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Archive for January, 2011

 

By Jessica Ward Jones, MD, MPH Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 28, 2010 

People with bipolar disorder whose symptoms began in childhood have a worse prognosis as adults.

The earlier in life an individual’s bipolar symptoms appear, and the longer the illness goes undiagnosed and untreated, the more severe the illness seems to be throughout life.

According to Dr. Robert M. Post, from the Bipolar Collaborative Network in Bethesda, Md., “Both childhood onset and treatment delay were associated with a persistently more adverse course of illness rated prospectively in adults.”

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic depression, is a mental disorder that is characterized by alternating periods of maniaBipolar disorder in children often presents differently than in adults and can be difficult to diagnose. (elevated or agitated mood) and depression. Bipolar disorder affects more than 5 million American adults according to the National Institute of Mental Health.  Although the average age of onset is 25 years, there is an increasing awareness of the disease in children. 

Post and his colleagues followed 529 adult outpatients with bipolar disorder over a period of four years.  The average age of the patients was 42. The participants were rated daily using the National Institute of Mental Health-Life Chart Method.  The study participants also completed questionnaires regarding the history of their symptoms and illness.

15 percent of the participants had symptoms before the age of 13 and 35 percent between the ages of 13-18.  During the first year of followup, compared to the patients whose symptoms developed as an adult, those with childhood onset had more manic and depressive episodes, more severe episodes of mania and depression, more days depressed, more rapid cycling, and fewer days of normal mood.

After following the participants for four years, those with onset during childhood, compared to those with adult onset, continued to have on average longer and more severe periods of depression, and fewer days of normal mood.

On average, the earlier the age at which symptoms appeared, the longer it took for the patients to be diagnosed.  In addition, the longer the delay in diagnosis, the more time patients spent depressed, the more episodes of depression they had, the worse the episodes were, and the more rapid the cycling of episodes.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/07/28/age-of-onset-influences-prognosis-in-bipolar/16102.html

 



 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 28, 2010

Teenagers diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at more risk of dropping out of school or having a delayed high school graduation than students with other mental disorders.

The new study determines teens with ADHD — the most common childhood psychiatric condition in the United States — have a higher attrition or a delayed graduation than students with other mental health disorders that often are considered more serious.

Researchers at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine found that nearly one third of students with ADHD, twice the proportion as students with no psychiatric disorder, either drop out or delay high school graduation.

The study also examined the effects of substance use and abuse on high school graduation and found that among students who engage in substance use, including alcohol and other drugs, teens who smoke cigarettes are at greatest risk of dropping out.

There are three types of ADHD: the hyperactive type, the inattentive type and the combined type. Symptoms include not being able to pay attention, daydreaming, being easily distracted and being in constant motion or unable to remain seated.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/07/28/teen-adhd-linked-to-delayed-high-school-graduation/16108.html

 



 

By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 28, 2010

Teenagers diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are at more risk of dropping out of school or having a delayed high school graduation than students with other mental disorders.

The new study determines teens with ADHD — the most common childhood psychiatric condition in the United States — have a higher attrition or a delayed graduation than students with other mental health disorders that often are considered more serious.

Researchers at the University of California at Davis School of Medicine found that nearly one third of students with ADHD, twice the proportion as students with no psychiatric disorder, either drop out or delay high school graduation.

The study also examined the effects of substance use and abuse on high school graduation and found that among students who engage in substance use, including alcohol and other drugs, teens who smoke cigarettes are at greatest risk of dropping out.

There are three types of ADHD: the hyperactive type, the inattentive type and the combined type. Symptoms include not being able to pay attention, daydreaming, being easily distracted and being in constant motion or unable to remain seated.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/07/28/teen-adhd-linked-to-delayed-high-school-graduation/16108.html

 



 

By John M Grohol PSYD

You’ve been diagnosed with a mental disorder and have been in treatment now for years. You’ve done both psychotherapy and psychiatric medications, and now it’s time to try to live life drug-free. You’ve successfully ended your psychotherapy treatment, but now you’re looking for advice and information about how to end your psychiatric medications.

