The Take 5 to Save Lives campaign asks supporters to take 5 steps

The Take 5 to Save Lives campaign asks supporters to take 5 steps:

1. Learn the signs



2. Join the movement


3. Spread the word


4. Support a friend


5. Reach out if you need help

Visit the campaign website to learn more about these 5 steps and how you or your organization can help spread the word.



For more information: http://www.take5tosavelives.com

High Schools Pilot Suicide Prevention Program

A new model for suicide prevention seeks to use the power of peer influence to change high school suicide rates for the better.

Undertaken by researchers at the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC), the Sources of Strength program will be the subject of a long-term study at high schools across New York and North Dakota.

Developed in the late 1990s by Mark LoMurray alongside other tribal and rural suicide prevention workers in North Dakota, the Sources of Strength program identifies a culturally diverse group of youth leaders to change behaviors through targeted messaging activities.

According to research team leader Peter Wyman, Ph.D., associate professor of psychiatry at URMC, the program’s objective is to “strengthen how teens handle depression, stress and other problems by training influential teen ‘peer leaders’ who work to change coping practices in their friendship networks.”

Identified youth leaders may include a mix of low-risk and at-risk teens who are trained to influence others to adopt positive coping mechanisms in connection with emotional crisis. The leaders work under the monitoring of adult mentors.

Current statistics reveal that suicide accounts for more deaths in youth and young adults aged 10 to 24 than all other natural causes combined. As many as eight percent of adolescents attempt suicide each year, with up to one third requiring medical attention.

“Sources of Strength is an innovative and promising program,” Wyman said.

Source: University of Rochester Medical Center

Can Psychological Trauma Be Inherited?

An emerging topic of investigation looks to determine if post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) can be passed to subsequent generations.

Scientists are studying groups with high rates of PTSD, such as the survivors of the Nazi death camps. Adjustment problems of the children of the survivors — the so-called “second generation” — is topic of study for researchers.

Studies suggested that some symptoms or personality traits associated with PTSD may be more common in the second generation than the general population.

It has been assumed that these transgenerational effects reflected the impact of PTSD upon the parent-child relationship rather than a trait passed biologically from parent to child.

However, Dr. Isabelle Mansuy and colleagues provide new evidence in the current issue of Biological Psychiatry that some aspects of the impact of trauma cross generations and are associated with epigenetic changes, i.e., the regulation of the pattern of gene expression, without changing the DNA sequence.

They found that early-life stress induced depressive-like behaviors and altered behavioral responses to aversive environments in mice.

Source: Elsevier

Ultrasound Technology Helpful in Treating Self-Harm Patients

According to a new study, radiologists, while using ultrasound technology and a minimally-invasive procedure, are able to successfully diagnose and treat patients who engage in a troubling self-harming behavior known as self-embedding.

Self-harm (or self-injury) is the general name used to describe a variety of disturbing behaviors in which a person intentionally causes harm to his or her body with no suicidal intent. It is a troubling trend among teenagers, and surprisingly, more common in girls.

The most common forms of self-injury include cutting oneself, bruising, burning, breaking bones, hair pulling, and the swallowing of toxic substances. Self-embedding–the focus of this study– takes the behavior of cutting a step further as the person will puncture the skin in order to insert a foreign object.

Sometimes these objects are left under the skin for years, and many of them have escaped detection during typical X-ray examinations. Ultrasound technology, however, is offering new hope for diagnosing and treating patients who self-embed.

Source: Radiological Society of North America

Psychological Abuse During Pregnancy Linked to Postnatal Depression

Postnatal depression is strongly linked to psychological abuse by an intimate partner during pregnancy, independent of any physical or sexual violence, according to the research of Dr. Ana Bernarda Ludermir of the Universidade Federal de Pernambuco in Recife, Brazil and colleagues at the School of Social and Community Medicine at the University of Bristol.

These findings are significant as most social policies currently focus on prevention and treatment of physical violence only.

A total of 1,045 women between the ages of 18 and 49 years were included in the study and interviewed during pregnancy and after delivery. The women, who were receiving care at primary health care clinics during their third trimesters, were given a questionnaire that assessed partner violence.

The findings showed that 270 (26 percent) of these women suffered from postnatal depression, and the most common form of abuse was psychological (28 percent).

Source: University of Bristol

Bipolar Does Not Increase Risk of Violent Crime

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor

A new Swedish study suggests that a person with bipolar disorder is not at increased risk of aggression. However, substance abuse associated with bipolar does increase the chance of violent crime.

The public debate on violent crime usually assumes that violence in the mentally ill is a direct result of the perpetrator’s illness.

Twenty-one percent of patients with bipolar disorder and a concurrent diagnosis of severe substance abuse (alcohol or illegal drugs) were convicted of violent crimes, compared to five percent of those with bipolar disorder but without substance abuse, and three percent among general public control individuals.

The differences remained when accounting for age, gender, immigrant background, socioeconomic status, and whether the most recent presentation of the bipolar disorder was manic or depressed.

“Interestingly, this concurs with our group’s previous findings in schizophrenia, another serious psychiatric disorder, which found that individuals with schizophrenia are not more violent than members of the general public, provided there is no substance abuse,” says professor Niklas Långström, head of the Centre for Violence Prevention at Karolinska Institutet.

According to the researchers, the findings support the need for initiatives to prevent, identify and treat substance abuse when fighting violent crime. Additionally, Långström hopes that the results will help challenge overly simplistic explanations of the causes of violent crime.

“Unwarranted fear and stigmatization of mental illness increases the alienation of people with psychiatric disorder and makes them less inclined to seek the care they need,” Långström comments.

Source: Karolinska Institutet

TNS Electrical Stimulation Helps Depression

By Traci Pedersen
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on September 4, 2010

A new therapy that electrically stimulates a major nerve in the brain shows promising results for relief of major depression. The treatment — trigeminal nerve stimulation (TNS) — reduced depression symptoms by an average of 70 percent during an eight-week study conducted at UCLA.

Major depression is a disabling brain condition resulting in depressed mood, negative effects on sleep, energy, decision-making and memory, and possible thoughts of death or suicide. The disorder affects 15 million adults in the U.S., and according to the World Health Organization, by 2020 it will be the second-largest contributor to disability in the world.

Although antidepressants have helped many people recover from major depression and resume their lives, there is only a 30 percent success rate for patients taking their first medication. If the first drug doesn’t work, patients typically continue trying a series of other antidepressants. Most of these medications have significant side effects, including obesity, sexual dysfunction, drowsiness, nausea and fatigue.

Dr. Ian A. Cook, the Miller Professor of Psychiatry at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and the study’s head investigator, presented the results at a recent National Institutes of Health conference on depression and other psychiatric disorders. There he noted that 80 percent of the subjects achieved remission with electrical stimulation, a significant statistic in this pilot study.

TNS Electrical Stimulation Helps Depression