Mental Health and the Fairer Sex

A new report released today on gender-based differences in mental health shows women are nearly twice as likely as men to suffer from major depression. The report addresses many other mental health issues facing women, including the effect trauma and violence can have on long term mental health, and outlines action steps for policy makers, health care professionals and researchers.

Action Steps for Improving Women's Mental Health, released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services' Office on Women's Health (OWH), brings together the most recent research on mental health issues in women and explores the role gender plays in diagnosing, treating and coping with mental illness. It also points to resiliency and social support systems as key factors in overcoming mental illness. Other highlights include:

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Rates of anxiety disorders are two to three times higher in women than men.
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Having a history of violence, trauma or abuse is associated with increased risk of depression, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), panic disorder and a tendency to engage in risky behaviors.
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Female veterans may face a higher risk of PTSD than their male counterparts.
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Family and other interpersonal connections in a woman's life may play an important role in building resiliency and offering protection from mental illness.

Acting Surgeon General Steven Galson, M.D., M.P.H., emphasizes, "Mental illness is often incorrectly perceived as a weakness, which prevents women from recognizing the signs and symptoms and seeking treatment. In order to reduce stigma, we need to encourage open, honest conversations."

The report also outlines specific action steps for policy makers, health care providers, and researchers to take in an effort to address the burden of mental illness on women's lives and increase their capacity for recovery. "We have an unprecedented opportunity to improve the mental health of women," says Dr. Wanda Jones, Director of the Office on Women's Health and Deputy Assistant Secretary of Health in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. "Our hope in releasing this report is that these groups will come together and turn these recommendations into action so that we better the health of our nation."

The Office on Women's Health also produced a booklet for women that addresses the stigma associated with mental health. Women's Mental Health: What It Means To You includes information on the signs and symptoms of mental illness, suggestions about where to turn for support and solutions for preventing and coping with mental illness.

Action Steps for Improving Women's Mental Health and Women's Mental Health: What It Means To You are available for free by visiting www.womenshealth.gov or by calling 1-877-SAMHSA-7 (1-877-726-4727).

Why I Volunteer

I have a tendency to rely on familiar phrases a little too heavily, so I wonder how many times someone has heard me say that no one learns about mental illness until the train hits them. I dearly love the visual of that metaphor ... can think of few things that capture the essence of serious brain disorder more completely than a train wreck. The onset of mental illness is a scene of total chaos and destruction, and it matters little if that onset happens to you or to someone you love. In an instant the world is transformed into a scary and perilous place; there is only darkness, twisted metal and pain.

The train hit me four years ago when a sobbing girl called my cell phone to tell me my son was on his way to St. Joseph's - that he had taken a lot of pills and she had called 911. I was standing in Safeway at the time, and I thanked her and left a cart full of groceries to start the hour drive it would take me to get to the hospital. I wasn't sure what I would find when I got there. It was the longest hour of my life. I don't remember what went through my head as I drove. Maybe darkness, twisted metal and pain.

That was the beginning of this journey, and I've been trying to make sense of the train wreck ever since. Luckily, my son came home with me the next day and began his own journey of recovery, slowly and shakily at first; but always making some progress. Medications, the frustrations of dealing with the VA, relapses, lost jobs, different medications, breaks, weight gain, counselors, blood tests and on and on it goes. Good days, a wedding, and growth as well. Lots and lots of learning - book after book and then the NAMI Family to Family course. A learning curve of unbelievable proportions for everyone. Through it all - love - and a deepening respect for anyone who has to live with these things. And more love.

So why do I volunteer? Penance, I'll tell you with a laugh. Doing time for all the mistakes I made before I understood the nature of the disease. As a way to honor his fight to survive and define my own. But more than that, volunteering is a way for me to help someone who just got hit by a train. Volunteering helps me shine a little light on the wreckage and find the survivors. So I'll teach a class, or facilitate a group, listen on the phone or pass on some information. It takes so little. It does so much.

Find your local NAMI affiliate for volunteering opportunities here.

