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All the news that’s fit to post

As I’ve been looking for stories for this blog, I’ve encountered an abundance of riches, both from RSS feeds and stories my classmates have written.

There’s just not enough time to do them all justice with their own post. So, I’m going to take a cue from my favorite TV show, “Jeopardy!” (yes, I’m a nerd), and make a hodgepodge category of stories that caught my eye this week.

From Britney to Katrina to Tom Brady, there should be something here for everyone.
Enjoy, and comment away!

1) Group helps women — and men — through abortion trauma; critics say it’s a ploy – Medill News Service
2) Super Bowl stress can be a hazard – Associated Press
3) Mental disorders persist among Hurricane Katrina survivors – National Institute of Mental Health
4) Oops, they did it again to Britney Spears – World of Psychology
5) Kids with ADHD may be more likely to bully – MSNBC.com
6) Winter Health Week shares survival strategies – Beyond Blue
7) Suicide risk high among Latinas - The Washington Post

Two sides of the brain-injury coin

Here’s another potential cause of many mental illnesses and other conditions: traumatic brain injuries.

Researchers at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York found that many people who suffered a major blow to the head later struggled with addiction, learning disabilities, memory loss and depression.

The good news is that they responded well to therapy for the injuries, often caused by an accident, sports mishap or parental abuse.
The bad news is that initial problems with memory and confusion after a brain injury often lead to worse problems later in life:

People get abused as kids, making them inattentive in school and sometimes unable to learn,” says [Jennifer] Highley [of Common Ground, an agency that builds housing for the homeless]. She says head injury and the emotional fallout from abuse can lead to alcoholism and addiction, and “that combination creates the inability to function and often leads to homelessness.”

However, one type of brain injury that’s not being linked to mental illness is those suffered during combat.
Many veterans returning from Iraq have reported serious brain injuries. Illinois recently launched a Warriors Assistance Program to screen all National Guardsmen returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Tammy Duckworth, director of the Illinois Department of Veterans Affairs, said,

“Too often mild traumatic brain injury is misdiagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Military doctors said the opposite is also true.
They hope more accurate diagnoses will help soldiers get the right kind of treatment.

Illinois has a hot line for veterans to call for screenings: 1-866-554-4927.
Civilians who think they may have a serious brain injury or are worried about someone else can contact their doctor for help.

Successful treatment may be all in your genes

Mental illnesses are known to run in families.

Allaboutdepression.com says,

If you have a parent or sibling that has had major depression, you may be 1.5 to 3 times more likely to develop the condition than those who do not have a close relative with the condition.

The link is even stronger with bipolar disorder:

Of those with bipolar disorder, approximately 50% of them have a parent with a history of clinical depression. When a mother or father has bipolar disorder, their child will have a 25% chance of developing some type of clinical depression. If both parents have bipolar disorder, the chance of their child also developing bipolar disorder is between 50% and 75%. Brothers and sisters of those with bipolar disorder may be 8 to 18 times more likely to develop bipolar disorder, and 2 to 10 times more likely to develop major depressive disorder than others with no such siblings.

However, a specific gene linked to depression has not been found — yet.

But a new study suggests that a gene could help determine why people respond better to certain antidepressants than others

The German team looked at how changes in the ABCB-1 gene affected three widely used treatments: Forest Laboratories Inc’s Celexa, Wyeth ’s Effexor and Remeron from Dutch chemicals group Akzo Nobel’s Organon pharmaceutical unit. … They found that the gene and the protein blocked Celexa and Effexor but not Remeron. The researchers do not know why but said the drugs’ different chemical makeup could be the reason.

The team added that a genetic test could be developed to help people for whom antidepressants don’t work.

Miss America takes fight with anorexia public

Kirsten Haglund of Michigan won the 2008 Miss America pageant on Saturday.

Like all Miss Americas, she has a cause. Based on her own experience with anorexia, she wants to raise awareness of eating disorders and encourage people to have a healthy body image.

“You have to have curves,” she said proudly.

“You can’t look like a stick-thin model.”

Haglund isn’t alone:

The National Eating Disorders Association estimates eating disorders affect 10 million girls and women and about one million boys and men in the United States.

Some of them, like Haglund, recover. But others don’t, leading one site to call anorexia “the most deadly mental illness.”

Treatment for eating disorders has a heavy psychological component, including therapy and behavior modification.

