Mental Health

Spc. Lance Pilgrim was among the first Army troops to enter Iraq in March 2003. Eventually, he was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and died from an accidental overdose in 2007 at the age of 26. His father, Randy Pilgrim, says he first realized something was wrong when his son broke down at the sight of an animal that had been run over. The image had triggered the memory of a traumatic time overseas. “We tried once to go around bodies in Iraq, but we were ambushed. So we were told from then on, don’t let anything slow you down,” Lance Pilgrim told his father. “I had to run over people. … I don’t think I’ll ever get that out of my mind.”

Two important points here:

1. Not every socially awkward and/or geeky person is on the autistic spectrum. Nevertheless, as we’ve come to understand more about autistic spectrum disorders, it has become clearer that people who 20 or 30 years ago would’ve been classified as “odd” in fact have a neurological condition.
2. It’s okay to find the autistic funny.

Some Buddhists like to decry Buddhism being used as self-help or therapy. And yet, Buddhism has become so entwined with self-help that in New York Magazine‘s recent self-help issue, half of the six feature articles mention Buddhism in some way. Kathryn Schulz’s piece “The Self in Self-Help,” accurately summarizes the whole phenomenon in just one sentence: “Curiously, Buddhism is simultaneously a burgeoning influence on the Western self-help movement and entirely at odds with it: anti-self, and anti-help.”

We get into ruts for all kinds of reasons – busy schedules to extremes like natural disasters. Sometimes the way we think about things can help us get out of a rut. This essay consders  the the differences between the way we look at things in the West and the way people in the East look at the world, and then consider how that may help some of us in the West get out of a rut that we’re in.

There’s been a deluge of publicity surrounding the results of study reported in The Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry suggesting that children can “grow out of autism.” The author isn’t convinced.

Excerpt from this outstanding essay:

“If we want to look at why Adam Lanza walked into an elementary school and opened fire on a bunch of children and adults, it’s not video games we need to be looking at. We need to ask who was paying attention to him, and had anyone noticed something was wrong with him emotionally, would the mental health care he probably needed have been both accessible and affordable?”

First-person account of one family’s experience by one of the top photographers in the world. For more information about Swannell’s “Transforming Lives” camapign, go to http://www.autism.org.uk/transforminglives.

Photojournalist Lori Grinker profiled three former U.S. service members sufferng from PTSD.

Stirring and valuable stuff from a brave young woman, as published by a site I have deep affection for — www.mindyourmind.ca.

These professionals are coming home damaged just like soldiers are, yet there are very few services for them. An excerpt from the article:

While suicide among soldiers has been a focus of Congress and the public, relatively little attention has been paid to the mental health of tens of thousands of civilian contractors returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. When they make the news at all, contractors are usually in the middle of scandal, depicted as cowboys, wastrels or worse.

No agency tracks how many civilian workers have killed themselves after returning from the war zones. A small study in 2007 found that 24 percent of contract employees from DynCorp, a defense contractor, showed signs of depression or post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, after returning home. The figure is roughly equivalent to those found in studies of returning soldiers.

If the pattern holds true on a broad scale, thousands of such workers may be suffering from mental trauma, said Paul Brand, the CEO of Mission Critical Psychological Services, a firm that provides counseling to war zone civilians. More than 200,000 civilians work in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to the most recent figures.

“There are many people falling through the cracks, and there are few mechanisms in place to support these individuals,” said Brand, who conducted the study while working at DynCorp.”There’s a moral obligation that’s being overlooked.”

This number — 349 just last year — is way, way, WAY, too high. Shocking. More than combat deaths in Afghanistan. It’s heartbreaking. We’ll have a book coming out later in the year that looks at this topic.

There is still so much we don’t know about bipolar — Marya Hornbacher speaks to this in our interview — but this study seems to advance the knowledge on how distinct circuit dysfunctions may contribute to different features of emotion dysregulation. Professor and senior author Dr. Amit Anand: “This study provided important information regarding brain areas that may be important in controlling response to emotional material and the functional abnormalities in these areas in mood disorders.”

A new finding in neuroscience for the first time points to developmental mechanism linking the disease causing mutation in an autism related disorder, Timothy syndrome, and observed defects in brain wiring, according to a study led by scientist Ricardo Dolmetsch and published in Nature Neuroscience.

Fascinating new study that shows children with autism distinguish pitch and melody better than other children.

An important reframing of the thinking around domestic abuse.