My first suggestion to you would be to talk to your doctor or psychiatrist. Nobody should go off of any medication without first getting their doctor’s consent and, hopefully, cooperation (or, if not their consent, at least their grudging acceptance that it’s your body and you can do with it what you want). Ideally, you’re seeing a psychiatrist for your psychiatric medications and not just your family doctor. If you are just seeing your family doctor, you may need a little more help than someone seeing a psychiatrist, because psychiatrists have much greater familiarity with helping people get off of the medications they previously prescribed to them. (In my experience, I’ve found many family doctors simply have little clue about the idiosyncrasies of discontinuing psychiatric medications, because of their unique tapering properties.)

Read More:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/07/28/withdrawing-from-psychiatric-medications/



 

By John M Grohol PSYD

You’ve been diagnosed with a mental disorder and have been in treatment now for years. You’ve done both psychotherapy and psychiatric medications, and now it’s time to try to live life drug-free. You’ve successfully ended your psychotherapy treatment, but now you’re looking for advice and information about how to end your psychiatric medications.

My first suggestion to you would be to talk to your doctor or psychiatrist. Nobody should go off of any medication without first getting their doctor’s consent and, hopefully, cooperation (or, if not their consent, at least their grudging acceptance that it’s your body and you can do with it what you want). Ideally, you’re seeing a psychiatrist for your psychiatric medications and not just your family doctor. If you are just seeing your family doctor, you may need a little more help than someone seeing a psychiatrist, because psychiatrists have much greater familiarity with helping people get off of the medications they previously prescribed to them. (In my experience, I’ve found many family doctors simply have little clue about the idiosyncrasies of discontinuing psychiatric medications, because of their unique tapering properties.)

Read More:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/07/28/withdrawing-from-psychiatric-medications/



Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology

Article Date: 28 Jul 2010 – 0:00 PDT

About 1 in 10 people have the potential to develop schizophrenia, but only 1 in 100 actually end up with this devastating illness. The challenge is in knowing why some do and some don’t.

Drawing from over 25 years of laboratory study, Mark F. Lenzenweger, a distinguished professor of clinical science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology at Binghamton University, thinks that not only does he have the makings of a good response to this troubling question but also how to go about finding those answers.

In his latest book, Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology, Lenzenweger explores lessons he has learned in the psychological science laboratory while probing the broader questions of how to think about and conduct psychopathology research.

“The liability for schizophrenia is relatively prevalent and common in our population,” said Lenzenweger. “Therefore, understanding why someone goes on to develop the illness is a high priority research question. I firmly believe that those who harbor this liability but do not develop the full-blown illness of schizophrenia may hold the key to this puzzle. Since this is an ongoing challenge for our society, training the next generation in how to think about and conduct psychopathology research is just as vital. So what I’ve tried to do is combine both of those elements in a way that I hope will appeal to both the experienced research and those just starting out.”

The book traces Lenzenweger’s intense efforts to find answers using laboratory and statistical procedures by examining a host of related conceptual issues, data analytic strategies and methodical viewpoints that he has found helpful over the years. Using clinical anecdotes and research recollection, Lenzenweger hopes that readers will develop an appreciation for those substantive issues that have and are currently pressing (and interesting) on the causes of schizophrenia and related disorders.

“Schizophrenia is perhaps the costliest form of mental illness,” said Lenzenweger. “In addition, it has a strong genetic component; about 80 percent of what determines schizophrenia is related to genetic influences. All people with schizophrenia share a personality organization known as schizotypy. And the person who carries shizotypy is known as a schizotype. Yet not all schizotypes are schizophrenic. In fact, the vast majority of schizotypes do not go on to develop the illness. So it stands to reason that the study of schizotypic individuals offers a unique perspective on what might cause the illness.”

