Military suicides have reached a 30-year high, according to a story published Thursday in the New York Times. In 2008, 128 soldiers killed themselves, with 15 additional deaths awaiting a final cause.
This grim picture becomes even more so when the Army declared its suicide rate has surpassed that of civilians, a macabre zenith not seen since the Vietnam war.
The reasons are myriad, from financial pressures to personal, legal and job-related difficulties.
An interesting dimension to the statistics: Thirty percent of the suicides took place during deployment and thirty-five percent afterwards. Another 35% of those who successfully suicided had never deployed.Sphere: Related Content
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Thursday, January 29, 2009
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Brain imaging sheds new light on schizophrenia
Schizophrenia may blur the boundary between internal and external realities by overactivating a brain system that is involved in self-reflection, and thus causing an exaggerated focus on self, a new MIT and Harvard brain imaging study has found.
The traditional view of schizophrenia is that the disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions that characterize the disease are caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions.
But this study, appearing Jan. 19 in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that schizophrenia also involves an excess of connectivity between the so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves.
“People normally suppress this default system when they perform challenging tasks, but we found that patients with schizophrenia don’t do this,” said John D. Gabrieli, a professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and one of the study’s 13 authors. “We think this could help to explain the cognitive and psychological symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Gabrieli added that he hopes the research might lead to ways of predicting or monitoring individual patients’ response to treatments for this mental illness, which occurs in about 1 percent of the population.
Schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and first-degree relatives of patients (who share half their genes) are 10 times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. The identities of these genes and how they affect the brain are largely unknown.
The researchers thus studied three carefully matched groups of 13 subjects each: schizophrenia patients, nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of patients and healthy controls. They selected patients who were recently diagnosed, so that differences in prior treatment or psychotic episodes would not bias the results.
The subjects were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while resting and while performing easy or hard memory tasks. The behavioral and clinical testing were performed by Larry J. Seidman and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, and the imaging data were analyzed by first author Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research scientist at the MIT Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute.
The researchers were especially interested in the default system, a network of brain regions whose activity is suppressed when people perform demanding mental tasks. This network includes the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, regions that are associated with self-reflection and autobiographical memories and which become connected into a synchronously active network when the mind is allowed to wander.
Whitfield-Gabrieli found that in the schizophrenia patients, the default system was both hyperactive and hyperconnected during rest, and it remained so as they performed the memory tasks. In other words, the patients were less able than healthy control subjects to suppress the activity of this network during the task. Interestingly, the less the suppression and the greater the connectivity, the worse they performed on the hard memory task, and the more severe their clinical symptoms.
“We think this may reflect an inability of people with schizophrenia to direct mental resources away from internal thoughts and feelings and toward the external world in order to perform difficult tasks,” Whitfield-Gabrieli explained.
The hyperactive default system could also help to explain hallucinations and paranoia by making neutral external stimuli seem inappropriately self-relevant. For instance, if brain regions whose activity normally signifies self-focus are active while listening to a voice on television, the person may perceive that the voice is speaking directly to them.
The default system is also overactive, though to a lesser extent, in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients who did not themselves have the disease. This suggests that overactivation of the default system may be linked to the genetic cause of the disease rather than its consequences.
The default system is a hot topic in brain imaging, according to John Gabrieli, partly because it is easy to measure and because it is affected in different ways by different disorders.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
The traditional view of schizophrenia is that the disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions that characterize the disease are caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions.
But this study, appearing Jan. 19 in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that schizophrenia also involves an excess of connectivity between the so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves.
“People normally suppress this default system when they perform challenging tasks, but we found that patients with schizophrenia don’t do this,” said John D. Gabrieli, a professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT and one of the study’s 13 authors. “We think this could help to explain the cognitive and psychological symptoms of schizophrenia.”
Gabrieli added that he hopes the research might lead to ways of predicting or monitoring individual patients’ response to treatments for this mental illness, which occurs in about 1 percent of the population.
Schizophrenia has a strong genetic component, and first-degree relatives of patients (who share half their genes) are 10 times more likely to develop the disease than the general population. The identities of these genes and how they affect the brain are largely unknown.
The researchers thus studied three carefully matched groups of 13 subjects each: schizophrenia patients, nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of patients and healthy controls. They selected patients who were recently diagnosed, so that differences in prior treatment or psychotic episodes would not bias the results.
The subjects were scanned by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while resting and while performing easy or hard memory tasks. The behavioral and clinical testing were performed by Larry J. Seidman and colleagues at Harvard Medical School, and the imaging data were analyzed by first author Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli, a research scientist at the MIT Martinos Imaging Center at the McGovern Institute.
The researchers were especially interested in the default system, a network of brain regions whose activity is suppressed when people perform demanding mental tasks. This network includes the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex, regions that are associated with self-reflection and autobiographical memories and which become connected into a synchronously active network when the mind is allowed to wander.
