Mental Health News

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There is hope for the future, especially that of children who live in tough situations because of the ican program.  This recently launched mental health program is designed to prevent mental health problems in young children who are eligible for Medicaid and Title 19. 

These ican programs involve having children work with counselors to build skills for life and work on improving social skills or learn tools for dealing with disrupted relationships.  Many of the children and adults being helped by these programs are facing health problems, aggression, types of depression, anxiety and disrupted relationships and poor social skills.

The mental health program is run by Horizons mental health facilities based out of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.  The long term goals of the agency include seeking grants to enable the non-profit organization to offer services of this type to private paying clients. 

Many of the clients for ican programs are referred to the mental health facilities through the juvenile court system, project concern and the schools.  The programs run through Horizon are really intended to help people and children especially develop the skills they need to deal with the major problems facing them. 

For instance, if someone comes into ican complaining of anxiety related issues, the counselors will work with them in classes designed to help them build the skills they need to handle their anxiety. 

In addition, the mental health facilities that run ican services also works with other local organizations to really help people develop better lives and deal with mental health problems.

Research has shown that certain foods can improve your mood and lessen the effects of mild anxiety and depression.  This holiday season, why not try some of the following foods to improve your mood and fight depression. 

Milk
Your brain uses an amino acid called tryptophan to make serotonin.  I’m sure most of you have heard that tryptophan in that Thanksgiving Roast Turkey is part of what makes you so sleepy, but it’s also present in milk.  Well, the serotonin that the brain makes from this stuff is also a mild sedative and can help calm you down and make your mood lighter.

Chocolate
No wonder guys bring chocolate to gals on dates.  It’s such a good thing; they hope we’ll associate good stuff with them!  Chocolate contains a lot of mood lifting chemicals to fight depression.  Plus, chocolate increases the levels of endorphins in the brain, which are literally the happy hormones and a painkiller.

Whole Grains
If you are feeling anxious and grouchy most of the time, try switching to whole grain pasta and breads in your diet.  These complex carbohydrates boost serotonin levels, which will increase your sense of calm. Plus, complex carbs can help keep your body fueled longer between meals, helping prevent a mood shattering drop in blood sugar.

Broccoli
Your mom made you eat this as a kid, but Broccoli is quite useful in helping fight depression.  It’s also pretty good with cheese sauce.  This veggie contains lots of stress relieving B vitamins, which help keep your nervous system in good mental health.

Coffee
It’s a drug for sure, but the caffeine in coffee can work to make you more alert as well as activating your brain’s pleasure centers.  On the down side it can also work to increase nervousness and anxiety.  If you are just feeling a little depressed, try one small, regular strength cup of coffee each day with milk and chocolate to see if your mood improves.

For more mood lifting foods check out the Ririan Project. http://ririanproject.com/2007/08/29/kick-start-your-day-with-these-11-mood-lifting-foods/

Those who survived Katrina or left only to come back to the ruins of New Orleans are still suffering and it shows in their mental health.  Many of the survivors of Katrina are showing signs of depression. 

A study released in November found that almost half of the pre-hurricane residents of New Orleans and one-fourth of those living in other affected areas had evidence of an anxiety or mood disorder about five to seven months after the Hurricane hit. 

The hurricane created a disaster area in the United States that is as large as Great Britain and killed more than 1,000 people.  Two years later, the city is still a shadow of it’s former self and many residents are still living in tents.  The strain of continuing to live in difficult conditions is likely one of the causes of depression in the survivors.

A telephone survey was conducted between Jan. 10 and March 31, 2006 with a little over 1,000 people who provided the information for the study.  It was found that a vast majority of those in the New Orleans metro area about 91.9% reported experiencing at least one of the 10 categories of hurricane related stressors.   The stressors such as death of a loved one down to robbery resulted in signs of depression and other anxiety/mood disorders occurring.

One of the major preventable causes of the mental health decline in New Orleans and surrounding area residents is concluded by the study to be the slow government response to Hurricane Katrina in evacuating, providing aid and more.

It seems that the government has been slacking off in mental health policy of late.  Washington D.C.’s mental health agency has failed to recover millions in denied Medicaid claims over the course of several years.  A recent audit has uncovered the gross ineptitude of the mental health agency’s financial system. 

The audit also found that of the approximately 1.4 million Medicaid claims that were submitted by the Department of Mental Health between 2002 and 2006, 500,000 of those claims were rejected.  However, by certain mental health laws the department is allowed to process and resubmit those claims so that they have a better chance of being approved, within a time frame of two years.  Yet, the audit found that the government has practically no system or process for doing so set up!

The Director of the Mental Health Department, Stephen Baron has issued a written response to the report that claimed the $30 million dollar figure quoted by the audit as unclaimed funds is over inflated by $5 million dollars.  Baron also admitted that his agency did lack the mental health policy to resubmit the claims prior to September 2006, but they have since then corrected the problem and resubmitted a total amount of $12.9 million in Medicaid claims for approval.  These resubmitted claims have resulted in reimbursement of $8 million.

The audit also found that the Department of Mental Health also failed to prevent it’s vendors from overspending their work orders and thus going over budget to the tune of $16.1 million dollars in the fiscal year of 2006.

Math anxiety can be considered a minor mental health disorder.  All it takes is one bad experience with math and a person can develop an anxiety around math for the rest of his life.  Most of us get plenty of bad experiences with math in school, so we end up feeling nervous about handling the checkbook, doing taxes and dealing in numbers as adults.  This is a real phobia.  It actually has its own diagnosis code from the American Psychological Association, which is 315.1.

