Massive cuts to mental health services also potentially impact public safety. As a whole, people living with serious mental illness are no more violent than the rest of the population. In fact, it is well documented that these individuals are far more frequently the victims of violence than the perpetrators of violent acts.

However, the risks of violence among a small subset of individuals may increase when appropriate treatment and supports are not available. The use of alcohol or drugs as a form of self medication can also increase these risks.

Unfortunately, the public often focuses on mental illness only when high visibility tragedies of the magnitude of Tucson or Virginia Tech occur. However, less visible tragedies take place everyday in our communities—suicides, homelessness, arrests, incarceration, school drop-out and more. These personal tragedies also occur because of our failure to provide access to effective mental health services and supports.

This report documents the state-by-state funding changes for public mental health services since 2009 for youth and adults living with serious mental illness. These cuts are likely to worsen in 2011 and 2012. The report also describes how states have chosen to implement these funding cuts. The report concludes with policy recommendations, focused on the steps that should be taken to ensure that valuable public resources are spent wisely and effectively. Crisis should be used as a vehicle for change, not as an excuse for abandoning some of our nation’s most vulnerable citizens.

U.S. has highest bipolar rate in 11-nation study

The United States has the highest lifetime rate of bipolar disorder at 4.4%, and India the lowest, with 0.1%.

Bipolar disorder is characterized by cycles of depression and mania, a euphoric, high-energy state that can result in heightened levels of creativity or output as well as erratic or risky behavior. People with bipolar disorder are at high risk of substance abuse and suicide, and treatment includes psychiatric care and medication.

However, fewer than half of people with the disorder were treated by a mental health professional, and only a quarter of those in lower-income countries sought treatment, according to the 11-nation study in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry.

"It's very important that we understand the scope and magnitude of this disorder so that we can plan appropriate treatments, facilitate recognition of diseases, and identify people at risk so we can bring them into treatment," says the study's lead author, Kathleen Merikangas, Ph.D., chief of the genetic epidemiology research branch at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland.

The U.S. ranked higher in every category of bipolar disorder as did, in general, other high-income countries. One exception was Japan, which had a lifetime prevalence of 0.7%. Colombia, a lower-income nation, also bucked the trend with a relatively high prevalence of 2.6%.

The study included people with either bipolar I or II. Bipolar I has the more severe symptoms (both depression and mania) and bipolar II has less severe symptoms.

Despite the regional variations, there were many similarities across the countries studied, including comparable symptoms and the fact that many people with bipolar disorder also had another mental health problem, usually an anxiety disorder (most often panic attacks).

No matter where people lived, bipolar disorder caused serious problems and impairment. About three-quarters of people with depression and half of those with mania said their symptoms disrupted their work or social life and relationships.

But why the higher overall prevalence rate in the U.S.?

There are several possible reasons, say experts.

It could be genetics; it could be environment. It also could be the way individuals in different cultures are willing to respond to this kind of an inquiry," says Sara Bodner, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine. "Cultural awareness plays a very big role in psychiatry. Some cultures have a huge reluctance to speak about psychiatric things."

In the U.S., people with bipolar symptoms may be more likely to be diagnosed with the condition. "We're pretty aware of [bipolar disorder]," Merikangas says.

Awareness dovetails closely with stigma. With lower awareness in lower-income nations comes higher levels of stigma. That means fewer people may be willing to talk about or get treatment for symptoms, which can lead to lower perceived rates of bipolar disorder.

"Rates of bipolar disorder were lower in countries with more stigma," Merikangas says.

But poorer countries may also have some protection against bipolar disorder that the U.S. lacks, such as traditional social structures that are still relatively intact.

"We have less buffers in terms of social networks, in terms of having strong family backgrounds," says Merikangas. "We're much more mobile here."

There has also been some speculation that the U.S.'s immigrant "melting pot" composition might contribute to the prevalence, says David Schlager, M.D., an assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at the Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine in Round Rock and a psychiatrist with Lone Star Circle of Care.

