USA.gov: Take Care of Your Mental Well-Being This Month
Mental health is just as important to your overall health as your physical well-being. Good mental health leads to a productive and well-balanced life.
May is Mental Health Month, an annual observance to remind people to take the time to take care for themselves mentally, not just physically.
Emotional stress can cause negative feelings and behavior, and in the long term, can have serious effects on someone’s life.
Mental health problems are some of the most often neglected, either because people don’t realize the impact emotional stress is having on their lives or they are simply too embarrassed to ask for help.
If you are experiencing emotional stress, you may be able to improve your overall quality of life by seeking treatment from a qualified professional. Find a mental health service provider near you.
If you, or someone you know, is in suicidal crisis or emotional distress, call 1.800.273.TALK (1.800.273.8255).
I like it when USA.gov puts out useful PSAs.
“Mental health is just as important to your overall health as your physical well-being. Good mental health leads to a productive and well-balanced life.”
^^
Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness ⇢
Not surprised by these figures at all.
82.5: The percentage of children and young adults who exhibit significant symptoms of mental illness at some point between the ages of 9 and 21.
The startling statistic comes from a collaborative study conducted by Duke University and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which surveyed 1,420 children over 12 years beginning in 1993. Investigators checked in up to nine times to test for anxiety, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and more.
The results: 61.1 percent met the diagnostic criteria for mental illness during at least one appointment, while an additional 21.4 percent had problems bad enough to interfere with school, social life, or family relations.
“We have to destigmatize the idea of mental disorder. We shouldn’t be surprised that the brain has problems, just like the rest of the body.”
Psychiatry Manual Drafters Back Down on Diagnoses
In a rare step, doctors on a panel revising psychiatry’s influential diagnostic manual have backed away from two controversial proposals that would have expanded the number of people identified as having psychotic or depressive disorders.
The doctors dropped two diagnoses that they ultimately concluded were not supported by the evidence: “attenuated psychosis syndrome,” proposed to identify people at risk of developing psychosis, and “mixed anxiety depressive disorder,” a hybrid of the two mood problems.
They also tweaked their proposed definition of depression to allay fears that the normal sadness people experience after the loss of a loved one, a job or a marriage would be mistaken for a mental disorder.
In a RARE step the American Psychiatric Association actually listens to psychologists and public concerns over definitions of mental illness. But only two concerns.
They gave you these, don’t expect much more from them.
Top 10 Reasons To Have Sex Tonight ⇢
1. Sex Relieves Stress. A big health benefit of sex is lower blood pressure and overall stress reduction, according to researchers from Scotland who reported their findings in the journal Biological Psychology.
Those who had intercourse had better responses to stress than those who engaged in other sexual behaviors or abstained.
2. Sex Boosts Immunity. Good sexual health may mean better physical health. Having sex once or twice a week has been linked with higher levels of an antibody called immunoglobulin A or IgA, which can protect you from getting colds and other infections.
3. Sex Burns Calories. Thirty minutes of sex burns 85 calories or more. It may not sound like much, but it adds up: 42 half-hour sessions will burn 3,570 calories, more than enough to lose a pound. Doubling up, you could drop that pound in 21 hour-long sessions.
4. Sex Improves Cardiovascular Health. While some older folks may worry that the efforts expended during sex could cause a stroke, that’s not so, according to researchers from England. In a study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, scientists found frequency of sex was not associated with stroke in the 914 men they followed for 20 years. The researchers also found that having sex twice or more a week reduced the risk of fatal heart attack by half for the men, compared with those who had sex less than once a month.
5. Sex Boosts Self-Esteem. Boosting self-esteem was one of 237 reasons people have sex, collected by University of Texas researchers and published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
“Great sex begins with self-esteem, and it raises it. If the sex is loving, connected, and what you want, it raises it.”
6. Sex Improves Intimacy. Having sex and orgasms increases levels of the hormone oxytocin, the so-called love hormone, which helps us bond and build trust. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh and the University of North Carolina evaluated 59 premenopausal women before and after warm contact with their husbands and partners ending with hugs. They found that the more contact, the higher the oxytocin levels.
7. Sex Reduces Pain. As the hormone oxytocin surges, endorphins increase, and pain declines. So if your headache, arthritis pain, or PMS symptoms seem to improve after sex, you can thank those higher oxytocin levels.
