Tag Archives: mental disorder

What is hoarding? How to help a hoarder?

Hoarding is a mental disorder where someone struggles to throw away or get rid of anything. They could hoard anything from newspapers to cats. A lot of hoarders continue to hold onto items because they believe at some point these things will be useful or valuable. Another reason that people develop hoarding tendencies is that they have other mental health issues. Many doctors believe that depression, obsession-compulsive disorder, attention deficit disorder, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder all can lead to hoarding. If you have someone in your life that suffers from hoarding, there are ways that you can help them. (more…)

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Kicking the habit among mentally ill

A new study, co-authored by Eric Achtyes from Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, shows that people with serious mental illness have better luck quitting smoking and avoiding relapse through extended treatments using varenicline, a smoking cessation drug, and cognitive behavioral therapy.

The study was recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Association. (more…)

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Payment Innovation Cuts Depression Time in Half

When 25 percent of the payments to community health clinics were based on quality of care, patients received better care and had better depression outcomes. The results of this initiative are published in the American Journal of Public Health.

University of Washington researchers examined records from almost 8,000 patients treated for depression in 29 community health clinics in the Washington State Mental Health Integration Program before and after the implementation of a pay-for-performance incentive. After the incentive was started, patients were seen more quickly and were more likely to receive consultation from a psychiatrist. They were also more likely to show improvements in their depression. (more…)

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Does Sex Matter? It May When Evaluating Mental Status

Adrianna Mendrek. Image credit : University of Montreal

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that differs between the sexes in terms of age at onset, symptomatology, response to medication, and structural brain abnormalities. Now, a new study from the Université de Montréal shows that there is gender difference between men and women’s mental ability – with women performing better than men. These findings, published recently in, Schizophrenia Research, have implications for the more than 300 000 affected Canadians. 

“We are the first to report sex differences in brain function of schizophrenics,” says Université de Montréal professor, Adrianna Mendrek a researcher at the Centre de Recherche Fernand-Seguin, Hospital Louis-H Lafontaine. “We chose to study a task involving mental rotation of a three dimensional image because in healthy men and women, this consistently elicits differences in terms of reaction time and performance accuracy.”  (more…)

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