Angela Peterson has compiled a list of the top 100 blogs for psychology students which you can find athttp://onlinepsychologydegrees.org/100-best-blogs-for-psychology-students/But don't forget to keep visiting Mental Health Update! Read Full Story

Researchers at Edinburgh University have been looking into the links between genetics and mental illness in a study of 4,000 people, half of whom were psychiatric patients. They found that a gene called ABCA13 was partially inactive in people with severe mental-health problems such as depression, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The researchers think that the gene may influence the way fat molecules are used in brain cells and the research will now focus on how exactly this happens.You can... Read Full Story

Adolescents who are socially insecure also experience more aches and pains and depression. Researchers from the Universite de Montreal studied 382 students from years 8 to 12 who weres asked to fill in questionnaires about their physical and emotional pain. The insecure teenagers experienced more pain in the form of headaches, stomach aches and joint pain and were more likely to be depressed. They also tended to be more 'alarmist' about their pain seeing it as a harbinger of something more se... Read Full Story

Levels of mental-health problems among former U.S. servicemen have increased dramatically since the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Researchers from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the University of California, San Francisco found that rates of post-traumatic stress disorder had increased by 4-7x and that one in three veterans enrolled in the veterans' health system has been diagnosed with a mental-health disorder. However, veterans are still reluctant to seek help with only 4 out of 10 pe... Read Full Story

Urinary incontinence and depression often go together in older women. The natural conclusion to draw from this is that becoming incontinent makes people depressed but new research from the University of Washington in Seattle suggests that it might actually be depression that makes people incontinent. Researchers looked at information from the ongoing Health and Retirement Study which covers 70,000 households. They looked at women who started the study with depression to see if they developed ... Read Full Story

Researchers from Ohio State University have been using data from the National Epidemiologic Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions to look at the links between ageing and alcohol. They found that although adults over 60 were less likely to abuse alcohol or be dependent on it those older people who did have a drink problem consumed more alcohol and had more binges than younger problem drinkers. Adult alcoholics over 60 drank more than 40 alcoholic drinks a week on average compared to younger... Read Full Story

Children whose mothers are depressed may suffer more with their asthma. Researchers from Johns Hopkins Children's Center analysed data from interviews with 262 African-American women whose children suffered from the condition, which African-Americans are known to be particularly vulnerable to. They found that when the mothers were more depressed their children's symptoms worsened. However, worsening symptoms among the children did not lead to more depression in the mothers. The researchers th... Read Full Story

Scientists have long puzzled over the links between memory, sleep and learning. Researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois asked 12 participants to associate 50 images with a random location on a computer screen. Each image was paired with a sound e.g. a stick of dynamite was paired with the sound of an explosion while a shattering wine glass was paired with the sound of breaking glass. 45 minutes after they had finished learning the participants were sent to lie in a darkened... Read Full Story

Burnout can be defined as emotional exhaustion with, cynicism about and lack of interest in one's job. Doctors are particularly at risk from burnout and a study of 7,905 surgeons by researchers at the John Hopkins University School of Medicine has found that it, and depression, are associated with more medical errors than straightforward tiredness. Nine per cent of the surgeons said that they had made a major medical mistake in the previous three months and 40% of them said that they were bur... Read Full Story

Researchers at the Cincinatti Children's Hospital Medical Center have added to the evidence linking exposure to substances in the womb to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). They studied 2,588 children aged between eight and fifteen of whom 8.7% had ADHD. Children who had been exposed to high prenatal levels of tobacco were 2.4x more likely to have ADHD while children whose mothers had had high levels of lead in their bloodstream were 2.3x more likely. Children who were exposed t... Read Full Story