LinkBlog
Generalized Anxiety Disorder - Patient treatment manual (pdf)
Understanding post-traumatic stress disorder
Most People are Optimists - Except for Lawyers
recommended links
Depression Is Real Coalition
-
ABIL: Agoraphobics Building
Independant Lives -
Agoraphobia and Panic
Disorder Foundation -
Anxiety Disorders Association
of America - Anxiety Network Australia
- Anxiety-Panic.Com
- AnxietyZone
- Army Behavioral Health
- BrainPhysics - OCD
-
Canadian Network for Mood
and Anxiety Treatments - Children of Hoarders
- Choices in Mental Health (UK)
-
Dart Foundation: Gateway to PTSD
information -
David Baldwin's
Trauma Information Pages - EMDR Institute, Inc.
- EMDR Network Japan
- Fear of Flying course (free)
- Healthy Minds
- Information for People with Anxiety Disorders
- Internet Guide to REBT, CBT
- Living with a Brain Disorder
- Morita Therapy
- Mayo Clinic : Depression
- Mayo Clinic : GAD
- Mayo Clinic : OCD
- Mayo Clinic : Panic Attacks
- Mayo Clinic : PTSD
- Mayo Clinic : Social Anxiety
-
Medicines.org.uk - Anxiety &
Depression guides - Mind-Your-Mind Canada
- National Center for PTSD
-
National Institute of Mental
Health (NIMH) - No Such Thing As Crazy
- OCD Action, UK
- OCD Ireland
- Obsessive Compulsive Foundation
- Open Minds, Open Doors
- Out of the silence - site for young people with mental illness
- Paniccure.com
- Partners With PTSD
- Prescription Drug Information
- Psychiatric Service Dog Society
- PsychNews
-
Rational Emotive Behavior
Therapy (REBT) - Sane Australia
-
Shyness & Social Anxiety
Service of Australia -
Social Phobia/Social Anxiety
Association - Social Anxiety Support board
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South African Depression &
Anxiety Group - Suicide Prevention Help
-
tAPir - the Anxiety Panic
internet resource -
The Panic Center (Free
CBT based programs) - The School of OCD
- UN-WHO Drug Trials Database
- U.S. Army Behavioral Health - PTSD
we support
"just don't smoke"
Yul Brynner
- Menthol cigarettes harder to quit
- Secondhand smoke in cars serious threat to kid's health
- Starting smoking young increases addiction risk
-
Smoking doesn't slim girls;
stunts boys' growth - 40 reasons why you should quit smoking
- Pregnant smokers 'prime' their kids to smoke
- Smoking related coronary artery disease quickly reversed if young smokers quit
- Not ready to quit? Try cutting back
- Half smoking again within year of lung cancer surgery
- Cutting back 'compensation' increases toxin load per cigarette
- Tobacco companies upped nicotine level 11% since 1998
- Workplace passive smoke increases lung cancer risk
- Hooked by genes: The DNA sequences cigarette companies love
- Smoking causes long lasting changes to brain's bio chemistry
- Nicotine receptor stimulant trebles the odds of stopping smoking
- Bupropion, nortriptyline double chances of quitting
- Nicotine's powerful role in reinforcing smoking
- Pregnant smokers raise child's risk of stroke, heart attack
- Smoking linked to pancreatic cancer
- Neurobiology of Smokers' Cravings
- 'Low cancer risk' cigarettes as deadly as regular kind
- Quitting reduces lung cancer death risk by 70%
- Fetal nicotine exposure linked to teen attention problems
- Outdoor second-hand smoke exposure can harm
- Response to day's first cigarette predicts ease of quitting
- 'Healthy' children of smoking parents aren't really so healthy
- Children of smokers have up to five times higher levels of a nicotine toxin
- Smoking increases risk of dementia
- Smoking kills even after quitting
- Antenatal second hand smoke exposure increases child's psychological problems
- Smoking could kill 1 billion this century: WHO
- Just 1 cigarette can lead to nicotine addiction
- Smokers less likely to survive early stage lung cancer
- Smokeless tobacco delivers carcinogens more efficiently than cigarettes!
- Smoking permanently turns on genes that increase lung cancer susceptibility
- Secondhand smoke a health hazard for pets too
- Hypnosis for smoking cessation sees strong results
- Smoking doesn't burn fat
- Smoking linked to sagging breasts
- No evidence waterpipes decrease smoking harm
- Tobacco smoke + alcohol damage hearts more than either alone
anti torture campaign
- Torture experts write APA policy
- [APA] still rocked by torture debate
- Petition for psychologists
- AMA president says APA "did not accurately represent our ethical guidelines"
- Psychologists Aiding Torturers
-
Annual conference endorses
APA's torture policy :( - Physicians for Human Rights call on Congress to vote No on Military Commissions Bill
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Torture is a Form of Trauma;
Trauma Causes PTSD - Psychoanalysts' association condemns torture use
- Humiliating, inhumane or degrading treatment IS torture
- Two American psychologists accused of war crimes. U.S. DoD investigating.
- DoD report proves psychologists central to POW/detainee abuse (pdf)
- 40 psychologists demand APA change policy on torture (pdf)
- Did the American Psychological Association turn a blind eye to torture for medicine precribing rights?
- Will psychologists still abet torture?
- Psychologist, Author Mary Pipher Returns APA Award Over Interrogation Policy
- Guantanamo Medical Role Likened to South Africa Under Apartheid
Deputy Army Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Lt. General John (Jeff) Kimmons, has stated that no actionable intelligence had been obtained through abusive interrogation methods in the last 5 years.
monument, Monmouth County
New Jersey.
