Recovery Michigan

Dr Pavel Goldstein, a postdoctoral pain researcher in the Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder was inspired to conduct the research after witnessing the birth of his daughter four years ago.

Still more evidence. Note that these changes in brain volume could conceivably occur over the short term. Of course, we need ways to alter the gut biome.....

https://goo.gl/QVTnvs

For this study, the researchers sought to identify brain and behavioral characteristics of healthy women clustered by gut microbiota profiles.

Forty women supplied fecal samples for profiling, and magnetic resonance images were taken of their brains as they viewed images of individuals, activities or things that evoked emotional responses. The women were divided by their gut bacteria composition into two groups: 33 had more of a bacterium called Bacteroides; the remaining seven had more of the Prevotella bacteria. The Bacteroides group showed greater thickness of the gray matter in the frontal cortex and insula, brain regions involved with complex processing of information. They also had larger volumes of the hippocampus, a region involved in memory processing. The Prevotella group, by contrast, showed more connections between emotional, attentional and sensory brain regions and lower brain volumes in several regions, such as the hippocampus. This group’s hippocampus was less active while the women were viewing negative images. They also rated higher levels of negative feelings such as anxiety, distress and irritability after looking at photos with negative images than did the Bacteroides group.

These results support the concept of brain-gut-microbiota interactions in healthy humans. Researchers do not yet know whether bacteria in the gut influence the development of the brain and its activity when unpleasant emotional content is encountered, or if existing differences in the brain influence the type of bacteria that reside in the gut. Both possibilities, however, could lead to important changes in how one thinks about human emotions.

Psychological support and new coping skills are helping patients at high risk of developing chronic pain and long-term, high-dose opioid use taper their opioids and rebuild their lives with activities that are meaningful and joyful to them.

A study of 343 post-surgical patients treated by an innovative, multidisciplinary hospital-integrated pain program at Toronto General Hospital (TGH), University Health Network (UHN) found that all patients showed reductions in pain and anxiety in the two-year study, but those who also received psychological services had greater reductions in opioid use, and their mood improved.

The study, "Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Manage Pain and Opioid Use after Major Surgery: Preliminary Outcomes from the Toronto General Hospital Transitional Pain Service," is published in the Canadian Journal of Pain, by first author Muhammad Azam, Ph.D. candidate at York University and senior authors Dr. Joel Katz, Affiliate Scientist, Toronto General Hospital Research Institute (TGHRI) and Dr. Hance Clarke, Director of the Transitional Pain Service at TGH, UHN and Clinical Researcher, TGHRI.

Although psychological approaches to help patients cope with pain have been used previously, what is novel in this study is the combined use of a specific psychological approach with mindfulness meditation training to help patients wean off high-doses of opioids and reduce their pain-related distress and disability.

"If we lower how many opioids patients are taking, but leave them disabled and not able to live their lives, that is not helpful," says Dr. Aliza Weinrib, one of the authors of the paper and a clinical psychologist who developed this innovative psychology program and teaches it to surgical patients at TGH. "Patients can learn to respond to their pain in a different way, making it less overwhelming. They don't have to be so tied to their medications."

The concern expressed here (that even negative portrayals of driven behavior will increase that behavior) doesn't just apply to eating disorders, but all driven behavior including the adolescent male commitment to military and combat service....

https://goo.gl/bRRRdU

When I was sick, there was a young adult book that centred around anorexia that I was obsessed with. I actually had a confronting interaction with it the other day. I work in a bookstore, and a young girl with her father came in and asked me if we stocked the book. I stood there for a moment, unsure of how to respond. How could I tell her that this book contributed to some of my worst stages of my illness? Her father was standing right next to her, should I have called her out in front of him? Thankfully, we didn’t have the book in stock, though I don’t know if I would have told her the truth if we did. For all I know, she could have just wanted to read it, and been perfectly healthy, though I don’t believe it’s ever really that kind of book.

It is a wonderfully well written novel, that captures eating disorders in a very accurate way. But when I was sick, this wasn’t representation to me, this was a novel filled with hints and tricks to help me become skinnier without getting caught.

I understand that the film is written and starred in by women who have suffered from eating disorders, and that they’ve done their best to represent an incredibly serious topic. But it terrifies me to think how dangerous it was for Lily Collins to lose so much weight for the role without relapsing, or why she even needed to. The actress is thinspo (thin-inspiration, a common term among anorexic people, of things reminding you not to eat) on a normal day, but not everyone who has an eating disorder looks like that.

John remained with the Dickinsons.

John had curious habits: he had an aversion to the margarine my grandparents used, so would bring his own butter, wrapped in paper and transported in his back pocket. It was a messy habit, but one he persisted with.

He was a solitary character, with little interest in the people around him, but loved to pore over sports statistics and had a remarkable capacity for remembering the most arcane athletics results.

My dad remembers meeting John at his boarding school, so they could go off to suitable locations together — Holyrood Palace, the castle, museums and art galleries.

They got on well enough.

