Recovery Michigan

Six months before and after CBT, Dr. Mason and team used functional MRI to analyze the brain activity of each participant as they viewed pictures of faces expressing various emotions.

For the new study, Dr. Mason and team used medical records to assess the monthly health of 15 of the 22 participants in the 8 years following CBT.

Subjects also completed a questionnaire that asked them about their recovery from psychosis 8 years after receiving CBT, as well as their overall well-being.

The researchers found that in the 8 years after CBT, participants had spent around 93.5 percent of months in remission from psychosis and around 88.2 percent of months with low affective psychotic symptoms.

Furthermore, the team found that the subjects who showed stronger connections in specific brain regions directly after receiving CBT - particularly in the amygdala and the frontal lobes - had higher psychosis remission rates over the subsequent 8 years.

The amygdala is the brain region associated with the processing of emotions such as fear, while the frontal lobes play a role in thinking and reasoning.

A new study funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome, and published in the journal Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging, has found that the wakefulness-promoting drug modafinil improves memory functions in people recovering from depression.

Depression is one of the leading causes of disability worldwide, and cognitive symptoms, such as difficulty completing everyday tasks, contribute to the disability associated with depression. Almost all people with depression experience problems with attention, concentration, and memory.

This cognitive impairment tends to persist even in the recovery phase of depression when mood symptoms start to improve. People with persistent cognitive symptoms often then experience poorer outcomes such as impaired work functioning and are at increased risk for relapse.

To test whether modafinil could help with these cognitive functions, researchers from the Department of Psychiatry and the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute at the University of Cambridge, asked sixty participants who have been previously diagnosed with depression to complete computerized memory, attention and planning tasks after receiving modafinil or placebo. The results showed that the participants who received modafinil experienced significant memory improvements.

The researchers found that participants who received modafinil made fewer errors in two specific types of memory, episodic memory, and working memory, both of which are important in day-to-day activities. Episodic memory is used when remembering events such as where we left our keys in the house or remembering where we parked our car, whereas we use working memory when we are rehearsing a new telephone number or when rehearsing a new passcode to access a computer network, for example.

The study found that alcohol use caused significant alterations in both electrical and chemical neurotransmission among the study participants, although none of them fulfilled the diagnostic criteria of a substance abuse disorder. Moreover, in an earlier study completed at the University of Eastern Finland, also within the Adolescents and Alcohol Study, cortical thinning was observable in young people who had been heavy drinkers throughout their adolescence. For young people whose brain is still developing, heavy alcohol use is especially detrimental. The findings of the study warrant the question of whether the diagnostic criteria for substance abuse disorders should be tighter for adolescents, and whether they should be more easily referred to treatment. The use of alcohol may be more detrimental to a developing brain than previously thought, although it takes time for alcohol-related adverse effects to manifest in a person's life.

The connection between childhood trauma and poor adult health will get some needed and welcome attention in 2017.

If you haven’t heard about ACEs, which stands for Adverse Childhood Experiences, you may soon. Two efforts to battle ACEs, also called toxic stress, are underway:

Children who grow up in chaotic households — witnessing violence or suffering abuse for example — are far more likely to suffer from poor mental health, substance abuse and incarceration as adults, according to studies that date back to 1995. The work was done by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Kaiser Permanente. The survey has been replicated at the state level, including Michigan.

ACEs include growing up in a home with:

THE YOUNG MOTHER was in danger of losing her child when she met with a psychologist in May of 2014. She had been living in a Manhattan shelter for victims of domestic violence, and New York City’s child welfare agency was considering taking the child from the woman, according to the woman’s lawyer. The psychologist was supposed to conduct an assessment and file a report, a finding that could end up before a Brooklyn Family Court judge who would decide the family’s fate.

The interview lasted barely an hour. The psychologist’s subsequent one-page report stated that the mother was “cognitively limited,” and that her “mental status exam” reflected “primitive and irrational decision-making.” The report, signed by a psychiatrist, also noted that the parenting abilities of the mother, an immigrant from Central America, were suspect because of the kinds of foods she chose to feed the baby.

The child was taken from the mother’s custody immediately after the evaluation, and the removal was approved by a judge days later.

In late 2015, a father in the Bronx lost all chance at custody of his child as the result of another similar evaluation. He had met with a psychologist for an hour shortly after the birth of his child, according to the man’s attorney. The psychologist did not ask a single question about the man’s potential to be a parent, and never saw him in the presence of his newborn. He was instead given what the psychologist called an “abbreviated IQ test,” the attorney said. The subsequent report to Family Court concluded the father’s “cognitive limitations” left him unfit to care for his child.

Lauren Shapiro, the director of Brooklyn Defender Service’s family defense practice, said her organization had worked with dozens of families broken apart in large part because of Montego’s evaluations.

