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By Cindy Halpin
Scientists have finally verified what certain people have long suspected—boys and girls learn differently—and many public schools have thus introduced gender-specific classrooms. Professionals in the field of substance abuse treatment have also seen that women are impacted by addiction differently than are men, and that the psychological and physiological effects of drugs and alcohol are often more severe for women.
The percentage of women who have mental health problems such as depression in addition to addiction or who show signs of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is significantly higher than it is for men; in addition, the mortality rate for women with addiction(s) is 50 percent to 100 percent higher for women than men. Because of their size and hormone fluctuations during the menstrual cycle, women generally become intoxicated more quickly than men—and become clinically “addicted” much more quickly (according to the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism).
Societal influences that historically have contributed to the disease of alcoholism or drug addiction also are different for men and women, sometimes influencing women to be even more reluctant to admit to substance abuses.
Obstacles to Treatment
Although 40 percent of all alcoholics are women, women account for only 25 percent of all who receive treatment for addictions (according to the Alcohol and Drug Problems Association of North America). Aside from society’s general expectations of women, as well as its association of women and alcohol with loose morals, women face specific barriers to treatment that men do not. Barriers for women are usually very practical: lack of childcare, fear of losing their children, lower wages, and less money.
Throughout American history, society and traditional family structures have contributed to women’s roles being central to the stability and “nurturing” of the immediate family, and often of the extended family of parents and in-laws and close friends. And whereas drinking a couple of beers with his buddies makes a guy “manly,” an alcohol or chemical abuse problem makes a woman shameful and suspect, and her family, the object of pity and scorn. Women are more likely than men to lack social and family support for going into treatment. Because alcoholism is also a family disease, and however dysfunctional the family may be, the roles of mother and wife are seen as essential in meeting the needs of the others, and everyone’s denial remains a powerful barricade to treatment.
....Because hormonal shifts play a role in relapse—possibly in the development of addiction as well—a hormonal shift assessment and treatment plan are integrated into treatment. As many women know only too well, hormonal shifts produce emotionality, anxiety, irritability, and depression and can be powerful triggers that may accelerate a woman’s pattern of abuse or even contribute to relapse.
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By CCHR International
June 23, 2010
A new study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry and headed by psychiatrist John H. Gilmore, professor of psychiatry and Director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research, claims to be able to detect “brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia risk” in infants just a few weeks old. We would like to point out the obvious flaw in this bogus study; there is no medical/scientific test in existence that schizophrenia is a physical disease or brain abnormality to start with. There is not one chemical imbalance test, X-ray, MRI or any other test for schizophrenia, not one. So with no evidence of medical abnormality to start with, the “associated with schizophrenia risk” amounts to what George Orwell called Doublespeak (language that deliberately disguises, distorts, misleads)—it means nothing.
For decades, psychiatrists and Pharma have spouted lines to the press and public amounting to, “researchers now believe” they have medical evidence of schizophrenia as a physical/biological abnormality, or “new evidence suggests” evidence of schizophrenia as a real disease. But despite millions of dollars in research funds and countless tales of “belief” —no evidence to support the theory. One of the most common tricks employed by the Psycho/Pharmaceutical industry to mislead the public, legislators and the press, is to take X-rays or brain images of people who have been long-term users of antipsychotic drugs (known to cause brain atrophy/shrinkage) and then claim people with schizophrenia have smaller brains. They’ve spouted similar studies on kids with ADHD having smaller brains, but the bottom line to that study was that the kids with smaller brains, were…smaller kids. These are just a few of the many PR spins employed by Psycho/Pharma to try and maintain the “belief” in psychiatry, in their credibility as a science. As evidenced by the recent statement of psychiatrist Allen Frances, former DSM- IV Task Force Chairman, this belief is falling apart even within their own ranks, “There are no objective tests in psychiatry-no X-ray, laboratory, or exam finding that says definitively that someone does or does not have a mental disorder.” —Allen Frances (And Frances isn’t the only psychiatrist exposing the fraud of the biological brain disease model; click here for more.)
The logical question the press should be asking is what are the American Journal of Psychiatry and “the Director of UNC Schizophrenic Research” really after? What is their goal?
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America's Most Popular Narcotic Drug
A narcotic painkiller tops Forbes' list of the most prescribed medicines.
Matthew Herper,
05.11.10, 04:00 PM EDT
The most popular medicine in the U.S. was prescribed 128 million times last year, even as a panel of experts called together by the Food and Drug Administration recommended that regulators ban it.
The drug is Vicodin, a 40-year-old addictive medicine that combines the narcotic hydrocodone with acetaminophen, the active ingredient in Tylenol; the prescription tally also includes numerous generic versions. It is emblematic of the trend that emerges from our look at the most popular prescription pills: the death of the blockbuster drug.
