Recovery Michigan

I had never been suicidal before being locked in a mental hospital.

Much of my stay there was a blur of medications. I laid on my back in a cold bed for days, for the first time wanting to die. I shuffled off to group therapy in my gray hospital socks, listened to the screams of my neighbors, peered into the ward next door, and obliged when student doctors and clergy came into my room and asked if I wanted to pray or take long surveys about my mental health. I took the surveys but declined the prayers.

I had never been suicidal before being locked in a mental hospital.

Much of my stay there was a blur of medications. I laid on my back in a cold bed for days, for the first time wanting to die. I shuffled off to group therapy in my gray hospital socks, listened to the screams of my neighbors, peered into the ward next door, and obliged when student doctors and clergy came into my room and asked if I wanted to pray or take long surveys about my mental health. I took the surveys but declined the prayers.

My once sharp memory dissipated. I used to be an actress, performing in multiple shows at a time, easily remembering every single line. Creativity was a core part of my identity and wellness. Now I would read one line over and over again, unable to retain a word. I did my last performance with a script in hand. Each time I left the stage, I vomited profusely before coming back on again — another side effect of the medications. Eventually, I stopped performing altogether.

Over time, I developed dependence on the anti-anxiety drug ativan, which I was prescribed to take every day, multiple times a day. On top of my other medications, my doctor prescribed me 20mg adderall to help get me up the morning, followed by 2mg ativan to reduce the teeth-chattering anxiety brought on by the morning’s strong upper. Then I would take another adderall mid-day to bring me up, followed by another dose of ativan. When panic attacks hit — which they frequently did — I would take multiple ativan at a time. Once, I collapsed on the floor of a campus building. A woman working at the front desk found me passed out cold on the floor and called my partner to pick me up.

I

devoted the next three years to the challenging, painstaking process of coming off my 10+ drug cocktail. I left my psychiatrist for a new one, a person I told, “I just want to get off of my meds to establish a baseline.” She reluctantly agreed. She didn’t have the vision or understanding of my mission, and I quickly found that my own research outpaced what she knew about the drugs.

Medication is a tool: Some people’s lives are saved by the right combination. Other people respond better to wellness options outside of the mainstream. Cannabis helped ease my depression, anxiety, pain, mood swings, and sleep challenges. Not only alleviating some of my mental and physical pain, cannabis centered me in gratitude and gave me some much-needed motivation and energy. I could now do short errands, drive around the block, even get to my own doctor appointments on public transportation — huge accomplishments for me. It was also the first time I was in control of my own dosing.

A significant association was found between depression and the clinical recurrence of IBD. A significant association was also found between symptoms of anxiety and the recurrence of IBD, the research team concluded.

"The same was true for anxiety but was less statistically significant. We recommended introducing screening for anxiety and depression and referral for psychological treatment as part of standard IBD care. This is currently not the case and, in the UK for example, only 12 per cent of IBD clinics have any referral pathways for psychological counselling.

"With this paper we showed that we can no longer ignore mental health in the treatment of chronic gastrointestinal conditions such as inflammatory bowel disease.

"Those depressed have more severe physical symptoms and more frequent flares. It is possible that if we provided good mental health care we could improve well-being of these patients and reduce healthcare costs."

"Patients with IBD should be screened for clinically relevant levels of depression and anxiety and referred to psychologists or psychiatrists for further evaluation and treatment."

Although reports of abuse, addiction and overdoses have long been attached to the misuse of prescription pain medication, researchers at the University of Colorado may have discovered a new peril.

Results of a three-month study released Monday by the university show opioids, such as morphine, cause an increase in chronic pain in lab rats, something that could have  implications for people, too.

Peter Grace, a CU assistant research professor, and Linda Watkins, a professor, led the study that they say shows lab rats exhibited long-lasting chronic pain after using morphine treatments for five days. Those results, Grace said, using opioid painkillers may be partly to blame for chronic pain.

“Our key finding is that we were able to demonstrate that a brief treatment with a pain killer, like morphine, doubled the duration of chronic pain,” said Grace, who works at CU’s department of psychology and neuroscience.

The study, which was published Monday in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” showed morphine treatment intensified the release of pain signals from specific immune cells in the rats’ spinal cords, leading to prolonged pain.

Researchers discovered that a nerve injury in the rats would send messages from the nerve cells to the spinal cord, which then put the cells in “alert mode.”

Researchers treated the nerve injury with morphine, launching those cells into overdrive and triggering a “cascade of actions,” such as spinal cord inflammation, Grace said.

The team discovered the combination of the initial pain signals combined with morphine increased pain-responsive nerve cell activity in the spinal cord and brain. That in turn led to increased pain that could last for several months.

As he pulls up her colorful blankets and tucks his daughter Raegan in for bed, Retired Army 1st Sgt. Seth Kastle knows that tonight “bedtime” will be a little different.

Tonight, Seth will read his daughters “Why Is Dad So Mad?” — a book he wrote about himself.

Kastle served for 16 years in the Army Reserve, and was deployed to Qatar, Afghanistan, and Iraq. When he returned home to his wife and kids in Wakeeney, Kansas, he struggled with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and had a hard time explaining it to his kids.

