#Concordia Expert on #PTSD & #Suicide
Concordia University
Expert shares quick, fun list of tips to avoid holiday-induced meltdowns
These pressures are particularly palpable during the holiday season. We often think our kids will be disappointed if we can’t measure up to their expectations at the holidays, and when we think it’s our job to keep them happy, we shudder at the thought of disappointing them. Dr. Aaron Cooper, PhD, licensed clinical psychologist at The Family Institute at Northwestern University and author of I Just Want My Kids To Be Happy (Late August Press, 2008), provides expert tips to parents as they set and manage their children’s expectations during the holidays.
A head injury can lead immune-system brain cells to go on “high alert” and overreact to later immune challenges by becoming excessively inflammatory – a condition linked with depressive complications, a new animal study suggests.
A UAB study shows early maturing in adolescent girls can increase aggressive and delinquent behavior.
A new study by a movement disorder neurologist at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center found that depression improved among patients with Parkinson’s disease who participated in a long-term group exercise program.
Washington, DC, December 8 - Children with epilepsy are at high risk for depression, anxiety, and behavioral functioning disorders. Mood and behavior are known to change or improve in children following epilepsy surgery, but research is inconsistent concerning the extent of the change.
With evidence growing that meditation can have beneficial health effects, scientists have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body.
Saint Louis University nursing instructor Julie Bertram found mental health nurses lend valuable perspective in treating troubled teens in foster care.
Veterans who suffer from anxiety may not get appropriate treatment for want of a specific diagnosis, finds a new study in General Hospital Psychiatry.
Pacific University (Ore.) professor Robin Shallcross is an expert on mental health care for Hispanics.
UCLA researchers have shown that teenagers with anxiety disorders show increased activity in a specific part of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), when they are interpreting a neutral situation negatively. Ultimately, the mPFC may serve as a biomarker for illness.
Teens that have had a parent or sibling on military deployment were more likely to have suicidal thoughts or be depressed than teens without military connections, finds a new study in The Journal of Adolescent Health.
A new study suggests that poor mental health and casual sex feed off each other in teens and young adults, with each one contributing to the other over time.
Researchers at the Intermountain Medical Center Heart Institute have discovered a link between elevated red cell distribution width levels and depression in patients being treated for heart disease. This new discovery can help physicians provide earlier diagnosis and treatment for possible depression in heart patients.
Women with depression in the perinatal period experience a high degree of conflict in deciding whether and how to treat their depression, but strongly prefer treatments other than antidepressant medications, reports a study in the November Journal of Psychiatric Practice®. The journal is published by Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, a part of Wolters Kluwer Health.
Even as the rate of diagnosis has reached 11 percent among American children aged 4 to 17, neuroscientists are still trying to understand attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). One classic symptom is impulsivity — the tendency to act before thinking.
Faced with the dual demands of motherhood and poverty, as many as one fourth of low-income minority mothers struggle with major depression. Now a new study shows that screening for the disorder and providing short-term, relationship-focused therapy through weekly home visits can relieve depression among minority mothers, even in the face of poverty and personal histories of abuse or violence.
To combat reliance on tobacco in mental health populations, experts agree that mental health services and government-sponsored tobacco control programs must work together to improve education and access to smoking cessation programs.
An innovative new training program from the Johns Hopkins University School of Nursing will bring mental health services to underserved areas of Maryland by providing advanced training in psychiatric care to nurse practitioners (NPs) working mostly in southern and western parts of the state and on the Eastern Shore.
Expert adolescent psychologist Dr. Hollie Sobel, PhD, discusses the psychological ways in which teens experience online bullying versus face-to-face conflict.
The family is the singular most important factor influencing human identity. Expert clinicians at The Family Institute at Northwestern University are available to discuss a wide variety of the psychological issues facing today’s families. Our experts’ focuses include under-resourced couples, LGBTQ families, parents of special needs children, families of color, and the aging population.
New study suggests “that if you’re working for a really bad boss over a long period of time, that experience may play out at the level of gene expression in your immune system," lead researcher says.
Among depressed patients evaluated in a primary care setting, use of an interactive multimedia computer program immediately prior to a primary care visit resulted in the increased receipt of antidepressant prescription recommendation, mental health referral, or both; however, it did not result in improvement in mental health at 12-week follow-up, according to a study in the November 6 issue of JAMA.
A new analysis by a team led by researchers at the George Washington University School of Public Health and Health Services (SPHHS) examines factors affecting the integration of mental health and substance abuse treatment services with medical care at community health centers.
During the 13-year surveillance period there were 217,409 incident diagnoses of anxiety disorders among active component service members (Table 1), according to the study published in the Medical Surveillance Monthly Report, a peer-reviewed journal on illnesses and injuries affecting service members from the Armed Forces health Surveillance Center (AFHSC). The unadjusted incidence rate was 117.2 per 10,000 person-years (p-yrs).
In a study published in Neuron, Tufts neuroscientists report that exposure therapy, a common treatment for anxiety disorders, remodels an inhibitory junction in the mouse brain. The findings improve the understanding of how exposure therapy suppresses fear responses and may aid in the development of more effective treatments for anxiety disorders.
Women working in Head Start, the nation’s largest federally funded early childhood education program, report higher than expected levels of physical and mental health problems.
The study has discovered a link between chronic use of pain-relieving medication and increase in the risk of developing major depression.
More than 1 in 10 Americans take antidepressants, but these medications can take weeks—and for some patients, months—before they begin to alleviate symptoms. Now, scientists from the University of Chicago have discovered that selectively blocking a serotonin receptor subtype induces fast-acting antidepressant effects in mice, indicating a potential new class of therapeutics for depression. The work was published Oct. 29 in Molecular Psychiatry.
Physical activity is being increasingly recognized as an effective tool to treat depression. PhD candidate George Mammen’s review published in the October issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine has taken the connection one step further, finding that moderate exercise can actually prevent episodes of depression in the long term. This is the first longitudinal review to focus exclusively on the role that exercise plays in maintaining good mental health and preventing the onset of depression later in life.
Pregabalin (Lyrica® Capsules CV) can significantly improve fibromyalgia pain in people who also are being treated for depression, according to research presented this week at the American College of Rheumatology Annual Meeting in San Diego.
An international research consortium led by investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and the University of Chicago has answered several questions about the genetic background of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and Tourette syndrome (TS), providing the first direct confirmation that both are highly heritable and also revealing major differences between the underlying genetic makeup of the disorders. Their report is being published in the October issue of the open-access journal PLOS Genetics.
Poverty coupled with stress have long-lasting effects on brain function, according to a study published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Whether it’s simply waking up on the wrong side of the bed, or a bad week at work, feeling down is a form of depression and should be addressed.
The prevalence of depression among those with migraine is approximately twice as high as for those without the disease (men: 8.4% vs. 3.4%; women 12.4% vs. 5.7%), according to a new study published by University of Toronto researchers.