health Network mental health professionals and students at theEntertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon University helps traumatized children by letting them use their tablets or smart phones to practice the life skills they’ve learned in the therapist’s office.