Recently in Mental Health Category

Researchers from the University of Southampton are testing whether a version of dialectical behaviour therapy is effective in treating refractive, or treatment-resistant, depression.

The approach is based on the idea that "depression is not the primary problem for many hard-to-help patients."

Thomas Lynch, Professor of Clinical Psychology at the university, explains: "Rather, their over-controlled personality style limits opportunities to interact flexibly with others and to learn new skills. So, when these people experience a depression-triggering life event, they find it hard to get help and their depression becomes more entrenched, resistant to change, and chronic in nature. Our therapy assumes that depressed, emotionally over-controlled patients lack the skills needed to be flexible, express vulnerable emotions, or establish close relationships; thus, we focus on teaching a range of skills that target these specific difficulties."

The £1.9million study, is a multi-centre randomised controlled trial and a collaboration between researchers from the universities of Southampton, Plymouth, Swansea, Bournemouth, Bristol, King's College London, and Exeter. 

Three things I've noticed:

1. Ruby Wax has launched Black Dog Tribe, a new site for people with depression - it's currently in beta and focuses on ways people can support each other. It features lots of interaction and multimedia stuff.

2. Social Spider and the Mental Health Providers Forum have produced a report, Better Mental Health in a Bigger Society which looks at how the NHS and local authorities can help individuals and communities take forward their own vision of wellbeing.

3. Lifehacker has a piece on how music can help you be more productive and boost your immune system, as well as helping people with dementia recall memories. 

(Pic: Brandon Giesbrecht on Flickr)

People with bipolar disorder and healthy siblings of those with bipolar disorder or schizophrenia are overrepresented among creative professions, a large-scale study has found.

The study is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, which also points out in an editorial that "most people who are creative do not have mental illness and most people who are mentally ill are not unusually creative."

But it raises interesting questions about the evolutionary role of mental illness and what will happen when, as the Journal points out, the "inevitable" genetic testing for bipolar disorder becomes reality.

It adds: "This may result in the unintended consequence of selecting against potentially beneficial variance in cognitive styles, drive, risk-taking and temperament. The potential for misuse through the development of pharmacological or other techniques to enhance cognition, energy, and mood can be imagined... Bipolar illness is devastating and this should remain the central focus of our scientific and clinical work. But while doing so, we need to
keep in mind the anciently observed thin partitions between disease and imagination."

(Pic model released: Caroline Arber/Mood Board/Rex Features)

The following is a guest post by Michael Richmond, who has just published his first novel, Sisyphusa, an allegory of the mental health system.

If there's one conclusion I've come to after five years of suffering from it, it is that mental illness doesn't happen in isolation. We know that one in four Britons will suffer from a mental disorder in their lifetime. The World Health Organization even predicts depression will be the second most widespread illness in the developed world by 2020.

But mental illness is not just statistics or distant "others," far removed from regular human activity. It is all too human. It is dependent on how we order our own individual worlds and how we relate to other human beings. We evolved as a social species and it was largely thanks to our ability to co-operate that we outlasted other early humans. In recent decades political, economic and cultural shifts have made society far less socially interdependent and far more greedy, selfish and acquisitive but this goes against our evolutionary biology. We are not built to go it alone.

Scarring void

I know this from my own experience of an isolating episode of depression. My family have been my loyal "tribe" and taken care of me. However, my inability to engage with wider society or reconnect with the friends I used to know has left a scarring void in my life. Mental illness must not be just a burden for the individual sufferer or their family because it is reflective of the society we have built. The social breakdown, health and wealth inequality, celebrity, consumerism and binge culture that we see around us all affect our mental health. These damaging phenomena are a monument to the unfettered market that has ruled our lives.

The policy of 'care in the community,' which has been pursued for the last thirty years, represents a more humane approach compared to the large Victorian asylums. These imposing buildings were conceived of more as quarantines where the uncomfortable truth of "madness," an ever-present throughout human history, was sealed off as an act of segregation. However, despite this move towards inclusiveness and a softening of political language the reality is still too often one of isolation, stigma and neglect if not outright abuse. By accepting that sufferers of mental illness are a part of and not apart from society, we must now accept that aspects of our society are contributing to our dire problems with our mental health. It is also crucial that there is widespread acceptance that mental illness is something that can befall anyone.

Thankless struggle

The pervasive neoliberal mantra of 'private good, public bad' has ring-fenced large swathes of the economy as beyond regulation but if the supreme aim of every country is to create an amenable business environment then the wellbeing of its citizens can never be more than an afterthought. Instead we're left with reactive government measures in health, crime, education and environmental policy being largely a thankless struggle to clean up the mess wrought by an economic system that fosters inequality, promotes narcissism and propagates that all human meaning resides in the relentless pursuit of material wealth. Too much of healthcare becomes "fire-fighting" when much more should be prevention and care.