“I struggle with anger. That’s probably my main symptom. I also have some issues that go with my memory,” Kastle said. “There’s mornings that you go into the bathroom and you look at the cup that holds your toothbrushes, and you just stare at it because you don’t know which one is yours.”

The study, however, showed that while schizophrenia is generally linked to a widespread reduction in brain tissue volume, certain regions of the brain among those with the condition showed a subtle increase in tissue over time.

The findings suggest that in terms of gray matter volume, the brains of schizophrenic patients become more "normal" the longer that they have the condition.

"Within the patient group, reduced thickness was consistently accompanied by increased thickness in distributed brain regions," the researchers reported in their study.

"While temporo-limbic and fronto-parietal regions showed reduced thickness, the occipital cortex showed increased thickness, especially in those with a long-standing illness."

Palaniyappan said that regardless of tissue damage, the schizophrenic patient's brain constantly attempt to reorganize itself, which could possibly hint that it tries to limit the damage of, or even rescue itself from the disease.

The findings of the study are important in that it shows brain tissue can repair itself. This suggests of the possibility for targeted treatments that can potentially reverse the effects of schizophrenia.

- See more at: http://www.techtimes.com/articles/161720/20160528/brains-of-schizophrenia-patients-attempt-to-self-repair-mri-scans-reveal.htm#sthash.WzNkLOFy.dpuf

Stress, anxiety, and insomnia affect millions of people worldwide, and to alleviate the symptoms, there are a variety of routes one can take, including the ever-popular pharmaceutical pills. But as our world continues to break through the madness of synthetic options and expose each other to holistic options derived from both ancient teachings as well as present-day healers, it’s important we keep our eyes and ears open for our own good.

Anyone who suffers from the above disorders knows the word “simple” doesn’t quite fit with how they feel. In fact, it seems to be very much the opposite: a complex feeling that can barely be put into words. So, how can something as simple as sleeping with weighted blankets be a plausible solution to stress, anxiety, insomnia, and more?

Weighted blankets have been traditionally used by occupational therapists as a means to help children with sensory disorders, anxiety, stress, or issues related to autism, and research continues to support this practice. One study, using the Grandin’s Hug Machine device, which allows administration of lateral body pressure, investigated the effects of deep pressure as a tool for alleviating anxiety related to autism. The researchers found “a significant reduction in tension and a marginally significant reduction in anxiety for children who received the deep pressure compared with the children who did not.”

Of weighted blankets specifically, occupational therapist Karen Moore says in psychiatric care, “weighted blankets are one of our most powerful tools for helping people who are anxious, upset, and possibly on the verge of losing control.”

Hailey, who says she developed persisting asthma as a result of mold exposure, described overall conditions at Rikers that were so punishing not even the guards — who spent only a fraction of their time in the building — could withstand them. Hailey says that one officer implored her to complain to authorities about the conditions, as the employee feared she would be punished for doing so herself.

“‘Please call 311 or somebody,’” Hailey recalled a guard telling her. “That’s how bad it was.”

Hailey’s and her guards’ experiences are not unique to New York’s infamous island jail. On the issue of hazardous mold alone, numerous prison employees across the country have asserted that they cannot bear even their limited exposure to a condition that inmates must live with day in and day out, according to workplace safety complaints submitted to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. During a one-year period ending January 15 of this year, OSHA received 81 workplace safety complaints regarding mold in penal institutions across the United States.

Bereavement, bullying, exams and physical health conditions such as acne and asthma are some of the experiences linked to suicide in children and young people according to a new report by The University of Manchester's National Confidential Inquiry into Suicide and Homicide by People with Mental Illness (NCISH).

Researchers studied the reports from a range of investigations and inquiries on 130 people under the age of 20 in England who died by suicide between January 2014 and April 2015, extracting information about their personal circumstances that the reports highlighted. This is the first time there has been a national study of suicide in children and young people in England on this scale.

The researchers found that 28% of the young people who died had been bereaved, in 13% there had been a suicide by a family member or friend. 36% had a physical health condition such as acne or asthma, and 29% were facing exams or exam results when they died. Four died on the day of an exam, or the day after.

Professor Louis Appleby, Director of NCISH said: "Suicide is a leading cause of death in young people and the impact on families is particularly traumatic. We found the risk rose sharply from mid- to late teens and the reasons appear to be complex.

The Department of Veterans Affairs has mistakenly declared thousands of veterans to be deceased and canceled their benefits over the past five years, a new snafu to emerge at the embattled department.

The VA has made the error more than 4,000 times over a half-decade because of employee mistakes or erroneous cross-checking of data by the department’s computers, among other reasons, according to correspondence between the VA and the office of U.S. Rep. David Jolly (R., Fla.) reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. The VA changed its procedures to address the issue, but it isn’t yet clear whether the new system is effective.

“Although these types of cases represent a small number of beneficiaries in comparison to the millions of transactions completed each year in our administration of benefits, we sincerely regret the inconvenience caused by such errors and work to restore benefits as quickly as possible after any such error is brought to our attention,” a VA spokesman said in a statement.

It wasn’t immediately clear whether the latest data represented an increase in the error rate or what prompted the VA to tackle the problem.

For veterans, benefits checks can suddenly stop appearing.