“We were shocked they were even being used by the court given that they didn’t follow the basic minimum standards for evaluating parents,” said Shapiro, who helped initiate the confidential 2012 survey.

Jama Adams, Montego’s clinical director, didn’t contest the findings of the 2012 review at the time, nor does he now. He said he and the clinicians he had hired had done the best they could, and had capably served untold numbers of families not captured in the limited review, before the city terminated its dealings with Montego in December of 2015.

Today, Adams looks back on the entire arrangement with the city as a kind of empty promise. The city, he said, had never been willing to spend the money it would have taken to produce high-quality mental health assessments. Meaningful examinations of parents or children would require taking weeks, not days, spending thousands of dollars, not hundreds. The city, he said, had set Montego up to fail. Adams said that failure had been shared by the judges in Family Court who relied on Montego‘s reports despite their clear limitations.

“These were snapshots,” Adams said of the reports. “But people started taking them as gospel.”

When former Microsoft employees complained of the horrific pornography and murder films they had to watch for their jobs, the software giant told them to just take more smoke breaks, a new lawsuit alleges.

Zac Easter knew what was happening to him. He knew why. And he knew that it was only going to get worse. So he decided to write it all down—to let the world know what football had done to him, what he'd done to his body and his brain for the game he loved. And then he shot himself.

It’s been over two and a half years since I had my last drink. The decision to quit drinking was not an easy one, but nothing worth doing is ever easy.

For the first two years I spent quite a bit of time thinking about how different my life was. Every six months or so I would sit down and write about what I was going through, both as a cathartic thought experiment, but also as a way to connect with other people going through the same thing in their lives.

It has been unbelievably rewarding. At first it was terrifying (as all good things are) to expose my weaknesses to strangers. After a while it became helpful. People are remarkably understanding and people want to help. People want to build communities around you and want you to build communities around them.

If there is one thing we all have in common it is certainly imperfection.

With gilt chandeliers 50 feet overhead and long strips of fabric draped over the windows, the theater looked like something out of a Stanley Kubrick film. The makeshift curtains ballooned in thermal updrafts above the radiators, creating rippling pockets of shadow around the edges of the room. On stage a band was tearing through a Cheap Trick tune, but the drummer hadn’t learned his part yet and the guitarist stopped strumming to stomp out the rhythm, his boots echoing in the cavernous, empty room.

Normally, Richard would be up there too, on auxiliary percussion, but he took the night off to tell me the story of how he came to Fort Lyon and got clean. Richard is 54 years old and had been sober for seven months, one of his longer stretches — discounting the six-year stint he did in prison. “But that was forced sobriety,” he said. He was making a choice now.

He was trying to tell me about losing his daughter but his voice kept getting drowned out by the amplified hair metal, so we exited the theater and stepped into the icy Colorado air. Somewhere beyond the women’s dorms, we heard coyotes chattering in the dark. Richard (who asked that I not use his last name, as did several others in this story) walked with a stiff splay-footed gait on account of his toes having been amputated last winter, frostbitten casualties of a drunken blackout in the snow.

I thought about the financial burdens that Richard had brought to bear on Colorado’s social infrastructure over the last decade. He had spent six years in state prison, had been in and out of jail many times for minor offenses, had taken several ambulance rides, had spent months in the hospital, had undergone intricate surgeries, and had sent a child into the foster care system.

But now Richard was with hundreds of other people like him: chronically homeless, addicted to drugs and alcohol, and taking part in a last-ditch attempt to reboot their lives. They had come from all corners of Colorado, of their own volition, to get clean at an abandoned Army fort in the middle of nowhere.

Somewhere on campus, a 12-step meeting had just wrapped up, and there were knots of people talking, enwreathed in clouds of smoke and frozen breath. Guitar licks filtered into the night through donated amplifiers. The band had moved on to Bob Seger deep cuts. This was Fort Lyon — something like a Betty Ford Center for the homeless — a radical experiment to rehabilitate some of society’s most vulnerable members.

#FilmDis Twitter Chat

The Disability Visibility Project™ is proud to partner again with activist/filmmaker Dominick Evans in his weekly #FilmDis Twitter chats. This chat will center on latest psychological horror film by M. Night Shyamalan: “Split.” The film’s main character has dissociative identity disorder played by James McAvoy. We will discuss the harmful messages about people with mental health disabilities in films like “Split” and many others.

Please note that this chat may be triggering and distressing to many. Please practice self-care.  

How to Participate

Follow @dominickevans and @DisVisibility on Twitter.

Use the hashtag #FilmDis when you tweet.  

Check out this explanation of how to participate in a chat by Ruti Regan: