Minneapolis St. Paul Mental Health Blog

Posts by:

MaryAPRN.com/ Advanced Practice Psych LLC

Mental Health | COVID-19 Affecting Many Americans

Mental Health | A survey from the American Psychiatric Association provides a glimpse into the mental well-being of Americans amid the COVID-19 pandemic:

48% are anxious about the possibility of getting the coronavirus,
40% are anxious about becoming seriously ill or dying from COVID-19,
and 62% are anxious about the possibility of a friend or loved one getting the infection.

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Mental Health | Cyber-bullying Intensifies Psych Symptoms in Teens

Mental Health | Adolescent psychiatric inpatients who were cyberbullied had significantly higher scores….

 
….. on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, anger, and fantasy dissociation scales than their hospitalized peers who were not cyberbullied, according to a study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
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Mental Health | Early Cannabis Use Associated With Adult Insomnia

Mental Health Update | Young adults who started using cannabis regularly before age 18 were more likely to report later sleep troubles, according to a study published online in Sleep.

“People tend to think that cannabis helps with sleep, but if you look closely at the studies, continued or excessive use is also associated with a lot of sleep deficits,” said study lead author Evan Winiger, a graduate student in the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at the University of Colorado-Boulder. “Our study adds to that literature, showing for the first time that early use is associated with increased rates of insomnia later on.”

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New Antipsychotic drug outperforms placebo in trials for Schizophrenia

Mental Health | Patients with an acute exacerbation of schizophrenia who received an investigational antipsychotic drug daily for 4 weeks had significantly greater improvement ....

....in the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale (PANSS) total score, compared with those who received placebo, according to a study in The New England Journal of Medicine.

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Mental Health | The Stages of Grief as a Framework for the Journey

Mental Health Update | As a health care professional, I have watched the progress of the COVID-19 pandemic with alternating measures of horror, dread, fascination, frustration, and fear.

The nurse in me wants to jump onto the front lines, don scrubs, and volunteer at the nearest emergency room. As I watch the understandable human response to this unprecedented circumstance, I know my skills as a psychiatric clinician will be needed soon enough to help with the emotional impact of this pandemic.

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Mental Health update | Low Vit D during pregnancy may cause ADHD risk

A new Finnish study finds that children of women with a vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy are 34 percent more likely to be diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), compared to those whose mothers had sufficient vitamin D levels in the first and second trimesters.
 
“Alongside genotype, prenatal factors such as vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy can influence the development of ADHD,” said researcher Minna Sucksdorff, M.D., from the University of Turku in Finland.
 

The study is the first population-level research to show a link between low maternal vitamin D levels in early to mid-pregnancy and an elevated risk for diagnosed ADHD in the children.

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Mental Health | Firearm Deaths see a large increase in US

Mental Health note | A new analysis of firearm deaths from 1999-2017 examines changes in each state within age, gender and racial/ethnic groups.

 
The rate at which Americans died from firearm injuries increased sharply starting in 2015, a new study shows. This recent increase occurred to varying degrees across different states, types of firearm deaths such as homicide and suicide, and demographic groups.
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