Work by researchers at the University of Chicago shows how a parent’s unemployment can have a large effect on a child’s success in school and even in later life. The summary in Science Daily also lists a series of publications by these same researchers that is worth pursuing.
The Great Recession could reduce school achievement for children of unemployed.
A new study printed in the Journal of the American Medical Association says widely-prescribed anti-psychotic drugs are no better than placebos at dealing with PTSD in veterans. Further, these drugs are the second line of defense for patients prescribed anti-depressants, which also are ineffective. Any bets on whether this means physicians will stop prescribing them?
Antipsychotic Doesn’t Ease Veterans’ Post-Traumatic Stress, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.
Time has posted a scathing column by journalist Maia Szalavitz that details the scandalous levels of drugging children with antipsychotics in the United States. The bottom line: Our society’s mainstream treatment for abused kids is chemical restraint.
Drugging the Vulnerable: Atypical Antipsychotics in Children and the Elderly – TIME Healthland.
Women have come to dominate the field of psychology to the point that people seeking male therapists are having a hard time.
Need Therapy? A Good Man Is Hard to Find – NYTimes.com.
A new study says physical abuse of children doubles the odds of chronic fatigue syndrome, multiple chemical sensitivities and fibromyalgia in adult women.
Stanford researchers have used optogenetics and mice to demonstrate that a single neural pathway in the amygdala is a dramatic “off” switch for anxiety.
In Optogenetics, Buttons for Neural Switchboards – NYTimes.com.
In an op-ed in today’s New York Times, Bessel van der Kolk makes the case that helping abused kids is worth the federal investment. The piece is triggered by the likelihood of extreme budget cuts for the National Child Traumatic Stress Network.
Treating the Traumas Inflicted on Children – NYTimes.com.
Researchers in the United Kingdom tracked 14,682 kids for five years and concluded those living in poverty had significantly diminished cognitive abilities. The same data, however, suggested that family instability had no significant effect. The Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health published the research and it is summarized here in Science Daily.
One of the more intriguing aspects (and one of the most significant, in terms of long-term health outcomes) of the body’s response to trauma is in the immune system. Part of the normal flight, fight freeze response to a terrifying event is shutting down the immune system to conserve energy, but repeated trauma can have lasting effects, and this is one of the reasons people abused as children die, on average, twenty years earlier than the rest of us. But now an intriguing study has shown dramatic differences in the immune system’s response to trauma based on gender, and suggests worse outcomes for women.
The press office at the University of California, San Francisco, provides an account of the study.
For some time, science has understood that brain scans can predict which patients respond well to cognitive therapy (only about half do), but brain scans are cumbersome and expensive. Now, however, researchers at two Pennsylvania universities have published results that say a quick, easy read of pupil dilation can do the same thing.
Science Daily has the story.
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