According to Lenzenweger, the way forward in understanding the causes and development of schizophrenia will be complex and difficult terrain.

“There will be no simple solution or discovery the remedies the entire problem,” said Lenzenweger. “But I hope that my book will chart the course for the field as it stands currently and show the way forward for the generation to come.”

Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology was released this month by Guilford Press. For more information, click here.

Source:
Gail Glover
Binghamton University

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/195993.php

 To Pre-Order/Purchase a Copy:

Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experimental-Psychopathology/dp/1606238655

/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280345104&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experimental-Psychopathology/dp/1606238655/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280345104&sr=8-3



Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology

Article Date: 28 Jul 2010 – 0:00 PDT

About 1 in 10 people have the potential to develop schizophrenia, but only 1 in 100 actually end up with this devastating illness. The challenge is in knowing why some do and some don’t.

Drawing from over 25 years of laboratory study, Mark F. Lenzenweger, a distinguished professor of clinical science, neuroscience and cognitive psychology at Binghamton University, thinks that not only does he have the makings of a good response to this troubling question but also how to go about finding those answers.

In his latest book, Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology, Lenzenweger explores lessons he has learned in the psychological science laboratory while probing the broader questions of how to think about and conduct psychopathology research.

“The liability for schizophrenia is relatively prevalent and common in our population,” said Lenzenweger. “Therefore, understanding why someone goes on to develop the illness is a high priority research question. I firmly believe that those who harbor this liability but do not develop the full-blown illness of schizophrenia may hold the key to this puzzle. Since this is an ongoing challenge for our society, training the next generation in how to think about and conduct psychopathology research is just as vital. So what I’ve tried to do is combine both of those elements in a way that I hope will appeal to both the experienced research and those just starting out.”

The book traces Lenzenweger’s intense efforts to find answers using laboratory and statistical procedures by examining a host of related conceptual issues, data analytic strategies and methodical viewpoints that he has found helpful over the years. Using clinical anecdotes and research recollection, Lenzenweger hopes that readers will develop an appreciation for those substantive issues that have and are currently pressing (and interesting) on the causes of schizophrenia and related disorders.

“Schizophrenia is perhaps the costliest form of mental illness,” said Lenzenweger. “In addition, it has a strong genetic component; about 80 percent of what determines schizophrenia is related to genetic influences. All people with schizophrenia share a personality organization known as schizotypy. And the person who carries shizotypy is known as a schizotype. Yet not all schizotypes are schizophrenic. In fact, the vast majority of schizotypes do not go on to develop the illness. So it stands to reason that the study of schizotypic individuals offers a unique perspective on what might cause the illness.”

According to Lenzenweger, the way forward in understanding the causes and development of schizophrenia will be complex and difficult terrain.

“There will be no simple solution or discovery the remedies the entire problem,” said Lenzenweger. “But I hope that my book will chart the course for the field as it stands currently and show the way forward for the generation to come.”

Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology was released this month by Guilford Press. For more information, click here.

Source:
Gail Glover
Binghamton University

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/195993.php

 To Pre-Order/Purchase a Copy:

Schizotypy and Schizophrenia: The View from Experimental Psychopathology

 http://www.amazon.co.uk/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experimental-Psychopathology/dp/1606238655

/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280345104&sr=8-3

http://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experimental-Psychopathology/dp/1606238655/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1280345104&sr=8-3



 

Published July 27, 2010 by:

Bicycle Basics for Children with Autism

Learning to ride a bike is a rite of passage for many children.

Sadly children with autism often are denied the pleasure of learning to ride a bike.  Many autistic children have sensory as well as physical issues that make learning to ride their own bicycle difficult if not impossible.  Frequently autistic children have problems with body awareness, balance and motor control all of which are necessary in order to learn to ride a bicycle.  Problems with eye hand coordination, focus and difficulty paying attention can also hinder an autistic child from mastering independent bike riding.

