In a statement, Victoria police said it was “extremely saddened to confirm that one of our members from the southern metropolitan region died last night following an apparent suicide”.

“He was off-duty at the time,” the statement said.

“Our thoughts and deepest sympathies are with his family, friends and colleagues at this very difficult time.”

Three Victoria police members have killed themselves so far this year.

“The death by suicide of a police member is always cause for enormous concern,” Victoria police said.

“Looking after our people is one of our highest priorities. We know that anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress can all be triggered by the stressful situations our people can find themselves in.”

In October, the Victoria police chief commissioner, Graham Ashton, launched a review into the mental health and wellbeing of Victoria police employees. His announcement came two weeks after a senior constable took her own life while on duty at a Melbourne centre for victims of sexual assault.

The review will examine how Victoria police can support police officers during and after their career and make recommendations on how this support can be strengthened.

On Wednesday, Ashton told ABC radio that police stress and suicides were a “worsening situation” in Victoria.

“I’m seeing a lot more police suicides than I ever used to,” he told the ABC.

“This affects everyone differently and people absorb issues, absorb trauma and absorb things that they’re exposed to in different ways, and we have to understand that.”

The deaths follow the announcement on Monday by the Victorian police minister, Wade Noonan, that he would take three months’ leave from parliament due the toll of “constant exposure to details of unspeakable crimes and traumatic events”.

“It has been difficult to cope with the constant exposure to details of unspeakable crimes and traumatic events that are an everyday part of my role and accumulation of these experiences has taken an unexpected toll,” he said.

In December the National Coronial Information System released data on intentional self-harm rates among emergency services personnel, revealing 62 police service members took their own life across Australia between 2000 and 2012.

This article first appeared on ‘The Guardian’ on 11 February 2016.

People get more depressed after the age of 65, says an English study using data on older Australians.

It’s the first to show depressive symptoms continue to increase throughout old age, says lead researcher Dr Helena Chui from the University of Bradford.

“We are in a period of unprecedented success in terms of people living longer than ever and in greater numbers and we should be celebrating this but it seems that we are finding it hard to cope,” she said.

Both men and women reported increasingly more depressive symptoms as they aged, with women initially having more than men.

“However, men showed a faster rate of increase in symptoms so that the difference in the genders was reversed at around the age of 80,” the researchers said.

Levels of physical impairment, the onset of medical conditions and the approach of death all played a part in having the symptoms.

“It seems that we need to look carefully at the provision of adequate services to match these needs, particularly in the area of mental health support and pain management,” Dr Chui said.

“Social policies and ageing-friendly support structures, such as the provision of public transport and access to health care services are needed to target the ‘oldest-old’ adults as a whole.”

This article first appeared on ‘9 News’ on 16 November 2015. ]]> http://www.newsinmind.com/research/depression-increases-with-age-study/feed 0 http://www.newsinmind.com/politics/government-urged-to-continue-supporting-mental-health-program http://www.newsinmind.com/politics/government-urged-to-continue-supporting-mental-health-program#respond Wed, 28 Oct 2015 00:55:32 +0000 http://www.newsinmind.com/?p=7605 There are calls for the Federal Government to continue funding a program that is making a massive difference for people with severe and persistent mental illness.

Hunter Partners in Recovery aims to better support people with mental illness by getting multiple services to work in a more collaborative and integrated way.

The service is hosting a forum today, called ‘Working Together for Change’, in a bid to identify and address gaps in the system.

Hunter Primary Care CEO Kevin Sweeney said the service has already helped more than 550 people.

“It’s very important that we retain a consistent strategy and approach for these people,” he said.

“Clearly they need a comprehensive suite of services to be able to assist them to recover, to function well in society.

“So it’s important that the funding continues in whatever form.”

The forum’s keynote speakers are Frank Quinlan from Mental Health Australia, and Leanne Wells from Consumer Health Forum Australia.

Doctor Sweeney said support services are already working together, but more can be done.

“It’s a question of bringing them together and looking at the particular issues of this client group,” he said.

This article first appeared on ‘ABC’ on 28 October 2015.

The study appears in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences, and finds gender differences when long-married partners are asked about their marital relationship.

“The men don’t really want to talk about it or spend too much time thinking about it,” said Carr. “Men often don’t want to express vulnerable emotions, while women are much more comfortable expressing sadness or worry.”

The finding supports Carr’s belief that men and women have very different emotional reactions to the strain and support they experience in marriage. While talking about issues and offering support makes the wives — who traditionally feel responsible for sustaining the emotional climate of a marriage — feel good, this only frustrated the husbands surveyed.

“For women, getting a lot of support from their spouse is a positive experience,” said Carr. “Older men, however, may feel frustrated receiving lots of support from their wife, especially if it makes them feel helpless or less competent.”

In the study, 722 couples, married an average of 39 years, were asked how their marital experience and the reactions of their spouse affected them.

They responded to whether they could open up to their spouse if they needed to talk about their worries, whether their spouse appreciates them, understands the way they feel about things, argues with them, makes them feel tense, and gets on their nerves.

“Men who provide high levels of support to their wives may feel this frustration if they believe that they would rather be focusing their energies on another activity,” Carr said.

It may also have something to do with the age of the couples, with one spouse in the study having to be at least 60. Men of this generation may feel less competent if they need too much support from their wives, Carr said.

This article first appeared on ‘Psych Central’ on 27 October 2015.

Professor Mike Slade, from King’s College London’s Institute of Psychiatry, says the current attitude of mental health professionals is one of “do what we tell you to do and you will be well again.”

He says stigma against mental illness is alive and well among health professionals, who continue to maintain “hope-destroying” practices.

While developed countries have closed most asylums, they’ve inadvertently created “virtual institutions”, where sufferers who appear to live in the community are actually stuck in a “mental illness-defined bubble”.

Prof Slade is calling for a shift to a ‘nothing about us without us’ attitude, where those affected by mental health problems are involved in the debate about their future.

“If we only listen to professional constructions and narratives, we inadvertently oppress,” he told Mental Health Australia’s Grace Groom Memorial Oration in Canberra on Wednesday night.

Treatment should be offered as a resource in someone’s recovery, “rather than done to them in their best interests”.

Prof Slade wants the mental health system to employ more people with lived experience of mental illness.

Instead of focusing only on patients, the system should be working with employers, educating them on how to accommodate workers with mental illness.

Mental health needed to move from a treatment-based model to a citizenship model, focusing on supporting people to make their own way rather than providing interventions.

“Living well for most of us does not happen in the hospital or in mental health service settings” Prof Slade said.

“It happens as we live our lives in our chosen community.”

This article first appeared on ‘SBS’ on 21 October 2015.

The University of Michigan study found that there’s only one interaction that offers more rewarding feelings than Snapchat: face-to-face communication stole the show, once again.

Published online in Information, Communication & Society, the study seems to be one of the first known published findings on the matter of daily mood in relation to Snapchat. For those who have live under a rock for the past four years, Snapchat is the mobile app that made “ephemeral social media” popular.

In other words, there are some platforms that promote sharing content for a limited period of time (e.g., 10 or 20 seconds). For a lot of people, Snapchat only equals to that “sexting app,” as the description could surely hint to that.

But according to lead author Joseph Bayer, researcher at U-M, the study revealed that Snapchat seems to be the preferred social media for instant and spontaneous communication with close friends, one that often leads to goofy and enjoyable times.

Bayer’s team enrolled in the study 154 college students who had and used smartphones. The researchers used a method called “experience sampling” – one that measures the way people feel, think, and behave on a day-to-day basis – as to have an understanding on what made the participants feel well.

In order to do that, researchers would text them the same survey at random times six times a day. The phase of gathering data went on for two weeks, in which the participants were asked to answer the same five questions:

How negative or positive do you feel right now? How did your most recent interaction occur? How pleasant or unpleasant was your most recent interaction? Within that interaction, how supportive or unsupportive was that person to you? How close are you to that person?

Researchers discovered that no other social media interaction was associated with such high levels of positive emotions as Snapchat – and Facebook scored significantly lower than others. One of the reasons behind this statistic is that Snapchat involved reduced “self-presentational” concerns, meaning that users did not have to worry if they looked conceited or ugly in their Stories.

Facebook is better known for sharing “perfect” moments – such as newborns, engagements and graduations – while Snapchat offers users a separate environment where the small moments are equally appreciated.

This article first appeared on ‘Mirror Daily’ on 21 October 2015.

German researchers analysed data from 20,000 people from three nations in the most comprehensive and largest study to date on the issue.

They found that birth order had no effect on five key personality traits: extroversion, emotional stability, agreeableness, conscientiousness and imagination.

However, the paper, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, supported earlier findings that the first child in a family was likely to be more intelligent.

Co-author Julia Rohrer, from the University of Leipzig, said the link between birth order and personality was first mooted in the early 1900s by psychiatrist and philosopher Alfred Adler — the second of six children.

He claimed firstborns were privileged, but also burdened by feelings of excessive responsibility and a fear of dethronement and were more likely to score high on neuroticism.

