There Must Be a Sad Story Behind This
A very small AP report. (Don’t sue me, AP!)
Two-month old baby missing in Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA (AP) — Philadelphia police are searching for a baby girl who has been missing for almost two days.
Police say the child’s mother entrusted 2-month-old Shaniyah Granby to a woman she knows only as “Crystal” around 5:30 p.m. Saturday. The 26-year-old mother called police 24 hours later when her daughter wasn’t returned.
Police say the mother is suspected to have mental health problems. She told police “Crystal” was an acquaintance who asked to take the baby shopping. Police say neither woman knows where the other lives.
liz | 5:10 PM | Uncategorized
Funny or Offensive?
We haven’t done one of these for a while, so I thought I’d share this, from The Onion’s YouTube channel. From what I understand from the comments, the woman who participated as the “guest” may have a muscular disease that simply resembles anorexia. Just FYI.
liz | 12:03 PM | Uncategorized
Country Folk
According to the Mayo Clinic and PsychCentral, rural women suffer a serious depression risk:
In a recent study, researchers for the Mayo Clinic discovered unmarried women living in rural areas have lower self-rated health status than their married counterparts. This lower health status often includes greater instances of self-assessed feelings of depression.
For single women, the problems are greater.
“Economic problems increase feelings of emotional stress. People today are worried about, among other things, the mortgage crisis and high gas prices. Many are left wondering how they are going to pay for necessities. Statistically, rural, unmarried women are more often economically depressed than their married counterparts,” says [the Mayo Clinic's] Dr. [James] Rohrer.
Depression Risk for Rural Women
[Photos of Country Woman cover girl Rosemary Corte, a peanut farmer.]
liz | 12:05 PM | Uncategorized
Wasted and Mad
Marya Hornbacher, who last wrote about suffering with an eating disorder, has now published another book — this time on living with bipolar disorder. I’m working on my own memoir now (or working on thinking about working on it), so I understand the urge to purge (metaphorically) in print. But something about writing multiple accounts of multiple disorders kind of makes me queasy. Augusten Burroughs did is quite deftly, I thought, and perhaps Hornbacher has pulled it off as well.
It seems Hornbacher, like many other chroniclers of bipolar disorder, struggles primarily with mania. Stay tuned for my book, which is going to be called: Rarely Manic, But Depressed As Shit.
liz | 2:42 PM | Uncategorized
Does This Look Like Dr. Drew Pinsky to You?
According to Gawker, Tom Cruise’s people went a little nuts when Dr. Drew Pinsky implied the megastar Scientologist might have been neglected as a child:
But Tom Cruise has allowed his lawyer to compare “Dr. Drew” to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels, because the doctor told Playboy the following about movie star Cruise’s fevered devotion to the Church of Scientology:
A lot of people in the public eye who behave strangely have mental illness we can learn from, and much of it is based on childhood trauma, without a doubt. Take a guy like Tom Cruise. Why would somebody be drawn into a cultish kind of environment like Scientology? To me, that’s a function of a very deep emptiness and suggests serious neglect in childhood – maybe some abuse, but mostly neglect.
Cruise’s high-powered attorney, Bert Fields, a frequent client of convicted wiretapper and racketeer Anthony Pellicano, called Pinsky an “unqualified television performer who is obviously just looking for notoriety,” adding, “The last time we heard garbage like this was from Joseph Goebbels.”
Tee hee. So funny. I mean, you just have to laugh at Cruise at this point.
liz | 9:17 AM | Uncategorized
Colorado Was So Beautiful…
Then I come back to this:
A world-renowned Harvard child psychiatrist whose work has helped fuel an explosion in the use of powerful antipsychotic medicines in children earned at least $1.6 million in consulting fees from drug makers from 2000 to 2007 but for years did not report much of this income to university officials, according to information given Congressional investigators.
According to the New York Times, Biederman’s work “helped to fuel a controversial 40-fold increase from 1994 to 2003 in the diagnosis of pediatric bipolar disorder … and a rapid rise in the use of antipsychotic medicines in children. …. But youngsters appear to be especially susceptible to the weight gain and metabolic problems caused by the drugs, and it is far from clear that the medications improve children’s lives over time, experts say.”
That’s a significant understatement. I have said, several times, that I do not believe children should be prescribed antipsychotic medication to treat childhood bipolar disorder, which is a diagnosis I am deeply suspicious of to begin with. In fact, my emotions are so caught up in this that I was unable to respond rationally to the Newsweek cover story on childhood bipolar disorder, which essentially painted a portrait of a child whose life was hopeless — despite the fact that he’s only 10 years old. It was a preposterous assumption to make: that his life was over. Yet that’s what the article did. If anything, his life was being severely compromised by the fact that he was medicated first as a toddler, when he was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Can you imagine diagnosing a child of two with such an illness, and then treating that child with something like Seroquel, which has dubious impact and efficacy in treatment of the illness overall? It’s appalling.
As for the Congressional investigation, I know what some clinicians will say: that Biederman and his colleagues are forced to rely on Big Pharma funding. That’s where the money is. But even a Harvard spokesperson and an NIH representative say that the violations in this case cross a line. The sad thing is that it’s a matter of disclosure that’s being questioned. No one’s worried about contaminated research because research is so difficult to do in the absence of pharma funding. So if you worry about this research, you essentially have to question it all. What a mess.
Researchers Fail to Reveal Full Drug Pay
liz | 1:43 PM | Uncategorized
Amazing Headline: T-Rex Useful in Beating Depression
I read it and thought they meant the band, but this is even cooler:
The team found that the component in human DNA, which activates depression, was also present in dinosaurs and would have helped determine their moods.
Evolution is amazing. I think velociraptor genes are to blame for anxiety.
liz | 4:22 PM | Uncategorized
It’s a Family Thing
The New York Times profiled Dr. Galynker, a psychiatrist who concentrates not on treating the family of people with bipolar disorder, but using them to help the patient:
“It can be something as subtle as a change in lipstick shade,” Dr. Galynker said. “Only a person who knows them very, very well would know.”
Patients often do not recognize the symptoms. “Because the mania feels so good, there’s no way for me to know that I’m doing it,” Mr. Cunanan explained. “That’s why it’s so important to have the family
involved.”
The added benefit, according to Galynker, is that because bipolar disorder has a genetic link, it helps the family understand and come to terms with their own risks.
Via The New York Times
liz | 5:55 PM | Uncategorized
Does Work-Related Stress Cause Depression?
Seems like a no-brainer, right?
Alli here, blogging for Liz while she finds her inner cowgirl, presumably with this guy, and avoids all work-related mental health problems minus possible lack of internet access.
Ha ha, I kid. But work-related stress can be a serious problem, according to researchers at the University of Melbourne. They report that about one in six workers with depression can trace it back to work-related stress.
Associate Professor Tony LaMontagne argues that the study suggests not just correlation between depression and job-related unpleasantness (which really is a no brainer), but causation, too. And he thinks he has an idea why:
“It’s a matter of not having the ability to decide how to get the work done that they’re asked to do,” he said.
“The combination of high demands and low control in a job is what makes it particularly bad.”
And Associate Professor LaMontagne says the tendency for women to inhabit lower paid jobs means they’re more at risk than men.
“There’s still, I think, persisting power and balances as between men and women in the workplace that also are in the wider society,” he said.
[Via ABC News Australia]
The implications for workers comp are pretty significant—if your job causes an illness, mental or otherwise, you should be able to get help.
What do you guys think? Is work stress a factor?
Photo courtesy of FreeParking
liz | 4:53 PM | Uncategorized
