Recovery Michigan

http://goo.gl/XYIIXI

More than half the states in the U.S. have enacted parity laws mandating comparable coverage for medical and SUD because insurance coverage for SUD treatment can be more restrictive in terms of cost sharing and treatment limitations. An estimated 23 million Americans had a SUD in 2010, according to the study background.

Researchers analyzed all state-level SUD parity laws in the private insurance market that were implemented between October 2000 and March 2008 and found that implementing any SUD parity law increased the treatment rate a relative 9 percent in all specialty SUD treatment facilities and by 15 percent in facilities that accept private insurance.

http://goo.gl/kut4do

In its investigation, CIR found that, post 9/11, the VA has increasingly been treating addictions with a variety of drugs, “feeding addictions and contributing to a fatal overdose rate among VA patients that is nearly double the national average.” Over the past dozen years, prescriptions for the four opiates hydrocodone, oxycodone, methadone and morphine have increased by 270 percent.

Waggoner’s weekend leave medications included 12 oxycodone pills.

As part of its investigation, CIR has created a comprehensive interactive tool that shows the VA systems with the highest prescription rates and allows users to search for information by region and system. The data is culled from CIR’s own research, as well as information from the VA and the U.S. Census Bureau.

http://goo.gl/Haz58l

Welcome to the MFI searchable online database for mental and emotional support. Those mental health providers listed agree to MFI Principles created by the MFI Choice in Mental Health Committee. (Want to be in the Directory? It's free, just let us know.)

I wonder what the spectrum of the blue lights is? Maybe they could supplement light bars for Seasonal Affective Disorder?

http://goo.gl/7CB698

We just found out by accident today that Japan railway operators actually install blue LED lights above train platforms to calm suicidal commuters down. When they started doing it in 2009 as an experiment at three suicide hotspots along the Joban Line through Mito city, there was nothing to show if it would work.

Now the results are in: the number of fatal accidents in these areas actually fell over the years. Preliminary results are showing that suicides almost halved in those areas, and according to an observational study by a team from the University of North Texas, the blue lights resulted in a 84% decrease in the number of suicides. Beam these blue lights to save lights, we say, beam on.

http://goo.gl/1JDQW8

Growing evidence suggests that gloomy moods improve key types of thinking and behavior, Forgas asserts in a new review paper aptly titled “Don’t worry, be sad!” For good evolutionary reasons, positive and negative moods subtly recruit thinking styles suited to either benign or troubling situations, he says. Each way of dealing with current circumstances generally works well, if imperfectly.

New and recent studies described by Forgas in the June Current Directions in Psychological Science illustrate some of the ways in which periods of sadness spontaneously recruit a detail-oriented, analytical thinking style. Morose moods have evolved as early-warning signs of problematic or dangerous situations that demand close attention, these reports suggest.

http://goo.gl/4FGPj4

Using algorithms to search through millions of tweets nationwide over a three-month period, researchers at Brigham Young University discovered a troubling but potentially valuable trend: Each state's ratio of tweets discussing suicide or key risk factors for suicide correlated strongly with that state's actual suicide rate as reported by traditional sources. A paper describing the research in detail was published online in Crisis.

http://goo.gl/YWomTx

It found that:

• People with severe mental illness were three times more likely to be a victim of any crime than those without.
• People with severe mental illness were five times more likely to experience assault than those without.
• Women with severe mental illness were ten times more likely to experience assault than those without.
• Nearly forty five per cent of people with severe mental illness reported experiencing crime in the last year.
• Sixty two per cent of women with severe mental illness reported being victims of sexual violence as adults.
• People with severe mental illness were seven times more likely to experience three or more different types of crime in a year than the general population.
• People with severe mental illness were significantly more likely to report the police had been unfair or disrespectful compared to the general population.

http://goo.gl/q82kvJ

When I was youngest, the stimming impulse was at its strongest, and my life most heavily defined by my stimulus of choice. My oldest memories are of this neck-feeling, like the tingle following a mild electrical shock, and then feeling the desperate urge to move, and then moving. Some people rock in place, some swing limbs. I paced in circles. Or I would repeat the word “if”, drawing the sharp F sound forcefully, the electric sensation traveling from my lips to the back of my neck. Or I’d press a fingernail into the gums of my front teeth, or close my fist and pull my fingers back, one by one. Special education scrubbed the more disruptive behaviors from me, but the thrum in my neck persisted.

Eventually, I learned to self-medicate through sound. Repetitious and regular sound is best for this purpose: laundry machines, police sirens, ticking clocks, ceiling fans. Sometimes I would hide in the dark of the crawlspace behind my bed and hold my enormous Manx cat to my ear as he purred himself to sleep. I liked animals. They seemed more concerned with immediate stimulus than people; they seemed more like me.

Lots going on about the inner experience of individuals with severe autism these days. Jon Stewart interviewed the translator of a great book by a 13 year old boy with severe autism (The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism, at Amazon: http://http//goo.gl/DS5SvL ), who was also a participant in "Wretches and Jabberers" (see http://goo.gl/OLyGVj, a film about the travels of two men with severe autism.

http://goo.gl/dNropF

A California hospital can't unilaterally ban all service animals from certain areas, such as a psychiatric ward, a federal judge has ruled.

Siding with a disabled woman who said she had to choose between getting the treatment she needs for her bipolar disorder and getting the help she needs from her highly trained service dog, Inglis, U.S. District Judge Ronald Whyte held last week that El Camino Hospital had violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to do an individualized assessment of Inglis before banning the animal, reports Courthouse News.

The hospital had argued that concerns about infection, the safety of its other patients and disruption of ward routine justified the blanket ban.

But that is not what the law requires, Whyte said in a written opinion in the San Jose case:

http://goo.gl/r4D9Bq

Video footage of naked, screaming inmates being drenched with pepper spray was aired in federal court Tuesday as evidence in a lawsuit to force California to improve its treatment of mentally ill state prisoners.