The 99'er Meme: Final Part

Sunday Stealing: The 99'er Meme: Final Part

76) In your opinion, what makes a great relationship?
I rarely think any relationship is "great," so I can't honestly answer that

77) How did/could someone win your heart?
Give me a puppy...

78) In your world, what brings on more creativity?
I'd like to say depression. Many of the best musicians and artists throughout history have channeled depression into their work and created great things. Me? I just get depressed and all my creativity disappears

79) What is the single best decision you have made in your life so far?
Divorcing my abusive, alcoholic, drug addict of an ex-husband

80) Why did you break up with your last ex?
He was totally obsessive and controlling (sadly a different ex than the ex-husband. Men suck)

81) What would you want to be written on your tombstone?
I don't want to have a tombstone. I want to be cremated then dumped somewhere

82) What is your favorite word?
For as many times as I say "um," you'd think it would be that

83) Give me the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word: delusional.
My brain

84) What is a saying you use a lot?
I, for some reason, end sentences by saying, "so..." way more often then it should be. I basically turn everything into a thought that the other person has to complete, so ...

85) Are you watching Idol this season? If yes, how do you like it?
Ugh. American Idol, I assume? Hellz no. I only watched the final episode of the season that Carrie Underwood was on to see if she'd win since we're both Okies

86) Were you surprised that House got canceled?
I've never watched it even once. I'm a little surprised cause I thought it was popular, but it makes no difference to me if it's on or not

87) What is your current desktop picture?
It's a photo of a cat playing with a baby pig

88) If you could press a button and make anyone in the world instantaneously explode, who would it be?
Just one person?

89) What would be a question where you'd not tell the truth?
One that would incriminate myself in my past crimes.... ;)

90) One night you wake up because you heard a noise. You turn on the light to find that you are surrounded by WEEPING ANGELS. The Weeping Angles aren't really doing anything, they're just standing around your bed. What would you do?
Probably bitch them out for waking me up and then I'd go back to sleep. You don't fuck with my sleep

91) You accidentally eat some radioactive vegetables. They were good, and what's even cooler is that they endow you with the super-power of your choice! What is that power?
You ask that like you assume I eat vegetables... I am a meat, cheese, and bread kind of person. It would have to be a radioactive tomato or pickle found on my hamburger cause that's about all I ever eat veggie wise. Anyways, I think I'd want super hearing abilities so I could hear what's being said in all the secret meetings going on at my office lately

92) You can re-live any point of time in your life. The time-span can only be a half-hour, though. What half-hour of your past would you like to experience again?
I don't want to re-live anything. I'm happy being in the moment

93) You can erase any horrible experience from your past. What will it be?
Can it be all of my past that I erase?

94) You have the opportunity to sleep with the music-celebrity of your choice. (let's say that you are both single and available) Who might it be?
 Right now I'd have to say Cady Groves. This girl is such a hot little thing (don't worry, she's over 18)...

95) You just got a free plane ticket to anywhere. You have to depart right now. Where are you gonna go?
Paris

96) Do you have any relatives or friends in jail?
I know some people, but they're not relatives and definitely not friends

97) Who's winning the U.S. Republican presidential nomination? Why?
Wait, what? There's a presidential race going on right now? 

98) Who's winning the next U.S. Presidential election?
Don't have any clue

99) If the whole world were listening to you right now, what would you say?
I'm in a bad mood, so probably it would be something really rude and would piss everyone off

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Psychiatry debates whether the pain of loss is really depression

By the Los Angeles Times

The pain of losing a loved one can be a searing, gut-wrenching hurt and a long-lasting blow to a person's mood, concentration and ability to function. But is grief the same as depression?

That's a lively debate right now, as the psychiatric profession considers a key change in the forthcoming rewrite of its diagnostic “Bible.” That proposed modification — one of many — would allow mental health providers to label the psychic pain of bereavement a mood disorder and act quickly to treat it, in some cases, with medication. With the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual's fifth edition set for completion by the end of this year, the editors of the British journal The Lancet have come out in strong opposition to the new language, calling grief a natural and healthy response to loss, not a pathological state.

“Grief is not an illness. It is more usefully thought of as part of being human, and a normal response to the death of a loved one,” writes the editor of The Lancet. “Most people who experience the death of someone they love do not need treatment by a psychiatrist or indeed by any doctor. For those who are grieving, doctors would do better to offer time, compassion, remembrance, and empathy, than pills.”