People experiencing migraines often avoid light and find relief in darkness. A new study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) has revealed a previously unknown connection between the light-sensitive nerve cells in the eye and centers in the brain that regulate mood and a host of physical parameters such as heart rate, shortness of breath, fatigue, congestion and nausea. The findings, which explain how light can induce the negative emotions and unpleasant physical sensations that often accompany migraine, were published online today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“While studying the effects of color on headache intensity, we found that some patients reported finding light uncomfortable even when it didn’t make their headaches worse,” said lead author Rami Burstein, PhD, Vice Chairman of research in the Department of Anesthesia, Critical Care and Pain Medicine at BIDMC and professor of anesthesia Harvard Medical School. “We found that exposure to different colors of light could make patients experiencing a migraine feel irritable, angry, nervous, depressed and anxious. These patients also reported feeling physical discomfort, including tightness in the chest or throat, shortness of breath, light-headedness and nausea.”

Burstein and colleagues showed different colored lights to 81 people who frequently experienced migraines and 17 people who had never had a migraine and asked them to describe what they experienced. The effects of light and color were tested three times: once for those who never experience migraines and twice for patients with migraines – once during an attack and once between attacks.

I wanted to replicate this result myself. So a few months ago, when I surveyed readers of my blog, I included some questions about perceptual illusions (including a static version of the hollow mask). I got five thousand responses, including a few from schizophrenic and autistic readers. Sure enough, the effect was there.

Schizophrenic readers were about twice as likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion as non-schizophrenics (28% vs. 14%, p = 0.04). They were also more likely to have a weak reaction to a similar illusion, the Spinning Dancer (58% vs. 81%, p = 0.01). Readers with a family history of schizophrenia landed in between schizophrenics and healthy controls (16% for mask, 63% for dancer, ns).

Autistic readers were only slightly more likely to report a weak reaction to the mask illusion than neurotypicals (17% vs. 14%), but thanks to our big sample size we could be pretty confident that this was a meaningful difference (p = 0.004). There was no different between autists and neurotypicals on the Spinning Dancer, not even a weak trend (58% vs. 60%, p = 0.4).

Looking deeper, I found a few other anomalies on illusion perception. Most were small and inconsistent. But one stood out: transgender people had an altered response pattern on both illusions, stronger than the alteration for autism and almost as strong as the one for schizophrenia (mask: cis 14% vs. trans 21%, p = 0.003; dancer: cis 58% vs. trans 71%, p = 0.001). These results are very tentative, and need replication. My mass survey isn’t a very sensitive instrument, and I place low confidence in any of this until other people can confirm.

Flawed, but nonetheless important critique of recovery becoming compliance.....

https://goo.gl/MX913t

Who could be against recovery? The emphasis on hope is something with which I have no quarrel, having once been told that I had none. But the recovery movement interprets this in a particular way and it is with an ideological slant that will reappear throughout this editorial. Consider a piece of research, a collaboration with service user researchers (Crawford et al., 2011). This was a nominal group study seeking to find out how service users, with either a diagnosis of psychosis or affective problems, ranked outcome measures commonly used in trials. 

Here, I will consider the group with a diagnosis of psychosis. Their top-ranked outcome measure was of side-effects of medication: this is what mattered most to them in terms of the outcomes of interventions. The Recovery Star ranked in the middle. Service users were critical of measures of function, pointing out that not socialising with others or breaking connections with families was not necessarily dysfunctional but a way of protecting one’s mental health. My point is that such aspirations are not absent from the recovery movement and associated measures. For all that goals are meant to be “personal”, certain goals are not permitted. You can not decide to go to bed for a month.

A $305,000 federal grant will go toward efforts to combat suicide and aid at-risk groups at Wayne State University.

Jeffrey Kuentzel, the university's director of counseling and psychological services, called the grant "a huge thing for Wayne State, because -- like at probably just about any large university with a lot students and resources stretched thin -- we could always use some more help with identifying students who need help."

He defined at risk groups as veterans, LGBT students and on-campus students who  experience homesickness or isolation from their normal support groups.

The grant will be broken down into about $100,000 per year. 

The Detroit Wayne Mental Health Authority and the university are also providing $328,000 in matching funds toward the initiative.

Breaking research published this week in JAMA Psychiatry takes a look at the role of brain inflammation in OCD. The senior author of the study is Dr. Jeffrey Meyer, head of the Neuroimaging Program in Mood & Anxiety at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, Canada.

Inflammation is a natural process; it is a normal component of the immune response and a standard reaction to injury. However, if the level of inflammation is inappropriate or continues for too long, it can have negative consequences. For instance, in a number of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis and atherosclerosis, inflammation is heavily involved.

Specifically, the researchers were able to selectively dye microglia, which are cells that act as the nervous system's most prominent immune defense and which are activated during inflammation. The researchers measured levels of microglia in six brain regions known to be important in OCD, including the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex.

Another interesting finding was that individuals who reported the highest levels of stress when trying to stop themselves from acting on compulsions also had the highest levels of inflammation in a particular brain region.

As so many diseases involve inflammation, there are already a range of drugs designed to tackle it. Because these drugs already exist on the market, it may be a fruitful avenue of research in the hunt for more effective treatments for OCD.

"Medications developed to target brain inflammation in other disorders could be useful in treating OCD," Dr. Meyer says. "Work needs to be done to uncover the specific factors that contribute to brain inflammation, but finding a way to reduce inflammation's harmful effects and increase its helpful effects could enable us to develop a new treatment much more quickly."