When he was 12, Louis’ anxiety intensified. He vividly remembers the incident which triggered his deepest fear. He was on the tube, when he was overcome by a desperate urge for the toilet. With no toilet nearby, his brothers suggested he relieve himself in a plastic bottle on the empty tube. Terrified of wetting himself, he did. As the train drew into Ravenscourt Park station and people stared at him in disgust.

Louis was determined he would never be humiliated like this again. He became obsessed with going to the toilet. His fear of wetting himself in public took over his life. Avoidance became his coping mechanism. He skipped school and missed social events. He felt he couldn’t share what he was thinking with anyone.

“I was incredibly embarrassed about my worries. Shame stopped me from telling people I had OCD,” he says.

After years of lies and secrecy, Louis decided to share his story of living with OCD with all of his Facebook friends.

“I went from never having told anyone the whole story except my psychiatrist, to telling everyone I knew in one go. It was easier to share it in a Facebook post, than to explain it in person.”

Stigma around mental illness prevents many people from speaking out. Time to Change, an anti-stigma campaign launched in 2007 by the charities Mind and Rethink Mental Illness, conducted a survey in January of 7,171 people who have experienced mental health problems. 86 per cent says that they have faced stigma and discrimination as a result of their condition, with 64 per cent reporting that it came from friends, and a further 57 per cent from family members.

Kate Nightingale, a campaign spokesperson, says: “Our latest survey shows that nearly two thirds of people with mental health problems are left feeling isolated (64 per cent), worthless (61 per cent) and ashamed (60 per cent) because of the stigma and discrimination they have faced. Often people with mental health problems state that the stigma is worse than the illness itself.”

David Cameron promised in mid-February to help more than a million extra people and invest £1bn annually in mental health services by 2020/21.

Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, described the five-year strategy as “a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform services and support for people with mental health problems.”

Rebecca Bird, 25, saw the crippling effect of stigma first hand when her mother Tracey Bird was admitted to a mental health unit.

“She didn’t want anyone to know she had anxiety. It was a massive embarrassment to her,” says Rachel.

Her mother was released from the unit because there weren’t enough beds. She killed herself a few weeks later.

After her mother’s death, Rebecca became reluctant to leave the house and started having panic attacks. The doctor immediately diagnosed her with anxiety.

She is incredibly open about her illness, and finds it worrying that mental illness is such a taboo.

“I’m determined not to let my condition ruin me like it did my mum.

“It’s fine to say you’re coming into work late because you have a blood test, but nobody ever says they’re coming in later because of counselling.”

Many people who reveal their mental health problems to others are met with a negative reaction. The Time to Change survey found that 48 per cent of people stopped looking for work or returning to work because of people’s reactions when they disclosed their condition.

Nick Burnley, 31, felt stigmatised by the health care assistants who says borderline personality disorder (BPD) wasn’t a legitimate reason for him being in hospital.

“They told me I was taking up a hospital bed,” he says, adding that he received little support from his parents. “They backed away and said they couldn’t handle me when I was ill.”

However, he is keen to emphasise that others have been incredibly supportive.

“I work as a personal trainer and my colleagues have been brilliant. Out of my last 50 clients, only one or two were apprehensive.”

Louis has found the reaction to his “coming-out blog” overwhelming.

“I was convinced that revealing the truth was reprehensible. I never thought about the fact that everyone has got something they’re insecure about.”

He has since been contacted by a lot of people saying they can relate to his experience.

“One of the rugby lads from school got in touch. I’ve always been insecure about not being a manly guy and I was very embarrassed at the thought of him reading my piece.

“He’d been suffering from depression and panic attacks and wrote to me: ‘thanks for encouraging me today when I wanted to curl into a ball and pretend I was fine.’ There’s a misconception that if you’re a tough guy, mental illness is a weakness.”

Greater awareness and an honest, open dialogue are needed to break the vicious cycle of stigma around mental illness, campaigners urge.

“We need to replace silence and stigma with talking, greater understanding and support. You don’t have to be an expert to talk about mental health. A few small words can make a big difference,” says Ms Nightingale.

A lack of understanding lies at the heart of the problem, Nick believes.

“They’re scared because they struggle to rationalise my condition,” he says. When asked why he thinks people with mental health problems are so hesitant to come forward, he quotes a line from the film Man of Steel: “My father believed that if the world found out who I really was, they’d reject me…out of fear.”

Investment in mental health services is urgent, Rebecca says. “At the moment the waiting list for counselling is 6-8 weeks. In the meantime your mind is just getting worse and worse.”

The report published by the NHS taskforce said that funding will help 600,000 more people access counselling services. One of the main recommendations was that £1.4bn should be invested in mental health care for children. Louis believes it is essential to raise awareness about mental illness among young people.

“I had no idea I had a condition which could be diagnosed and treated,” he says.

“I just lived with my problem in silence. I would focus all my energy on getting out of going to school. Every day I would think about letting a car run over my foot. No child should seriously have to consider that as an option.”

This article first appeared on ‘Independent’ on 26 February 2016.

The findings challenge long-held assumptions that mental health problems in transgender children are inevitable, or even that being transgender is itself a type of mental disorder, said lead author Dr. Kristina Olson, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

“The thinking has always been that kids who are not acting gender-stereotypically are basically destined to have mental health problems,” said Olson. “In our study, that’s not the case.”

