Recovery Michigan

Do you like lists? Do you spend half an hour each morning writing down your tasks for the day ahead in bullet-points? Do you sometimes have trouble falling asleep at night?

If your answer to all of those is "yes," then I have good news for you. You may be able to achieve that sweet night's sleep much faster if you start writing your to-do lists just before bed, instead of first thing in the morning.

Recently, Michael K. Scullin and other researchers from Baylor University in Waco, TX, set out to investigate whether writing down all the tasks that we have to finish over the next day or two could help us to achieve a more peaceful state of mind, conducive to falling asleep more easily.

When people started to show up to Dr. William Cooke's primary care office in Austin, Ind., in 2014 with HIV, Cooke knew it was probably related to the region's opioid epidemic. But what he and the rest of the public health community didn't know was who they were missing or how long the HIV outbreak had been going on.

Now they've got a clearer picture — literally. In visualizations published in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, dots and lines define the constellations of Indiana's HIV outbreak. Using genetic sequencing, they show how long the outbreak had been going on, connected people who hadn't previously been linked by traditional methods, and showed how the virus jumped from a slowly spreading infection to a virus transmitted quickly via needle sharing and other, smaller sub-epidemics.

Genetic data has been used to track HIV before. But now, the technology is being used to map HIV outbreaks in real time, lending molecular weight to the in-person interviews that public health officials have used for centuries to track and stop outbreaks. The Austin reconstruction is an example of what it can do.

"This is an instrumental tool for bringing new infections down to zero," says John Brooks, senior medical advisor at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Division of HIV/AIDS Prevention. "We have the tools, in terms of treatment reducing transmission to nearly zero. We have prevention... and now we know how to find people."

The largest reported mortality increases were in young people. Among 25-year-old AI/ANs, mortality increased 2.7% annually for men and 5% annually for women between 1999 and 2014.

“Increases in premature mortality of this magnitude have rarely been observed in the US,” NCI investigator Meredith S. Shiels, PhD, told JAMA.

But experts say the real picture could be even worse for the 5.2 million people in the United States who identify as AI/AN. Their deaths are notoriously underreported due to racial misclassification on death certificates. An astounding 40% of AI/ANs who die are listed as a different race—usually white—on their death certificates by funeral home directors, according to a 2016 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Shiels and her coauthors estimated AI/AN mortality based on death certificates from Indian Health Service (IHS) regions known as Contract Health Services Delivery Areas (CHSDAs), where racial misclassification tends to be lower. But even here, around 20% of AI/ANs are still misclassified as other races on their death certificates. By comparison, only 3% of Hispanics and Asians and Pacific Islanders and almost no whites or blacks are racially misclassified on death certificates, according to the CDC.

“What this basically translates to is an underestimation of mortality for the American Indian population,” said Elizabeth Arias, PhD, director of the US Life Table Program at the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS).

A critical part of any real strategy for dealing with sexual predation.....

https://goo.gl/aaPvfD

I was two years into therapy, which I began in the spring of 2005 when I heard that a child in my old neighborhood in Iowa had been murdered by a sexual predator. The horror of that event pushed me to examine the impact of growing up in environment where the young and vulnerable were sexually exploited by those in power. At that point in my progress, I knew I couldn’t trust myself to not try to start secret, sexual relationship with a student.

The perpetrators in my neighborhood in the 1980’s were not adults, but babysitters, older siblings, and teenage neighbors sexually exploiting the younger children. I remember being molested by a babysitter under a blanket while watching a movie and being “humped” by an older boy in a basement. I also have small flashes of other memories, a painful slideshow that has been slowly coming together over time.

Another target of the same kind of abuse was one of my friends, a neighbor girl one year younger than me. The abuse stopped when she moved away from the neighborhood at age 9. After that I only saw her at school. Neither of us told anyone what had happened. The memories faded over time, except far-away flashes in my mind when I’d see her walk by in the hallway. We gradually drifted apart and fell out of contact.

About a year after I declined the art school position, I found her online and we met at a restaurant in Minneapolis. I was instructed by my counselor to use extreme caution in broaching the subject of abuse, only to discuss it if she wanted to. I didn’t need to wait long. As soon as the waiter left us alone, she began: “We grew up in a pretty messed up neighborhood, huh?”

