Recovery Michigan

Dr. Yolanda Lucidre, a psychiatrist from Australia, recently published a paper about the iatrogenic effects of psychiatric drugs. Iatrogenic effects refer to those negative consequences which result directly from the provision of medical care. She highlights how these effects have been rising, and have led to increased numbers of disability claims, health care costs, and deaths, and how they are connected to the increase in the diagnosis of mental illness.

The research on iatrogenic effects has implications for patient safety, the provision of a genuine informed consent process and patients’ legal rights. Lucire also documents how the psychiatric and pharmaceutical industries and regulatory agencies which are meant to protect the public interest have been complicit in the pushing of a dangerous pro-drug agenda in New Zealand and Australia.

Youth suicide, she reports, began to rise in the 1980s in Australia as stimulant medication began to be prescribed, and this trend continued as antidepressants were prescribed to young people, who in previous generations may have been identified as going through normal developmental transitions.

A similar result was found in a review of studies by the Cochrane Collaboration. Suicide rates in Australia also rose in general from 1963 to 2006, especially among males, with antidepressants carrying the highest suicide risk followed by atypical antipsychotics. Another disturbing statistic she collected shows that 36 homicides were committed by patients admitted to the New South Wales Mental Health public sector between 1999-2003 within 28 days of beginning treatment.

Young adults with symptoms of alcohol dependence may see health effects late in life - even decades after conquering their problem drinking, according to a study in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

Researchers found that, of 664 U.S. male veterans, those who had symptoms of alcohol dependence for at least five years in young adulthood generally had poorer physical and mental health by the time they were in their 60s.

And that was true even if they'd gotten control over their drinking problems by the age of 30.

The findings are surprising, said lead researcher Randy Haber, Ph.D., of the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Health Care System, in Menlo Park, Calif.

It's clear that people's lives improve when alcohol dependence goes into remission, Haber pointed out, but it is not clear whether there are hidden consequences that remain after heavy drinking has ceased. For instance, evidence shows that both brain and body are affected by excessive drinking, but we don't know how long these effects last.

The new findings suggest that years of alcohol dependence during young adulthood result in silent but "permanent" injuries that, in later life, appear to result in serious health problems, according to Haber.

The undersigned organizations issued the following statement today regarding the report released on October 27th by the Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder (MH and SUD) Parity Task Force, established by President Obama in March 2016.  A more in-depth analysis of the report and its recommendations is forthcoming; the below represents an initial analysis of the Parity Task Force report.

“We applaud the Obama administration and the Task Force Co-Chairs, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Michael Botticelli and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz, for their dedication to ensuring equal coverage of and meaningful access to mental health and substance use disorder (MH and SUD) care through strong implementation and enforcement of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA).  Access to mental health care is critically important to reducing the rising suicide rate in America.  In light of the nation’s opioid crisis, strong enforcement of the Parity Act is critical to ensuring better access to life-saving substance use disorder care.  The report released last week bolsters work to improve access to care in important ways by, among many other recommendations and initiatives, directing $9.3 million to states to strengthen implementation of the Parity Act, providing additional technical assistance to state regulators to improve parity compliance in commercial insurance and Medicaid, and taking important initial steps to both strengthen consumer rights to detailed information about why their insurance claims are denied, and to simplify the complaint process for consumers.   

However, much additional work remains to help individuals and families who need mental health and substance use disorder care realize the full promise of MHPAEA.  We call on the federal government to implement not only the Task Force’s excellent recommendations, but to also undertake the following critically important actions: 

The undersigned organizations issued the following statement today regarding the report released on October 27th by the Mental Health and Substance Use Disorder (MH and SUD) Parity Task Force, established by President Obama in March 2016.  A more in-depth analysis of the report and its recommendations is forthcoming; the below represents an initial analysis of the Parity Task Force report.

“We applaud the Obama administration and the Task Force Co-Chairs, White House Office of National Drug Control Policy Director Michael Botticelli and Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Cecilia Muñoz, for their dedication to ensuring equal coverage of and meaningful access to mental health and substance use disorder (MH and SUD) care through strong implementation and enforcement of the Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act (MHPAEA).  Access to mental health care is critically important to reducing the rising suicide rate in America.  In light of the nation’s opioid crisis, strong enforcement of the Parity Act is critical to ensuring better access to life-saving substance use disorder care.  The report released last week bolsters work to improve access to care in important ways by, among many other recommendations and initiatives, directing $9.3 million to states to strengthen implementation of the Parity Act, providing additional technical assistance to state regulators to improve parity compliance in commercial insurance and Medicaid, and taking important initial steps to both strengthen consumer rights to detailed information about why their insurance claims are denied, and to simplify the complaint process for consumers.   

However, much additional work remains to help individuals and families who need mental health and substance use disorder care realize the full promise of MHPAEA.  We call on the federal government to implement not only the Task Force’s excellent recommendations, but to also undertake the following critically important actions: 

Issue additional guidance detailing what constitutes adequate disclosure......

Require prospective parity compliance reviews....

