Mental Health Update

Get Googling to boost your brain power

A study by researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles suggests that using Google could boost older people's brain power. The researchers scanned the brains of 24 neurologically-normal people between the ages of 55 and 78. Half of them...

Published Tue, Oct 20 2009 3:59 AM by Mental Health Update

Weight, self esteem and models

Researchers from Erasmus University in the Netherlands, the University of Cologne in Germany and Arizona State University have been looking into the vexed issue of women's weight and self-esteem and the influence of different-sized models. They showed...

Published Tue, Oct 20 2009 3:27 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Eating Disorders

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

Injecting other drug users

Brighton has one of the biggest drug problems of any UK city and it is thought that around 2% of people between the ages of 15 and 44 inject drugs. The coroner of Brighton has raised concerns that the practice of drug users injecting other people might...

Published Tue, Oct 20 2009 2:09 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Substance Abuse

PTSD raises death risk after surgery

People who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have an increased risk of dying after surgery - even if the trauma they suffered happened many years beforehand. Researchers from the University of California, San Francisco studied 1,792 male veterans...

Published Mon, Oct 19 2009 7:30 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: PTSD

Smaller classes in early years key to bridging achievement gap

Governments spend a lot of time and effort in trying to reduce the gap in educational achievement between high and low achievers. New research from the U.S. suggests that concentrating these efforts on reducing class sizes in the very first years of school...

Published Mon, Oct 19 2009 7:09 AM by Mental Health Update

Psychosis and emotions; not so different after all

There has been little research into the emotions of people suffering from psychosis. Historically there has been a divide between the neuroses, like depression and anxiety, which are thought to have an emotional origin and the psychoses which are thought...

Published Mon, Oct 19 2009 6:26 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Psychosis

Feeling down, how we cope with it and how it all links to depression

Everyone feels down from time to time. Most people try and get over it in a process that psychologists call 'mood repair.' Psychologists have identified over a 100 strategies for mood repair (adaptive strategies) but also a number of responses...

Published Mon, Oct 19 2009 3:48 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Depression - causes

Schizophrenia, art appreciation and jumping to conclusions

People with schizophrenia are more likely to jump to conclusions about things than other people. In one experiment participants were asked to judge whether a jar contained more of one or another colour of beads as they were pulled out, one by one; compared...

Published Mon, Oct 19 2009 3:33 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Schizophrenia

Antidepressants and suicide risk

Antidepressant treatment has been linked with an increase in suicidal thoughts among some people. Dr Nader Perroud from the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London studied 811 people with moderate to severe depression comparing the number of...

Published Fri, Oct 16 2009 6:57 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Antidepressants, SSRIs - side effects

Don't write me off campaign gets backing from MPs

A third of people with autism in the U.K. - around 100,000 people - currently live without a job and without benefits. The Public Accounts Committee of the House of Commons has recently published a report on adults with autism calling for improved support...

Published Fri, Oct 16 2009 5:59 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Autism

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

Mothers, daughters and OCD

Scientists still do not really know what causes obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) but there is some evidence that it runs in families. Most studies into this have looked at an overall diagnosis of OCD but OCD is made up of a number of different symptoms...

Published Fri, Oct 16 2009 3:46 AM by Mental Health Update

Filed under: Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

How juggling could boost your brainpower

Juggling could boost your brainpower. Researchers at Oxford University studied 24 healthy young adults. Half of them were given weekly training sessions in juggling for six weeks and were asked to practice for 30 minutes every day while the other half...

Published Wed, Oct 14 2009 6:43 AM by Mental Health Update

Troubled childhoods, early deaths

Having a stressful childhood can significantly reduce people's life expectancy. Researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and the Kaiser Permanente Organisation studied 17,337 men and women to investigate the links between bad childhood...

Published Wed, Oct 14 2009 3:50 AM by Mental Health Update

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