The change under consideration would expunge any reference to the passage of time since a loved one's death before a diagnosis of depression could be considered. The current edition of the diagnostic manual states that if a patient's low mood and energy, sleep difficulties and appetite changes persist for more than two months following bereavement, a diagnosis of depression might be considered. An earlier edition of the manual had established a year as the period during which mourning should not be confused with depression.

“Putting a time frame on grief is inappropriate,” The Lancet's lead editorial states simply. And in a “Perspectives” essay also published Thursday in Lancet, Harvard University medical anthropologist Dr. Arthur Kleinman agrees, eloquently exploring what's at stake.

“Is grief something we can or should no longer tolerate?” asks Kleinman, who describes his own grief after his wife of 46 years died last March from Alzheimer's Disease. “Is this existential source of suffering like any dental or back pain unwanted and unneeded?”

Kleinman calls the current two-month time period allowed for grief a “shockingly short expectation” that no religion or society would support. To allow grief to be redefined as depression with no allowance at all for the passage of time not only spells “the loss of grief”: it risks redefining vast numbers of Americans who are taking their time to adjust to the loss of a loved one as sick, he writes. And it powerfully rewrites cultural values about how we understand and mark the loss of a fellow human being.

Proponents of the change have argued that it would allow the bereaved to seek help for their suffering. And they add that it would not define all who grieve as depressed. They argue there is often no difference, but for the recent death of a loved one, between the behaviors that define depression and those that define grief.

The Lancet's editors note there is no evidence that antidepressant medications improve the moods of people who are healthy to begin with. Citing fellow critics of the proposed move, Kleinman suggests that it might have been inevitable once the financial interests of pharmaceutical manufacturers collided with psychiatry's loose definitions of mental illness and the profession's tendency to expand its patient base.

“Its ubiquity makes grief a potential profit center for the business of psychiatry,” writes Kleinman.

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Teens Victimized by Dating Violence Often Have Difficult Pasts

By HealthDay

Teens victims of dating violence are likely to have suffered other forms of violence, such as sexual violence and child abuse, according to a new study.

Interviews with a national sample of 1,680 youth aged 12 to 17 revealed that every victim of dating violence reported it wasn't the first time they had been victimized, the researchers at the University of New Hampshire Crimes Against Children Research Center said.

Sexual violence and child abuse were the most common other types of mistreatment experienced by teen dating violence victims.

More than half of teen dating violence victims had a history of some form of child abuse, with more than 40 percent of victims physically abused by a caregiver and nearly 70 percent having witnessed violence in their families.

The study also found that 60 percent of teen dating violence victims had also suffered at least one type of sexual victimization, with the most common types being verbal sexual harassment (30 percent), flashing by a peer (25 percent) and sexual assault (20 percent).

The researchers also found that youth who had been cyberbullied were three to four times more likely to be victims of teen dating violence than other youth.

The study appears online in a special issue of the journal Psychology of Violence. February is Teen Dating Violence Awareness Month.

Teen dating violence is often regarded as a stand-alone issue, but these findings show that it is more typically part of a pattern of multiple victimizations, the researchers said.

"We were genuinely surprised how interconnected teen dating violence turned out to be with other forms of victimization. We thought there would be overlap but had no idea that all dating violence victims are dealing with other forms of violence and abuse as well," lead author Sherry Hamby, a UNH Crimes Against Children Research Center research associate said in a UNH news release.

"We know that some youth are just generally more at risk for everything than other youth," Hamby said. "If they live in a violent family or violent neighborhood, they may not be able to avoid violence or know how to. If they've been hurt in the past, it may lower their self-esteem or impair their ability to protect themselves. In particular, we need to help kids from violent families, kids who have been bullied or kids who have been sexually abused from getting involved or staying in an assaultive relationship."

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New mental health manual is "dangerous" say experts

By Reuters

Millions of healthy people - including shy or defiant children, grieving relatives and people with fetishes - may be wrongly labeled mentally ill by a new international diagnostic manual, specialists said on Thursday.

In a damning analysis of an upcoming revision of the influential Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), psychologists, psychiatrists and other experts said new categories of mental illness identified in the book were at best "silly" and at worst "worrying and dangerous."

"Many people who are shy, bereaved, eccentric, or have unconventional romantic lives will suddenly find themselves labeled as mentally ill," said Peter Kinderman, head of Liverpool University's Institute of Psychology at a briefing in London about widespread concerns over the manual.