Math Anxiety can cripple you financially.  From a hesitance to balance your check book to avoidance in balancing your bills, this mental health disorder can be a real problem. 

However, you can slowly work your way back into feeling comfortable with working math.  Here are a few tips.

1. Use Shortcuts-Don’t be afraid to use a calculator for your daily math needs.  There is no reason to feel bad about using this tool.  You went through school to learn all the basics already.  No need to keep testing yourself on them.

2. Immerse yourself in Finances-If this mental health disorder has you feeling like you can’t handle planning for your financial future, then try learning a little bit about the sector.  Get yourself a subscription to Money Magazine or leave the television on CNBC for a few minutes each day and you’ll be surprised at how much you start to soak up about money and the math that goes with it.

3. Don’t forget the kids-Keep your kids from getting your math phobia too.  Sit down with them and help them with their math homework.  Be encouraging, without pushing them.  You can even ask your child’s math teacher what you can do to help your child learn math, without becoming overly worried or anxious about it.

Medical researchers find that for many, the problem of drug addiction and mental illnesses occur together.  It has long been known that people with mental illnesses ranging from anxiety disorders to bipolar depression commonly struggle with addictions.  These can be addictions such as nicotine, alcohol and cocaine or others.  In fact, Andrew Chambers, MD, cited that at least half of all people who seek help for their addictions are also diagnosed with a co-occurring mental health disorder. 

For a long time previously, doctors had assumed that the addictions were a kind of ‘self-medication’ for those suffering with mental illnesses who just slid into addiction.  However, Andrew Chambers decided to find out if this was the cause through the scientific method. 

He and his team at the medical school of Indiana University compared the adult mood- and drug addiction related behavior of two groups of adult rats.  One group underwent surgery to purposely damage their amygdalas and another group underwent a fake surgery to simulate the same conditions. 

The rats that underwent the real surgery were found to be significantly more sensitive to cocaine and developed an addiction to the drug when addicted to it much faster. 

Dr. Chambers theorized that the reason the amygdalas are damaged in humans can vary.  Sometimes there are relatively rare cases of temporal lobe epilepsy, tumors or early brain injury.  However, these co-occurring drug addictions and mental illnesses are more common than that.  Chambers believes they could also be the result of developmental damage to the amygdale during early childhood.  An early emotional trauma combined with certain genetic backgrounds can alter the early development of the neural networks involved in the amygdala leading to brain disturbances.

Skilled companion dogs can be of great aid to those with mental health problems.  Everyone knows that an animal pal can provide comfort during times of emotional or mental stress, but a skilled companion dog can also provide needed assistance for those with mental and physical conditions. 

A man with Alzheimer’s can benefit from the attention and care of an assistance dog with special training.  The dog will always be there to comfort him should he become confused.  It will be able to guide him back home, when he finds himself lost with the simple word, ‘home’ and sometimes the dog will even know intuitively that his companion needs aid and guide him back to his home.

Skilled Companion dogs are usually trained to work in combination with an able bodied adult, this can include a mental health care worker, to take care of or assist a person with mental health problems or disabilities.  They can assist people with cerebral palsy, early-onset Alzheimer’s and even autism to improve quality of life and protect their companion from harm. 

These dogs are usually chosen when very young and sent to live with a family from the age of 6 weeks to about two years of age.  In the family environment they learn social skills, basic house training and basic commands.  When they are old enough they are taken for special training in a program that focuses on providing assistance dogs, such as Canine Companions for Independence.  Here they spend up to 9 months learning how to take care of and aid those human companions with mental health problems. 

Once a skilled companion dog or assistance dog graduates the program he or she is matched with a human in need.  Most programs that provide assistance dogs do not charge a fee or at least charge very little for the assistance dog.  However, they may require that a person has a physical or developmental disability and that the person demonstrate that an aid dog would improve their quality of life.  Those with mental health problems such as early-onset Alzheimer’s will find that such loving and skilled companions as these dogs are life savers. 

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.

It seems that stress and depression may lead to mental health issues such as mild cognitive impairment and even progress into Alzheimer’s Disease.  This could be very important news for those looking into the treatment of Alzheimer’s since a correlation between the two problems seems to have been found. 

U.S. researchers announced this finding after 12 years of studying the medical records of 1,256 older people who started out with no mental health problems.  After the 12 years about 482 people in the study developed mild cognitive impairments.  All the participants were interviewed for the study and rated based on how prone they were to stress and types of depression.  Those participants whom admitted to being prone to anxiousness or stress were 40 times more likely to develop said mild cognitive impairment.  If that isn’t a call for more yoga in your life I’m not sure what is.

Mild cognitive impairment is a mental health issue classified as a kind of memory loss that’s considered to be the transitional stage between normal aging and dementia.  Alzheimer’s is a degenerative brain disease signified by forgetfulness and inability to concentrate, that starts gradually and slowly worsens over time.  Eventually Alzheimer’s reaches a point where most memories are gone, and the patient is completely unable to care for him or herself.  Cognitive impairment causes people to have trouble remembering some things.  However it’s not considered to be a significant mental health issue.  About 10 to 15% of those with mild cognitive impairment later develop Alzheimer’s.

What is probably most disturbing about these findings is that Robert Wilson of Rush University Medical Center in Chicago stated that the participants in the study were showing many of the changes in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer’s Disease.  Because of this US study, chronic stress has been found to be related to the first clinical manifestation of Alzheimer’s.