Recovery Michigan

I begin with the memorials of those who died in psychiatry: M’hamed El Yagoubi writes about his wife and companion Nathalie Dale (in France). Dorrit Cato Christensen writes about her daughter Luise (in Denmark), and Olga Runciman dramatizes her anger and outrage over another death in Danish psychiatry. María Teresa Fernández speaks in honor of her brother (in Mexico), and also reflects from a moral perspective and as a person with a disability who works on the CRPD.

Survivors have a unique vantage point on degradations such as solitary confinement, restraints, injections, forced nakedness, brutality, authoritarianism, the stultifying effects of psychiatric drugs, the sheer destruction of electroshock, and sadistic psychological manipulations. How can we heal from abuse that society condones and that the law allows with impunity? For women forced psychiatry is sexualized and gendered, and should be recognized as both disability-based and gender-based violence. These writings stand as evidence of severe harm and as critique of laws and practices from the bottom up.

We need an easily recognizable accessibility symbol for non-toxic, wireless, VOC, scent, and fragrance-free places that show they are accessible to people with MCS/ES, asthma, COPD, migraines, and others who need healthy environments in order to remain functional and not become physically or cognitively impaired.

These signs would be used only in places that actually enforce the policies.

Do you look to smoking for relief from a bad back? Or aching joints? Or abdominal pain?

Think twice before lighting up that cigarette. “Nicotine-induced pain relief is short-term. Over time, smoking may actually worsen your pain,” says pain management specialist Crawford Barnett, MD.

Smokers are nearly three times as likely to get lower back pain. Smoking may aggravate abdominal pain and joint pain, as well. In fact, smoking may increase pain sensitivity in general.

The nicotine in tobacco can trick the body into feeling good — at first. It triggers the release of chemicals, like dopamine, which give off a satisfying, “reward” sensation. It’s what makes smoking so addictive.

But that same tobacco also impairs the delivery of oxygen-rich blood to bones and tissues. Decreasing blood and nutrient flow can cause degeneration, particularly in discs of the spine, which already have more limited blood flow. The result can be lower back pain and sometimes osteoporosis.

Physicians also link smoking with fatigue and slower healing, factors that make painful conditions more prominent. Researchers are exploring even more physiological reasons why smoking makes people with fibromyalgia, arthritis and other chronic pain hurt more. 

“Almost everyone knows smoking can cause cancer, lung disease and cardiovascular disease,” says Dr. Barnett. “But not everyone realizes that smoking can make your pain worse.”

To make matters worse, when smokers suffer from debilitating pain, potentially life-changing treatments may not work.

Besides its weight loss-related benefits, recent studies have pointed to many other advantages. For instance, Medical News Today recently covered research suggesting that the diet may increase longevity and improve memory in old age.

Other studies have noted the neurological benefits of the diet. The keto diet is used to treat epilepsy, and some have suggested that it may prove helpful in Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.

However, the mechanism by which a keto diet may benefit the brain in these illnesses has been a mystery. The new research - which was led by Dr. Raymond Swanson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco - suggests that it may do so by reducing brain inflammation.

In the new study, Dr. Swanson and team show the molecular process by which the keto diet reduces brain inflammation. The researchers also identify a key protein that, if blocked, could create the effects of a keto diet.

In the story of America’s opioid crisis a recent tripling in prescriptions of the painkillers is generally portrayed as the villain. Researchers and policy makers have paid far less attention to how social losses—including stagnating wages and fraying ties among people—can increase physical and emotional pain to help drive the current drug epidemic.

But a growing body of work suggests this area needs to be explored more deeply if communities want to address the opioid problem. One studypublished earlier this year found that for every 1 percent increase in unemployment in the U.S., opioid overdose death rates rose by nearly 4 percent.