Published in Pediatrics, the study looked at 73 children between the ages of three and 12 who have “socially transitioned,” changing their preferred pronouns and, typically, their names, clothing and hairstyles.

The researchers found that these children had rates of depression and anxiety no higher than two control groups — their own siblings and a group of age- and gender-matched children.

And their rates of depression and anxiety were significantly lower than those of gender-nonconforming children in previous studies, the researchers noted.

Co-author Dr. Katie McLaughlin, a University of Washington assistant professor of psychology, called the findings “incredibly promising.”

“They suggest that mental health problems are not inevitable in this group, and that family support might buffer these children from the onset of mental health problems so commonly observed in transgender people,” she said.

For the study, researcher had the parents complete two short surveys under the National Institutes of Health’s Patient-Reported Outcome Measurement Information System. The surveys asked parents whether their children had experienced symptoms of depression or anxiety during the past week, for example, feeling sad or being worried when going to bed.

The researchers found that the transgender children’s levels of depression averaged a score of 50.1, almost the same as the national norm of 50. Their anxiety rates were 54.2, only slightly higher than the national norm.

The higher anxiety rates aren’t exactly surprising, Olson said. Though transgender children are becoming increasingly visible in the mainstream media, their reality remains little understood even within the medical community.

Transgender people were long classified under the umbrella of “gender identity disorder” by the widely used Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). The term was replaced with “gender dysphoria” in 2013, after considerable debate and lobbying from advocates to remove the word “disorder” from its name.

“It is hard to be transgender in 2016 in the United States,” Olson said. “If peers know that a child is transgender, they often tease that child. If peers do not know, the transgender child has to worry about being found out. It’s not surprising that transgender children would have some more anxiety, given the state of the world for transgender children right now.”

The researchers acknowledge that the positive mental health among study participants might be explained by factors other than just parental support.

Parents could be biased in their reporting, for example, wanting their kids to appear healthier than they are. Or the children themselves might have personality traits, such as confidence, that correlate to a healthy emotional state. Future studies will investigate these possibilities, they noted.

The study is part of the TransYouth Project led by Olson. The first large-scale, longitudinal study of transgender children in the U.S., it involves more than 150 transgender children and families from about 25 states. The project’s initial study, published in 2015, found that transgender children’s gender identities were as deeply rooted as those of their non-trans peers.

The researchers next plan to look at how factors outside of the family, such as treatment by peers, might predict mental health in transgender children, and whether the age of transition makes a difference.

“It will be important to follow these children over time, particularly during the transition to adolescence, to understand patterns of mental health and positive adjustment across development for transgender youth who are supported by their families,” McLaughlin said.

Olson said while there is still a tremendous amount to be learned about transgender children, the study’s findings suggest it’s possible for them to live happier lives than previous generations of transgender people.

“I think they’re proof that you can be a young transgender kid today and be happy and healthy and doing just as well as any other kid,” she said. “It’s some good news, finally, which I don’t think there’s much of in what we hear about transgender kids.”

This article first appeared on ‘Psych Central’ on 29 February 2016.

To gather their results, researchers went to the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, a region routinely called “the worst place in the world” to be a woman, said Darlene A. Kertes, the study’s lead author and an assistant professor in UF’s department of psychology. Women in this unstable region are routinely the target of rape and other war-related traumas.

“Our research shows that stressful life experiences affect our bodies all the way down to our genes,” said Kertes, who also is affiliated with the University of Florida Genetics Institute.

The study was published in the January/February issue of Child Development, the flagship journal for the Society for Research in Child Development. The results showed that mothers’ stressful life experiences were linked with epigenetic markers in key genes that regulate the body’s response to stress, in both mothers and newborns.

“The study is one of the first of its kind to be conducted in a developing country,” Kertes said. “Most information to date about effects of stress and trauma on prenatal development has been gathered in a Western context.”

Samples of umbilical cord blood, placenta and the mothers’ blood were collected at birth and tested for impacts of war trauma and chronic stress. The researchers looked at DNA methylation, an epigenetic process that makes genes more or less able to respond to biochemical signals in the body.

During pregnancy, a mother’s bodily responses to stress are passed onto the fetus, affecting a child’s brain development, birth weight and functioning of the children’s own HPA axis even after they are born.

The researchers looked at the babies’ birth weight as an indicator of children’s overall development. They found that stress-linked DNA methylation differences predicted lower birth weight.

“The stress exposure affected the maternal and fetal tissues differently, which shows that the impact of stress differs depending on an individual’s life phase,” Kertes said, adding that stress experienced at very young ages affects the way the body responds to stress throughout life.

This is the first time researchers have documented stress effects, either pre- or postnatal, on methylation of a gene called CRH in humans. CRH makes a hormone that triggers the body’s stress response. The study also confirmed stress effects on several other genes known to be involved in the stress response.

Kertes and her colleagues have started to examine the longer term effects of stress on child development in conflict-ridden regions. She emphasized that traumatic events can also have cross-generational impacts.

“War and conflict do not just impact the health and well-being for people who experience it directly,” she said. “It can potentially have long-term consequences for future generations.”

This article first appeared on ‘Eurek Alert’ on 2 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/general-news/depression-increases-with-age-study/feed 0 http://www.newsinmind.com/general-news/government-urged-to-continue-supporting-mental-health-program http://www.newsinmind.com/general-news/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.