Recovery Michigan

When comparing the four most common classes of antihypertensive drugs, investigators found that two drugs were associated with an increased risk for mood disorders, while one drug decreased mood disorder risk.

Dr. Padmanabhan and colleagues identified that people prescribed beta-blockers and calcium antagonists were at twofold increased risk of hospital admission for mood disorders, compared with patients on angiotensin antagonists.

In contrast, patients prescribed angiotensin antagonists had the lowest risk for hospitalization with mood disorders, compared with patients taking other blood pressure drugs and patients on no antihypertensive therapy from the control group.

Patients from both the group prescribed thiazide diuretics and the control group were found to have the same risk for mood disorders.

The team also found that the presence of co-existing medical conditions significantly increased the risk for mood disorders in the 5-year follow-up period.

When I was five, I staged a suicide with some ketchup and a butter knife. My mom made me wear a pair of underwear that “felt funny,” and already versed in my outbursts over shoes, socks, turtlenecks, and panties, she paid my tantrum no mind. So there I strategically laid on top of a detached cabinet door in my bedroom, mindful of not staining the carpet. I wanted recognition, not revenge.

Mood disorders have a tendency to show their onset as people stumble through their mid 20s. And like clockwork, a few years after college is when I began to cycle through the unpredictable waves of euphoria, irritability, and depression. At first it started over something silly, like breaking my Hollandaise sauce while making breakfast. Other times, in utter rage of not being able to communicate my feelings, I’d throw my cell phone across the room. Instances like this always had the same outcome: me bawling, curled up in my closet or the smallest corner of the kitchen, while my boyfriend stared in bewilderment. But those depressions were short lived, and I’d explode into a stage of productivity soon after. Within a two week period, I broke up with my boyfriend who I lived with, quit my job, began the process of donating my eggs, got an unconventional piercing, and started planning a tattoo that would cover a quarter of my body. Being at this peak of my exceptional self, I attracted a person who I thought I would spend my life with. I had sunshine in my eyes and was the embodiment of joy and what a human should be. I was flying higher than I ever had before; I was manically in love.

There’s weight loss and weight gain and popped blood vessels from days of crying. There are packs of Benadryl® being eaten to stay in the sweet stillness of unconsciousness. There are moments of ferocity where you hold your breath and tie pantyhose around your neck. There are broken computers, smashed glasses and bloody knuckles. There are suicide attempts and trips to the ER and stays in the psych ward. There are hours and hours and hours of therapy.

There’s cognitive impairment from the depression and the medication. Your brain moves in slow motion, and you can’t remember when you last fed or bathed yourself. There’s the art of mixing your perfect Rx cocktail, but sometimes your meds don’t work. And sometimes they make your throat constrict in painful throbs at night. Sometimes you have to alter the dosage or change the medication all together. But it takes time for your body to adjust, so all you can do is hold on for dear life and hope you don’t hit turbulence until you reach your therapeutic level.

We don’t talk about it because it’s the hardest thing to talk about. People spend so much energy trying to keep the black holes in their lives a secret, but now all of mine is spent trying to survive. When I came out of the closet about being diagnosed with type II Bipolar Disorder, an Internet troll mocked me:“my mental illness makes me special.” Instantly he confirmed my lifelong fear — the fear of my feelings being bad! I felt discredited and patronized. And, even worse, the fear of people accusing me of seeking some sort of special treatment or pity. I don’t want your pity. I want the respect of being listened to. I’ve put too much time and money into self-care for you to doubt my diagnosis, or worse, belittle it.

Ken Auletta, Edgewood’s chief human resources officer, who led the nonprofit organization’s end of the negotiations, said management was equally pleased by the contract.

“I think it’s one of those things where both sides can walk out with an agreement we feel good about,” Auletta said.

ProPublica reported on the early efforts by Edgewood workers to unionize as part of its series of stories on systems of care for troubled youth in July 2015.

At the time, counselors at Edgewood had just voted to unionize and were beginning to work toward contract negotiations. As in many other group homes, the workers had complained for years that the pay at Edgewood had been too low to attract and retain quality staff. Staff turnover contributed, they said, to a volatile work environment, where inexperienced workers were asked to supervise children who are often deeply disturbed and occasionally violent. Several current and former Edgewood workers told ProPublica they had been hurt on the job by children and hadn’t received adequate time off or compensation afterward.

In April 2016, ProPublica told the story of another facility in Davis, California, where inexperienced and underpaid workers had been so overwhelmed the group home had completely unraveled. The home, FamiliesFirst, was one of the state’s largest Level 14 homes before it spiraled out of control. Over a period of months, children hitchhiked to different parts of the state; violent episodes spiked; children were sexually assaulted; and police were called routinely. Eventually, the county was forced to shut down the home.

Edgewood workers were inspired to unionize due in part to the tumult that unfolded in Davis. The home’s management was not initially warm to the idea. Throughout 2014 and 2015, each side waged a campaign against the other. Pro-union workers, for instance, alleged that the home’s management held private meetings with some staff and offered them modest benefits to dissuade them from formally organizing.

Scientists have discovered a possible link between sleep habits and early substance abuse. Sleep duration and quality during late childhood seem to predict alcohol and cannabis use later.

