mental disorders

Do Screens Make Psychotic Adults?

Flickr Images Do your work responsibilities and recreational choices involve a lot of computer use? Are you in the habit of updating social media through the day? Are you finding it weirdly difficult to concentrate on this paragraph? If the answer to all three questions was in the affirmative, this might not be [...]

How Artificial Intelligence Could Help Diagnose Mental Disorders

Flickr Images People convey meaning by what they say as well as how they say it: Tone, word choice, and the length of a phrase are all crucial cues to understanding what’s going on in someone’s mind. When a psychiatrist or psychologist examines a person, they listen for these signals to get a [...]

The Global Community Is Failing To Address Mental Health

Pixabay Images When it comes to mental health, the global health community has failed. Mental, neurological, and substance-use disorders are among the leading causes of the global burden of disease. By 2020, depression will be the second leading cause of disability. Suicide is a leading cause of death among adolescents. People with severe [...]

Workaholism Tied To Psychiatric Disorders

Pixabay Images Taking work to the extreme may be a sign of deeper psychological or emotional issues. Whether this reflects overlapping genetic vulnerabilities, disorders leading to workaholism or, conversely, workaholism causing such disorders, remain uncertain. In wait for more research, physicians should not take for granted that a seemingly successful workaholic does not [...]

New Study Of High-risk Teens Reveals A Biological Pathway For Depression

Pixabay Images A long line of research links poverty and depression. Now, a study by Duke University scientists shows how biology might underlie the depression experienced by high-risk adolescents whose families are socio-economically disadvantaged. The study, published May 24, 2016 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, combined genetics, brain imaging and behavioral data gathered [...]

Do You Inherit Your Parent’s Mental Illness?

James Longman/BBC News In the battle to find what causes mental illness, scientists are increasingly looking at genetic factors. For James Longman - whose father killed himself after suffering from schizophrenia - it's a very personal question. I'm often told I look like my dad, that I have his mannerisms and some of [...]

By |2016-05-15T09:50:11+10:00May 15th, 2016|Categories: Mental Health & Wellbeing, Society & Culture|Tags: , , , , , |1 Comment

Still in a Crib, Yet Being Given Antipsychotics 

Andrew Rios’s seizures began when he was 5 months old and only got worse. At 18 months, when an epilepsy medication resulted in violent behavior, he was prescribed the antipsychotic Risperdal, a drug typically used to treat schizophrenia and bipolar disorder in adults, and rarely used for children as young as 5 years. When Andrew screamed in his sleep and seemed to interact [...]

Seven Myths about Dyslexia Put to Rest

flickr As researchers who study dyslexia, we often read articles or overhear conversations that completely misunderstand what dyslexia is – or how it can be treated. Dyslexia is the term used to describe someone with reading difficulties – and it affects up to 10% of Australians. A reader with dyslexia may have difficulty in [...]

Cats and Mental Illness

eruditefeline.wordpress.com, 20th Century Fox Film Corp The association between cats and lunacy is a common one in pop culture. Think of James Bond’s villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Number 1) and his cat, or Inspector Gadget’s Doctor Claw and M.A.D. Cat; or think of Dr. Eleanor Abernathy, the Crazy Cat Lady from The Simpsons. Is it somehow [...]

Alertness to Mental Disorders Key to Preventing Youth Suicides

Youth suicide is an immensely complex interplay of social, psychological, neurological, biological and cultural variables. The problem is that these variables carry unequal weights and no single one has been demonstrated to be necessary or sufficient to cause an individual to take their own life. This makes it very difficult to predict whether a young [...]

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