Recovery Michigan

What it was like when you first came home.

What you’re doing today.

What civilians will simply never understand.

What happened on your alive day.

For those of us who haven’t served, your life as a veteran is difficult to comprehend and fully empathize with. We’ll never be able to.

You can help bring us one step closer.

Come share a story on Medium.

Hit the button that says “Write a response” at the bottom of this page, and write a story. The three stories with the most recommends at 11:59 p.m. PST on November 10 will get Medium swag and be tweeted from the @Medium Twitter account to our readers.

"Redeployed military personnel have reported for the last 13 years complex nighttime behaviors ranging from sleepwalking, tossing and turning, thrashing, screaming, and even hitting their bed partners," said Col. (Dr.) Vincent Mysliwiec, principal investigator and lead author, and U.S. Army Medicine sleep medicine specialist. "While these disruptive nocturnal behaviors are frequently reported, they are rarely documented in laboratory settings."

According to published results, all of the young men developed disruptive nighttime behaviors and nightmares after suffering a traumatic experience. Some reported screaming and combative movements, while others experienced night sweats and crying episodes throughout the night. "Normally individuals in REM sleep are paralyzed and do not move, thus they are unable to act out their dreams. Patients with TSD appear to have dream enactment, with purposeful movements that can occur in REM sleep," said Mysliwiec. "This case series is a major step forward in not only diagnosis and treatment of military personnel with sleep disturbances, but also sleep safety for families."

A drug being studied as a fast-acting mood-lifter restored pleasure-seeking behavior independent of - and ahead of - its other antidepressant effects, in a National Institutes of Health trial. Within 40 minutes after a single infusion of ketamine, treatment-resistant depressed bipolar disorder patients experienced a reversal of a key symptom - loss of interest in pleasurable activities - which lasted up to 14 days. Brain scans traced the agent's action to boosted activity in areas at the front and deep in the right hemisphere of the brain.

"Our findings help to deconstruct what has traditionally been lumped together as depression," explained Carlos Zarate, M.D., of the NIH's National Institute of Mental Health. "We break out a component that responds uniquely to a treatment that works through different brain systems than conventional antidepressants - and link that response to different circuitry than other depression symptoms."

Prescription opioid dependence has been increasing for the last 15 years and now surpasses heroin dependence. Doctors are also writing more prescriptions for pain management, which has led to higher experimentation and addiction rates, according to lead author David Fiellin, M.D., professor of internal medicine at Yale School of Medicine.

"Primary care physicians lack evidence-based guidelines to decide between detoxification or providing patients with ongoing maintenance therapy," said Fiellin.

Fiellin and his colleagues conducted a 14-week randomized clinical study of 113 patients with prescription opioid dependence. Patients randomly received either buprenorphine detoxification or ongoing buprenorphine maintenance therapy. Buprenorphine is a medication used to treat addiction. Study participants in the detoxification group received six weeks of stable doses of buprenorphine followed by three weeks of tapering doses. All patients received physician and nurse support and drug counseling for all 14 weeks.

The team found that patients in the detoxification group tested positive for illicit opioid use more often than those in the maintenance group. Patients who received ongoing buprenorphine were less likely to use illicit opiates. Few of the patients in the detoxification group stayed in treatment or were able to abstain after the medication was discontinued.

A new study shows that some anti-inflammatory medicines, such as aspirin, estrogen, and Fluimucil, can improve the efficacy of existing schizophrenia treatments. This work is being presented at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology conference in Berlin.

For some time, doctors have believed that helping the immune system may benefit the treatment of schizophrenia, but until now there has been no conclusive evidence that this would be effective. Now a group of researchers at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands has carried out a comprehensive meta-analysis of all robust studies on the effects of adding anti-inflammatories to antipsychotic medication. This has allowed them to conclude that anti-inflammatory medicines, such as aspirin, can add to the effective treatment of schizophrenia.

Research has shown that the immune system is linked to certain psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Schizophrenia in particular is linked to the HLA gene system, which is found on chromosome 6 in humans. The HLA system controls many of the characteristics of the immune system.

According to lead researcher, Professor Iris Sommer (Psychiatry Department, University Medical Centre, Utrecht, Netherlands):

"The picture on anti-inflammatory agents in schizophrenia has been mixed, but this analysis pulls together the data from 26 double-blind randomised controlled trials, and provides significant evidence that some (but not all) anti-inflammatory agents can improve symptoms of patients with schizophrenia. In particular, aspirin, estrogens (in women) and the common antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (fluimicil) show promising results. Other anti-inflammatory agents, including celecoxib, minocycline, davunetide, and fatty acids showed no significant effect".

Researchers found people withschizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder are comfortable using a social media website like YouTube to provide and receive naturally occurring peer support.

“What we found most surprising about our findings was that people with severe mental illness were so open about their illness experiences on a public social media website like YouTube,” said lead author John Naslund, a Ph.D. student at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy & Clinical Practice.

“We saw that people with severe mental illness did not appear to be concerned about the risks of openly sharing their personal illness experiences because they really wanted to help others with similar mental health problems.”

Create and maintain an Emergency kit.

Create a plan for you and your family/support.

Get, and stay, informed.

The app, which went live at the end of 2012, takes its name straight from the frontlines. “POS REP” is military slang for “Position Report,” which means to provide your location. The fact that it’s an app goes beyond the mobile-only trend. “Mobile is ideal for the type of user behavior we’d like to encourage. We don’t want veterans sitting behind their computers posting cat GIFs all day. We want veterans engaging with each other online, but more importantly offline,” says Allman, who previously founded Cloud Corpsman, a direct import tool for Veteran’s Affairs “Blue Button” medical data. “There’s also a battle taking place in the way we consume content. Search works well if you know exactly what you’re looking for (say, for a pair of shoes), but when you get out of the military, often times you don’t know what you want or need in terms of services. POS REP uses a discovery approach to push curated information that we believe is relevant or useful based on our collective experience as veterans.”

Emergency rooms have become a place of last resort for the mentally ill. With increased demand on proper mental health facilities, the practice known as psychiatric boarding -- temporarily holding mentally ill patients in hospital ERs until beds become available at certified treatment centers -- has become a serious problem nationwide. Now, it’s an unconstitutional one in Washington state.

Last year, 10 patients in Pierce County, Wash., sued to end their involuntary detention on the grounds they were not being held at appropriate treatment facilities. During a preliminary hearing before a mental health commissioner, experts testified that patients held in hospitals commonly receive little or no mental health care. It is testimony backed up by a 2008 report from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that found that boarding “often creates an environment in which a psychiatric patient slowly deteriorates.”

In a study presented at the ANESTHESIOLOGY™ 2014 annual meeting, researchers followed 12 patients with PTSD who had undergone a simple anesthetic procedure called a stellate ganglion block (SGB). This common procedure involves injecting a small amount of local anesthesia into the base of the neck. SGB is traditionally used to treat a variety of conditions, from pain syndromes to sleep disorders.

"While it doesn't cure the problem, we found that SGB appears to be a fast-acting and effective long-term treatment for chronic, extreme PTSD in veterans," said Michael T. Alkire, M.D., staff anesthesiologist at the Long Beach VA Healthcare System in California. "These improvements far outlasted what we would expect from SGB, which is usually used as a temporary nerve block and typically lasts three to five hours."

Symptoms improved over time, and after one month, CAPS scores registered normal to mild PTSD levels for most of the patients. Positive effects were still seen at three months, but began fading and were generally gone by six months. Overall, 75 percent of the participants reported significant improvement of their PTSD symptoms after the SGB.