Recovery Michigan

The research looked at the role that adolescents' increasing use of social media use might play in ER visits for suicidal behavior. In his study, Naveen Poonai, MD, MSc, examined the widespread media reports about the suicide death of 15-year-old Amanda Todd and whether there was a resulting effect on suicide-related visits by youths to Ontario's emergency departments. Amanda Todd committed suicide on Oct.10, 2012, after years of cyberbullying that she described in a YouTube video that went viral after her death.

Using 2002-2013 data from Canada's National Ambulatory Care Reporting System, researchers used an interrupted time?series analysis to examine monthly rates of emergency department visits related to suicidal behavior such as intentional self-poisoning before and after Todd's suicide. They found a no significant change in ER visits for suicidal behavior after her death. Importantly however, the authors found a significant increase in ER visits in teenagers for suicidal behavior that begin in June 2011. No such increase was found among the younger children studied.

Suicide is the second leading cause of death among teens and young adults in Canada and the United States.

Jamie Sharkey is an inmate at the State Correctional Institution at Camp Hill.

He's also a Certified Peer Specialist for others dealing with mental illness in prison.

"I'm trying to be part of the solution, not the problem anymore."

His distinction is part of a new program within the Department of Corrections. According to the DOC, Pennsylvania is the first to use the Mental Health First Aid program so broadly. The program began in 2014.

"To be in the position that I'm in as an offender and to give back in this way and prepare to do the same on the outside, it's tremendous," Sharkey says.

Department of Corrections Secretary John Wetzel says the course is similar to a first aid or CPR training.

Increasingly, researchers have suggested that the immune system and inflammation may also play a role in mental health. In 2014, for example, a study from Dr. Khandaker and team found that children with higher levels of cytokines and other "inflammatory markers" were at greater risk of depression and psychosis in later life.

In clinical trials, two new classes of anti-inflammatory drugs - anti-cytokine monoclonal antibodies and cytokine inhibitors - have been shown to reduce inflammation in a range of autoimmune diseases, and these drugs have already started to be administered to patients who do not respond to standard treatments.

Given the potential link between inflammation and depression, Dr. Khandaker and colleagues set out to investigate whether these drugs might also help alleviate symptoms of depression.

"About a third of patients who are resistant to antidepressants show evidence of inflammation," notes Dr. Khandaker. "So, anti-inflammatory treatments could be relevant for a large number of people who suffer from depression."  

Prescriptions sleeping pills are common. As many as four percent of U.S. adults ― that’s nearly 10 million people ― use them, according to a 2013 estimate from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But they also come with some fairly alarming potential side effects. The medication guide for Ambien, for example, warns that potential side effects may include aggressive behavior, confusion, depression, hallucinations and “suicidal thoughts or actions.”

Given this, who should take sedative-hypnotic medications, the class of drugs to which popular medications like Ambien and Lunesta belong? And how frequently do the drugs actually cause these problems?

A new study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry says that answer is rather elusive.

The new study looked back at all previously published research linking suicide or suicidal thoughts with 11 different hypnotic drugs currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the treatment of insomnia. The study also included FDA safety reviews or commentaries about those 11 insomnia drugs, as well as detailed FDA reports of hypnotic-related suicide deaths dating back to the 1970s.

The evidence suggests that the increased risk of suicide among people taking hypnotics was anywhere from 2 to 24 times higher than the risk of suicide in people not taking sleep aids.

Risk of suicide or having suicidal thoughts associated with the prescription sleep aids appeared to be highest in the first few days of starting on the medication, which in some cases was accompanied by other unusual behaviors like sleep walking, confusion, hallucinations or paranoia.

Compared with the brains of healthy people, the brains of people with opioid dependence didn’t produce strong responses to the cute baby pictures. But once the opioid-dependent people received a drug callednaltrexone, which blocks the effects of opioids, their brains produced a more normal response.

“When the participants were given an opioid blocker, their baby schema became more similar to that of healthy people,” said Dr. Daniel D. Langleben, one of the researchers. “The data also raised in question whether opioid medications may affect social cognition in general.”

The study, among the first to look at the effects of opioid dependence and how its treatment affects social cognition, was presented last month at the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology Congress in Vienna. While the study was small, addiction researchers say it provides insights into the parenting behavior of addicts.