Read More …  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5582194/ways_to_help_a_child_with_autism_learn.html?cat=25



 

Published July 27, 2010 by:

Bicycle Basics for Children with Autism

Learning to ride a bike is a rite of passage for many children.

Sadly children with autism often are denied the pleasure of learning to ride a bike.  Many autistic children have sensory as well as physical issues that make learning to ride their own bicycle difficult if not impossible.  Frequently autistic children have problems with body awareness, balance and motor control all of which are necessary in order to learn to ride a bicycle.  Problems with eye hand coordination, focus and difficulty paying attention can also hinder an autistic child from mastering independent bike riding.

Read More …  http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/5582194/ways_to_help_a_child_with_autism_learn.html?cat=25



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But they have a surfeit of something different—what Baron-Cohen calls “systemizing ability.” They are lousy at understanding people but relatively good, he says, at making sense of the world. Some of them have a disablingly low IQ, and in such cases the systemizing may take the form of a seemingly purposeless obsession—they may stare for hours, say, at the veins of a leaf, or they may memorize train schedules or license plates. But in others, such as a mathematician Baron-Cohen knows at Cambridge who has been diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome—a disorder at the high-functioning end of the autism spectrum—that same systemizing ability can lead to work that is rewarded with fame. (Asperger’s is a mild form of autism in which individuals are able to function normally, but have difficulty reading the emotions of others.)

Low-empathizing, high-systemizing: That, in a nutshell, is Baron-Cohen’s theory of what characterizes autism. Those traits span the autism spectrum, from people who are mute and unable to function to people who find a niche in society. Moreover, Baron-Cohen’s theory embeds this autism spectrum firmly in a much larger two-dimensional continuum—one that includes all of us. The essential difference between men and women, according to Baron-Cohen, is that women are better at empathizing and men at systemizing—on average, he stresses. There are plenty of male brains in female bodies, and vice versa. There are even female autistics, but there are many more male ones: In Baron-Cohen’s theory, autism is a case of the “extreme male brain.”

In the back of Baron-Cohen’s book, The Essential Difference: The Truth About the Male and Female Brain, you can fill out questionnaires that allow you to determine your Empathy Quotient (EQ) and Systemizing Quotient (SQ). Baron-Cohen himself can’t take the empathizing and systemizing tests, because he wrote them. But from all appearances he may be one of those fortunate individuals with a brain that is equally balanced between male and female. People who know him place him far up on the empathizing axis. “When you go into a meeting with him, you always feel good afterward,” says one graduate student. Says another, “On the one hand, he’ll coach us very closely, but on the other, he leaves us lots of space to do what we like.” Yet Baron-Cohen is pushing a theory that attempts to capture the full diversity of human brain types in a single X-Y graph—and if that isn’t male systemizing, what is? “We all have some autistic traits,” he says. “It’s just a matter of degree.”

“I am interested in knowing the path a river takes from its source to the sea. Strongly agree? Slightly agree? Slightly disagree? Strongly disagree?”—from the Systemizing Quotient questionnaire

Baron-Cohen—born in 1959—grew up in Golder’s Green, a middle-class and strongly orthodox Jewish neighborhood in North London. His father worked in the family menswear business; his mother taught dance. His first cousin, Sacha Baron-Cohen, is Ali G, the notorious assault comedian and on-air deflator of pompous windbags. Simon, in contrast, seems like he would be polite even to windbags. He is around six feet tall, with narrow, sloping shoulders and short, sandy hair that is beginning to show a male pattern; on the day we met he wore a blue short-sleeve shirt over khaki pants and sensible black shoes. The photo on his book jacket shows him without his wire-rim glasses, but he looks more natural with them on. His voice is mild and measured. Nothing in his bland and tidy little office—a Cezanne print, a few framed book covers—provides any obvious clues to where he is coming from.

