Recovery Michigan

Antidepressants remain the primary treatment for depression, but they may not benefit all patients. It is estimated that around 10 to 30 percent of patients with depression either fail to respond to antidepressants or experience only mild improvements paired with severe side effects.

With this in mind, researchers are on the hunt for new interventions that can boost current treatments for depression. Could yoga meet this need?

Yoga is a mind-body practice that has seen a significant rise in popularity over recent years. According to figures from the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, around 13 million U.S. adults have practiced yoga in the past 12 months. Of these adults, 58 percent report practicing yoga to help maintain their health and well-being.

Alleviation of back pain and stress are among the most common reasons cited for practicing yoga, but studies have increasingly suggested that it could also be used to help treat depression.

One study reported by Medical News Today last year, for example, associated breathing-based yoga with improvements in depressive symptoms in a small number of patients with the condition.

The suicide rate among teenaged girls continues to rise and hit a 40-year high in 2015, according to a new analysis released Thursday.

It’s all part of a growing national trend for more suicides, said CDC suicide expert Thomas Simon.

“Nationally overall we have been seeing an increase in suicide rates that is pretty pervasive among all age groups,” added Simon. Overall suicide rates have gone up 28 percent since 2000, he said.

The new analysis from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics compares recent trends to data going back 40 years. It found the suicide rate for males aged 15 to 19 rose from 12 per 100,000 to 18 per 100,000 men and boys that age between 1975 and 1990. Suicide rates for boys fell between 1990 and 2007 and then started rising again, to 14 suicides for every 100,000 teenaged boys by 2015.

“Rates for females aged 15–19 were lower than for males aged 15–19 but followed a similar pattern during 1975–2007,” the NCHS team wrote. “The rate in 2015 was the highest for females for the 1975–2015 period.”

We would never let a teacher or coach physically strike or sexually molest our child. Why then do we allow teachers and coaches to bully our children? There are three major reasons why this occurs:

1. Sexual and physical abuse can be documented on the body and are in the criminal code. The law takes them seriously, therefore so do parents. In contrast, emotional abuse is not in the criminal code, so it can still be confused with "motivation" -- especially in the education system.


2. Bullying can be hard to detect because, when done by teachers and coaches, it's often mistaken for passion and a demand for excellence. Parents believe in authoritative teachers and coaches who say they know what's best for children.


3. Psychiatric and psychological studies mostly depend on interviews, emotions, and lived experience. They cannot provide hard evidence that serious harm is occurring.

How and Why It Happens

Adding to years of psychological and psychiatric research, current studies by neuroscientists confirm that emotional abuse harms in serious ways. MRI imaging shows the physical harm done by bullying, not to the body, but to the brain. Bruises heal and broken bones mend, but neuroscientific research shows that emotional abuse can leave permanent scars on the brain.

Most, if not all, of this neuroscientific research examines peer bullying: child-to-child on the playground or adult-to-adult in the workplace. However, bullying hinges on power imbalance, and the greatest imbalance is adult-to-child, especially teacher-to-student or coach-to-student-athlete. Adults in caregiver positions control the child’s present and future. We always instruct our children to tell the teacher if bullying occurs. However, we should also instruct them that sometimes (although not often) teachers and coaches are bullies, and children must report to their parents what's being said and done.

But it's not that simple. When students do report on teacher or coach bullying, parents are instantly in a double bind, because the teacher and coach may still have power over their child. Reporting the harm might make the child more of a target. This is why teachers and coaches need greater oversight if we want children and parents to be confident speaking up about bullying.

When parents and educators understand just how permanent and damaging bullying is to the brain, it won't seem extreme to argue that teachers and coaches should be held legally accountable for emotional abuse. As with physical and sexual abuse, this would be a powerful deterrent. It would also create the possibility that bullies in caregiver positions would have the choice and support to seek help prior to working with children.

5 Bullying Myths

The results revealed that for every 10-gram increase in alcohol intake each day (for comparison, a "standard drink" in the U.S. contains 14 grams of alcohol), the risk of basal cell carcinoma increased by 7 percent, while the risk of squamous cell carcinoma increased by 11 percent.

Recently, many of my patients have been asking about a ketogenic diet. Is it safe? Would you recommend it? Despite the recent hype, a ketogenic diet is not something new. In medicine, we have been using it for almost 100 years to treat drug-resistant epilepsy, especially in children. In the 1970s, Dr. Atkins popularized his very-low-carbohydrate diet for weight loss that began with a very strict two-week ketogenic phase. Over the years, other fad diets incorporated a similar approach for weight loss.

What is a ketogenic diet?

In essence, it is a diet that causes the body to release ketones into the bloodstream. Most cells prefer to use blood sugar, which comes from carbohydrates, as the body’s main source of energy. In the absence of circulating blood sugar from food, we start breaking down stored fat into molecules called ketone bodies (the process is called ketosis). Once you reach ketosis, most cells will use ketone bodies to generate energy until we start eating carbohydrates again. The shift, from using circulating glucose to breaking down stored fat as a source of energy, usually happens over two to four days of eating fewer than 20 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day. Keep in mind that this is a highly individualized process, and some people need a more restricted diet to start producing enough ketones.

In essence, it is a diet that causes the body to release ketones into the bloodstream. Most cells prefer to use blood sugar, which comes from carbohydrates, as the body’s main source of energy. In the absence of circulating blood sugar from food, we start breaking down stored fat into molecules called ketone bodies (the process is called ketosis). Once you reach ketosis, most cells will use ketone bodies to generate energy until we start eating carbohydrates again. The shift, from using circulating glucose to breaking down stored fat as a source of energy, usually happens over two to four days of eating fewer than 20 to 50 grams of carbohydrates per day. Keep in mind that this is a highly individualized process, and some people need a more restricted diet to start producing enough ketones.

Interesting community support approach......

https://goo.gl/Bhhk7S

Walking down a street in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood–like many other parts of the city–it’s not uncommon to see a homeless person in the throes of a mental health crisis. People passing by often call 911. But an app called Concrn offers an alternative: if you report someone in distress, a trained community member will come offer help instead of the police.

Concrn’s staff includes a core group of seven trained, paid, part-time responders who are community members in the Tenderloin, so the organization can also provide jobs in a low-income neighborhood. It also works with volunteers from a variety of backgrounds; some are social workers, some come from the tech world. To become a responder, each person spends 20 hours studying compassionate response techniques such as empathic listening, using a program adapted from Stanford University’s Center for Compassion and Altruism Research. They then spend 80 hours on the street with mentorship from a lead responder.

A new program at the University of Virginia is aiming to shift the rigid, negative thoughts that come with mental disorders.

Take, for example, the prospect of asking your boss for a raise. The notion would make many people feel a bit nervous, but not prevent them from asking. For others, the notion brings nothing but bad thoughts, perhaps spawning fears of the boss screaming obscenities and firing them on the spot. This mind-tangle is so daunting it leads many people to inertia.

The new, online program being developed at UVA can train people to imagine different, positive outcomes to lots of different scenarios. Unlike other online applications that might seem similar, this program will go through continuous study and be refined as needed.

“It is four sessions long and each session is about 15 to 20 minutes,” said Bethany Teachman, a licensed clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at UVA. “People will see a variety of brief stories that are missing an ending. We encourage them to fill in those endings in different ways across the different sessions.”

In essence, Teachman said the program, which is anonymous, is designed to teach users to develop a new style of thinking. “We want to give people practice in learning how to think about those situations in new ways, because we think that people who are prone to anxiety, depression and negative mood tend to have a pattern of thinking that things will turn out badly, and that can have really serious, negative consequences.”