Although I was rooting for Miss New York (her brother was a friend of mine when I lived upstate), I wish Haglund the best and hope other people with anorexia can find inspiration from her story.

If you pray, will you make it through the day?

I’m always a little skeptical of studies that try to determine whether prayer helps people recover from illness.

Not because I don’t believe in prayer, but because I think religious tenets usually can’t be measured within a scientific framework. Therefore, such studies just seem like a waste of time: No matter what your beliefs, you probably won’t change your mind – or your prayer habits – based on the results.

However, I think it’s great when people affected by mental illness find strength and coping strategies in religion and spirituality.

For one thing, houses of worship can provide a great sense of community and support, which alleviates feelings of loneliness.

Clergy and other religious leaders can also often be a person’s first stop when seeking help. Some churches, including First Presbyterian in Evanston, even run counseling centers.

Sadly, some congregations have done great harm over the years, telling people that if they really loved or trusted God, they wouldn’t be depressed.

Well, tell that to Jesus. Or Job. Or Jeremiah, or any one of a number of biblical people who weren’t super-happy all the time.

Besides the Christian tradition, Buddhism and Hinduism make heavy use of meditation, which comes in various forms and has many possible health benefits.

World of Psychology shares a study being done at Emory University on how to prevent depression before it starts by using “compassion meditation,” promoted by the Dalai Lama.

His Holiness tells CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta that while depression has a biological basis, it can be mitigated by changing how we think about other people. Instead of seeing some as enemies, some as friends and the rest as “other,” we should try to treat everyone the same, “with hands of compassion moving in action.”

(The New Testament has a somewhat similar concept.)

The research team at Emory says the study looks promising. Perhaps researching religion and prevention will be more conclusive than religion and cures.

From heartache to heart disease in several easy steps

Depression is being realized as more than just a mental condition. Besides having numerous physical symptoms (including headaches, fatigue and problems with sleeping and digestion), it may contribute to heart disease, according to the American Heart Association.

The heart association cites a study that found men with depression had greater amounts of substances in the blood that can signify inflammation and lead to clogged arteries. The results were even greater among men who were otherwise healthy and had no other symptoms of heart disease.

However, the link is far from conclusive:

One surprise of the study was that depressive mood was more frequent in French men than Irish men even though the incidence of heart disease is higher in Ireland.

In America, heart disease is the No. 1 cause of death for men and women in all racial groups except Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. For them, it’s No. 2, behind cancer.

Besides depression, anxiety, particularly workplace stress, can also raise a person’s risk, as Julie Deardorff of the Chicago Tribune reports on her “Julie’s Health Club” blog.

“Stress appeared to upset the part of the nervous system which controls the heart, telling it how to work and controlling the variability of the heart rate,” the BBC News reported.

That’s not good for us Americans, who seem to thrive on stress and creating it for ourselves. We commute long distances, work long hours, spend too much money, eat too much (unhealthy) food, drink excessively, smoke, and don’t exercise or sleep enough.

Some of that is unavoidable, thanks to the demands of modern life. And many people face stress caused by poverty or other situations that are largely beyond their control.

But it’s probably no coincidence that many of the same things recommended to prevent heart disease are also good for people with depression and anxiety. In fact, they’re good for people in general.

We have yet to learn all the ways our minds and bodies are connected. Even though heart disease seems far away to my generation, we should still know our risks, take some control and start healthy habits now, before it’s too late.

Heath’s words were good advice for Britney

I don’t know if Heath Ledger and Britney Spears ever met, but if they had, maybe they would have compared stories about people questioning their mental health.

The tabloid headlines about Spears have proliferated since her bizarre behavior last year, not helped by her 16-year-old sister’s pregnancy and an invasion-of-privacy visit from Dr. Phil, which my classmate Andrea Bartz critiqued.

Other mental-health professionals are mad that their colleagues are diagnosing from a distance, according to the Associated Press.

Dr. Gail Saltz, of New York, says it’s bad practice to slap a label on someone without doing a thorough evaluation. That’s especially crucial for bipolar disorder:

It’s one thing, she notes, to discuss what concerns a doctor might have when a young woman has two toddlers, is going through a divorce and is suspected of substance abuse. It’s another thing, she says, to speculate she has something specific like bipolar disorder. … “It’s not like a blood test,” she says. “Brains don’t have a check box.”

