Recovery Michigan

More than one million people worldwide, including over 40,000 North Americans commit suicide on an annual basis, according to the Centre for Disease Control and Prevention's 2012 estimation.

In a research article, Flett and his co-authors Professor Paul Hewitt of the University of British Columbia and Professor Marnin Heisel of Western University note that physicians, lawyers and architects, whose occupations emphasize on precision, and also those in leadership roles are at higher risk for perfectionism-related suicide, citing the recent cases of prominent perfectionists who died by suicide.

The authors document how being exposed to relentless demands to be perfect, a concept they refer to as socially prescribed perfectionism, is linked consistently with hopelessness and suicide. Other key themes discussed are: how perfectionistic self-presentation and self-concealment can lead to suicides that occur without warning; and how perfectionists often come up with thorough and precise suicide plans.

On Wednesday, the Michigan Veteran Affairs Agency formally launched a new program with the United Way’s 2-1-1 telephone information system.

The Michigan Veteran Resource Service Center (MVRSC) is the first of its kind the U.S., said MVAA director Jeff Barnes. Uniting with 2-1-1 brings in an additional 8,000 services that veteran programs may not offer.

"Our goal is to connect these veterans that are making the transition home back to the local service provider in the community where they work and live," Barnes said. "This is important because this is where the veteran will access services and make in convent for their schedules and families."

Veterans can get information by calling 2-1-1, 1-800-MICH-VET or going to MichiganVeterans.com. From there, they can learn about federal benefits, state programs and referrals to veteran programs in their communities.

The recent tragedy of Robin Williams's suicide—and the ensuing media storm—raised awareness of suicide as a mental health issue, but also generated a lot of misinformation. This week, the Savvy Psychologist cleans up after the headlines.

The media frenzy is starting to settle after the tragic suicide of Robin Williams. Some of the coverage, I was happy to see, was sensitive and compassionate, while some was just plain irresponsible, sensationalistic, and full of specific details-- all of which can put vulnerable people at risk, and perpetuate misinformation.

So, this week on the Savvy Psychologist, we’ll set right 7 myths about suicide.

Myth #1: People Who Attempt Suicide Are Just Trying to Get Attention / It’s a Cry for Help

Mums and dads who may be overwhelmed by their children's self-harming can now find support in the experiences of other parents, through a new resource on the website healthtalk.org.

The information on the site is based on detailed interviews with 39 parents carried out by researchers from the University of Oxford's Department of Psychiatry. The parents shared their stories from finding out that their child self-harmed to getting help, coping as a family and supporting their child to recovery.

Dr. Anne Stewart, a Consultant Child & Adolescent Psychiatrist at Oxford University and a member of the advisory panel for this new healthtalk.org resource, said: "Parents who discover their child is self-harming often feel bewildered, angry and very afraid for the future. They can feel quite guilty or ashamed. This may make it difficult to talk about with friends or with other family members. We've created this resource to help parents to realise that they're not alone in what they're dealing with and provide in-depth information and advice from other parents who've been there too."

The controversial war on drugs not only costs a lot, it has done almost nothing to curb the drug addiction rate since 1970, according to this stunning chart by documentary filmmaker Matt Groff comparing the cost of drug control to the drug addiction rate. Groff used the rate of addiction to illicit drugs from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, pairing it with federal drug control budget spending numbers from the International Centre for Science in Drug Policy. 

Groff, who made the chart for his new documentary on the drug war The 1315 Project, says that it shows the costly war on drugs simply isn't working. A note: The numbers on this chart alone don't add up to $1.5 trillion, which represents a more inclusive count of drug control spending, with prison costs and state level costs determined by the Office of National Drug Control Policy, but instead to $800 billion. Groff included that $1.5 trillion because the chart appears in the documentary as a source discusses that more complete amount. 

As you can see, while the blue illicit drug addiction rate line has remained relatively steady at about 1.3 percent, the green line for drug control spending has skyrocketed. The increased spending did not correlate to lower addiction rates

These findings may be relevant to the high rates of smoking in schizophrenia.

"The data seem to suggest that smoking might produce some clinical benefits for some patients by increasing the availability of receptor targets for nicotine in the brain," commented Dr. John Krystal, Editor ofBiological Psychiatry. "This finding adds to evidence that brain nicotine-related signaling might play a role for new medications developed to treat schizophrenia."

The team found that the more symptoms of PTSD women had, the higher the prevalence of food addiction. Women with no symptoms of PTSD had food addiction prevalence of 6%, compared with almost 18% prevalence among women who had 6-7 symptoms of PTSD. Furthermore, the earlier the age at which PTSD symptoms occurred, the stronger the association with food addiction.

This study involved 200 people who were either overweight or obese and were also taking antipsychotics for serious mental illnesses; half of the study participants were enrolled in a year-long lifestyle intervention, the other half served as the control group and did not participate in the intervention.

Intervention participants lost nearly 10 more pounds than those in the control group during the weight loss phase of the study. They regained some of their weight during the weight maintenance phase of the study, but still weighed about 6 pounds less than people in the control group by the end of the intervention.

Intervention participants were also more than twice as likely as those in the control group to have normal fasting glucose levels at the end of the intervention period, and they had fewer medical hospitalizations (6.7 percent compared to 18.8 percent).

Hundreds of women worked in France and Belgium as nurses and ambulance drivers, right alongside the male soldiers, or "Tommies." Their experiences included tremendous violence and physical suffering; their diaries and letters home include descriptions of being fired on by enemy forces, who used the ambulances to gauge distance to the trenches; spending long nights trapped in No Man's Land; suffering amputations and broken bones from crashes and falling shells; and even getting hit with "secondary gas," as the acrid fumes clinging to the victims they were helping could burn their eyes.

They also wrote of mental anxieties and traumas that bore striking resemblance to the era’s understanding of "shell shock"—but they largely suffered them without diagnosis or treatment. If a female ambulance driver or nurse could not stand the strain of war, she was simply sent home. Unlike the male soldiers, women were expected to be mentally incapable of handling the trauma of war, and high female attrition was hardly a concern. The tremendous effort put into “curing” men with shell shock—87 percent of British troops diagnosed with the condition were returned to front line service within a month—was due to the army’s need for combat-ready men. The supply of women was not rapidly diminishing.

However, the diaries and letters of women stationed on the front reveal countless instances of women discussing their "shock" and reaction to the emotional stress around them. One woman wrote of a friend who had gone temporarily deaf, and another who had trouble with her vision, as a result of the stress and strain of their work. Several novels, poems, and memoirs also explore the themes of mental instability among women at the front. In Helen Zenna Smith's Not So Quiet, a female ambulance driver is sent home from France on "sick leave" after she witnesses a friend dying at the front, but she receives no medical attention. In The Forbidden Zone,Mary Borden's memoir of her time as a nurse in France, she describes herself as becoming "delirious" and feeling like she "seemed to be breaking into pieces." She was sent home because officials felt she was "tired."