***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
***The offer still stands, if I was in charge of the FBI, there would be no mental illness in the United States within 30 days.***
(FBI director Robert Mueller in this YouTube Video <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBJ2Hsq6HaM>)
[For what I do, I suppose I maybe in some people's "kill" list for wanting to destroy the mental illness scam which has a large group of people (dangerous people) who benefit greatly from it, but do remember I offer a solution that works for those with mental illness]
__________________________________________________________________
[1] Mentally ill flood ER as states cut services -When I offer to end mental illness?
CHICAGO/NEW YORK (Reuters) - On a recent shift at a Chicago emergency department, Dr. William Sullivan treated a newly homeless patient who was threatening to kill himself.
"He had been homeless for about two weeks. He hadn't showered or eaten a lot. He asked if we had a meal tray," said Sullivan, a physician at the University of Illinois Medical Center at Chicago and a past president of the Illinois College of Emergency Physicians.
Sullivan said the man kept repeating that he wanted to kill himself. "It seemed almost as if he was interested in being admitted."
Across the country, doctors like Sullivan are facing a spike in psychiatric emergencies - attempted suicide, severe depression, psychosis - as states slash mental health services and the country's worst economic crisis since the Great Depression takes its toll.
This trend is taxing emergency rooms already overburdened by uninsured patients who wait until ailments become acute before seeking treatment.
"These are people without a previous psychiatric history who are coming in and telling us they've lost their jobs, they've lost sometimes their homes, they can't provide for their families, and they are becoming severely depressed," said Dr. Felicia Smith, director of the acute psychiatric service at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston.
HURSDAY, Dec. 29 (HealthDay News) -- People with a mental illness struggle with symptoms ranging from crushing depression and crippling anxiety to powerful delusions and hallucinations that force them to actively sort out the real from the imagined.
And if that weren't enough, they also have to deal with the way the rest of the world perceives their inner struggle.
Stigma associated with mental illness remains widespread in U.S. society, despite some progress made in demystifying these medical conditions, said Michael J. Fitzpatrick, executive director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI).
"It's pervasive, but it's nuanced, too," Fitzpatrick said. "Most Americans understand that mental illnesses are treatable illnesses. I think people basically understand depression. Depression is talked about in the media and is considered a treatable disease. But when you reach psychosis and schizophrenia, there's still a lot of misunderstanding and fear."
LONDON — Computer analysis of brain scans could help predict how serious or long term a psychotic patient's illness may become and help doctors make more accurate decisions about how best to treat them, researchers said on Monday.
In a study in the journal Psychological Medicine, scientists from King's College London's Institute of Psychiatry and University College London's computer science department found that using computer algorithms to analyze MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) brain scans can predict a patient's outcome.
Foster children are being prescribed cocktails of powerful antipsychosis drugs just as frequently as some of the most mentally disabled youngsters on Medicaid, a new study suggests.
The report, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, is the first to investigate how often youngsters in foster care are given two antipsychotic drugs at once, the authors said. The drugs include Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa — among other so-called major tranquilizers — which were developed for schizophrenia but are now used as all-purpose drugs for almost any psychiatric symptoms.
NEW YORK — American kids are increasingly likely to be admitted to the hospital for mental problems, although rates of non-psychiatric hospitalizations have remained flat, a new study shows.
From 1996 to 2007, the rate of psychiatric hospital discharges rose by more than 80 percent for 5-13-year-olds and by 42 percent for older teens.
"This occurs despite numerous efforts to make outpatient services for the more vulnerable kids more widely available," said Joseph C. Blader of Stony Brook State University of New York, whose findings appear in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
He said hospitalization is the last resort, because it's so disruptive for normal life.
"It's a pretty traumatic thing for a family when your child is admitted to a psych unit," he told Reuters Health.
Overall, short-term hospital admissions for mental illness rose from 156 to 283 per 100,000 children per year over the ten-year study period, based on data from the National Hospital Discharge Survey.
By Rachael Rettner
Head trauma may increase the risk of developing schizophrenia, a new study says.
The results show people who have suffered from a traumatic brain injury (TBI) are 1.6 times more likely to develop schizophrenia compared with those who have not suffered such an injury.
The risk was particularly high in those with a family history of schizophrenia.
Previous studies regarding TBI and schizophrenia have yielded mixed results as to whether the conditions are linked. The new study is one of the first to pool information from past research in a systematic way to get an indication of the risk.
While the new findings suggest the link does exist, they don't prove that brain injuries cause schizophrenia. And it could be that patients were already developing the psychiatric condition when their injury occurred, the researchers said. More work needs to be done to find exactly what's behind this relationship, they said.
By Rajan
Some people have a superior memory of veracity than other because of a variation in the particular region of the brain. The study of those regions could improve the understanding of brain disorders such as schizophrenia, say researchers. Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder which affects twenty-four million people globally, shows statistics of the World Health Organization.
Up till now comparatively little is known about causes of the disease. For their study researchers from Cambridge University tested fifty-three study participants. The study participants first had brain scans which showed if they had either a clear presence or absence of PCS in the left or right part of the brain.
Then study participants were shown the well-known word pairs such as Laurel and Hardy, which were sometimes complete and sometimes had the second word blanked out. The study subjects were then asked to remember whether they had seen a completed pair, or whether they had completed the pair in their own mind.
