Mental Health News

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Scientists have found that the brains of Autistic children have specific abnormalities.  Mental health disorders such as autism have been on the increase lately, whether it’s a result of more accurate diagnosing of conditions or as they say, something in the water is still under discussion.  Yet, it certainly has more researchers paying attention to the children’s mental health these days.

Researchers found in the case of autistic children that there is more gray matter in the areas of the brain that control social processing and sight-based learning than in children without autism.  In order to make this discovery researchers combined two imaging techniques that involve tracking the motion of water molecules in the brain and pinpointing the small changes in gray matter volume between 13 year old boys with high-functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome and 12 healthy kids with an average age of 11 years old.  How they got the kids to sit still for the involved procedure is still a mystery!

In the case of mental health disorders such as autism, these children had enlarged gray matter in the parietal lobes of their brains, which are linked to the mirror neuron system of cells that are associated with empathy, emotional experiences and sight based learning.  The autistic children also had less gray matter volume in the right amygdala regions of their brains and that the decreases in volume in this region of the brain correlate to the degree of impaired social interaction per child.

Autism is considered one of the fastest growing mental health disorders involving developmental disability in the US.  It usually appears in the child’s first 3 years of life and impairs social skills and communication skills.

In Hastings, Nebraska a small program at Hastings Regional Center, focused on mental health care for adolescents is in trouble.  It is so little used that the $3 million dollar program could be shut down. 

This mental health care program is currently only treating one adolescent, but it has a multi-million dollar budget.  However, some of the funds in the program are being used in another program at the local community focused center where both programs have a home.

The program is focused on helping adolescences with major mental health problems who haven’t been successfully treated in other programs.  It is also geared towards a community focused treatement. 

The other program receiving some of the unused funds from this mental health care program’s multi-million dollar budget is full.  It has 40 adolescent participants who are being helped with substance abuse problems.  Children’s mental health care programs such as these are important in trying to help those with mental health problems and substance abuse issues while they are still young.  They may even have a better chance at full recovery as youths. 

The Director of Behavioral Health for the Department of Health and Human Services involved with the program stated that they have tried to remain good stewards of the money provided for the program.  When they noticed the number of participants in the mental health care program dwindling they reduced the capacity size from 16 to 8 adolescents.  They also worked to cut costs to preserve the $3 million budget. 

A state legislative task force issued a report after reviewing the mental health care program’s situation that recommended the program be shut down.  There are currently no plans to shut down the other full substance abuse treatment program at the Hastings Regional Center.