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.

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:Danielle Crofford Fetters

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:Danielle Crofford Fetters

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

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

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

 

By Therese J. Borchard

Abraham Lincoln is a powerful mental health hero for me. Whenever I doubt that I can do anything meaningful in this life with a defective brain (and entire nervous system, actually, as well as the hormonal one), I simply pull out Joshua Wolf Shenk’s classic, “Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.” Or I read the CliffsNotes version: the poignant essay, “Lincoln’s Great Depression” that appeared in “The Atlantic” in October of 2005.

Every time I pick up pages from either the article or the book, I come away with new insights. This time I was intrigued by Lincoln’s faith — and how he read the Book of Job when he needed redirection.

Following I have excerpted the paragraphs from The Atlantic article on Lincoln’s faith, and how he used it to manage his melancholy.

Throughout his life Lincoln’s response to suffering–for all the success it brought him–led to greater suffering still. When as a young man he stepped back from the brink of suicide, deciding that he must live to do some meaningful work, this sense of purpose sustained him; but it also led him into a wilderness of doubt and dismay, as he asked, with vexation, what work he would do and how he would do it. This pattern was repeated in the 1850s, when his work against the extension of slavery gave him a sense of purpose but also fueled a nagging sense of failure. Then, finally, political success led him to the White House, where he was tested as few had been before.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/07/25/did-abraham-lincoln-use-faith-to-overcome-depression/

 

By Therese J. Borchard

Abraham Lincoln is a powerful mental health hero for me. Whenever I doubt that I can do anything meaningful in this life with a defective brain (and entire nervous system, actually, as well as the hormonal one), I simply pull out Joshua Wolf Shenk’s classic, “Lincoln’s Melancholy: How Depression Challenged a President and Fueled His Greatness.” Or I read the CliffsNotes version: the poignant essay, “Lincoln’s Great Depression” that appeared in “The Atlantic” in October of 2005.

Every time I pick up pages from either the article or the book, I come away with new insights. This time I was intrigued by Lincoln’s faith — and how he read the Book of Job when he needed redirection.

Following I have excerpted the paragraphs from The Atlantic article on Lincoln’s faith, and how he used it to manage his melancholy.

Throughout his life Lincoln’s response to suffering–for all the success it brought him–led to greater suffering still. When as a young man he stepped back from the brink of suicide, deciding that he must live to do some meaningful work, this sense of purpose sustained him; but it also led him into a wilderness of doubt and dismay, as he asked, with vexation, what work he would do and how he would do it. This pattern was repeated in the 1850s, when his work against the extension of slavery gave him a sense of purpose but also fueled a nagging sense of failure. Then, finally, political success led him to the White House, where he was tested as few had been before.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/blog/archives/2010/07/25/did-abraham-lincoln-use-faith-to-overcome-depression/

 

Article Date: 27 Jul 2010 – 2:00 PDT

New investments in mental health care announced by the government today will pay dividends, according to the Australian Psychological Society.

“An injection of $276.9 million into the mental health budget will make a significant difference, especially as the government has funded programs that stretch from early intervention to crisis services and cover people across the lifespan,” she said.

Read in Full:  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/195927.php

 

Article Date: 27 Jul 2010 – 2:00 PDT

New investments in mental health care announced by the government today will pay dividends, according to the Australian Psychological Society.

“An injection of $276.9 million into the mental health budget will make a significant difference, especially as the government has funded programs that stretch from early intervention to crisis services and cover people across the lifespan,” she said.

Read in Full:  http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/195927.php

By Jessica Ward Jones, MD, MPH Associate News Editor
Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on July 27, 2010

According to new research, insomnia in children is a widespread problem, and psychiatrists often resort to medication.

Dr. Judith Owens from the Brown Medical School in Providence and her colleagues found that in a survey of child psychiatrists, ”insomnia was a major problem in almost a third of their school-aged and adolescent patients and (they) endorsed using medication to treat the insomnia in at least a quarter of these patients.”

Insomnia in children has been linked to a wide variety of medical, psychological and behavioral problems, including neurodevopmental problems, ADHD, poor concentration in school, aggressive behavior, oppositional behavior, and anxiety.  Up to 25 percent may have difficulty sleeping at some point in childhood. Causes can vary widely but include medical and neurological conditions as well as psychological disorders.  In addition to medication, treatment options include improved sleep hygiene (careful attention to bedtime conditions that promote sleep), relaxation techniques, meditation, hypnosis, and cognitive behavioral therapy.  At present in the there are no FDA-approved sleep medications for children.

To assess what methods are currently used by child psychiatrists, Owens sent surveys to 6,018 members of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry regarding practice patterns in their school-age and teenage patients. 1,273 psychiatrists responded, reporting that insomnia was an important problem in nearly one-third of these patients.

Among the children with insomnia, more than 25 percent were treated with medication.

In addition, 96 percent of the doctors surveyed had prescribed one or more prescription medication per month, and 88 percent had recommended an over-the-counter medication. Those surveyed were highly concerned about the effects of untreated insomnia.  The psychiatrists perceived the lack of data on sleep medication in children and possible side effects as a reason to not use medication more often.

Of the medications prescribed, alpha agonists (medications like clonidine) were used most frequently for ADHD, and trazodone was used often for mood and anxiety disorders, as well as antidepressants.

Children with mood disorders were also treated with atypical antipsychotics (medications like Abilify), anticonvulsants (medications like Tegretol or Neurontin), and short-acting hypnotics (medications like Ambien).

Over-the-counter medications were also recommended often; for example, melatonin was recommended to more than one third of patients.

“The most important rationale for the use of sleep medication among child psychiatrists is to manage the effects of sleep disruption on daytime functioning. It is important to note, however, that concerns about side effects and the lack of evidence regarding their effectiveness were cited as significant barriers to their use,” said Owens.  ”Despite the high frequency of use and the wide range of medications chosen, practitioners also expressed a number of significant concerns about the appropriateness of sleep medication in general for children.”

These results are important in demonstrating the frequency of sleep disorders in children and how often child psychiatrists feel it necessary to resort to medication.  There is clear evidence that lack of sleep not only can create behavioral and psychiatric problems, but can exacerbate existing mental health issues.

Read in Full:  http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/07/27/children-and-sleeping-pills/16048.html