Sno-Valley Counseling

Packaged Food Makes Girls Hyper

shunter — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 13:26:47 +0000

Bisphenol A, BPA, resembles the sex hormone estrogen, and it harms health. Estroben is known to be important in fetal brain development. A study suggests that prenatal (not childhood) exposure to BPA is connected to anxiety, depression and difficulty controlling behaviors in three-year-olds; the most severe were girls.

Religious Practice and Mental Health: a healthy association

shunter — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 21:13:45 +0000

How did religious practice get such a bad rap? Until the early part of the 1800s, psychiatry and religion were closely connected. Then things changed when Charcot and his pupil Freud associated religion with hysteria and neurosis. That was the dividing point, which has persisted until recently. Mental health professionals in the West have dismissed and attacked religious experiences, calling them irrational, outdated, and dependency forming, and viewed religious experiences to result in emotional instability.

Erase Painful Memories?

shunter — Fri, 20 Apr 2012 19:43:42 +0000

PTSD- combat and/or other causes, phobias, obsessive-compulsive disorder, additions, and intractable pain are disorders of learning and memory – orbetter stated, of forgetting. Some people never forget the time they reached for a garden weed and came out with a gartersnake. Others cannot go into places that they associate with getting high.

Head Injuries in the Penalty Box

shunter — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 19:04:20 +0000

Us kids were warned: stay off the ice on Saturday mornings. Why? Teams of boys were playing hockey. I thumbed my nose one Saturday morning and took my chances. And wound up in a four-foot high snowbank on the edge of the ice, having been run off the ice by the hockey players.

In the mid-1960s one of the hockey greats from the Chicago Blackhawk team hanged up his blades and opened a restaurant in Oakbrook, IL. I went there to dine and to see him. His face reflected the violence of hockey; it spoke of unspeakable pain. Now I wonder what life was like for him after that. Did he wind up like Ali, another head injury victim but from boxing? The new senior vice president of player safety and hockey operations is clamping down as much as he’s able. He may not last long in this position – the players, owners and coaches may call for his recall – and let’s hope he makes some inroads. For the players’s sakes. Read the whole SI article here:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1191041/index.htm

I’m for kids playing sports, but let’s put structure and safety boundaries around it. Stevens probably learned his hard-hitting trick when he was a five-year-old. The sport will be the same; we don’t need to crush someone’s brain to make the game fun and interesting for those of us who watch from the sidelines.

shunter — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 16:34:58 +0000

Wife: “You think it’s easier to keep things hidden in order to spare your spouse the harsh reality” of inner turmoil. “It’s almost like trying to shelter them. But it’s a spouse, not a child.” Husband: “No matter what your dreams are or your partner’s dreams are, talk about them. No matter what your problems or your partner’s problems are, talk about it. Find out together how to solve them.”

Painkillers and SSRIs

shunter — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:24:19 +0000

If you’re using a SSRI antidepressant, consider quitting the pain medications. NSAIDs, aspirin, Tylenol may disrupt the action of the antidepressant! Jennifer L. Warner-Schmidt et al. of Rockefeller University experimented with mice. The mice given the SSRI citalopram for two weeks approached food more than twice as fast as unmedicated mice. Mice given ibuprofen with the SSRI for two weeks headed for the food nearly as slowly as unmedicated mice (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA.) The researchers then looked at a previous study of patients with treatment-resistant depression and found that an anti-inflammatory drug or acetaminophen taken with an SSRI experienced relief significantly less than when not taken togther. Warner-Schmidt said that doctors need to keep it in mind when looking at patients who are not responding to SSRI treatment for depression. (Scientific American Mind, September/October 2011, pg 11.)

Kids’ Brains Playing Music

shunter — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:11:33 +0000

Let your child play an instrument and he’ll reap the benefits in old age with a sharper mind! Brenda Hanna-Pladdy et al. from Emory University neuropsychology discovered that of 70 people between the ages of 60 and 83, those who played an instrument for a decade or longer scored significantly higher on tests measuring memory and other cognitive abilities than those with no musical background. (Scientific American Mind, September/October 2011, pg 7.)

Tourette’s and OCD Related?

shunter — Sat, 27 Aug 2011 22:03:59 +0000

Andrew Feigin et al. (North Shore LIJ Health System, Manhassett, NY) scanned 12 unmedicated Tourette’s patients’s brains and 12 ‘healthy’ brains using the positron-emission tomography (PET scan) technology. They found that Tourette brains exhibited more activity in the premotor cortex and cerebellum – regions that handle motor control – and less activity in the striatum and orbitofrontal cortex areas involved in decision making and learning. These finds support the idea that the symptoms of the disorder may arise from the brain’s inability to suppress abnormal actions using decision-making skills.

When it comes to tics and compulsions, the neural networks in Tourette’s and OCD are distinct but nonetheless involve brain regions with similar functions, in particular, motor activity and decision making. Feigin says it isn’t all that surprising, given that tics are similar to compulsions in that both involve extra involuntary movements. (Scientific American Mind, September/October 2011, pg. 7)

Study Shows Married People Actually Like Each Other

shunter — Fri, 12 Aug 2011 03:22:31 +0000

[From Jezebel.com] Contrary to popular belief, it appears marriage is not always a miserable slog through quagmires of irritation and ennui culminating only in messy divorce or unfulfilled death. In fact, a study shows that some married people totally still like each other.

According to Miller-McCune, researchers talked to 274 married Americans, 47.8% of whom said they were “very intensely in love” with their spouses. A little over thirteen percent said they were “intensely in love,” while 26.2% were “very in love,” which makes marrieds sound like a pretty smitten bunch. Lovey-doveyness did decline for couples married 10 to 20 years, but went up again for those together 20 years or more. And while love numbers were a bit lower in a version of the study conducted in New York state, researchers say that could be because people in the Northeast are just disgruntled.

The study is obviously heartening for married people — the odds that they’ll still be able to stand their spouses in a few years are pretty good. Of course, the availability of divorce may have something to do with that — as Tom Jacobs of Miller-McCune points out, “With all the hand-wringing about the high divorce rate, could it be that the people who stay married are more likely to truly be in love?” Given this, it would be interesting to track married people’s love over time as various social factors change. For instance, a look at marital happiness as gay marriage becomes more common might refute conservative claims that allowing gay couples to marry would somehow harm straight relationships. For now, it’s just nice to know that some married people are still into each other long after the honeymoon is over.

Long-Term Love Not Just A Fairy Tale [Miller-McCune]

Image via Lisa F. Young/Shutterstock.com

Children on the Move

shunter — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 15:06:54 +0000

Is a “gypsy” lifestyle undermining a child’s need for stability? Check it out in “The Huff”:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ariel-gore/what-kind-of-stability-do_b_906985.html?ref=fb&src=sp