The topic has been the subject of at least one book, "The Hypomanic Edge: The Link Between (a Little) Craziness and (a Lot of) Success in America," by John D. Gartner, Ph.D. Gartner, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, discusses the hypomanic qualities of entrepreneurs and leaders who took risks to come to America. (Hypomania is a milder form of mania in which a person feels exuberant and may be highly creative without losing touch with reality or experiencing psychosis, which can happen in some people with mania.)

"The U.S. attracts people who believe they can achieve a better life," Schlager says. "They come to believe they can pick up and start again. It's a self-selected sample of people who are grandiose and impulsive. It takes a certain suspension of belief to actually believe you can come here and make it happen. Those are a significant percentage of people on the bipolar spectrum."

The new study is important because cross-national comparisons of bipolar disorder have generally been difficult to conduct because various countries define bipolar disorder in slightly different ways.

These researchers circumvented that problem by having trained interviewers use the same criteria (from the fourth edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the gold standard for psychiatry) to diagnose the disorder in face-to-face interviews with 61,392 people in 11 countries.

Of the entire population studied, 0.6% of people had bipolar I, 0.4% bipolar II, and 1.4% qualified for "subthreshold" bipolar, which would exhibit the least severe symptoms. For something called "bipolar spectrum" (meaning all the categories taken together, including those with mild enough symptoms they may hardly be noticeable to other people), the overall prevalence was 2.4% over a lifetime.

When viewed over the past 12 months, the figures were 0.4% for bipolar I, 0.3% for bipolar II, 0.8% for subthreshold bipolar, and 1.5% for the spectrum.

The study was conducted by researchers around the world and funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Pfizer Foundation, and a variety of other pharmaceutical companies and public health organizations.

Copyright Health Magazine 2010

Is the iPad a 'Miracle Device' for Autism?

By John Brandon Published March 09, 2011  FoxNews.com

Original article as printed Jan. 2009) For update as of 2011, please click here )

Tetris helps to 'reduce trauma'

Volunteers were exposed to distressing images, with some given the game to play 30 minutes later, the PLoS One journal reported.

Players had fewer "flashbacks", perhaps because it helped disrupt the laying down of memories, said the scientists.

It is hoped the study could aid the development of new strategies for minimising the impact of trauma.

However, the researchers accept translating their findings into practical applications could prove difficult.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), often associated with experiences during conflict, can affect anyone who has suffered a sudden and shocking incident.

One of its main features is the "flashback", in which the distressing sights, sounds or smells of the incident can return in everyday life.

" Tetris may work by competing for the brain's resources for sensory information "
Dr Emily Holmes, Oxford University

The Oxford University experiment works on the principle that it may be possible to modify the way in which the brain forms memories in the hours after an event.

A total of 40 healthy volunteers were enrolled, and shown a film which included traumatic images of injuries.

Half of the group were then given the game to play while the other half did nothing.

The number of "flashbacks" experienced by each group was then reported and recorded over the next week, and those who played Tetris had significantly fewer.

Treatment hope

Dr Emily Holmes said it might produce a "viable approach" to PTSD treatment, although she acknowledged that a lot needed to be done to translate the experiment into something that could be used to help real patients.

She said: "We wanted to find a way to dampen down flashbacks - the raw sensory images of trauma that are over-represented in the memories of those with PTSD.

"Tetris may work by competing for the brain's resources for sensory information.

"We suggest it specifically interferes with the way sensory memories are laid down in the period after trauma and thus reduces the number of flashbacks that are experienced afterwards."

She stressed that no conclusions could be drawn on the general effects of computer gaming on memory.

Dr Holmes added: "We are not saying that people with PTSD should play Tetris but we do think it is hugely valuable to understand how the brain works and how it produces intrusive flashback memories.

"Because we cannot study the genesis of real flashback memories during real trauma we need to find other approaches and this sort of cognitive science can give us models to help us better understand emotional memory."

Professor David Alexander from the Aberdeen Centre for Trauma Research stressed it was ethically impossible to simulate an event so catastrophic as the type of incident which can lead to post-traumatic stress disorder.