“Treating problems with drugs and alcohol once they exist and preventing them can be challenging, and we are always looking for modifiable risk factors,” says Brant P. Hasler, assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology at the University of Pittsburgh. “Doing what we can to ensure sufficient sleep duration and improve sleep quality during late childhood may have benefits in terms of reducing the use of these substances later in life.”

...both sleep duration and sleep quality at age 11 were associated with early substance use throughout adolescence.

The study participants who slept the least, compared to the participants who slept the most, were more likely to report earlier use, intoxication, and repeated use of both alcohol and cannabis. Every hour less of sleep at age 11 was associated with a 20 percent acceleration to the first use of alcohol and/or cannabis.

Worse sleep quality was associated with earlier alcohol use, intoxication, and repeated use. Worse sleep quality was also associated with earlier cannabis intoxication and repeated use, but not first use.

When the seasons change, what do I do as a person with bipolar disorder?

Seasons changing can be a dangerous thing when you live with a mood disorder. When the weather gets colder and it starts getting darker earlier, there is a good chance your mood may shift as well.

I know this because I live it every year. I don’t struggle with fall, or spring — but I’ll be damned if I don’t get knocked down every summer and winter… especially winter.

For me, there’s just something magical about the dark nights, the bitter cold and the holidays arriving. Something magically dark and dangerous, much like the “Nothing” from “The NeverEnding Story.”

I do wonderfully up until Halloween, and then on November 1, it’s like a switch goes off in my brain that says, “Holy sh*t! You’re doing awesome! Let’s wreak some havoc!” And then I spiral downward in a rapid succession.

How can you prevent a tragic spiral during the winter months? I don’t have all the answers, but I have discovered some techniques that have really helped me during the last three years.

'I won't be able to cope with my pain if I don't sleep well' - research from the University of Warwick reveals that the way chronic pain patients think about pain and sleep leads to insomnia and poor management of pain.

Researchers from the Sleep and Pain Lab in the Department of Psychology have demonstrated that conditions like back pain, fibromyalgia, and arthritis are directly linked with negative thoughts about insomnia and pain, and this can be effectively managed by cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).

Esther Afolalu and colleagues have formulated a pioneering scale to measure beliefs about sleep and pain in long-term pain patients, alongside their quality of sleep - the first of its type to combine both pain and sleep and explore the vicious cycle between sleep and pain problems.

The scale was tested on four groups of patients suffering from long-term pain and bad sleeping patterns, with the result showing that people who believe they won't be able to sleep as a result of their pain are more likely to suffer from insomnia, thus causing worse pain.

The results show that the scale was vital in predicting patients' level of insomnia and pain difficulties. With better sleep, pain problems are significantly reduced, especially after receiving a short course of CBT for both pain and insomnia.

The study has provided therapists the means with which to identify and monitor rigid thoughts about sleep and pain that are sleep-interfering, allowing the application of the proven effective CBT for insomnia in people with chronic pain.

Most suicides in young kids are not due to depression

Suicide in children, though rare, is the 10th leading cause of death for elementary school-aged kids in the U.S. According to a study in a forthcoming issue of the journal Pediatrics, it can’t be explained the same way for kids of all ages.

Children of both age groups who died by suicide had several things in common. Most were male, most died at home and about one-third of them had diagnosed mental disorders. Children in both age groups also had an identical likelihood —29%—of telling another person their suicidal intentions.

But the researchers found distinct differences, too. Younger children who died by suicide were far more likely to be black than early adolescents—a surprising finding, since suicide rates for young people are consistently higher in white Americans, but one that bolsters recent data finding a rise of suicides in black children and a drop in white children.”Theories surrounding the increase seen in the suicide rate among young black children are yet to be established,” wrote Arielle Sheftall, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Ohio and the study’s first author, in an email to TIME. “We are planning additional studies to investigate potential factors underlying this racial disparity in child suicide.”

An equally stark finding was that most of the children with mental illness who died by suicide had attention-deficit disorder, not depression. While about 60% of children in the younger group had ADD or ADHD, only 33% had depression; in older kids, 66% of them had depression, and 29% had ADD or ADHD. “This finding falls along developmental lines,” Sheftall says. “It suggests that children who die by suicide may be more vulnerable as a group to respond impulsively to interpersonal challenges.”

People who are seeking treatment for alcohol dependence and whose goal is to quit drinking entirely are more likely to achieve this goal if they are treated by a care provider who advocates total abstinence. Those who wish to learn to drink in moderation are not as successful, even when they are treated by a care provider who works with controlled consumption. These are the results of a study carried out at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. London Business School, Antai at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Copenhagen Business School are amongst the holders.

Care providers in Sweden have different views on how alcohol problems should be treated. Some suggest that people with alcohol dependence can learn to control their drinking, while others believe these people should practice total abstinence.

Previous studies have shown that the crucial factor in treatment success is that patients and care providers have the same view, and that the choice of treatment method plays a subordinate role. But how great an influence choice of method has on the final treatment outcome has not been studied previously.

The study followed up 201 adult patients 2.5 years after treatment onset. It showed that a shared view between patient and care provider was not decisive for the treatment outcome. "Instead," states Associate Professor Kristina Berglund, who studies dependence at the Department of Psychology, "patients whose goal was total abstinence were more successful than those who had chosen to control their drinking."

Around 90 percent of patients who were in agreement with their care provider on total abstinence were still sober at the follow-up, whereas only 50 percent who were in agreement with their care provider on controlled consumption treatment had succeeded in controlling their drinking at follow-up.