8. Sex Reduces Prostate Cancer Risk. Frequent ejaculations, especially in 20-something men, may reduce the risk of prostate cancer later in life, Australian researchers reported in the British Journal of Urology International.
But they found men who had five or more ejaculations weekly while in their 20s reduced their risk of getting prostate cancer later by a third.
9. Sex Strengthens Pelvic Floor Muscles. For women, doing a few pelvic floor muscle exercises known as Kegels during sex offers a couple of benefits. You will enjoy more pleasure, and you’ll also strengthen the area and help to minimize the risk of incontinence later in life.
10. Sex Helps You Sleep Better. The oxytocin released during orgasm also promotes sleep, according to research.
Do I even need to comment on this one?
Thin slices of the human brain mounted on glass
You can hang these near your DNA portraits.
A human brain dissection – in pictures
Ever wonder what the process of a human brain dissection looks like? Here is a series of images of professor Steve Gentlemen (love that last name) dissecting a brain at the Brain Bank.
Image Credit: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
My apologies to anyone that is sensitive to this kind of material.
Great Brain Scan PSA for the Alzheimer Society in BC.
Somatic stem cells obtained from skin cells for first time ever
This is an immunofluorescence microscopy image of the induced neural stem cells (iNSCs) using antibodies against two neural stem cell markers SSEA1 (red color) and Olig2 (green color). Credit: MPI for Molecular Biomedicine
This is great news.
Mouse Norovirus (MVN)
Shown here is the electron microscopy image reconstruction of mouse norovirus (MNV). The capsid is colored according to the distance from the center of the virion. The inner shell is colored red and yellow while the protruding domain (P domain) is colored in green and blue. The outer most tip (blue) is used by the virus to recognize the host cell and is where many antibodies bind. There is a yellow strand connecting the P domains to the shell of the virus that likely helps keep the P domains highly mobile and has been now observed in three different genera of this family of viruses.
Credit: Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, St. Louis.
Antipsychotic drugs grow more popular for patients without mental illness
The continuing overmedication of the world.
Two graduate students who had no symptoms of mental illness wondered if she thought they should take a powerful schizophrenia drug each had been prescribed to treat insomnia.
Those Georgetown students exemplify a trend that alarms medical experts, policymakers and patient advocates: the skyrocketing increase in the off-label use of an expensive class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics. Until the past decade these 11 drugs, most approved in the 1990s, had been reserved for the approximately 3 percent of Americans with the most disabling mental illnesses, chiefly schizophrenia and bipolar disorder; more recently a few have been approved to treat severe depression.
Here are some highlights of the article:
1. Atypical antipsychotics are being prescribed by psychiatrists and primary-care doctors to treat a panoply of conditions for which they have not been approved, including anxiety, attention-deficit disorder, sleep difficulties, behavioral problems in toddlers and dementia.
2. In the past few years major drugmakers have paid more than $2 billion to settle lawsuits brought by states and the federal government alleging illegal marketing; some cases are still being litigated, as are thousands of claims by patients. In 2009 Eli Lilly and Co. paid the federal government a record $1.4 billion to settle charges that it illegally marketed Zyprexa through, among other things, a “5 at 5 campaign” that urged nursing homes to administer 5 milligrams of the drug at 5 p.m. to induce sleep.
3. In 2010 antipsychotic drugs racked up more than $16 billion in sales. For the past three years they have ranked near or at the top of the best-selling classes of drugs, outstripping antidepressants and sometimes cholesterol medicines.
4. “Antipsychotics are overused, overpriced and oversold,” said Allen Frances, former chair of psychiatry at Duke University School of Medicine
Great article that goes more into detail about doctors prescribing medications for disorders that the medications have not been approved to treat. Take a few minutes and read it.
Shining light in the ears may alleviate SAD symptoms
Millions of people experience depression and lower levels of energy in the winter due to seasonal-affective disorder (SAD), or the “winter blues.” Since the disorder is thought to arise due to a shortage of natural light, one common form of treatment is light therapy, in which the person sits in front of a bright, full-spectrum light at certain times of day. But the effectiveness of light therapy has been unclear, and now researchers from Oulu, Finland, think they know why: light-sensitive regions of the brain may actually play a larger role in SAD symptoms than those in the eyes. For this reason, they’ve designed earphones that shine light through the ear canal to light-sensitive proteins on the brain’s surface, with encouraging results.
Practical, non-pharmaceutical, and effective? I like it. Maybe a coupling with some CBT?