Listening to Madness

We don't want to be normal," Will Hall tells me. The 43-year-old has been diagnosed as schizophrenic, and doctors have prescribed antipsychotic medication for him. But Hall would rather value his mentally extreme states than try to suppress them, so he doesn't take his meds. Instead, he practices yoga and avoids coffee and sugar. He is delicate and thin, with dark plum polish on his fingernails and black fashion sneakers on his feet, his half Native American ancestry evident in his dark hair and dark eyes. Cultivated and charismatic, he is also unusually energetic, so much so that he seems to be vibrating even when sitting still.

I met Hall one night at the offices of the Icarus Project in Manhattan. He became a leader of the group—a "mad pride" collective—in 2005 as a way to promote the idea that mental-health diagnoses like bipolar disorder are "dangerous gifts" rather than illnesses. While we talked, members of the group—Icaristas, as they call themselves—scurried around in the purple-painted office, collating mad-pride fliers. Hall explained how the medical establishment has for too long relied heavily on medication and repression of behavior of those deemed "not normal." Icarus and groups like it are challenging the science that psychiatry says is on its side. Hall believes that psychiatrists are prone to making arbitrary distinctions between "crazy" and "healthy," and to using medication as tranquilizers.

Hall and Icarus are not alone in asking these questions. They are part of a new generation of activists trying to change the treatment and stigma attached to mental illness. Welcome to Mad Pride, a budding grassroots movement, where people who have been defined as mentally ill reframe their conditions and celebrate unusual (some call them "spectacular") ways of processing information and emotion.

Just as some deaf activists prefer to embrace their inability to hear rather than "cure" it with cochlear implants, members of Icarus reject the notion that the things that are called mental illness are simply something to be rid of. Icarus members cast themselves as a dam in the cascade of new diagnoses like bipolar and ADHD. The group, which now has a membership of 8,000 people across the U.S., argues that mental-health conditions can be made into "something beautiful." They mean that one can transform what are often considered simply horrible diseases into an ecstatic, creative, productive or broadly "spiritual" condition. As Hall puts it, he hopes Icarus will "push the emergence of mental diversity."

Read all of this fascinating article here, and thanks to Mike for the link.

New Web Site

During these difficult times, Mental Health America wants Americans to know that there are tools that can buffer the effects of stress and help them cope better with the many challenges they face. This May, in honor of Mental Health Month, the organization is launching the Live Your Life Well campaign to provide people with 10 specific, research-based tools that can combat stress and promote health and well-being.

From relaxation techniques to journaling exercises to simple ways to get better sleep and improve eating habits, the materials offer a wide range of resources to build resiliency and well-being. The 10 Tools of Live Your Life Well also includes information on seeking the help of a mental health professional.

Check out this new resource here.

Female Vets Struggling to Get Treatment for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

The war in Iraq has been now been raging for six years.

It's the first war where women in the U.S. military are in combat roles.

Even years after serving in Iraq, female veterans are still adjusting to civilian life.

At a women's veterans art show in San Francisco vets say the six year anniversary of the war brings back painful memories.

"The 6 year anniversary has me thinking about the friends that I lost. And the friends that I still have who have been forever scared by the war," said Iraq war veteran Lindsey Rousseau-Burnett.

Many of the women we talked to say they are getting psychiatric help from the Veteran's Administration.

But they say the agency is behind the times.


"Because women supposedly aren't in combat they have a higher burden of proof to try and prove they have PTSD," said vet Kayla Williams.

The veteran's service organization Swords to Plowshares says female Iraq war vets are the fastest growing population of homeless.

"There numbers in terms of homelessness is growing exponentially. There are very few services for them because homeless veterans services, VA services have grown up serving a male cliental," said Swords to Plowshares Amy Fair-Weather.

These vets are hoping sharing their stories through pictures and books will help make the road to recovery easier for the women currently serving in Iraq.


