April 2010 - Mental Health Update

Antidepressants and self-poisoning risk - which are the riskiest?

Self-poisoning is a common way of killing oneself, especially among women. Because suicide is linked to depression, and antidepressants are often easily available, antidepressants are involved in around 25% of all poisoning suicides in the U.K. and 20...

Published Fri, Apr 30 2010 6:26 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Antidepressants, SSRIs - side effects, Suicide, Venlafaxine, Mirtazapine, Dosulepin, Citalopram, Amitriptyline, Doxepin

Bupropion helps people with schizophrenia stub it out

People with schizophrenia are three times more likely to smoke than the rest of the population and find it harder to give up. A drug called bupropion blocks the effects of nicotine and has been used to help people without schizophrenia quit. A team of...

Published Fri, Apr 30 2010 6:02 AM by Mental Health Update

U.K. Government boosts help to veterans

The U.K. Government has announced £2m of new funding for the veterans' charity Combat Stress to help improve access to mental-health services for former servicemen. The money will fund up to 15 community psychiatric nurses to work in mental-health...

Published Wed, Apr 07 2010 1:39 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: PTSD

Brain-training games don't make you any cleverer

Brain-training games might be good fun but they probably don't make you cleverer. In an experiment for the BBC television programme 'Bang Goes The Theory' 11,000 people used the games for six weeks and took tests of their memory, concentration...

Published Wed, Apr 21 2010 2:16 AM by Mental Health Update

What makes a 21st turn tipsy?

The legal age for drinking in the U.S. is 21 and there has been quite a lot of coverage of people dying as a result of excessive drinking on their 21st birthday. Researchers from the University of Texas, at Austin studied 150 college students asking them...

Published Thu, Apr 22 2010 2:32 AM by Mental Health Update

Pollution hits intelligence in young children

Exposure to pollutants in the womb can affect children's cognition at the age of five. Researchers from the Columbia Center for Children's Environmental Health in New York studied 214 children born to healthy, non-smoking women in Krakow, Poland...

Published Wed, Apr 21 2010 3:21 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Child Development

Depression and Relationships – A Two-Way Street? - Guest post by Teresa Jackson

Mental illness is not easy to understand, especially if it’s in the form of depression. Most people do not realize that depression is a mental ailment that is just like schizophrenia or mania in that those who are affected by it cannot control it. We...

Published Wed, Apr 07 2010 1:29 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression

Family history, protein plaques and Alzheimer's disease

Hardly surprisingly getting old is the main risk factor for Alzheimer's disease but the next most significant one is having a family history of the condition. Lisa Mosconi from New York University led a team of researchers using PET (positron emission...

Published Fri, Apr 09 2010 5:17 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Alzheimer's Disease, Neuroscience

Alcohol consumption in older people

Most studies into how people drink over their lifetimes have found that consumption peaks in early adulthood and declines later but little is known about individual's drinking patterns and what factors make people drink less or more as they age. Researchers...

Published Thu, Apr 22 2010 2:13 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Alcohol Problems

Parenting programmes - are they a long-term solution?

Parenting programmes like The Incredible Years have been proven to have good short-term effects but little research has been done into their long-term effectiveness or into what makes them effective, or not, in children diagnosed with 'conduct disorder'...

Published Tue, Apr 27 2010 4:10 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Child Development, Parenting, Incredible Years

New gene linked to Alzheimer's risk

Researchers from the University of Miami have identified a new gene associated with an increased risk of developing Alzheimer's disease. In a study of 5,376 people, 2,269 of whom had Alzheimer's disease, the researchers compared a stretch of genes...

Published Thu, Apr 22 2010 7:34 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Alzheimer's Disease, Genetics

Psychosis - hearing the service users' stories

There has been lots of research into psychosis but relatively little of it has looked at the thoughts, feelings and life histories of the people who suffer from the condition. John Rhodes from the Willesden Mental Health Resources Centre in London and...

Published Fri, Apr 30 2010 3:54 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Psychosis

Smoking and depression go together like bacon and eggs

In the U.S. the National Center for Health Statistics has been analyzing data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey to look into the links between depression and smoking. They found that 43% of adult smokers aged 20 and over have depression...

Published Thu, Apr 22 2010 7:10 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression, Smoking

Dreams, memory and learning

Dreams have been linked to prophesies and the unconscious welling up to the surface or dismissed as the brain's equivalent of a PC's screensaver but new research by scientists at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston suggests that...

Published Wed, Apr 28 2010 3:40 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Dreams

Obesity, genes and Alzheimer's disease

FTO is a gene associated with obesity. People with one copy of it are on average 1.5kg heavier than average and people with two copies of it are 3kg heavier. The gene is carried by 46% of Western Europeans and researchers from California University now...

Published Tue, Apr 20 2010 4:06 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Alzheimer's Disease, Obesity, Genetics