Forbes' list of the 15 most popular drugs comes from IMS Health ( RX - news - people ), a company that tracks sales at the pharmacy level for drug companies. The list shows how medicine makers are rapidly losing their grip on the average consumer. Only one drug in the top 15, Pfizer's ( PFE - news - people ) Lipitor, is a big-selling brand-name medication. The rest are cheap generic versions of one-time big sellers that have lost their patent protection and become commodities. Generic copies of Vicodin go for 30 cents a pill, compared to $4 per pill for Lipitor.
Vicodin is a drug that is crying out to be replaced. Vicodin has a supporting role on the television show House, M.D. because the protagonist, a Sherlock Holmes-like doctor, is hooked on it. It is particularly dangerous because when patients develop a tolerance for the narcotic they start taking too much. This can lead to liver failure from overdoses of the acetaminophen component of the combo. Most of the 400 deaths due to acetaminophen poisoning each year result from misuse of the Vicodin or similar drugs. Last June an FDA advisory panel recommended banning Vicodin. The FDA is still deciding whether to take this advice.
"People are taking this as if they're taking a strong Tylenol," says Michel Dubois, director of pain medicine at New York University Langone Medical Center. There's nothing wrong with Vicodin after a surgery or tooth extraction, he says, but it's being used too often by primary care physicians with "minimal training" in dealing with chronic pain. "It has been trivialized, and its wrong to trivialize this strong a pain medication," he says.
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Joe Hibbeln, M.D., believes our diet is making us depressed, addicted and violent. He thinks he’s found a simple solution.
MSN.com
By Rachael Moeller Gorman, EatingWell.com
May 17, 2010
Joe Hibbeln maneuvers his small blue Mazda 626 around traffic on a wide boulevard in Bethesda, Md.
"How many people," he shouts over the noise from the open window, "even Miss America, say ‘I want to make the world a happier place’?" He turns the wheel sharply to the left. "Well, I’m doin’ it! I’m zeroing in on a nutritional deficiency that makes the world an unhappy place."
Hibbeln, a captain in the United States Public Health Service, one of the country’s seven uniformed services ("army of the Surgeon General," says Hibbeln), is talking about omega-3 fatty acids. He has, in fact, devoted his entire career to studying the long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids that are best known for their heart-health benefits. He loves them. He loves the fish they come from.
Hibbeln, 49, is average height, with dark, graying hair slightly longer on top and matching bushy eyebrows. His love affair with fats began simply. In a musty autopsy suite at the University of Illinois-Chicago medical school more than 25 years ago, Hibbeln, an aspiring psychiatrist, held a brain for the first time. It was jiggly and white, not what one would expect of a computing juggernaut. "What the heck is this thing made of?" Hibbeln asked. Mostly fat, his instructor replied.
Fascinated by the idea that the most complex organ in our bodies was, in large part, a type of tissue most of us want to get rid of, Hibbeln began scouring the scientific literature to learn more about how the fat comprising the brain influenced its function. He kept encountering the work of Norman Salem, Jr., Ph.D., a neurobiologist who studied docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), a particular type of omega-3 fat prevalent in the brain—and in fish. (Fish often consume a lot of omega-3-rich algae or eat other, smaller fish that do.)
During his last year of medical school, Hibbeln reached out to Salem, who told him something that forever changed his career path: Our bodies do not produce DHA or other omega-3s from scratch; we have to get them from food. These words opened up a whole new avenue of inquiry for Hibbeln, and he jumped into researching how the fats we eat (or don’t eat) might change our brain.
He was especially interested in mental illness. He has a family member with mental illness and in 1985, his parents, Raymond and Shirley, helped found the first national support group for families dealing with mental illness, what’s now called the Depression and Bipolar Support Alliance.
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Extensive imaging study shows human brains surprisingly similar at rest.
Behavioral Health Center
March 2010
Findings could lead to deeper understanding of mental illness.
A new study funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) titled “Toward discovery science of human brain function” has produced intriguing results that may shed light on mental illnesses.
The study—a vast international collaboration led by investigators at the NYU Langone Medical Center—is published in the latest online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The resulting map of functional connections among different regions of the resting brain could shed new light into the fundamental processes that can sustain health or promote disease in the human brain.
For years, researchers assumed that activity patterns in the brain varied widely from person to person. This study shows, however, that some of those activity patterns, at least when assessed in the resting brain, display a basic universal architecture that is shared among people of all types. Researchers collected “resting-state” functional MRI data (functional brain scans of participants performing no task while relaxing inside the scanner) from more than 1,400 healthy volunteers at 35 international centers.
While the core elements of this resting architecture are the same, differences in the strength of functional relationships were detected between male and female brains and also across different ages. These variations are subtle, but they present an interesting platform for future research and drug discovery.
This collaborative project is the largest-ever functional imaging study of the normal brain. Investigators have made the data freely available through a Web site supported by the National Institutes of Health Blueprint for Neuroscience Research. Open sharing of the data will allow the establishment of normative population benchmarks, against which researchers will be able to compare patients with brain disorders or at greater risk for addiction and other psychiatric disorders.
To access the article: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/recent
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