Alcohol has often been suggested as a contributor to and trigger for asthma. However, researchers haven't conducted a significant amount of research as to the specifics of alcohol and asthma.

One of the biggest research studies on the topic was published in 2000 in The Journal of Allergy and Clinical Immunology. The study from Australia asked more than 350 adults to fill out a questionnaire on their allergy triggers related to alcohol. The study's findings included:

• 33 percent said that alcohol had triggered an asthma attack on at least two occasions
• Wine was associated with being particularly allergenic
• The onset of most alcohol-related asthma symptoms occurred within 1 hour of drinking alcohol
• Most asthma symptoms reported were mild to moderate in severity

The researchers highlighted two components of some alcoholic beverages that appeared to be particularly allergenic and could contribute to an asthma attack: sulfites and histamines.

Sulfites are a preservative that is commonly used in making wine and beer, but also may be added to other food types. People with asthma are often especially sensitive to the effects of sulfites.

Another potentially allergy-causing substance in alcohol is called histamine. This compound is created when alcohol is fermented. Histamine is present in all alcohol types, including liquor, beer, and wine.

Histamines are common causes of allergic reactions - this is why some types of allergy medications are called antihistamines.

A University of Manchester study which looked at more than thirty years of research into bipolar, found that people with the disorder are 2.63 times more likely to have suffered emotional, physical or sexual abuse as children than the general population.

In the study, published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the researchers identified 19 studies from hundreds published between 1980 and 2014 which gathered data from millions of patient records, interviews and assessments.

By applying rigorous statistical analysis to the data, the researchers compared the likelihood of people with and without bipolar disorder having adverse childhood experiences, such as physical, emotional and sexual abuse. The findings revealed a strong link between these events and subsequent diagnosis.

Dr Filippo Varese, one of the study authors, said: "Much research into bipolar has focussed on bio-genetics, but following previous work on schizophrenia, we felt that a similar effect could be found in bipolar. The link between experiencing a troubled childhood and subsequently being diagnosed with this serious condition is extremely strong."

The authors defined childhood adversity as experiencing neglect, abuse, bullying or the loss of a parent before the age of 19. There was a particularly strong link between emotional abuse with this four times more likely to have happened to people with bipolar. However, the loss of a parent did not raise the risk significantly.

Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric condition that can result from a person’s exposure to a single traumatic event. The more severe complex PTSD is a long-term condition that results from experiencing prolonged trauma, over which the person has little or no control, and from which escape seems hopeless. Many times, complex PTSD affects those who suffered ongoing physical, emotional, or sexual abuse during childhood and victims of long-term domestic violence. 

Complex PTSD can cause people to feel like their emotions are out of control like they may have a breakdown at any moment. They often feel unloved and unworthy of positive feelings from others toward themselves–that they can never be good enough. They may have feelings of being overwhelmed like they cannot possibly handle even one more thing. Additionally, they may feel like they are just waiting for the “other shoe to drop,” even when things are going well.

Other common characteristics include:

• Rage: This can be turned inward causing things like eating disorders, substance abuse,depression, promiscuity, and codependence; or turned outward causing violence, destruction of property, and being overly controlling.
• Avoidance: A person with complex PTSD may withdraw from relationships with others to lessen the chances of rejection, criticism, and exposure.
• Catastrophizing: This is the practice of assuming the worst case scenario and feeling like even the most minor problems are catastrophic events.
• Denial: A person may believe that a traumatic event or memory didn’t happen, when in fact, it did.
• Dependency: This it the reliance on someone else for a person’s own personal and emotional well-being.
• Fear of Abandonment: This can be the unsubstantiated feeling that one is in danger of being rejected or replaced.
• Hypervigilance in relationships: This manifests when a person maintains an unhealthy level of interest in the behaviors, comments, and thoughts of others.
• Learned helplessness: This happens when someone believes that they have no control over a situation, even when they do.
• Low self-esteem: This is when a person has a self-perception which is negative and inconsistent with reality.
• Self-loathing: This is an extreme hatred of one’s self.

This study adds to a growing body of evidence about patients with BPD and co-occurring PTSD. According to our results, PTSD is significantly related to dissociation (DES) and a history of suicide attempts in BPD patients. A trend was found for the impact of PTSD on the symptom severity (BSL) and the history of self-mutilation in patients with BPD.