Recovery Michigan

Cassandra Moshfegh, a research assistant in Paul Marvar's laboratory at the George Washington University, and colleagues sought to investigate the effect of orange essential plant oil on PTSD symptoms. Previous studies have shown that orange essential oil may have a depressant-like effect on the central nervous system.

The team presented the research at the American Physiological Society's annual meeting during the Experimental Biology 2017 conference, held in Chicago, IL.

Essential oils are naturally produced by plants and can be used for therapeutic purposes. The aromatic compounds of orange essential oil are usually extracted from the peel of the orange. Essential oils can be inhaled, applied to the skin, or ingested in foods or beverages.

The researchers found that the mice exposed to orange essential oil were significantly less likely to exhibit freezing behavior and stopped freezing altogether earlier than the mice that received water and fear conditioning. Moreover, the mice exposed to orange essential oil experienced a significant decrease in the immune cells linked to the "biochemical pathways" associated with PTSD.

The mechanism behind the differences in behavior between the two groups could be explained by the variations found in gene expression in their brains.

"Relative to pharmaceuticals, essential oils are much more economical and do not have adverse side effects. The orange essential plant oil showed a significant effect on the behavioral response in our study mice. This is promising because it shows that passively inhaling this essential oil could potentially assuage PTSD symptoms in humans."

Cassandra Moshfegh

The conundrum of hepatitis C is well known. The virus kills more than 20,000 Americans each year, more, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, than the other 60 infectious causes of death combined. A cure is in hand, but is out of reach for many because it costs tens of thousands of dollars per patient. The problem is most acute in state Medicaid programs and prisons, where 700,000 people need treatment but only 20,000 a year will get it. The price controls some have asked for would make treatment affordable, but would also be likely to chill innovation in pharmaceutical companies, the very innovation that benefits society by producing such remarkable drugs.

A recent consensus committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine proposed a novel strategy to improve access to hepatitis C medicines. Their report recommends that the firms producing the hepatitis C treatments compete to license their patent to the federal government for use in neglected patients, such as Medicaid beneficiaries and prisoners. Such a deal would protect the innovator companies’ market share in the lucrative private markets, while allowing the government to save billions of taxpayer dollars and reach more poor patients.

Drug overdoses claimed more lives in the U.S. than firearms for the first time ever this year, CBS reports.

It's evident that this epidemic has gotten out of control — in 2016 alone, 50,000 Americans died from overdoses, while 20.5 million were addicted to drugs.

Over the course of modern American history, more people who have died from drug use than during wars, motor vehicle accidents and disease.

Based on data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's WONDER, DrugAbuse.com created a graph to demonstrate just how extreme those numbers are:

On April 11, when a 12-year-old on spring break walked to the corner store in his Chicago neighborhood with his brother and a friend to buy snacks, he watched as a car drove by and both his brother and the friend were shot–along with a dozen other people. The children survived, but now they have to deal with the next problem: trying to recover from the trauma.

After a years-long battle with mental illness, 27-year-old Adam Maier-Clayton committed suicide last week.

His dying wish was to make it easier for other people in his situation to do the same.

The Windsor, Ont., man killed himself to end the debilitating physical and mental pain he experienced as a result of anxiety, mood disorder and obsessive compulsive disorder.

This idea that suicide is dignified and painless is a dangerous one. Take it from someone who tried and failed.

Nearly seven years ago I overdosed on dozens of pills — causing multiple cardiac arrests and weeks in hospital on life support.

I survived, but only narrowly so.

Everything from the method to the date and time was meticulously thought out.

I picked the day because I didn’t have any other appointments scheduled — as though missing a meeting would have been the only problem with my plan any other day.

Suicidal people are irrational. This is true even when decisions appear to be made through logic and reason.

I saw suicide as the answer to pain I was convinced wouldn’t abate.

It wasn’t just about picking the easy way out of an unpleasant situation — it was the only way. I saw no way my life would improve.

Spoiler alert: it did.

A congressional proposal to make service members buy into their Post-9/11 GI Bill benefits surprised veterans groups on Tuesday, with advocates divided over whether it amounts to a long-term fix for the benefit or an unfair bill for veterans. 

“This new tax on troops is absurd,” said Veterans of Foreign Wars National Commander Brian Duffy in a statement. “Ensuring veterans are able to successfully transition back to civilian life after military service is a cost of war, and not a fee that Congress can just pass along to our troops.

“Congress must stop nickeling and diming America’s service members and veterans.”