Whitfield-Gabrieli found that in the schizophrenia patients, the default system was both hyperactive and hyperconnected during rest, and it remained so as they performed the memory tasks. In other words, the patients were less able than healthy control subjects to suppress the activity of this network during the task. Interestingly, the less the suppression and the greater the connectivity, the worse they performed on the hard memory task, and the more severe their clinical symptoms.
“We think this may reflect an inability of people with schizophrenia to direct mental resources away from internal thoughts and feelings and toward the external world in order to perform difficult tasks,” Whitfield-Gabrieli explained.
The hyperactive default system could also help to explain hallucinations and paranoia by making neutral external stimuli seem inappropriately self-relevant. For instance, if brain regions whose activity normally signifies self-focus are active while listening to a voice on television, the person may perceive that the voice is speaking directly to them.
The default system is also overactive, though to a lesser extent, in first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients who did not themselves have the disease. This suggests that overactivation of the default system may be linked to the genetic cause of the disease rather than its consequences.
The default system is a hot topic in brain imaging, according to John Gabrieli, partly because it is easy to measure and because it is affected in different ways by different disorders.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
Saturday, January 17, 2009
72-Hour Observations
Weekend Psych News
Proposed cuts draw fire in Virginia
Virginia's Department of Mental Health wants to save $16 million by closing some of the state's psychiatric centers. But the legislature isn't going along quietly. Read about the heated debate at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
New psych hospital focuses on moving from intensive care to community life
Fort Hamilton Hospital in Hamilton, Ohio unveiled a shiny new 15-bed psychiatric unit on Thursday. This is the first psych facility in Butler County and will focus its energy on moving its patients back into the community. Read more about it at the Oxford Press.
Cheerleader mom sent to psychiatric hospital
The Green Bay, Wisconsin mother who tried out for cheerleading under her daughter's name has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for three years in lieu of jail time for identity theft. Read more about it at MSNBC.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
Proposed cuts draw fire in Virginia
Virginia's Department of Mental Health wants to save $16 million by closing some of the state's psychiatric centers. But the legislature isn't going along quietly. Read about the heated debate at the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
New psych hospital focuses on moving from intensive care to community life
Fort Hamilton Hospital in Hamilton, Ohio unveiled a shiny new 15-bed psychiatric unit on Thursday. This is the first psych facility in Butler County and will focus its energy on moving its patients back into the community. Read more about it at the Oxford Press.
Cheerleader mom sent to psychiatric hospital
The Green Bay, Wisconsin mother who tried out for cheerleading under her daughter's name has been sent to a psychiatric hospital for three years in lieu of jail time for identity theft. Read more about it at MSNBC.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
Friday, January 16, 2009
Georgia reaches agreement with feds
Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue announced yesterday that his state has reached an agreement with the Justice Department to overhaul patient care seven state psychiatric hospitals.
The agreement, which still needs judicial approval, covers almost every area of patient care:
As discussed on this blog, Georgia has been under intense scrutiny after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation uncovered 136 deaths and nearly 200 cases of patient abuse since 2002. Recently, the state has been exploring privatizing its crumbling public psychiatric hospital system.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
The agreement, which still needs judicial approval, covers almost every area of patient care:
- Incident reviews and investigations
- Treatment planning
- Seclusion and restraint protocols
- Medical and nursing care
- Discharge planning
As discussed on this blog, Georgia has been under intense scrutiny after an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation uncovered 136 deaths and nearly 200 cases of patient abuse since 2002. Recently, the state has been exploring privatizing its crumbling public psychiatric hospital system.Sphere: Related Content
Read more...
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Deep problems in the Grand Canyon State
While many of us were sleeping last night, the lines in Arizona's mental health battle were etched deeper into the sand. At issue are the number of patients being un- or under- served by the state's partially privatized system, particularly in Maricopa County. At midnight, the Arizona Republic published a story appearing today, "Audit calls county's mental care worse." Based on an analysis by court-appointed monitor Nancy Diggs, Magellan Health Services, the company which won the contract in 2007 to manage mental health services in Maricopa County, has failed to meet the needs of 83% of the county's most seriously ill clients. If that weren't damning enough, the report also found three in five patients do not have "an adequate clinical team" and four in five don't even have a completed mental health assessment.
"They've really gone to hell in a handbasket."
Nancy Diggs, court-appointed monitor.
Magellan won their contract promising to clean up the mess left by their predecessor, Value Options .
Among the lightning rods for the current controversy is the case of Joe Gallegos, a longtime mental health client who had been court-ordered into treatment at a Glendale, Arizona clinic. He didn't receive help from Magellan and on December 23, murdered two young boys in a Southwest Phoenix park, beating them to death with a baseball bat.
Sphere: Related Content
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