I prefer the argument for helping people to lead healthy and meaningful lives but even those with a solely economic view of humanity must deduce that it costs much more to deal with the effects of these problems than it would to begin to tackle them at root. Research by Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson for their book, The Spirit Level, reveals that more unequal societies have higher rates of mental illness and do worse on various other social indicators. They write that mental illness is closely related to status anxiety and so more unequal and callous countries leave more people marginalised, more 'losers' and more problems for us all.

Such high levels of mental illness mean this issue can no longer be brushed under the carpet. Is there any issue which touches nearly everyone's lives yet is so ignored or misunderstood by politics and media? Our rates of mental illness demand that we re-examine our attitudes and language towards the concept of 'madness.' For mental health workers and carers, who see all this play out on the front line, I only wish that their jobs could be made easier by changes at a political and economic level. I also wish that they could be spared the re-organisations, managerial initiatives and arbitrary targets which prevent them from doing what they do best - caring for patients with humanity and compassion.

Will you be incorporating this into your social work practice in the UK? I would be interested to hear from anyone who tries it out.

There was an interesting piece in the Guardian earlier this week about a reporter who spent a week trying to integrate into their lives some of the tips for happier living produced by Action for Happiness.

The experiment was apparently not without success. I know Action for Happiness also produces information about encouraging a happier workplace and I wonder if any social work/care teams have tried implementing any of their recommendations. Or perhaps you'd like to try them out - feel free to tell me how it goes!

One of the things AoH recommends is meditation and the Guardian article specifically referred to a site called Headspace which encourages people to start meditating for 10 minutes a day. Has anyone tried it? Again I'd be interested to hear how it went. In fact, I might try it myself and report back here on how it is going. Now, if only I could free up 10 minutes each day...

Mental health charity Sane has launched a nationwide Black Dog campaign to raise awareness of depression.

Winston Churchill famously referred to his depression as the "black dog" and Sane plans to install at least 40 black dog sculptures around the UK.

Sane chief exec Marjorie Wallace explains: "We hope the physical presence of a black dog will help people to define their experience of this invisible condition and provide a language in which to express inner feelings of anxiety, depression and loneliness."

Comedienne Ruby Wax has recently started a five week run of her show Ruby Wax-Losing It at London's Duchess Theatre. Accompanied by singer/pianist Judith Owen, Wax reflects on her own breakdown before engaging in a conversation with the audience about the issues raised.

The duo are also holding open forums at the theatre for members of the public. The forums, held in partnership with mental health charity SANE, will feature guest speakers from the fields of psychology, psychiatry and neuroscience, and will also provide an oppurtunity for memebers of the public to share their experience of mental illness.

The upcoming sessions, which take place from 2-4pm, will feature:

• 13th September - Professor Peter Fonagy, head of research, Department of Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology, UCL
• 20th September - Dr Mark Collins, consultant psychiatrist, The Priory Hospital Roehampton
• 26th September - Professor Mark Williams, director, Oxford Mindfulness Centre

Apparently, Wax's long-term goal is to establish a place, like Alcoholics or Narcotics Anonymous, where people can go to talk about their mental health issues.

Sounds interesting and I hope to find out more and see the show next week.

People living in countries with a more progressive tax system are generally happier than those in countries with a flatter tax system, a study suggests.

Someone should tell UK chancellor George Osborne, who has been urged by certain economists to remove the 50p rate. Unfortunately, he seems far more interested in punishing public sector workers and unemployed for the financial mess we now found ourselves in.

Meanwhile, reading fiction seems to have interesting psychological effects - improving empathy and fulfilling a need for social connection.

And finally, aerobic exercise may reduce the risk of dementia.

More than a third of EU citizens suffer from mental health problems, new research suggests. While the figure has increased since the last survey in 2005, that is accounted for by the inclusion of a number of previously excluded conditions.

The researchers noted that mental health treatments were "unusually deficient" when compared to other health conditions.

They called for screening of children for anxiety to prevent future problems.

Depression in women has doubled since the 1970s.

And it appears that mental health conditions are starting earlier, with the increasingly insecure world in which young people are growing up blamed. We've torn down most of our safety nets, structures and employment paths in favour of out-of-control markets and "flexibility" in recent years so it should hardly be surprising. (This analysis/rant is inspired by Tony Judt's Ill Fares The Land - which is well worth a read).

(Pic: openDemocracy on flickr)