At the risk of adding to the “drive-by psychiatrist” phenomenon, I also want to highlight some news on the death of Ledger (who I loved in “10 Things I Hate About You”).

Those close to him say he had had trouble sleeping, and prescription medicines for anxiety and insomnia were found near his body.

In 2007, while filming”The Dark Knight” here in Chicago, Ledger told the Sun-Times,

“I’m lucky in a sense because I have a job where I get to scream and cry. I get to purge myself in ways that don’t really affect me personally.”

The final quote seems even more poignant now:

“I’m pretty good at dropping a character once it’s over for the day. Certainly once the film is over, I throw it all away. Your life is what matters.”

“Your life is what matters.” Let’s hope people keep that in mind when it comes to helping Spears and others.

Is bad news no news on antidepressants?

As promised, here’s more on that New England Journal of Medicine study that suggested failing to publish studies on antidepressants’ effectiveness led to doctors prescribing them unnecessarily.

John M. Grohol at PsychCentral says the findings shouldn’t be that surprising, as researchers naturally want to tell people what works, not what doesn’t work.
However, he says drug companies “should all be required to ensure all negative study data is as readily available as the positive study data.”

Elsewhere, The Last Psychiatrist wonders what the big deal is and challenges the credibility of Dr. Erick Turner, who helped write the NEJM study:

Turner has “30 publications in peer reviewed journals.” How many of those publications had negative results? One: B12 was not effective for seasonal affective disorder. So did he submit negative studies and they were rejected, or did he simply discard them? Turner was also a reviewer for the FDA– why not simply release all that data?

He/she also blames a shift in focus by medical journals:

Keep in mind these studies were done > 5 years ago, back when the culture wasn’t “everything has equivalent efficacy.” Nowadays, that’s the hot topic– studies showing Pharma sucks, or branded meds are no better than generics. Back “then” journals were all about finding the next big thing, the assumption of progress, etc. There’s no room in journals for the null hypothesis.

CL Psych shares the contempt but thinks some negative studies should have made it in:

There have always been journal editors who have some ability to think critically and publish material that runs counter to that of mainstream medicine. Sure, some of the studies would have been rejected a time or two, but I think they would have been published at some point.

On the other hand, at Slate.com, Peter D. Kramer writes that despite obvious flaws with the studies, people shouldn’t automatically be scared off antidepressants.

Kramer and CL Psych (below) point out another major problem by the drug companies:

the study found that drug companies changed their primary outcome measures and statistical analyses in between submitting to the FDA and submitting for journal publication. This resulted in inflated effect sizes for every antidepressant. Kind of a big deal, as the medical literature ends up suggesting the drugs are more beneficial than they actually are.

But Kramer disputes that conclusion:

Perhaps the best thing to say about this new data analysis is that it bears no news at all about antidepressants. They are just as good or as bad as we imagined them to be.

(*Thanks to John M. Grohol for his links.)

How to really support our troops (and veterans)

Psychological struggles among veterans after they return from war are nothing new. In World War I, doctors first used the term “shell shock” to describe the anxiety and debilitating panic that struck troops who fought among heavy artillery fire in Europe. Some soldiers got to leave the fighting to recover, but others were sent back to the front, seen as “cowards who were trying to get out of fighting.”

Today, post-traumatic stress disorder is a household term. It can affect anyone who’s suffered a traumatic event, such as child abuse, sexual assault or a natural disaster. But it’s probably most commonly thought of in relation to veterans.

ScienceDaily reports “a threefold increase in new cases of self-reported post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms among combat-exposed military personnel since 2001,” including veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some groups were more likely to report PTSD: “participants who were female, divorced, enlisted, and in those who reported being a current smoker or problem drinker at baseline [the start of the survey].”

And the symptoms can persist for decades.

With help and support, many younger veterans are able to readjust to civilian life. I met some of them at a Student Veterans of America conference earlier this month: men and women who have gone to college after seeing combat, bonding with each other as they try to fit in on their campuses.

But others haven’t been so fortunate. The Associated Press reports that more young Iraq and Afghanistan veterans are becoming homeless and are showing the signs of PTSD even earlier than those who fought in previous wars.

Pete Dougherty, the Veterans Administration’s director of homeless programs, promises to make sure they don’t fall through the cracks:

We’re out there trying to get everybody we can to get those kinds of services today so we avoid this kind of problem in the future.

But perhaps it would be wise for us to think how we can better understand PTSD and help as well.