The plan — draft legislation from House Veterans Affairs Committee Chairman Phil Roe, R-Tenn. — would deduct $2,400 from future service members’ paychecks to establish eligibility for revamped post-military education benefits. This was first reported Tuesday by Task & Purpose.

Currently, the post-9/11 GI Bill offers full tuition to a four-year state college (or the equivalent tuition payout for a private school) plus a monthly housing stipend to any service member who spends at least three years on active duty, and to reservists who are mobilized to active-duty for extended periods. Troops wounded while serving are also eligible. 

Unlike the older Montgomery GI Bill benefit, the post-9/11 GI Bill does not require any fees or pay reductions for eligibility. The new proposal would change that, taking up to $100 a month from new enlistees’ paychecks for the right to access the benefit after they leave the ranks. 

The money collected would amount to a fraction of the overall cost of the veterans education benefit. Congressional staff estimate the move would bring in about $3.1 billion over the next 10 years, while total GI Bill spending is expected to total more than $100 billion over the same decade. 

In a new study, researchers from the Medical Research Council (MRC) in the United Kingdom reveal how a licensed antidepressant and a compound currently being trialled as a cancer drug blocked brain cell death, reduced brain shrinkage, and restored memory in mouse models of prion disease and frontotemporal dementia (FTD).

Study leader Prof. Giovanna Mallucci, of the MRC's Toxicology Unit and the University of Cambridge in the U.K., and colleagues believe that their findings could lead to much-needed treatments for Alzheimer's diseaseand other neurodegenerative diseases in as little as 2 to 3 years.

Clinical trials are needed to determine the safety and efficacy of the compounds for neurodegenerative disease in humans, but the fact that one of the compounds is already used for the treatment of depressioncould speed up the process.

Now, the researchers have identified two new compounds that have not only proven effective for preventing brain cell death in mice, but they also had minimal side effects.

The team then tested these compounds on mouse models of prion disease - a group of neurodegenerative diseases caused by proteins called prions, which prompt the misfolding of healthy proteins - and a familial form of FTD.

FTD is a type of dementia caused by the loss of brain cells in the frontal lobes of the brain.

Two compounds were found to be effective: trazodone and dibenzoylmethane (DBM). Trazodone is a medication used for the treatment of depression, while DBM is a licorice-derived compound currently undergoing testing as an anti-cancer drug.

In most of the mouse models of prion disease, both drugs prevented signs of brain cell death by recovering protein production, and in FTD mouse models, the drugs restored memory.

Additionally, the researchers found that the drugs led to a decrease in brain shrinkage in both mouse models. Brain shrinkage is a hallmark of neurodegenerative disease.

The team notes that the side effects of both drugs were minimal.

Trazodone is the most promising candidate, since its safety has already been established in humans.

I have always been an ‘artist’, I just didn’t realize what that meant until my mental illness appeared. I despise the term ‘mentally ill’; it implies that who I am as a person is fundamentally corrupted and broken.

The Mad Studies Podcast by Winston Lindqwister is a series of full-length interviews with disability studies and mad studies scholars, psychiatric survivors and ex-patients, artists, and members of the mad pride movement.

We are currently working on getting these videos captioned.

The authors of a recent Health Affairs Blog post argue that 42 CFR Part 2, the law designed to protect confidentiality of patients with substance use disorders, is outdated and unnecessary. We could not disagree more. 42 CFR Part 2 provides bedrock protections for people with substance use disorders that are as critical now as they were in the 1970s when the law was first enacted. The purpose of the confidentiality law is to ensure that a person with a substance use disorder is not made more vulnerable to discriminatory practices and legal consequences as a result of seeking treatment. Unfortunately, patients with substance use disorders still face enormous consequences associated with disclosure, including loss of employment, loss of housing, loss of child custody, loss of benefits, discrimination by medical professionals, and even arrest, prosecution, and incarceration. As our country faces an unprecedented epidemic of opioid addiction and overdose, we must ensure that fear of discrimination does not deter people from seeking treatment.

(W)e provide a few examples below:

• a father in recovery who was being denied visitation with his children because he was in methadone treatment, despite the fact that he was not using any illegal substances;
• a mother who was being threatened with eviction from a shelter because she was being treated with prescribed methadone for her opioid addiction; and,
• a young man whose employer refused to allow him to return to work after he successfully completed treatment for alcoholism, alleging that he was a safety threat even though his physician had cleared him to return to work with no restrictions.