Protein could be key to stress, anxiety, and depression resiliency
When faced with adversity, some people succumb to debilitating psychological disorders including posttraumatic stress disorder and depression, while others are able to remain remarkably optimistic. A key question in mental health research is: Why are some people resilient to stress, while others are not?
A new mouse study reveals that the difference may depend in part on the chemistry of the brains' reward circuits. The findings could point to new psychiatric drugs, and perhaps even new ways to encourage resilience for people in high-stress circumstances, including soldiers in combat, disaster victims, and emergency responders, according to the researchers.
A significant finding is that resistance is not simply a passive absence of vulnerability mechanisms, as was previously thought, but a biologically dynamic process that results in specific adaptations in the brain’s response to stress.
"One of the major insights provided by this work is that resilience to stress is an active process," said Dr Eric Nestler, chairman of psychiatry at UT Southwestern Medical Center and senior author of the study, which also included researchers from Harvard and Cornell universities.
"This means that chronic stress, depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and similar disorders might be treated by promoting the mechanisms that underlie resilience," Dr Nestler added.
Mice, like humans, vary widely in their reactions to stress. Some adapt well, while others become timid and appear depressed. While stress is known to play a major role in human mental illness, scientists wonder why some people can cope well with adversity while others do not.
The researchers used male mice that had been inbred to the point that they were genetically identical and raised them in the same carefully controlled environment. They stressed the rodents by placing them in the territory of a larger, aggressive mouse and recorded how this stress affected their ability to interact socially. In a previous study, Dr Nestler and his colleagues established that mice which repeatedly go through this "social defeat" are a good model for human depression.
"One important lesson we have shown even in previous papers is that a series of genetically identical animals respond differently to chronic stress," Nestler said. "Thirty to forty percent seemed to be resilient and did not develop bad symptoms. The clinical implications are that the ability to identify mechanisms of resistance can help provide new and novel approaches to stress."
In the current study, some of the mice interacted with the unfamiliar, more aggressive mouse, while others avoided it and showed submissive behavior.
The researchers classified the mice according to whether they had coped with the stress or not. They found that some showed a long-lasting social withdrawal, while others continued to interact normally with other mice.
The mice that coped less effectively were also less attracted to sugar but more to cocaine than the coping mice, suggesting that there was a link between their vulnerability to stress and substance abuse.
The researchers then examined two areas of the brain that are associated with pleasure and reward, called the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and the nucleus accumbens.
Neurons in the VTA send chemical signals to the nucleus accumbens, and the researchers found that in mice experiencing social defeat and depression, these neurons fire faster. Upon firing, the neurons cause the release of BDNF.
The researchers further found that the vulnerable mice had an up to 90 percent increase in Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor (BDNF) in their nucleus accumbens. The resilient ones did not, presumably because neurons from their VTAs did not fire as much. When the researchers blocked BDNF in the more timid mice, they became resistant to stress.
BDNF promotes neuroplasticity in the brain, presumably enabling new connections between neurons, the researchers explained, a process which is considered the cellular basis for learning and memory.
"The increase in BDNF may have an adaptive role normally, allowing an animal to learn that a situation is bad and avoid it in the future," said Dr Nestler. "But under conditions of extreme social stress, susceptible animals may be 'over-learning' this principle and generalizing it to other situations. They avoid their aggressors, but they also avoid all mice and even other fun things like sugar or sex."
"Preventing BDNF signaling to the nucleus accumbens may be a key mechanism of resistance to stress and depression," Dr Nestler said.
The researchers also found that better-coping mice had far more genes turned on and off in the VTA and nucleus accumbens than vulnerable mice. This discovery suggests that successful coping with stress is an active process that involves the regulation of many genes, not just the lack of responses seen in poorly coping animals.
Three of the genes that showed the greatest difference between the two groups of mice coded for potassium channels, molecules that let potassium pass through a nerve cell's membrane when it fires. The researchers found that the resilient animals had increased activity of the potassium channels, which counters the increased nerve firing, and hence the increase of BDNF release, in the vulnerable mice.
To explore how these results might apply to humans, the researchers obtained brain samples from depressed and non-depressed humans. The depressed people showed a 40 percent increase in BDNF levels in the nucleus accumbens, compared to controls.
From these various findings, the researchers concluded that preventing BDNF release into the nucleus accumbens may be a way to increase coping ability to stress or depression.
"It may be possible to develop compounds that improve one's ability to cope with stress," Dr Nestler said. However, he cautioned that "Blocking BDNF at certain stages in the process could perturb other systems in negative ways. The key is to identify safe ways of enhancing this protective resilience machinery."
Vaishnav Krishnan, an M.D./Ph.D. student in the Medical Scientist Training Program and lead author of the paper, said, "The study yields significant insights into molecular mechanisms that may underlie individual differences of people in reacting to stressful life events.
"We have always tried to understand the changes in the brain that lead to such things as the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder," Krishnan added. "This study shows we can increase our understanding and development of new therapeutic measures to overcome those changes."
Commentating on the study Dr Thomas R. Insel, director of the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health, which partly funded the research, said the findings are "part of a large body of work coming out of Dr Nestler's laboratory trying to understand what this important neurotrophic molecule, BDNF, does."
"What's exciting here is that it is important for resilience, being able to recover from a traumatic event," Insel added. "One of the great values of this work is to help us understand how mammals, including humans, might be able to recover from the traumas inherent in human existence."
This was work was also supported by grants from the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National Alliance for Research in Schizophrenia and Depression.
Krishnan V, Han MH, Graham DL, et al. Molecular Adaptations Underlying Susceptibility and Resistance to Social Defeat in Brain Reward Regions Cell 2007 Oct 17;131:391-404 [Abstract]