The Meehl Foundation Blog

The three of you are miracles.”

When I heard these words directed at me and the two other women sitting nearby, my heart skipped a beat, and tears sprang to my eyes.

“Why?” I asked tentatively, although I already knew the answer.

Because you’re alive,” she said simply.

Many in the field of clinical psychology consider DBT to be the gold standard for treating suicidal behavior, other self-harm behaviors and borderline personality disorder…http://www.courant.com/health/connecticut/hc-suicide-prevention-0727-20110727,0,362075.story

“That did it,” said Dr. Linehan, 68, who told her story in public for the first time last week before an audience of friends, family and doctors at the Institute of Living, the Hartford clinic where she was first treated for extreme social withdrawal at age 17. “So many people have begged me to come forward, and I just thought — well, I have to do this. I owe it to them. I cannot die a coward.”

No one knows how many people with severe mental illness live what appear to be normal, successful lives, because such people are not in the habit of announcing themselves. They are too busy juggling responsibilities, paying the bills, studying, raising families — all while weathering gusts of dark emotions or delusions that would quickly overwhelm almost anyone else….http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/23/health/23lives.html?_r=2&hp

The Meehl Foundation is an Amen Brain Healthy treatment program addressing the following:

If seeing a picture of certain foods causes you to go into craving, eating and binging mode, you could possibly have a food addiction, similar to a drug addiction. According to a report that will appear in the August print issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, people with addictive-like eating behaviors appear to have greater neural activity in certain regions of the brain similar to substance dependence, including elevated activation in reward circuitry in response to food cues.

Food and drug use both result in dopamine release in mesolimbic regions of the brain and the degree of release correlates with subjective reward from both food and drug use.
Read more…http://70.32.73.82/blog/5158/is-your-brain-addicted-to-food/

What makes you crave a Big Mac when you see the golden arches? Or long for a beer when you see a cold one on TV? A single pathway in the brain is to blame, new research suggests, and putting the brakes on it could stop addicts from relapsing.The pathway connects the hippocampus, the part of the brain that analyzes and interprets the environment around you (using the contextual information that comes in through your senses, such as  seeing a beer on TV) with the ventral tegmental area, or VTA, which processes reward-driven behaviors (such as grabbing a beer from the refrigerator).Reward-driven behaviors release the brain chemical dopamine. Such behaviors include sex and eating, which are very important in daily life. But some drugs release these dopamine “rewards” at higher levels than natural reactions do, the heart of addiction…read more http://www.livescience.com/15053-reward-seeking-environment-link-addiction-craving.html

 For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour.  This is very important news.  Good probiotics are very important expecially after taking any aniti-biotics.  Our family takes probiotics all the time, ‘scientific reasearch” is now ke….read more herehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110517110315.htm

 Why Don’t Psychiatrists Look At The Brain: The Case for the Greater Use of SPECT Imaging in Neuropsychiatry.  Neuropsychiatry Reviews. February 2001, Vol. 2, No. 1. Pages 1, 19-21.   Psychiatrists are the only medical specialists who rarely look at the organ they treat. The odds are that if a patient is having serious problems with feelings (eg, depression), thoughts (eg, schizophrenia), or behavior (eg, violence), the psychiatrist will never order a brain scan. He or she will prescribe medication, psychotherapy, electroconvulsive therapy, or a host of other treatments that will change brain function—but will not know which areas of the patient’s brain work well, which areas work too hard, and which do not work hard enough. In my opinion, the lack of brain imaging has kept psychiatry behind medicine’s other specialties, reducing our effectiveness with patients and hindering our efforts to reduce stigma and improve compliance…read more from Dr. Amen…http://www.amenclinics.com/brain-science/spect-research/amen-clinics-research/

Women who have bipolar disorder and also experience premenstrual mood exacerbation appear to have a worse course of illness, a shorter time to relapse, and greater symptom severity than women with bipolar disorder who do not experience premenstrual mood exacerbation, according to a report that was published February 15 online in AJP in Advance.

Premenstrual mood exacerbation may be a clinical marker predicting a worse presentation and course of bipolar disorder in reproductive-age women….Read more http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/46/6/17.2.full?sid=d9ff6095-aef7-4475-afb7-48fd75f26b93

Monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAO-Is) are a type of antidepressant that is often effective for people with anxious depression or comorbid panic attacks, especially when other antidepressants don’t work.During the post-partum period, monoamine oxidase type A increases as a result of the drop in circulating estrogens that occurs at this time; estrogens normally suppress MAO-A.  This increase in MAO-A leads to the more rapid metabolism of many neurotransmitter monoamines, reducing their levels in blood and brain, thus potentially propelling a subsequent depression….read more

Scientists across the world have been working diligently for decades to try to pinpoint what causes Alzheimer’s disease. Each year, we learn a little bit more about what sets this devastating disease in motion.

For years, it has been recognized that apolipoprotein E4 (apoE4) is the major genetic risk factor for AD, and people who have the apoE4 gene account for 65-80% of all Alzheimer’s cases.

According to research in the Journal of Neuroscience, apoE4 appears to result in a loss of a particular type of cell in the hippocampus, which is the brain’s learning and memory center and an area that is damaged with Alzheimer’s.http://www.amenclinics.com/blog/4740/neurotransmitter-deficiency-linked-to-alzheimer%E2%80%99s-disease/

This post and the next post GABA and Alzheimer’s are linked together. 

It is a known fact about the need for people with Bipolar Disorder to take their meds.  This article show the importance of Lithium.  Mark added a small dose of Lithium when this research came out.  Then added GABA 2 months ago.  The improvement has been dramatic.  http://bjp.rcpsych.org/cgi/content/abstract/190/4/359