"It's not humane, it's not scientific, and it won't help decide what help a person needs."

The DSM is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and has symptoms and other criteria for diagnosing mental disorders. It is used internationally and seen as the diagnostic "bible" for mental health medicine.

No one from the APA was immediately available for comment.

More than 11,000 health professionals have already signed a petition (at http://dsm5-reform.com) calling for the development of the fifth edition of the manual to be halted and re-thought.

Some diagnoses - for conditions like "oppositional defiant disorder" and "apathy syndrome" - risk devaluing the seriousness of mental illness and medical zing behaviors most people would consider normal or just mildly eccentric, the experts said.

At the other end of the spectrum, the new DSM, due out next year, could give medical diagnoses for serial rapists and sex abusers - under labels like "paraphilic coercive disorder" - and may allow offenders to escape prison by providing what could be seen as an excuse for their behavior, they added.

RADICAL, RECKLESS, AND INHUMANE

Simon Wessely of the Institute of Psychiatry at King's College London said a look back at history should make health experts ask themselves: "Do we need all these labels?"

He said the 1840 Census of the United States included just one category for mental disorder, but by 1917 the APA was already recognizing 59. That rose to 128 in 1959, to 227 in 1980, and again to around 350 disorders in the fastest revisions of DSM in 1994 and 2000.

Allen Frances of Duke University and chair of the committee that oversaw the previous DSM revision, said DSM-5 would "radically and recklessly expand the boundaries of psychiatry" and result in the "lexicalization of normality, individual difference, and criminality."

David Pilgrim of Britain's University of Central Lancashire said it was "hard to avoid the conclusion that DSM-5 will help the interests of the drug companies."

"Madness and misery exist but they come in many shapes and sizes," he said. "We risk treating the experience and conduct of people as if they are botanical specimens waiting to be identified and categorized in rigid boxes.

"That would itself be a form of collective madness for all those complicit in the continuing pseudo-scientific exercise."

Nick Craddock of Cardiff University's department of psychological medicine and neurology, who also spoke at the London briefing, cited depression as a key example of where DSM's broad categories were going wrong.

Whereas in previous editions, a person who had recently lost a loved one and was suffering low moods would be seen as experiencing a normal human reaction to bereavement, the new DSM criteria would ignore the death, look only at the symptoms, and class the person as having a depressive illness.

Other examples of diagnoses cited by experts as problematic included "gambling disorder," "internet addiction disorder" and "oppositional defiant disorder" - a condition in which a child "actively refuses to comply with majority's requests" and "performs deliberate actions to annoy others."

"That basically means children who say 'no' to their parents more than a certain number of times," Kinderman said. "On that criteria, many of us would have to say our children are mentally ill."

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Most Teens Who Self-Harm Are Not Evaluated for Mental Health in ER

By HealthDay 

Most children and teens who deliberately injure themselves are discharged from emergency rooms without an evaluation of their mental health, a new study shows.

The findings are worrisome since risk for suicide is greatest right after an episode of deliberate self-harm, according to researchers at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio.

The researchers also found the majority of these kids do not receive any follow-up care with a mental health professional up to one month after their ER visit.

"Emergency department personnel can play a unique role in suicide prevention by assessing the mental health of patients after deliberate self-harm and providing potentially lifesaving referrals for outpatient mental health care," said lead study author Jeff Bridge, principal investigator at the hospital's Center for Innovation in Pediatric Practice, in a news release. "However, the coordination between emergency services for patients who deliberately harm themselves and linkage with outpatient mental health treatment is often inadequate."

For the study in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, researchers examined Medicaid data for adolescents aged 10 to 19 years. Only 39 percent of the patients discharged after trying to harm themselves received a mental health assessment in the emergency department.

Only about half of the children who had visited the ER for a mental health-related reason within the previous 60 days received a mental health evaluation during their visit to the ER for self-harm.

Up to 90 percent of young people who deliberately harm themselves meet criteria for at least one psychiatric disorder, particularly mood disorders, the researchers said.

The U.K.'s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence recommends that people who show up in an emergency room for self-harm should receive a mental health evaluation before being released from the hospital.

"This study highlights the need for strategies to promote emergency department mental health assessments, strengthening the training of physicians in pediatric mental health and adolescent suicide prevention and timely transitions to outpatient mental health care," Bridge said.

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