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Recovery Update features the most recent articles from throughout the field of psychiatric rehabilitation. Stay up to date on all the latest mental health news through this weekly newsletter.
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In the last few years, emergency department physicians at St. Joseph Hospital in Chicago noticed a troubling trend. More behavioral health patients were presenting to the ED and — regardless of their concern — waiting for hours before being discharged or admitted.
Long lengths of stay in the ED are not just costly, they can worsen symptoms for behavioral health patients who find the environment stressful, said Christopher Novak, chief operating officer of the behavioral medicine service line at Amita Health, St. Joseph's parent system.
Research led by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation points to a groundbreaking discovery about a new potential treatment and prevention for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
The research team, led by Dr. Fang Liu, Senior Scientist and Head of Molecular Neuroscience in CAMH's Campbell Family Mental Health Research Institute, and Professor and Co-director of Division of Neuroscience and Clinical Translation, Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, recently identified a protein complex that is elevated in PTSD patients.
The USC Signal Analysis and Interpretation Lab (SAIL), a center that focuses on analyzing signals by people, from people and for people, in new collaboration with UCLA, has found that AI can accurately detect changes in clinical states from speech as well as physicians. The study appears in PLOS One.
SAIL, which has long applied AI and machine learning to identify and classify video, audio and physiological data, partnered with researchers at UCLA to analyze voice data from patients being treated for serious mental illnesses, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and major depressive disorders.
"Crazy," "hysterical," "overreactive," "hormonal." These are stereotypes many women still have to fight to be taken seriously. And that fight can be especially challenging because so many women do face very real symptoms such as bloating, headaches, irritability and mood changes — often on a monthly cycle.
These symptoms, especially ones around mood, are often stigmatized and hidden. But they can be signs of changes in hormone levels — estrogen, specifically — and those changes can become more pronounced, and even severe, at key points in women's lives: puberty, pregnancy and perimenopause.
Patients with severe mental illness (SMI) routinely have no access to adequate medication, psychological counseling, social support, and/or housing. The horrible result is that 600,000 patients are either prisoners or homeless — or rotate between the two. The past 50 years of neglect and criminalization have made the US one of the worst places in the world to have a mental illness.
Meanwhile, on the mild end of the psychiatric symptom spectrum, we have the opposite problem of massive over-treatment.
A British woman says she was diagnosed with a tennis ball-sized brain tumor after long suffering from migraine and psychosis — symptoms doctors reportedly dismissed as anxiety, depression and possibly bipolar disorder.
"It was frustrating to be told by doctors that my symptoms were caused by mental illness," 22-year-old Laura Skerritt, of Somerset, told British news agency South West News Service (SWNS). "I sensed that my health problems weren’t being caused by mental illness.”
People with serious mental health conditions who cross paths with criminal justice system are often languishing for weeks and even months in county jails because the state doesn't have enough space to house and treat them in secure medical or mental health facilities, lawmakers were told Friday.
It's a longstanding problem for law enforcement, hospitals and the court system, and it's again before the Legislature's Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee, which heard graphic testimony on the issue.
California legislators on Tuesday introduced two bills aimed at improving access to mental health and addiction treatment by requiring health insurance companies to authorize some forms of treatment more quickly and to cover more comprehensive mental health services.
State Sens. Jim Beall, D-San Jose, and Scott Wiener, D-San Francisco, co-authored Senate Bill 854 and Senate Bill 855 — which both would apply to private health insurance plans only, and not to public insurance programs such as Medi-Cal, the joint federal and state health insurance program for low-income residents. The bills do not address how uninsured residents seek care.
Aid workers are worried about a mental health crisis on the border. Thousands of migrants are camped out in Mexican border towns, waiting to ask for asylum in the U.S. Many are becoming despondent.
PRA and the Certification Commission for Psychiatric Rehabilitation and Recovery are making BIG changes to the delivery of its certification exams in November! Beginning around Nov. 15, certification exams will no longer be delivered at testing centers – instead, they will be delivered via live virtual proctoring, allowing candidates to take the CPRP and CFRP exams 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, from the comfort of their own homes (or anywhere with an internet connection). With this change, score reports will also be delivered upon completion of the exam, eliminating the wait for candidates to find out if they passed. Later this year, the platform for applying to sit for a PRA certification exam, apply for recertification, and reinstate a lapsed PRA credential will change to a new and more user-friendly system, allowing candidates and certified individuals to submit payment, apply, arrange to test, and receive results and certificates – all in the same electronic system! Information on exact launch dates and instructions will be made available on the PRA Website.
PRA is excited to promote a learning collaborative offered by the SAMHSA-funded New England Mental Health Technology Transfer Center (MHTTC). Dr. Janis Tondora of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health and Dr. Dan Wartenberg of Newport Mental Health will be leading a Learning Collaborative on Person-Centered Recovery Planning (PCRP). Person-centered planning is a foundation of psychiatric rehabilitation and recovery oriented services.
How do you know if you're doing the right thing? What do you know about PSR? When do you have an ethical duty to breach confidentiality? What are the ethics involved in advocacy? How is teamwork affected by the ethical code? What if we can’t avoid dual relationships? My client found me on Facebook and sent me a friend request - what do I do? Join Deb Brasher, MS, CPRP for this course on Ethics and Boundaries and find out! Participants will receive four CPRP and/or CFRP contact hours upon completion of the course.Register Today / Find Out MoreView other Academy online courses
New research overturns the belief that people with severe mental illness are incapable of effective communication with their psychiatrist, and are able to work together with them to achieve better outcomes for themselves.
"Interviews are a critical part of assessing people suffering from thought disorder (TD), and deciding what the best therapy is for them," says Professor Cherrie Galletly from the Adelaide Medical School, University of Adelaide.
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