 
Article Date: 06 Oct 2010 – 5:00 PDT
The American Psychiatric Association announced the start of field trials to test proposed diagnostic criteria for the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Field trials will help assess the practical use of proposed DSM-5 criteria in real-world clinical settings.
The field trials follow a public comment period in which more than 8,000 written comments on the draft diagnostic criteria were submitted to the DSM-5 website by clinicians, researchers and family and patient advocates. Submitted comments were reviewed by DSM-5 Work Groups and resulted in further refinement of the criteria.
Evaluation measures
For the diagnostic criteria that are being evaluated, the results of the field trials will address:
– Feasibility: are the proposed criteria easy for clinicians to understand and to use?
– Clinical Utility: do the proposed criteria do a good job in describing patients’ psychiatric problems and help clinicians make decisions about treatment plans?
– Reliability: are the same conclusions reached consistently when the criteria are used by different clinicians?
– Validity: how accurately do the diagnostic criteria reflect the mental disorders they are designed to describe?
In addition, the field trials will help assess severity measures and cross-cutting dimensional measures.
Read in Full:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/203673.php
 
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on October 6, 2010Â
A new study leads scientists to believe the urge to do exciting things is linked to the neurotransmitter dopamine, a chemical that helps transmit messages in your brain.
Researchers analyzed genes in the dopamine system and found a group of mutations that help predict whether someone is inclined toward sensation seeking.
Sensation seeking has been linked to a range of behavior disorders, such as drug addiction. It isn’t all bad, though.
“Not everyone who’s high on sensation seeking becomes a drug addict. They may become an Army Ranger or an artist. It’s all in how you channel it,†says Jaime Derringer, the first author of the study.
She wanted to use a new technique to find out more about the genetics of sensation seeking. Most obvious connections with genes, like the BRCA gene that increases the risk for breast cancer, have already been found, Derringer says.
Now new methods are letting scientists look for more subtle associations between genes and all kinds of traits, including behavior and personality.
Read in Full:Â http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/10/06/is-thrill-seeking-hard-wired/19245.html
 
Article Date: 06 Oct 2010 – 2:00 PDT
This study demonstrates that supplemental brief dynamic therapy in the treatment of patients with obsessive compulsive-disorder with concurrent major depressive disorder (who are receiving effective medication) has no significant clinical effect on both obsessive and depressive symptoms.
When obsessions and compulsions afflict a person, one wonders whether psychoanalysis or related brief psychotherapies may help. This was tested in a study performed by researchers of the University of Torino in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics.
Until now no studies have investigated the benefits of adding brief dynamic therapy (BDT) to medication in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), while a number of recent investigations have demonstrated the efficacy of supplemental BDT among patients with major depressive disorders (MDD). The objective of this study was to explore the efficacy of BDT combined with pharmacotherapy in comparison with pharmacotherapy alone in the treatment of OCD with concurrent MDD.
Read in Full:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/203605.php
 
Article Date: 06 Oct 2010 – 2:00 PDT
An impressive body of knowledge has linked stress to illness vulnerability. Yet stress is inextricably linked to everyday life. So when does it hurt?
Allostatic load reflects the cumulative effects of stressful experiences in daily life. When the cost of chronic exposure to fluctuating or heightened neural or neuroendocrine responses exceeds the coping resources of an individual, allostatic overload ensues. In this paper, clinimetric criteria for the determination of allostatic overload are suggested. They are based on: (a) the presence of a stressor exceeding individual coping skills, and (b) clinical manifestations of distress.
Read in Full:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/203608.php
 
Wed, 6 Oct 2010
Victoria University researchers are investigating whether iPads – or other electronic devices capable of converting words or pictures to speech – can be used to help autistic children communicate.
Autism is a developmental disorder that affects the brain, with one in every 150 children afflicted. Most of them have difficulty communicating and about half fail to develop speech at all.
Professor Jeff Sigafoos, of Victoria University, and Dr Dean Sutherland, of Canterbury University, have been given $885,000 in taxpayer funding over the next three years to identify the best communication tools for those without speech.
Prof Sigafoos and Dr Sutherland will study 40 children aged between four and seven and hope to find enough families willing to take part in the project in Wellington and Christchurch, where the two researchers are based.
They will test responses to the three most common alternatives to speech for autistic children: electronic speech-generating devices, which include an iPad or iPod Touch with special applications installed and a range of text-to-speech machines; sign language; and pointing to or exchanging pictures.
Read in Full:Â http://www.odt.co.nz/news/technology/130224/ipads-ipod-touch-may-help-autistic-children-speak
 