Baron-Cohen himself offers one: He grew up with an older sister who is severely disabled, both mentally and physically. Today she lives in an institution, is confined to a wheelchair and has a very low IQ. “Yet despite that,” says Baron-Cohen, “as soon as you walk into the room, she makes eye contact, her face lights up. Even though she has no language, you feel like you’re connecting to another person.”

In other words, she is the opposite of autistic. Autism is perfectly compatible with a high IQ—yet some degree of social disconnectedness, of extreme self-centeredness, has been a core feature of the disorder ever since it was first described in the 1940s and given a name derived from the Greek word for self. Baron-Cohen first encountered it when, fresh out of Oxford with an undergraduate degree in developmental psychology, he went to work teaching autistic children one-to-one at a small school in London. It was then he realized that autism is fascinating as well as sad. “I was struck by this dissociation between intelligence and social development,” he says. “It became glaringly obvious that they are two different things.”

Thanks in part to Baron-Cohen, that understanding of autism is now widely shared—which is one reason the number of children diagnosed as autistic has risen so dramatically in the past decade. Autism was once almost invariably associated with a below-normal IQ, and its prevalence was said to be around 4 in 10,000. Nowadays, it is ten times that. Many children are diagnosed with an autism-spectrum disorder, many of them at the high-functioning Asperger’s end. With the explosion in diagnoses there has been an explosion in research. Geneticists are looking for genes linked to autism, which surely exist; the disease has been known to run in families. Neuroscientists are looking for the anatomical or physiological irregularities in the brain that must result from the anomalous genes.

Baron-Cohen is engaged in genetics and neurobiology, too, as codirector of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University. But his background is in cognitive psychology; he seeks to identify the basic mental processes that are common to all cases of autism and that link autistic behavior to its biological roots. In 1985, while still a graduate student at University College London, he made a breakthrough discovery of one such process. With his advisers Uta Frith and Alan Leslie, he presented autistic children with dolls named Sally and Anne, and the following story: Sally puts a marble in her basket and leaves the room. Anne takes the marble and hides it in her own box. Sally comes back and looks for her marble—where does she look?

A normal 4-year-old child says that Sally will look for the marble where she left it, in her basket. The child may even giggle at the joke on Sally. A kid with Down’s syndrome will get it right too. But autistic children don’t get it right. They say Sally will look in Anne’s box—because after all, that’s where the marble really is. They have no notion, Baron-Cohen discovered, of where Sally might think the marble is. They lack a “theory of mind”—abstract jargon for the simple realization, which the normal child comes to at around age 4, that other people have thoughts and intentions that may differ from his own. And that figuring those thoughts out helps him to understand what those people say and do.

Baron-Cohen later coined a term for this deficit: “mindblindness.” In 1989, Uta Frith proposed that autistic people’s inability to derive a theory of mind from their experience of the world was just one aspect of a broader deficit: the inability to draw together information so as to derive coherent and meaningful ideas. Frith’s weak central coherence theory explained why people with autism remember strings of nonsense words almost as well as they do sentences, or why they do jigsaw puzzles without the picture: They just don’t seek the pattern in a mass of details. “Their information-processing systems, like their very beings, are characterized by detachment,” Frith wrote. A rival theory, which has proponents today, attributes the narrow interest in details, as well as other symptoms of autism, to executive dysfunction, a very broad inability to plan, to control impulses and to switch attention as needed to solve a problem.

Neither weak central coherence nor executive dysfunction, though, explain why some autistic people do so well. And in the 1990s, after Baron-Cohen had moved to Cambridge and begun seeing adult Asperger’s patients, including many high achievers, at his own clinic, he became increasingly aware of that gap. Furthermore, he says, nobody seemed to be addressing another key fact: Autism affects far more boys than girls. At the Asperger’s end of the spectrum, the ratio is about 10 to 1. The sex difference, says Baron-Cohen, is “one puzzle that has been completely ignored for over 50 years. I think it’s a very big clue. It’s got to be sex-linked.”

Read in Full:  http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200401/autism-whats-sex-got-do-it?page=2