Overdose is now the nation’s leading cause of death for people in the prime of life. And suicide- and alcohol-related deaths have also risen—most dramatically in regions with the highest levels of economic distress. “It will be hard to address the addiction and overdose crisis without better understanding and addressing the neurobiology linking opioids, pain and social connectedness," says Sarah Wakeman, medical director of the Substance Use Disorder Initiative at Massachusetts General Hospital and an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

Connecting opioid use to social stress is not a new idea. Forty years ago the late neuroscience pioneer Jaak Panksepp first proposed the now widely accepted hypothesis that our body’s naturally produced opioids—endorphins and closely related enkephalins—are critical to the nurturing bonds that develop between parents and offspring and also between monogamous mates in mammals. Panksepp’s work and that of others showed that blocking one opioid system in the brain—which relies on the mu-opioid receptor—increased the distress calls of infants separated from their mothers in species as varied as dogs, rats, birds and monkeys. Giving an opioid drug (in doses too low to produce sedation) reduced such cries.

The brain scan came as a surprise even to researchers who for years have been studying the relationship between brain disease and deaths of professional football players.

Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end and a convicted murderer, was 27 when he committed suicide in April. Yet a posthumous examination of his brain showed he had such a severe form of the degenerative brain disease C.T.E. that the damage was akin to that of players well into their 60s.

It was, a lawyer for his family said, in announcing the findings on Thursday, “the most severe case they had ever seen in someone of Aaron’s age.”

C.T.E., or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, has been found in more than 100 former N.F.L. players, some of whom committed suicide, according to researchers at Boston University.

“Pain without a cause is pain we can’t trust,” the author Leslie Jamison wrote in 2014. “We assume it’s been chosen or fabricated.”

Jamison’s work might come to mind when watching Lady Gaga’s new documentary, Gaga: Five Foot Two, or when reading about the singer postponing her European tour. The pop star this month informed the world that she suffers from fibromyalgia, which causes chronic muscle pain. In the documentary, she visits the doctor, she curls up on a couch, she cries in agony. On Instagram, she prays while holding a rosary. The caption is a lengthy apology to her fans for having to postpone upcoming performances due to her condition.

Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) have increased brain levels of a marker of microglial activation, a sign of inflammation, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatryby researchers at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. In the study, Dr. Peter Talbot and colleagues found that the increase in the inflammatory marker was present specifically in patients with MDD who were experiencing suicidal thoughts, pinning the role of inflammation to suicidality rather than a diagnosis of MDD itself.

“Our findings are the first results in living depressed patients to suggest that this microglial activation is most prominent in those with suicidal thinking,” said Dr. Talbot. Previous studies suggesting this link have relied on brain tissue collected from patients after death.

It is well established that PTSD can increase the risk of anxiety and depression, but less is known about how PTSD might impact physical health.

Some studies have suggested that people with PTSD may be at greater risk of heart failure, while other research has uncovered a link between PTSD and a greater risk of autoimmune disorders.

The new study included the data of 54,763 U.S. women, all of whom were assessed for PTSD and exposure to trauma using the Short Screening Scale for DSM-IV PTSD and the Brief Trauma Questionnaire.

Over 24 years of follow-up, the team assessed the women's medical records and used American College of Rheumatology criteria to determine the incidence of SLE. A total of 73 SLE cases occurred.

The researchers found that women who met the criteria for PTSD were 2.94 times more likely to develop SLE compared with women who had experienced no trauma.

Furthermore, the results revealed that women who had been exposed to any kind of trauma - regardless of whether they had symptoms of PTSD - had a 2.87 times greater risk of SLE.

This prompted a team of researchers - led by scientists from McMaster University in Ontario, Canada - to study the link between antidepressant use and mortality risk.

Prof. Andrews and his team conducted a meta-analysis of existing research from various medical databases, looking for a link between mortality and antidepressant use. The analysis comprised 16 studies, summing up approximately 375,000 participants.

The researchers pulled out data on cardiovascular diseases, cardiovascular risk, and the class of antidepressants. They looked at SSRIs, tricyclic antidepressants, and others.

They used a so-called mixed-effects model to conduct their meta-analysis, controlling for depression and other diseases.

Maslej spoke to Medical News Today about the methodology, reassuring us of its strength. "We made sure to only include studies that did a good enough job controlling for important variables (like depression and other illnesses)," she said, "and so we have attempted to statistically rule out other factors that could contribute to mortality."