"The volunteers here knew that something was going to happen, but they were not going to be harmed - a genuinely traumatic incident is different in scale, and is usually completely unexpected and marked by feelings of loss of control."

He said that post-traumatic stress was normally detected and diagnosed only weeks after the event, rather than in the hours immediately afterwards, and it was very difficult to predict which people were likely to develop it.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/health/7813637.stm

Published: 2009/01/07 00:29:25 GMT

© BBC MMX

Wed Oct 13, 2:35 pm ET

Expert says media dangerously ignore mental illness in coverage of gay teen suicides

 By Liz Goodwin

News accounts have focused public attention on a recent spate of gay young people taking their own lives in response to taunting related to their sexuality. One side-effect of the coverage has been increased discussion of the problem of anti-gay bullying. The White House, celebrities, talk-show hosts, and cable-news pundits have all chimed in on the tragic deaths.

But what if the way we're talking about these suicides could actually be encouraging vulnerable young people to copycat the tragic behavior?

That's what worries Ann Haas, research director for the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention. By putting forth bullying as a "cause" of suicide and ignoring underlying mental-health issues that are present in 90 percent of people who die by suicide, the national media may be "normalizing" suicide as a rational response to bullying. For youth already at risk, this could be a dangerous message.

Here's an example. A recent headline on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer website reads: "City council meeting results in gay teen suicide." The story is about the death of Zach Harrington, an openly gay teen living in Norman, Oklahoma. His sister told the Norman Transcript that a week before he took his own life, Harrington had gone to a city council meeting to advocate for them to recognize October as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) history month. Harrington's family says the three-hour council debate was "toxic," even though the final vote endorsed the measure, and that Harrington was very hurt by the event.

So is it fair to write that the meeting "resulted" in a suicide?

Not really. Suicides are complex, Haas says, and inadvertently portraying them as a rational response to a single incident or problem can lead already vulnerable people to identify with and copy the behavior. This makes for an unusually fine line between raising awareness about an issue and sensationalizing it.

"We know quite a bit about what kinds of media stories can encourage copycat suicides," Haas says. Stories depicting the person who's died by suicide as very sympathetic can inadvertently encourage vulnerable young people to identify with him or her.

"There's an identification there that could lead you to feel, well, 'My goodness, this person was feeling the same thing that I'm feeling, and he took his life.' It kind of normalizes suicide," she says. "It presents it as a sort of an understandable if not socially acceptable response to a problem. If a story is presented from the viewpoint of the mental disorders that commonly lead to suicide, it's much less likely to have that kind of identification that leads young people to copy the behavior."

A public-radio reporter wrote that when reporters begin to write about the motivations that might prompt an individual to commit suicide, "It erases the line that separates motivation from rationality, making suicide seem like an understandable, if not unavoidable, culmination of a person's experience. Suicide is not a rational act. It is an act of desperation, carried out after a monumental struggle."

Words like "epidemic" and "rash" to describe an increase in suicides can also lead to copycat behavior, Haas says.

The executive director of the anti-bullying Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN), Dr. Eliza Byard, says that her group is careful to never say that bullying caused someone to die by suicide.

"I find it very hard to look at a headline that makes a more direct or simple one-to-one relationship [between bullying and suicide], or that details some of the more horrifying details of any particular case," she says. "Those feel awful."

Byard also says there hasn't been enough mention of mental illness in media coverage, though it can be difficult for reporters to discuss mental illness in cases when it's gone undiagnosed. She prefers stories that focus not on the young people who died but on the solutions to some of the problems they faced.

"It's not about martyrdom, it's not about a sort of morbid recapitulation of these stories over and over again. Once people come to grips with the consequences, then you move on to what needs to happen now to make it better today," she says. "That kind of emphasis has been really helpful, where stories focus on the collective work of making things better."

That's one of the reasons Haas has high praise for the "It Gets Better" campaign, a growing collection of YouTube videos from around the world telling LGBT young people their lives will improve, and that they're not alone.

(Photo of vigil at Rutgers University for Tyler Clementi: AP) Source