However, the idea became firmly entrenched in the modern era when United States academic, Professor Frank Sullaway, developed the Family Niche Theory of birth-order effects in 1996.

Based on Darwin’s theories of evolution, he argued that siblings adapted to certain roles within the family to reduce competition and enhanced the family unit’s “fitness”.

According to Professor Sulloway’s theory, because firstborns were physically superior to their siblings at a young age, they were more likely to show dominant behaviour and become less agreeable.

Laterborns, searching for other ways to assert themselves, tended to rely on social support and become more sociable and thus more extroverted.

Personality theory deeply entrenched

Ms Rohrer said this theory had become deeply entrenched in the public psyche.

“Whether you have younger or older siblings appears to be of such great importance as a child, that the assumption that this has a lasting impact on personality just seems ‘natural’,” Ms Rohrer said.

“I think there are some biases at work that help firm those beliefs. For example, parents might infer their firstborn is emotionally unstable and very anxious because their infant cries a lot and is easily scared.

“The second-born child might actually cry just as much, but now the parents already know that this is just the way that children are, and stop attributing this behaviour to the child’s character.”

To test Professor Sullaway’s theory, Ms Rohrer’s team used data from three large national studies in Great Britain, the US and Germany.

The team undertook a range of analysis and looked for effects that were evident within families and also more generally expressed across all families.

“We tried our best, but we simply couldn’t find the majority of the expected effects in our data sets,” she said.

Their finding that birth order had no lasting impact on later personality traits was consistent across all three national studies, across the different measures of personality and across the participants’ whole of life span, she said.

The study could be the final nail in the coffin of Professor Sullaway’s theory.

Ms Rohrer said there was now a large body of work that had been unable to detect the birth-order effects as predicted by the Family Niche Theory.

“Rationally, we might want to abandon its main ideas or maybe modify its content in a way that it is more in line with empirical findings,” she said.

Firstborn IQ effects ‘rather humble’

Ms Rohrer said the study did confirm IQ is impacted by birth order and said it was likely this was due to social effects rather than biological.

“One theory is that later children ‘dilute’ the resources of the parents, including attention,” she said.

While the firstborn gets full parental attention for at least some time, laterborns would have to “share” from the beginning.

Another possible contributing factor was that a firstborn could “tutor” their younger siblings, explaining to them how the world worked.

“Teaching other people has high cognitive demands,” Ms Rohrer said.

“The children need to recall their own knowledge, structure it and think of a good way to explain it to youngsters, which could be a boost to intelligence for some firstborns.”

However, she said the IQ effects were “rather humble” and not deterministic.

“The effect does not imply that every firstborn is slightly more intelligent than his or her younger siblings. It means that if you assess the intelligence of a large number of sibships, you will find more sibships in which the firstborn is smarter than sibships in which the laterborn is smarter,” she said.

“So as a thirdborn, you could very well be more intelligent than your older siblings, and birth order is only one of multiple factors that can contribute to differences in intelligence amongst siblings.”

This article first appeared on ‘ABC‘ on 20 October 2015.

“It makes the world of difference, especially today,” he said after meeting with Ms Thorp in his home for a phone consultation with a doctor in Broken Hill. “I wouldn’t go outside, I wouldn’t go anywhere else to see a doctor.”  Too sick to drive 200 kilometres from the South Australian town to Broken Hill for help, the texts and the subsequent meeting with Ms Thorp were a “lifeline”.

While Pete (last name withheld) finds the openness and the nothingness of the bush “almost uplifting”, the lack of privacy in a small town was suffocating: “Everybody knows what everyone’s doing, everybody knows what everyone’s saying.” Ms Thorp is part of a push by the Royal Flying Doctor Service to expand its mental health services to meet growing demand. In 2014, demand for mental health services grew 30 per cent, and in 2013, they jumped 28 per cent. In response, the RFDS will offer mental health services in the Central West, out of its Dubbo base, and has increased the number of mental health experts like Thorp based in Broken Hill. They visit towns like Wilcannia, White Cliffs, Packsaddle, Menindee, Tibooburra, and Wanaaring.
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To maintain patients’ privacy, discretion, decoys and improvisation are needed. Ms Thorp sees patients wherever she can: on a park bench, near a toilet block, the front seat of a hot car or in a corridor of an abandoned railway building. Another man, who has a history of depression and was angry after a heart attack, talked informally to her in the shade of an old corrugated iron wall that had become her defacto office in Yunta on a hot spring day. Later that day, the same man sent a friend over to meet Ms Thorp. Referrals like these are one reason why demand has grown, RFDS said.

