Recovery Michigan

Teaching cops, firefighters and prison workers to recognize and know how to handle people with mental illness is a big part of the efforts to reduce suffering and death at the hands of law enforcement. Less talked about is the mental health of the cops, firefighters and prison workers themselves.

In the last two years, the number of suicides among firefighters exceeded the number of deaths in the line-of-duty, according to Jeff Dill, a retired firefighter who is chief executive officer and founder of the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance.

In these kind of jobs, human tragedy comes with the badge. For the most part, though, departments are doing too little to help their public protectors deal with the stress and trauma of it all.

“We see people die in our daily life,” says Andrew Shannon, public information officer for the Code Green Campaign, which offers peer counseling and other support services to firefighters and emergency medical personnel nationwide.

Stress levels are also heightened by lack of sleep. For workers in his field, Shannon says 48-hour shifts are not uncommon.

“We get sleep time, but it’s interrupted,” he says.

Mass shootings and natural disasters have become more common, likely worsening the emotional impact on police, firefighters and paramedics. Dill initially founded the Firefighter Behavioral Health Alliance, a counseling service for firefighters, in 2008, after seeing the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on the emergency response workers.

This is an example of the general idea that "noise" helps individuals and groups organize learning and the coordination of effort....

https://goo.gl/b7vGXf

Learning disabilities that affect about 10% of human population are linked to atypical neurodevelopment, but predominantly treated by behavioural interventions. Behavioural interventions alone have shown little efficacy, indicating limited success in modulating neuroplasticity, especially in brains with neural atypicalities. Even in healthy adults, weeks of cognitive training alone led to inconsistent generalisable training gains, or “transfer effects” to non-trained materials. 

Meanwhile, transcranial random noise stimulation (tRNS), a painless and more direct neuromodulation method was shown to further promote cognitive training and transfer effects in healthy adults without harmful effects. It is unknown whether tRNS on the atypically developing brain might promote greater learning and transfer outcomes than training alone. Here, we show that tRNS over the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortices (dlPFCs) improved learning and performance of children with mathematical learning disabilities (MLD) during arithmetic training compared to those who received sham (placebo) tRNS. Training gains correlated positively with improvement on a standardized mathematical diagnostic test, and this effect was strengthened by tRNS.

People with Tourette’s disorder or chronic tic disorder are over four times more likely to die by suicide than the general population, according to a new study in Biological Psychiatry. Dr. David Mataix-Cols of Karolinska Institute, Sweden, led the study of the largest group of patients with tic disorders in the world.

The study sample included 7,736 patients from the Swedish National Patient Register diagnosed with tic disorders over four decades. Compared with 77,360 people from the general population, the increased risk remained even after taking other psychiatric comorbidities into account, showing that tic disorders are associated with an increased risk of suicide in their own right.

Thanks to Erik and Lara Quinn for the Not so NICE Guidelines to Borderline Personality Disorder!

The actual NICE guidelines are on the left with our version of what actually happens on the right. The guidelines may exist but we all know services don’t actually look like the guidelines say they should. This is basically a p*ss take of the NICE guidelines, sorry I mean satirical overview… (mustn’t swear!) to raise awareness of the abysmal services we receive and the stigma and judgement we have to contend with.”

Putting art on an equal footing with science when designing video games for mental health

As psychologists become interested in using games as cognitive training tools, there seems to be a naive assumption that building good games is easy, that it’s just a matter of recruiting the 20-year-old Python programmer down the hall and “POOF!” a beautiful game. I was one of those naive psychologists. Now I understand how much more than a good idea and a few programmers it takes to build a powerful game experience.

We want to know about the emotional arc experienced by our players, what design elements keep them playing, what game elements touch them most deeply, how compelled players are to share these experiences, what narratives transfer outside of the game, how relevant these game experiences are within young people’s rapidly shifting digital landscape, and so on.

https://goo.gl/zkVHoQ 

People with autism are often associated with having difficulty making everyday decisions. However, a new study has shown that adults with autism spectrum conditions actually make more consistent and rational choices in higher-level decision-making tasks. This means they were less susceptible to cognitive biases and could even be less fooled by deceptive advertising.

Autism Spectrum Conditions (ASC) are a band of conditions characterized by difficulties with social interaction, poor communication, and repetitive behavior. Although it varies hugely between people, many people with ASC are reported to be extremely high-functioning and said to "see the world differently," so to speak. This new research helps to shed some light on these differences.

"People with autism are thought to focus more on detail and less on the bigger picture – this is often found in more perceptual studies, for instance by showing that people with autism are less susceptible to some visual illusions," study author George Farmer of the University of Cambridge said in a statement. "We wanted to know if this tendency would apply to higher-level decision-making tasks...."

However, the people with ASC made consistent choices and were not nearly as “controllable”.

This, the researchers argue, is evidence of more rational and consistent high-level decision making.

"People with autism are indeed more consistent in their choices than the neurotypical population. From an economic perspective, this suggests that people with autism are more rational and less likely to be influenced by the way choices are presented," said Farmer.

 "These findings suggest that people with autism might be less susceptible to having their choices biased by the way information is presented to them –for instance, via marketing tricks when choosing between consumer products.”

Background: Diagnosis of consciousness can be very challenging in some clinical situations such as severe sensory-motor impairments.

Case study: We report the case study of a patient who presented a total “locked-in syndrome” associated with and a multi-sensory deafferentation (visual, auditory and tactile modalities) following a protuberantial infarction.

Result: In spite of this severe and extreme disconnection from the external world, we could detect reliable evidence of consciousness using a multivariate analysis of his high-density resting state electroencephalogram. This EEG-based diagnosis was eventually confirmed by the clinical evolution of the patient.

Another thread of the opioid crisis uncovered.  An 83% increase-Wow. This has surely been going on for decades.....

https://goo.gl/btvxzq

New opioid use among older COPD patients was associated with an increased risk of death from causes related to coronary artery disease in a retrospective cohort study from Canada. 

Among COPD patients living in long-term care facilities, the coronary artery disease death rate was more than double among new opioid users versus patients not on opioids, reported Nicholas Vozoris, MD, of St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto, and colleagues.

And new opioid use was associated with an 83% increase in coronary artery disease-related deaths among community-dwelling patients.

Findings from the study, published June 29 in the European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, raise concerns about the use of opioids in patients with COPD, especially among the large population of older patients with comorbidities, Vozoris said.

A large-scale Department of Veterans Affairs project to research how veterans’ genes and military service affect their health surpassed 580,000 participants June 30 during an enrollment event at American Legion headquarters in downtown Washington, D.C.

The Million Veteran Program was designated the largest genomic database in the world when it reached 500,000 participants last August. Project leaders plan to use the information to research conditions such as diabetes, cancer, Gulf War illness, heart disease, kidney disease, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. But the project could face an uncertain future based on President Donald Trump’s proposed 2018 VA budget, veterans with the American Legion said.

Researchers at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health and Albert Einstein College of Medicine studied the link between food allergy and childhood anxiety and depression among a sample of predominantly low socioeconomic status minority children. The results showed that children with a food allergy had a significantly higher prevalence of childhood anxiety. Food allergies were not associated with symptoms of childhood depression or with symptoms of anxiety or depression among their caregivers. The results are published in the Journal of Pediatrics.