Mental Health Update

Adolescence is a crucial stage for physical and mental human development. An adolescent brain has increased desire of knowledge and exploration. At the same time it is highly vulnerable to high-risk behaviors, mental illness, and addiction. Adolescent drug and alcohol abuse, results in side affects that can impact them for entire life. Adolescence and Alcohol Abuse Easy access to alcohol is one of the most potential reasons that drive an adolescent towards alcohol abuse. As adolescents are not fully grown physically and mentally, alcohol abuse will have a long lasting and severe effect on them. Alcohol is a depressant that slows the function of ... Read Full Story

I have previously blogged about the unfortunate effect of atypical antipsychotics on body weight and on the possible strategies that may be effective in dealing with this important complication of psychiatric treatment. As the number of children and adolescents diagnosed with and treated for psychiatric disorders continues to increase, the use of these medications in this population is of growing concern. The extent to which atypical antipsychotic medications promote weight gain and increase cardiometabolic risk in children and adolescents was recently addressed by Christoph Correll and colleagues from the Zucker Hillside Hospital, Glen Oaks, NY, in a paper published in JAMA . The researchers ... Read Full Story

Researchers from the VA Ann Arbor Health System in Michigan have been looking into the links between mental-health problems and heart disease. They studied 150,000 veterans who completed a survey in 1999 and were followed for eight years. By the end of the study 8% of the participants had died of heart disease with people with psychosis being more than twice as likely to die. People with depression and bipolar disorder were also more likely to die of heart disease but this increased risk disappeared once unhealthy lifestyles had been taken into account. However, even after allowing for things such as smoking and weight ... Read Full Story

Researchers at the Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London have been looking into abnormalities in the white matter of people's brains and how this can lead to the development of schizophrenia. Professor Philip McGuire and Dr Sophia Frangou used a technique called diffusion tensor imaging to examine the white matter of adolescents and adults with schizophrenia. They found that the adolescents had severe deficits of white matter in the posterior (back) region of the brain; specifically the parietal region. In the older patients the white-matter abnormalities had "migrated" to the front of the brain where they had a dramatic impact on the frontal lobes. ... Read Full Story

Last year the UK government reclassified cannabis from a class C to a class B drug, partly out of concerns that cannabis, especially the more potent varieties, may increase the risk of schizophrenia in young people. But the evidence for… Read Full Story