“Sometimes we have to be discrete so it may mean wandering away, having a walk with someone, or if we have access to a vehicle, we may take them for a drive down the river so we are not actually seen with that person,” Ms Thorp, who is a highly experienced and credentialed nurse who has also run area hospitals, said.

To throw others off the scent, she makes a point of talking to as many as people as possible. That was not hard in Yunta where nearly half the population and some station owners and families visited the improvised clinic or dropped in for a chat. “Whether it is g’day, how are you, just to pass the time of day so you can’t necessarily put two and two together,” she said.

To gain trust in towns where newcomers are viewed with suspicion, the mental health nurses hit the streets – visiting the police, the school, roadhouses and local businesses to introduce themselves.

Problems range from depression to relationship issues, which can be a real challenge when families live and work together as closely as they do on properties and businesses in remote areas. She also visits schools to talk to children about developing healthy mental habits and building on their own strengths.

Vicki Hemley, of Packsaddle Station, about 200kms north of Broken Hill, sought counselling and advice after a young family friend killed himself.

“Mental health problems are not unique to the bush, but the uniqueness of the bush is where do we go to get help and who do we talk to now? If we can’t get an appointment for a week, that week may be the difference between someone getting help or making a rash decision.”

A 42-year-old with no children of her own, she was heartbroken by the boy’s death, and she also wanted advice on what to say to his family.

“Glynis told me to listen,” Ms Hemley, who added that Ms Thorp had also listened to her, said.

About 20 per cent of Australians suffer a mental illness each year and women are twice as likely to seek help for mental health issues as men, especially in the rural and remote areas serviced by the RFDS. Yet the amount of mental services in the bush lags behind those in the city.

This article first appeared on ‘Sydney Morning Herald’ on 15 October 2015.

During Mental Health Week last week, Health Minister Cameron Dick unveiled the Queensland Mental Health Promotion, Prevention and Early Intervention Plan 2015-17, which aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of Queenslanders by taking early action.

Mr Dick also announced more than $450,000 in funding to improve mental health through greater social inclusion and community participation, particularly in regional areas.

In Parliament yesterday Ms Howard highlighted the government’s commitment to youth mental health, in light of the LNP’s closure of the Barrett Adolescent Centre, which is currently the subject of a commission of inquiry headed by the Hon. Margaret A Wilson QC.

“The Palaszczuk Government values the mental health of our youth and has committed $11.8 million over four years to rebuild mental health care for young people in Queensland after the last three years of neglect,” she said.

Ms Howard also emphasised the importance of working together as a society that values mental health.

“Mental health is an issue that touches all of our lives at some point, either personally or through the experiences of friends and family,” Ms Howard said.

“Most of us can manage these issues and get on with our lives, but others need help.

“Whether as a government, a community or individually, we must do everything we can to assist them.”

Meanwhile the Opposition today sought a bipartisan approach to mental health support services by harmonising two bills currently before Parliament.

Shadow Minister for Health Mark McArdle said it was crucial politics was left at the door when dealing with such an important issue as mental health.

“Currently there are two bills before Parliament, one introduced by the LNP in April and the other introduced by Labor in September,” Mr McArdle said.

“Both bills aim to improve and maintain the health and wellbeing of persons with a mental illness and ensure Queenslanders are supported through evidence based clinical practice.

“In the Minister’s speech introducing the government bill into the house he said, the ‘bills have many reform directions in common’.

“Given the Minister’s comments, it makes sense to present one single Mental Health bill supported by all sides of politics.

“The LNP has written to the Minister for Health and the Chair of the Parliamentary Health and Ambulance Services Committee Leanne Linard calling for one, unified bill on Mental Health.

“In the letter we have requested an extension of the reporting time to allow for this process to occur.

“We are also open to work with the government on any differences within the bills, proposing for any issue to be set aside and worked through individually to form a set of consensus clauses.”

Mr McArdle said one bill, being supported by all sides of politics sends a clear message that mental health is a clinical area where a great deal of bipartisanship exists.

“By working together we can deliver a bill that improves the lives of the nearly 20% of Queenslanders affected by a mental disorder each year,” he said.

The West Moreton Mental Health Collaborative held a number of free community events around the Ipswich region during Mental Health Week last week, including a morning walk, a community showcase at The Park Centre for Mental Health, an information night and a free breakfast in Queens Park and held a silent art auction at the Ipswich Community Art Gallery. Aftercare also hosted an early childhood mental health forum.

This article first appeared on ‘Queensland Times’ on 14 October 2015.