Mental Health Update

Pleasure, depression and neuroscience

Anhedonia is the inability to experience pleasure and is one of the main symptoms of depression. A brain-scan study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has been looking into the neuroscience of anhedonia. The researchers studied 46 people...

Published Tue, Dec 22 2009 7:09 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression

Anxiety and birthweight

The list of drinks and substances that pregnant women have to worry about can seem endless and now researchers from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Centre have added another factor to the list: anxiety itself. The researchers studied a sample of...

Published Wed, Oct 28 2009 7:45 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Anxiety Disorders

Teenagers, genes and intoxication

Researchers from Brown University in Rhode Island have been looking into the links between variations in the OPRM1 gene and alcohol misuse in teenagers. Their study of 187 teenagers with an average age of 15 found that 51.9% of youngsters with an alcohol...

Published Thu, Oct 29 2009 9:28 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Child Psychology, Alcohol Problems

Yoga and mental health

Women with eating disorders may lack body awareness including having a reduced awareness of basic body signals such as hunger and fullness, energy levels and fatigue. They can also lack awareness of their moods so that instead of being recognised and...

Published Thu, Nov 05 2009 3:17 AM by Mental Health Update

Catching the attention of college binge drinkers

Binge drinking in college is a big problem nowadays in both the U.S. and the U.K. Studies have shown that at least 40-45% of college students engage in heavy drinking each year, with between 12-31% qualifying for a clinical diagnosis of alchol abuse and...

Published Mon, Oct 12 2009 3:04 AM by Mental Health Update

Social phobia and depression in Japan

Phobias and major depression are both relatively common and can occur together. It could be that there are common biological and psychological factors between the two conditions or that there are sociocultural factors that make phobias more damaging in...

Published Fri, Oct 16 2009 5:18 AM by Mental Health Update

Needle sharing, poor planning and logic puzzles

People who share drug-injecting equipment put themselves at increased risk of developing HIV, hepatitis and other infections. It is thought that a third of the cases of HIV in the U.S. are due to injecting drug use and around 60-80% of injecting drug...

Published Tue, Oct 20 2009 2:33 AM by Mental Health Update

Students in counselling more distressed but less suicidal

College students going for counselling are more depressed and lonely than they were ten years ago but less likely to think of killing themselves. Researchers from Hofstra University in New York State looked at the records of 3,256 college students who...

Published Fri, Aug 13 2010 2:19 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression - in adolescence, Anxiety

Shocking therapy for major depression

Electrical stimulation of one of the main nerves going into the brain could be an alternative to antidepressants for people suffering from major depression. Researchers from the University of California Los Angeles used a stimulator about the size of...

Published Mon, Sep 13 2010 7:21 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression

Surviving the tsunami in Sweden

Lars Wahlstrom from Sweden's Karolinska Institutet has been looking into the mental health of Swedish people who survived the Boxing Day tsunami in 2004. His study surveyed around 1,500 people from Stockholm who had been in the disaster area. Around...

Published Mon, Sep 13 2010 3:28 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: PTSD

New figures show extent of U.K.'s drink problem

New figures from the North West Public Health Observatory in the U.K. have revealed the shocking extent of the U.K.'s alcohol problem. The figures show that there were 954,469 alcohol-related admissions to English hospitals in the year ending March...

Published Wed, Sep 01 2010 3:23 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Alcohol Problems

Health visitors and postnatal depression

With governments all over the world looking to make cuts in expenditure health visitors can often be seen as an easy option for cuts. However, research from the universities of Leicester, Nottingham and Sheffield have found that they can play a role in...

Published Wed, Sep 01 2010 5:13 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Postnatal Depression

Malnutrition, mothers and depression

Malnutrition early in life has been linked to the later development of psychological problems in childhood and adolescence such as decreased attention, bad behaviour and a lower IQ. Researchers from Harvard Medical School studied 171 children aged between...

Published Thu, Jul 01 2010 2:19 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Child Psychology, Depression - in adolescence

New programme helps fostered children

Children who have been placed in foster care after being abused are at a much higher risk of developing mental-health problems and it has been estimated that as many as 57% of them might have a psychological problem such as depression, post-traumatic...

Published Mon, Aug 09 2010 4:03 AM by Mental Health Update

Judging others and revealing ourselves

What we say about other people could actually say much more about ourselves. Researchers at Wake Forest University in North Carolina studied friends rating one another, first-year students rating others they knew in their dormitories and fraternity and...

Published Tue, Aug 03 2010 5:35 AM by Mental Health Update

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