At that point in therapy, I had been working through my reoccurring nightmares of being sexually attacked and seeing my childhood friends be exploited and prostituted. When my neighbor and I spoke, her memories lined up with my nightmares and it became more real for both of us. She told me her memories of both teenage boys and girls abusing her — being shown pornography then instructed to act it out, having several boys molest her in a sleeping bag in one night, and being traded to older teens in exchange for alcohol.

House Republicans and Democrats joined forces on more than a dozen bills to fight the prescription opioid and heroin epidemic.

Prescriber education, treatment of vulnerable populations, and upholding the rule of law are just some of the issues covered in the various bills, he noted.

Asked whether the group was lobbying to include funding for the opioid epidemic in a must-pass spending bill, Ann McLane Kuster (D-N.H.), co-chair of the task force, said that the group had considered it, and would be issuing a letter on that matter soon.

MacArthur said it was "confusing to progress" to advance programs at the federal level and then fail to provide the funding to implement them.

Certainly true of me.....

https://goo.gl/UPThKN

Social learning biases appear to play a role in anxiety. New research has found evidence that people with social anxiety disorder show a negativity bias when learning from feedback.

The study, which was published in the scientific journal Emotion, found that people without social anxiety disorder showed the opposite bias.

“Broadly speaking, my research addresses how emotion and behavior are influenced by social context, and so far, we know very little about the psychological and brain mechanisms that underlie social context effects on the self,” explained study author Leonie Koban of the University of Colorado Boulder.

“How we perceive our self and how we feel about our self is central to human experience. Self-perception and -esteem are also importantly altered (e.g., much more negative self-image) in many psychopathologies, including social anxiety disorder.”

“So it is really important to understand how self-perception and feelings about the self (i.e., state self-esteem) are fluctuating over time and how those dynamics differ between people,” Koban told PsyPost. “We looked at this from a learning perspective, by testing the idea that self-perception and feelings are influenced by social learning.”

In the study of 21 adults with social anxiety disorder and 35 controls, the participants gave a 5-minute speech about their perfect job before a panel of judges.

The participants rated their own performance after giving the speech. Then they viewed ratings from the judges and rated how they felt about themselves and about the judges. About 20 minutes later, the participants were asked to rate their performance again.

They were asked to rate their performance yet again 7 to 17 months later.

The researchers found that the adults with social anxiety disorder updated their self-perception to a greater extent in response to negative than to positive performance feedback.

The participants without social anxiety disorder, on the other hand, showed the opposite bias. For them, the positive feedback left more of a mark.

Few people have any idea of the number of people in Ontario afflicted with the debilitating, painful, often co-occurring and even life-threatening conditions of Environmental Sensitivity/Multiple Chemical Sensitivities (about 250,000), Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (about 155,400) and Fibromyalgia (about 222,300). But it turns out that, in total, there are a whopping 650,000 of them (Statistics Canada 2010 and 2014 figures are roughly the same). Consider that these numbers place people with these conditions in the top 5 major chronic disease categories in Ontario and in Canada – 9 times more than the number of people living with Alzheimer’s disease, and 8 times more prevalent than Crohns.These sufferers and their families carry a huge burden of illness because in addition to the physical punishments they endure, they also face neglect, inappropriate treatment and stigmatization in Ontario’s health and social service systems; these, in turn, are the results of ignorance, obsolete ideas, inertia and lack of capacity.

Dozens of confidential documents apparently leaked from Jehovah’s Witnesses archives appeared online Tuesday, providing a rare window into how the religion’s child abuse policies favor accused sexual predators at the expense of the victims.

FaithLeaks, a group pushing for more transparency in religious organizations, posted the documents in tandem with a story published by Gizmodo.

The documents detail the accusations of two sisters who say they were sexually assaulted by their father when they were growing up in the Jehovah’s Witnesses religion. One says her father tied her down and molested her. The other says her father raped her repeatedly over a period of years.

Most of the 33 documents are letters between local leaders and the religion’s global headquarters in New York, The Watchtower Bible and Tract Society. They show how the alleged perpetrator was able to attend a congregation with one of his alleged victims, in violation of a restraining order, while leaders admonished a member for reporting the violation to police.

The Watchtower’s written policies direct leaders to keep sexual abuse allegations away from authorities and handle them internally, Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting has found.