Recovery Michigan

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) today announced a proposed rule to align mental health and substance use disorder benefits for low-income Americans with benefits required of private health plans and insurance. The proposal applies certain provisions of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act of 2008 to Medicaid and Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP). The Act ensures that mental health and substance use disorder benefits are no more restrictive than medical and surgical services.

“Improving quality and access to care impacts the health of our nation. Whether private insurance, Medicaid, or CHIP, all Americans deserve access to quality mental health services and substance use disorder services,” said Vikki Wachino, acting director, Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services.

The proposed rule ensures that all beneficiaries who receive services through managed care organizations or under alternative benefit plans have access to mental health and substance use disorder benefits regardless of whether services are provided through the managed care organization or another service delivery system. The full scope of the proposed rule applies to CHIP, regardless of whether care is provided through fee-for-service or managed care.

"We studied the impact of domestic violence on the risk of mental health problems, particularly depression," explained Isabelle Ouellet-Morin, first study author and a researcher at the Institut universitaire en santé mentale de Montréal. "We also studied the role of certain factors from the victims' personal history, such as childhood abuse and economic poverty," explained Ms. Ouellet-Morin, who is also a professor at the School of Criminology at the University of Montreal.

1,052 mothers participated in the Environmental Risk (E-Risk) Longitudinal Twin Study over 10 years. Only subjects with no previous history of depression were considered for the study. Over this decade, the researchers conducted multiple interviews to determine whether the subjects had suffered violence from their spouses and whether they suffered from mental health disorders.

Results

• More than one third of the women reported suffering violence from their spouses (e.g., being pushed or hit with an object).
• These women had a more extensive history of childhood abuse, abuse of illicit substances, economic poverty, early pregnancy, and an antisocial personality.
• They were twice as likely to suffer from depression, even when controlling for the impact of childhood abuse.
• Domestic violence had an impact not just on mood but on other mental health aspects as well. These women had a three times higher risk of developing schizophrenia-like psychotic symptoms. This risk doubled for women who were also victims of childhood abuse.

Researchers from the University of Florida (UF) found that after Illinois increased taxes on beer, wine and spirits in 2009, there was a 26% fall in car crashes involving alcohol.

They report their findings in the American Journal of Public Health

The reduction in alcohol-related fatal car crashes was greatest among young people, say the researchers, who found in this group deaths fell by 37%.

In August 2009, the state of Illinois put up tax on beer by 4.6 cents a gallon, on wine by 66 cents a gallon and on distilled spirits by $4.05 a gallon. If all of this tax is passed on to the consumer, it adds 0.4 cents to the cost of a glass of beer, 0.5 cents to the cost of a glass of wine and 4.8 cents to the cost of a shot of spirits.

This is the 2014 ebook edition of the 1997 paperback Becoming One: A Story of Triumph Over Multiple Personality Disorder, ISBN 978-0962387982, by Sarah E. Olson. It includes a 2014 Addendum, a new Foreword by Howard Asher Psy.D, and a new linked resources page. 

Peer-to-peer application outperforms conventional self-help technique for easing depression, anxiety.

“I was at MIT without an engineering degree and really trying to race to learn computer programming,” Morris recalls. He found himself spending a lot of time on a programmers’ question-and-answer site called Stack Overflow. “Whenever I had a bug or was stuck on something, I would go on there, and almost miraculously, this crowd of programmers would come and help me,” he says. “It was just this intuition that, just as we can get people on Stack Overflow to help us identify and fix bugs in code, perhaps we can harness a crowd to help us fix bugs in our thinking.”

A user of the new tool — which Morris calls Panoply — logs on and, in separate fields, records both a triggering event and his or her response to it. This much of the application was duplicated exactly for the expressive-writing tool used by the control group in the study.

With Panoply, however, members of the network then vote on the type of thought pattern represented by the poster’s reaction to the triggering event and suggest ways of reinterpreting it. As users demonstrate more and more familiarity with techniques of cognitive reappraisal, they graduate from describing their own experiences, to offering diagnoses of other people’s thought patterns, to suggesting reinterpretations.

“We really wanted to see that people are utilizing this skill over and over again, not only in response to their own stressors but also as teachers to other people,” Morris says. 

Previous studies have suggested that roseroot could enhance mood by stimulating the receptors of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin in the brain that are involved with mood regulation. Other research also suggests the herb affects beta-endorphin levels in the body.

In what is the first ever randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled, comparison trial of roseroot extract, the researchers compared its effects on mild to moderate major depressive disorder with sertraline, a commonly prescribed antidepressant therapy.

In comparison with participants receiving a placebo, patients taking roseroot had 1.4 times the odds of improvement, whereas patients taking sertraline had 1.9 times the odds.

However, far more patients receiving sertraline (63%) reported side effects than those receiving roseroot (30%). This finding suggests that roseroot may have a more favorable risk to benefit ratio than sertraline for treating mild to moderate depression.

Also see JAN's Accommodations for Brain Injury in the Workplace just below the PTSDitem

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and how an individual with PTSD can effectively work with job accommodations is often misunderstood. Employers and employees with disabilities can greatly benefit from exploring successful accommodation ideas and how they benefit the workplace. This 25 minute training module and accompanying transcript will cover information on PTSD, accommodation ideas, and workplace situations and solutions. This module can be used to train new accommodation specialists, disability managers, and others responsible for making accommodation decisions. Trainees can view the module at their computer or use the module as part of a larger training.

"Results from these studies imply that mood-congruent information evokes controlled attention deficits in individuals with depressed mood," the authors conclude. "If mood-congruent information is not able to be efficiently removed from the focus of attention, we would expect this to result in a relative decrease in working-memory capacity for individuals with depressed mood compared to those without depressed mood."

With day-to-day memory and concentration difficulties a defining feature of both clinical depression and dysphoria, understanding the link between the two is of vital importance to improving the wellbeing of those who experience either condition.

Erin Michalak, PhD, who heads a bipolar research program based at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has seen a “paradigm shift” in the field when it comes to recognizing the importance of factors and treatments beyond the biomedical.

“We know now from the science that a large degree of how people fare over time is dictated by psychological and social factors—how strong their social support network is, how well they deal with stigma, do they have a strong sense of identity or a healthy spiritual life,” she says.

“Many of them talked about medications, but many of them also talked about things that would have been seen as peripheral research areas until quite recently,” Michalak says. For example, “Mindfulness practices might have been seen as a fringe area of science. Now mindfulness-based approaches have credence in bipolar science.”

Science has also been generating solid evidence about the benefits of cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and other psychotherapies, both alongside and independent of medication. One of the most influential developments since bp Magazine began publishing is a treatment approach called interpersonal and social rhythm therapy (IPSRT).

In fact, the understanding that people with bipolar are especially susceptible to disruptions in daily routine, and therefore benefit greatly from establishing structure in their lives, has become gospel since the seminal study on IPSRT was published in 2005.

he overdose death rate in Washington decreased 27 percent 2008 and 2012, while national rates have remained essentially unchanged. According to a new study in the American Journal of Public Health, average opioid doses in Washington have also declined, likely accounting for many of the lives saved.

"Our State's ability to shift this epidemic into reverse has been the result of strong partnerships among state agencies, university pain specialists, legislators and health care providers," said study lead author Gary Franklin, Medical Director, Washington State Department of Labor and Industries, and a professor at the Univ. of Washington, Seattle.

New state laws on prescription opioid use, including one that mandated the adoption of new dosing guidelines; a statewide Prescription Drug Monitoring Program; and telemedicine and on-line programs for health care providers have all been key to the turnaround.