October 6, 2010 Â
When Ari Ne’eman walked onstage at a college campus in Pennsylvania in June, he looked like a handsome young rabbi presiding over the bar mitzvah of a young Talmudic scholar.
In truth, Ne’eman was facilitating a different kind of coming-of-age ceremony. Beckoning a group of teenagers to walk through a gateway symbolizing their transition into adult life, he said, “I welcome you as members of the autistic community.†The setting was an annual gathering called Autreat, organized by an autistic self-help group called Autism Network International.
Ne’eman’s deliberate use of the phrase “the autistic community†was more subversive than it sounds. The notion that autistic people — often portrayed in the media as pitiable loners — would not only wear their diagnosis proudly, but want to make common cause with other autistic people, is still a radical one. Imagine a world in which most public discussion of homosexuality was devoted to finding a cure for it, rather than on the need to address the social injustices that prevent gay people from living happier lives. Though the metaphor is far from exact (for example, gay people obviously don’t face the impairments that many autistic people do), that’s the kind of world that autistic people live in.
Now, as the first openly autistic White House appointee in history — and one of the youngest at age 22 — Ne’eman is determined to change that.
Read in Full:Â http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/10/exclusive-ari-neeman-qa/all/1
 
Article Date: 05 Oct 2010 – 6:00 PDT
During October, vote online to fund the development of the Mojo Project, an online intervention program for musicians with bipolar disorder.
Growing out of the expertise of the National e-Therapy Centre (NeTC) based at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, the Mojo Project is a proposed online program for sleep management that musicians with bipolar disorder can access at their convenience.
Bipolar disorder is often associated with creativity, with several celebrated musicians including Sting, Tom Waits and Macy Gray revealing that they’ve been diagnosed with the condition.
“The lifestyle that most musos lead is not conducive to the regular sleep that their body needs,” said Swinburne Associate Professor and Director of Clinical Psychology Programs, Dr Greg Murray, who studies circadian rhythms in mood disorders.Â
“This regular sleep is even more critical for people with bipolar disorder as disturbed sleep patterns can trigger relapses into mania.”
To kick-start the Mojo project, the Sean Costello Memorial Fund has submitted a $50,000 grant request to the Pepsi Refresh Everything project.
If successful, the project will fund the tailoring of a program by Murray for musicians with bipolar disorder.
If you are a US resident aged over 13 and would like to support the Mojo project, visit here during October 2010 to register and vote.
The Pepsi Refresh Everything project hosts a popularity poll to give away millions to fund ideas that can ‘change the world’. Each month project proposals are listed at the refresheverything.org website. Visitors to the site can vote for their favourite ideas, with the most popular projects ‘winning’ funding from Pepsi.
Source:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/203569.php
 
The Social Network is the movie depicting Mark Zuckerberg’s development of his world-dominating Internet social-networking creation, Facebook.
Facebook itself is gender-free – anyone can list whatever information they want, and anyone can contact whomever they want, with the permission of the recipient.Â
I would guess in practice this still means boys approaching girls – although there is a lot more to Facebook than just that.
The movie, however, portrays a lot of gender interaction – none having to do with work. All of the main business figures – Zuckerberg, his competitors, his enemies, the primary lawyers – are men. All of the brain trust meetings, and confrontations, involve men. When Zuckerberg and his partner, Eduardo Saverin, meet Internet entrepreneur Sean Parker, Saverin brings his girlfriend – who serves as eye candy. In the house in California where Zuckerberg and his work group are making Facebook into an Internet monster, women are there strictly for play.
                 Cast of The Social Network
Zuckerberg attains his first notoriety by creating an on-line contest comparing women’s attractiveness (“hotness”) in a competition that crashs the Harvard network – now I wonder which gender was flooding the Internet with their votes?
Read in Full:Â http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/addiction-in-society/201010/sexism-in-the-new-facebook-world
Jan
22
 
So this is the 20th anniversary since Congress first established Mental Health Awareness Week as the first week in October.
The effort to increase awareness about mental health is based in the history of numerous government reports and well-meaning workgroups and such that have found that stigma still exists surrounding the diagnosis of mental disorders. Surprise, surprise. Of course it still exists. People who’ve never encountered someone living with a mental illness still believe it’s the kind of thing that “happens to other people.â€
But it happens to a lot more “other people†than anyone realizes. In our lifetime, 1 in 5 Americans will have a diagnosable mental disorder. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just announced last week that the 12 month prevalence rate for depression stands at 9 percent. That means in any given year, 1 in 10 Americans suffer from the most common mental disorder, depression.
That’s a lot of depressed people.
But for many reasons, most of these people never seek treatment for their depression. Or any other mental disorder, too. They believe it’s too costly. Or it’ll take too long. Or it’s too much effort. Or they don’t want any psychiatric drugs, because of fears surrounding them. There are a whole host of reasons people suffer in silence with their depression or other mental health concern.
Read in Full:Â http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/10/04/mental-health-awareness-week/
 
Article Date: 05 Oct 2010 – 3:00 PDT
New research from Rhode Island Hospital found that reduced levels of brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a protein in the brain that encourages growth of neurons, may be a trait marker for individuals with psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNES) (seizures that are psychological in origin). The findings are published in the October 4, 2010, issue of Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology.
Read in Full:Â http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/203478.php