Recovery Michigan

Online programmes such as the Life Skills programme increase the ability to address a much wider audience while achieving the same quality of service as face-to-face treatments, providing an approximate increase of 6-fold in terms of service capacity. Participants use the programme for eight weeks, with the support of weekly reviews from their designated Aware-trained supporter, who provides encouragement, feedback and guidance.

The researchers at TCD began last January to recruit participants for a randomised controlled trial, the gold standard in research. The aim of which was to evaluate the effectiveness of the online intervention in improving symptoms of depression and quality of life.

The results indicated significant improvement for those who used the programme with over 70% moving to below the threshold of clinical depression symptoms (<14) on the Beck Depression Inventory. While those who did not have access experienced no significant improvements. In terms of service provision those who had access to programme demonstrated the same results that one would expect to see in a similar face-to-face trial with clinicians.

From 2,429 suicides and 50,323 controls, the researchers found that taking psychiatric medications during the previous year made a person 5.8 times more likely to have killed themselves. If a person had made contact with a psychiatric outpatient clinic, they were 8.2 times more likely to have killed themselves. Visiting a psychiatric emergency room was linked to a 27.9 times greater likelihood of committing suicide. And if someone had actually been admitted to a psychiatric hospital, they were 44.3 times more likely to have commited suicide within the year.

“Psychiatric admission in the preceding year was highly associated with risk of dying from suicide,” concluded the researchers. “Furthermore, even individuals who have been in contact with psychiatric treatment but who have not been admitted are at highly increased risk of suicide.” Essentially, the researchers found that increasing levels of psychiatric care are associated with “a severely increased risk of dying.” They concluded, “The public health significance of this finding may be considerable.”

They also suggested that we may have therefore discovered the most accurate predictor of suicide we’ve ever found: The more someone seeks or is forced into psychiatric care, the closer they probably are on the trajectory towards suicide.

The only problem with this line of reasoning is that there’s no evidence to support it. Suicide is not a progressive illness like cancer; that is, there’s no evidence that people with suicidal feelings travel on a trajectory of ever-intensifying, ever-more-constant suicidal feelings while getting into ever more intensive psychiatric care until they die at steadily increasing rates along the way. If suicidality was in fact progressive in that way, we’d be much better at identifying where people are along that path and intervening at the right time to prevent suicides. Instead, completed suicides tend to be impulsive.......

Anxiety can have a serious impact on our long term health. Whether long term or short term anxiety this infographic explains just exactly what happens to our bodies under the stress of anxiety.

Knowledge is power.

Out of 27 emotions in total, the researchers found that sadness was the longest-lasting emotion; shame, surprise, fear, disgust, boredom, being touched, irritation and relief, however, were the shortest-lasting emotions.

The findings indicate that emotions do not last as long when they arise from events that carry low importance to the individual. However, long-lasting emotions come from events with strong importance attached to them.

Silence, shyness, and introversion each remain complicated and intersecting aspects of my identity. As I have slowly grown into and out of my shyness, I still seek balance between my desire to build relationships and contribute to activist causes with my tendency and preference to keep to myself. And clearly, there is a balance to be had – on one hand, others may not get the chance to know me if I keep my distance; but on the other, many of the opportunities to connect are built for those who already naturally at ease in social settings.

"I'm always aware of what I'm talking about and who I'm with in the moment," Dixon says. "I just don't know what happened yesterday or the day before. My declarative episodic memory is shot."

Since the accident, Dixon has relied heavily on hissmartphone to augment the part of his brain that is no longer functioning properly. He uses Twitter throughout the day to make note of the details he isn't likely to remember tomorrow: What he was reading about, what kind of coffee he ordered, who he spoke to. Even the details of his sex life, which he tweets about in Korean to avoid embarrassing over-the-shoulder moments. All of this goes into his private Twitter account, which he can later refer to, search, and analyze.

A flood of patients who have become newly insured under the Affordable Care Act are visiting doctor's offices and hospitals, causing some health workers to worry about how they can provide care to everyone in need. One group, however, isn't lining up for care: People with mental health issues or substance use disorders.

Though Obamacare extends coverage to this group – collectively referred to as behavioral health – various loopholes in the health care law at this time have kept people from requesting mental health care. Some states haven't expanded Medicaid, the government health insurance program for poor or disabled Americans, leaving about 5 million in a coverage gap, the majority of whom, experts believe, need mental health care. In other cases, patients aren't even aware of the benefits they can get with their new health insurance.

In study 1 we found higher levels of basal DNA breakage in individuals with PTSD and trauma-exposed subjects than in controls, indicating that traumatic stress is associated with DNA breakage.....  In study 2, we found that psychotherapy reversed not only PTSD symptoms, but also DNA strand break accumulation. The results of the study showed - for the first time in vivo - an association between traumatic stress and DNA breakage; they also demonstrate changes at the molecular level, i.e., the integrity of DNA, after psychotherapeutic interventions.

The former director resigned, and two supervisors were terminated over the summer, after a patient died because of neglect. Since then, the I-Team has reported more than a dozen employee suspensions relating to patient abuse. Interim Director Cynthia Kelly says KPH has more serious problems than any other state psychiatric facility. 17 employees are suspended, pending investigation of an incident. Kelly also adds that a patient's arm was broken while staff restrained him.

When Elizabeth Peña died last week, her family said she died after a brief illness. We now know that the Cuban-American actress’s untimely demise was the result of cirrhosis of the liver due to alcohol abuse, in addition to acute gastrointestinal bleeding, cardiopulmonary arrest, and cardiogenic shock.