Streamline the consumer complaint and appeals process....

Issue guidance identifying plan standards that violate the law.,,,

Rebecca Burgess sees a problem with the way many people perceive the autism spectrum. Her resolution? The comic below. The Tumblr user debuted “Understanding the Spectrum” (below), which gets rid of the linear autism spectrum image (i.e. you’re either “not autistic, “very autistic” or somewhere in between) and replaces it with a round spectrum full of several traits or ways the brain processes information.

“I want people to understand that autistic people don’t all fit a stereotype, and show people the consequences of stereotyping,” Burgess, from the U.K., told The Mighty in an email. “[Stereotyping leads to] underestimating the skills of autistic people or not believing someone [who is on the spectrum].”

The comic, which she released in April for Autism Acceptance Week, has earned her messages from autistic people, parents and teachers, thanking Burgess for helping them explain the spectrum in a more accurate way.

Take a look at “Understanding the Spectrum” below, and let us know how you would describe the spectrum to someone unfamiliar with autism in the comments at the bottom.

Young children and teenagers are increasingly likely to be poisoned by opioid painkillers that are often prescribed for other family members, a study finds.

The rate of children hospitalized for opioid poisoning increased 165 percent from 1997 to 2012, from about 1.40 per 100,000 kids to 3.71 per 100,000.

"Opioids are ubiquitous now," says Julie Gaither, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale School of Public Health and the study's lead author. "Enough opioids are prescribed every year to put a bottle of painkillers in every household. They're everywhere, and kids are getting into them."

The study, which was published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, examined more than 13,000 hospital-discharge records from 1997 to 2012 for opioid poisonings and used census data to extrapolate rates. The discharge data was collected by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality.

Changes in the composition and diversity of the gut microbiota have been associated with diseases such as obesity and type-2 diabetes in humans. These diseases have also been linked with chronic sleep loss. However, it is not known whether sleep loss alters the gut microbiota in humans. With this in mind, Christian Benedict, associate professor of neuroscience, and Jonathan Cedernaes, M.D., Ph.D, both from Uppsala University, collaborated with researchers from the German Institute of Human Nutrition Potsdam-Rehbruecke. In their study, the researchers sought to investigate in nine healthy normal-weight male participants whether restricting sleep to about four hours per night for two consecutive days as compared with conditions of normal sleep (about 8 hours of sleep opportunity) may alter the gut microbiota in humans.

“Overall we did not find evidence that suggests that the diversity of the gut microbiota was altered by sleep restriction. This was somewhat expected given the short-term nature of the intervention and the relatively small sample size. In more specific analyses of groups of bacteria, we did however observe microbiota changes that parallel some of the microbiota changes observed when for instance obese subjects have been compared with normal-weight subjects in other studies, such as an increased ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes. Longer and larger clinical sleep interventions will be needed to investigate to what extent alterations of the gut microbiota may mediate negative health consequences attributed to sleep loss, such as weight gain and insulin resistance,” says senior author Jonathan Cedernaes.

“We also found that participants were over 20 percent less sensitive to the effects of the hormone insulin following sleep loss. Insulin is a pancreatic hormone needed to bring down blood glucose levels. This decreased insulin sensitivity was however unrelated to alterations in gut microbiota following sleep loss. This suggests that changes in microbiota may not, at least in the short-term, represent a central mechanism through which one or several nights of curtailed sleep reduce insulin sensitivity in humans,” says first author Christian Benedict.

“Those studies give us confidence that gut bacteria are playing a causal role in very important biological processes, which we can then hope to exploit with psychobiotics,” says Review lead author Philip Burnet, an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Oxford. “We’re now on the search for mechanisms, mainly in animal models. The human studies are provocative and exciting, but ultimately, most have small sample sizes, so their replicability is difficult to estimate at present. As they say, we’re ‘cautiously optimistic.'”

Researchers seem to agree that the key players responsible for the bacteria-gut-brain axis — the nervous system of the intestines, the immune system, the vagus nerve, and possibly gut hormones and neurotransmitters (e.g., serotonin and dopamine) — are involved. What varies is the excitement about the use of psychobiotics as methods of treatment for psychological disorders and enhancing cognition. For example, in mice we know that psychobiotics often increase brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is closely linked to learning and memory. At present, we have no way of knowing whether psychobiotics affect BDNF in humans, and a systematic review recently found no overall benefit of probiotic ingestion in humans.

Visits to the emergency room for alcohol intoxication in the United States have increased by more than 50 percent over the past decade, a new study finds.

What's more, ER visits tied to alcohol are taking up an increasing portion of hospital resources, and are requiring longer hospital stays than in the past, the researchers said.

"These visits place a strain on the U.S. emergency care system and represent a public health problem," the researchers, from The George Washington University's Center for Healthcare Innovation and Policy Research, wrote in the Oct. 7 issue of the journal Alcohol and Alcoholism. There is a need for more attention to efforts to identify and reduce problematic drinking, which could also help to reduce alcohol-related ER visits, they said. [7 Ways Alcohol Affects Your Health]