Over a period of months, the world watched Britney Spears spiral into a mental health abyss all too familiar to this parent’s eyes. The vultures and tabloids heaped blame, shame, ridicule and humiliation on her young shoulders, despite the fact that she was clearly sick. She needed medical care and proper treatment; she needed help. Fortunately, her father stepped in to demand that help and she seems to be on the road to recovery. Facing down the hoopla surrounding her illness and its distressing symptoms, Ms. Spears valiantly offers living-large proof that treatment works. With a good doctor and family support, she is on the mend.

Check out this audio clip of her upcoming release.

In 2006, Lauren Greenfield unveiled the HBO documentary THIN to rave reviews at Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival.  Revealing the inner world of anoretics, bulemics and treatment at the Renfrew Center Foundation, THIN brought eating disorders and the battle to overcome them to the forefront of modern consciousness.

Now, two years later, production company Tijuana Entertainment hopes to bring the same focus and understanding to the treatment of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, commonly referred to as OCD, and its related disorders.

As Tijuana Ent. gears up to create the new documentary series in Los Angeles, they’re searching for people  in need of help. The non-exploitive documentary will aim to improve the participants’ lives through sessions with licensed therapists including John Tsilimparis, MFT and Karen Pickett, MFT.  Cognitive Behavioral Therapy will be provided free of charge to the chosen applicants during production and filming.

If this opportunity is of interest to you, contact Alicia Kincaid, Casting Coordinator, at therapycasting@yahoo.com.

I knew in my gut that my son Michael’s pot smoking was both symptomatic and causal regarding his mental health. We talked time and again about the damage he could be inflicting on his brain and about his doctor’s inability to treat his bipolar disorder correctly when he continued to use.

Deaf ears. No need to say more. But we have to get the word out. We have to share the facts. And the facts are now indisputable.

Marijuana, in addition to being a gateway drug (it is for most and it certainly was for Michael) has now been proven to accelerate the onset of psychosis in those whose genetic makeup predisposes them to serious mental illness.

Shouldn’t that information be enough to keep young people from experimenting?

Here are the facts:

Earlier this year a team of Spanish researchers found a strong and independent link between marijuana use and the onset of psychosis at a younger age. The possibility of chance has been factored out, as have gender and the use of other drugs. The amount of cannabis used, however, is a significant variable.

“The clinical importance of this finding is potentially high,” Dr. Ana Gonzalez-Pinto from Santiago Apostol Hospital in Vitoria,”given that cannabis use is extremely prevalent among young people.”

The researchers also discovered that “estimates of the attributable risk suggest that the use of cannabis accounts for about 10 percent of cases of psychosis.”

The findings are based on 131 patients ages 15 to 65 years who needed inpatient care for a first psychotic episode during a 2-year period. The results showed a significant gradual reduction in the age at which psychosis began that correlated with an increased dependence on cannabis. Compared with nonusers, age at onset was reduced by 7, 8.5, and 12 years among users, abusers and dependents, respectively, the researchers report.

These results “point to cannabis as a dangerous drug in young people at risk of developing psychosis,” Gonzalez-Pinto and colleagues conclude.

Spread the word. Share the facts. Save a life.

I recently wrote this article for Caring and Sharing, a publication for mental health consumers and their families, put out by the National Alliance on Mental Illness. It shares a small glimmer of hope in the world of mental health research.

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness affecting 1 in every 100 people at some point during their lives. Genetic factors are thought to account for more than 70% of all cases, and scientists have long sought to identify those genetic markers in an effort to predict who is predisposed to the disease so that they can avoid triggers and perhaps onset. Recently, two-large scale, multi-national collaborations netted results that brought the medical community closer to that goal by identifying sections of the human genome that, when deleted, can elevate the risk of developing schizophrenia 15-fold, as compared to the general population.

The International Schizophrenia Consortium (ISC)1, a collaboration of researchers from 12 institutions in Europe, the United States and Australia, studied the genomes of 3,391 patients with schizophrenia, looking for a specific type of genetic error called a copy number variation, in which a section of the genome is deleted or duplicated.

The SGENE consortium2, made up of 18 institutions across Europe, the United States and China, catalogued all the copy number variations between 15,000 parents and their children, and then looked for matches to these variations in nearly 5000 schizophrenia patients.

Both groups documented genetic deletions associated with schizophrenia in the same three locations: Two new discoveries on chromosomes 1 and 15, and confirmation of the previously connected chromosome 22. The SGENE collaboration located an additional deletion on chromosome 15, and the ISC determined that people with schizophrenia are more likely to carry rare chromosomal structure changes than are those without the disease. Both groups also verified that these deletions confer a greatly increased risk of schizophrenia (somewhere between 3 and 15 times greater for different deletions), but that each occurs in only around 1% of the population.

Although these findings don’t completely explain the genetic basis of schizophrenia, the replication of the findings in two distinctly separate studies is important. “The fact that there are two independent studies that come at the problem from different angles and using different methodologies is fantastic for psychiatric genetics,” says Pamela Sklar of Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, part of the ISC study.

Jonathan Flint, who studies the genetic basis of psychiatric diseases at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics at the University of Oxford, agrees that the results are a major advance, but points out that converting these findings into a better understanding of the biology of schizophrenia will take a lot more work. “The genetic changes on chromosome 22 have been known for some time,” he says, “but the exact genes that cause the increase in risk still remain unclear.”

Nevertheless, these are the first deletions associated with schizophrenia to be identified in such a large sample across several populations. Since schizophrenia is a disorder affecting thoughts and emotions, it is a devastating disease that is little understood and is difficult to diagnose. These findings shed light on its causes and provide a first component to a molecular test to aid in clinical diagnosis and intervention.

A friend of mine found the perfect residential treatment facility for her dually-diagnosed twenty year-old daughter. Unfortunately, this perfect place is in another state, eight hours away by car. As we talked, she shared her fears about placing her very sick girl in the care of strangers, and asked me how she could be certain her safety was guaranteed.

Of course, this concerned and engaged mom had already done her homework and knew that this particular facility treated both the mental illness and substance abuse with which her daughter was dealing. In addition to those facts, certain policies and methods of communication are vital.

Listed below  are some of the rights that youth and families possess in order to prevent abuse or neglect in a residential setting. If any of these are disregarded or unavailable, I’d look for a new placement.

RIGHTS OF YOUTH AND FAMILIES TO PREVENT ABUSE AND NEGLECT

• Your child should have reasonable access to a telephone to make uncensored calls.
• You and your child should be provided with direct, 24-hour telephone numbers for use if rights are being violated or they are being mistreated.
• You should always be notified if their child is sick or injured.
• You should always be notified within 24 hours about medication changes and missed dosages.
• You should always be notified within 48 hours of any on-site investigations or reports of child abuse and neglect, violation of health and safety standards, or violations of state licensing standards.
• Your child should never be subject to abusive disciplinary methods, such as seclusion, restraint, corporal punishment, fear tactics, humiliation, forced labor, medicinal sedation, or the withholding of food, water, clothing, shelter, or medical care.
• You should never be approached with funding incentives to relinquish custody of your child.