Influenced by a school shooting, a neuroscientist is on a mission to change how both the brain and immune system handle stress.
.. when asked to circle half of the bunnies on a sheet of paper, she diligently circled the back half of each bunny.
.. Long-term stress is considered responsible for 60 percent of all human illness and disease
.. Analyzing the lives of children born to mothers who were pregnant during the Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944, a famine that affected more than 4.5 million people, researchers found that prenatal exposure to extreme stress led to long-term cognitive and mental-health issues, as well as addiction. Prenatal stress exposure has since been linked with ADHD in children as old as 15 years, increased risk for autism, greater impulsivity in boys and girls, and poorer task performance in boys.
.. exposure during the second and third trimesters is linked with increased risk for depression, anxiety disorders, and bipolar disorder.
.. About 40 percent of the risk of depression is genetic, and stress is the most common trigger.
In Quick Response, de Blasio Calls Fatal Shooting of Mentally Ill Woman ‘Unacceptable’
Wallace Cooke Jr., who said he was a cousin of Ms. Danner’s mother, said Ms. Danner learned she had mental illness when she was in college.
“I resent her being dead this morning,” said Mr. Cooke, a former police officer who retired in 1984 after working for 15 years at the 26th Precinct in Harlem. “It’s totally unnecessary to kill a mentally ill person.”
..“Was it absolutely necessary to shoot Ms. Danner once, let alone twice?” he said. “A 66-year-old elderly woman with a medical condition is dead today. We all have to do better.”
How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Diagnose Mental Disorders
This model focused on tell-tale verbal tics of psychosis: short sentences, confusing, frequent use of words like “this,” “that,” and “a,” as well as a muddled sense of meaning from one sentence to the next.
.. The AI would present its findings as a number—like a blood-pressure reading—that a psychiatrist could take into account when making a diagnosis. And as the algorithm is “trained” on more and more patients, that reading could better reflect a patient’s state of mind.
.. If a person’s speech shows fewer signs of depression or bipolar disorder after being given one medication, this tool could help show that it’s working. If there are no changes, the AI might suggest trying another medication sooner, sparing the patient undue suffering.
.. And no one has yet published a proof-of-concept for depression or bipolar disorder.
.. Still, Vahabzadeh believes technology like this could someday help clinicians treat more people, and treat them more efficiently. And that could be crucial, given the shortage of mental-health-care providers throughout the U.S.
How to Fix a Broken Mental-Health System
Congress has a chance to overhaul the provision of care, making treatment more available to those who desperately need it.
.. Every day, when I am walking to work, or just walking through the streets of downtown Washington, I encounter homeless people on the street. The homeless cover many categories, but prominent among them are those with serious mental illnesses. They know no boundaries of race or education; there was a prominent story last year in the Washington Post of a homeless man with schizophrenia who told a judge that he didn’t need a lawyer, that he was a lawyer. When the judge reacted with bemused skepticism, the man informed the judge—accurately—that they had been in the same class at Harvard Law School (which also included Chief Justice Roberts!)
.. our focus has been far more on less serious illnesses like anxiety and depression than on the most serious mental illnesses, and our deep and understandable concern about civil liberties has gone too far when it comes to those who either don’t recognize they are ill or have deep psychoses. For them, freedom of choice can mean homelessness, jail, or worse.
.. 90 percent of beds in state hospitals have been eliminated, leaving only the streets, jails, or prisons for those with serious mental illness.
.. But they face another problem—getting adequate reimbursement from insurance companies—including from Medicaid and Medicare. Thanks to the yeoman efforts of the late Senator Paul Wellstone, along with Pete Domenici, the law provides for parity in insurance coverage for mental-health and physical-health services, a provision that was underscored in the Affordable Care Act. But as lots of people who have tried to get reimbursement from their providers for psychiatric care could attest, parity in theory and in practice are two different things. And even where providers cover the services, the reimbursement rates are often well below what is provided for physical health issues.
.. The best hope for the Stabenow-Blunt bill is to incorporate it into the opioid-crisis bill now in a conference committee