© 2009 NBC News

A General's Personal Battle by Yochi J Dreazen

Maj. Gen. Mark Graham is on the frontlines of the Army's struggle to stop its soldiers from killing themselves. Through a series of novel experiments, the 32-year military veteran has turned his sprawling base here into a suicide-prevention laboratory.

One reason: Fort Carson has seen nine suicides in the past 15 months. Another: Six years ago, a 21-year-old ROTC cadet at the University of Kentucky killed himself in the apartment he shared with his brother and sister. He was Kevin Graham, Gen. Graham's youngest son.

After Kevin's suicide in 2003, Gen. Graham says he showed few outward signs of mourning and refused all invitations to speak about the death. It was a familiar response within a military still uncomfortable discussing suicide and its repercussions. It wasn't until another tragedy struck the family that Gen. Graham decided to tackle the issue head on.

"I will blame myself for the rest of my life for not doing more to help my son," Gen. Graham says quietly, sitting in his living room at Fort Carson, an array of family photographs on a table in front of him. "It never goes away."

Suicide is emerging as the military's newest conflict. For 2008, the Pentagon has confirmed that 140 soldiers killed themselves, the highest number in decades.

At a Senate hearing last week, Gen. Peter Chiarelli, the Army's vice chief of staff, told lawmakers that 48 soldiers have already committed suicide in 2009. The figure puts the Army on pace for nearly double last year's figure. "I, and the other senior leaders of our Army, readily acknowledge that these current figures are unacceptable," Gen. Chiarelli said at the hearing.

Beyond Fort Carson, the Army has launched a broad push to reduce the incidence of suicide. Over the next four months, all soldiers in the Army will receive additional training on suicide prevention and broader mental health issues. The Marine Corps, which is also being hit hard by suicide, will give all Marines similar training this month. In February and March, the Army for the first time ever excused units from their normal duties so, one by one, they could learn new ways of trying to identify soldiers in need of help.

Read the rest of the article here.

Yesterday

Yesterday, I got some inspiration to purge... and pulled out some boxes from the garage with the intent of clearing them out and consolidating. Everybody has some stupid cardboard boxes full of stuff, you know. Old stuff that seemed too important to toss but not important enough to have sitting in the room with you. Usually the stuff remains in the cardboard box forever, being dutifully moved from home to home until you die and then your offspring become in charge of tossing it out unceremoniously whilst muttering under their collective breath. This is the way of stuff.

However, I seem to have some odd recessive gene that occasionally prompts me to rid myself of the weight of some of the stuff. Unfortunately, this gene is not of the sort of nature that might suggest that I just march into the garage, pick a couple of boxes at random and heave them into the dustbin without a peek. There must be peeking and consideration, lest I might divest myself of something of deep and irreplaceable value. This is a good thing, as in this last batch of peeking I finally located my long lost divorce decree - which does indeed have some value and although not irreplaceable, could lead to a good deal of unpleasantness if suddenly needed and not available.

Within this box of divorce decrees (keep,) notebooks of adolescent poetry (pitch!) the first board I broke with my fist in karate (PITCH,) tax records from 1998 (still have to keep?) and such, was a rather nondescript envelope. And within the envelope was a photocopy of a death certificate and another copy of a handwritten note. And then I was crying and the purging of stuff came to an untimely end. Like the life described therein.

I wonder if I will ever really heal from the loss of my father. It's funny that I didn't miss him until I was 32 years old. Until then, I had this sad dream of a daddy who died tragically just before my arrival on the scene - snatched from life by an untimely accident. I spotted him occasionally in the pain in my mother's eyes, but beyond that he was only this tragic and beautiful fellow in my dreams. Then, as an adult with children of my own, that death certificate came home to roost and answered my questions once and for all. My father wasn't snatched from life at 25. My father took his life.

So, who am I crying for? Not sure about that. Suffice it to say that I have come far enough to say that I can understand the wish to have it end. Not so much a wish for death... just a wish for an end to the pain of living. Buddhists suggest that we embrace the pain; accept that pain is the whole substance of living - I haven't figured out how to do that. Not by a long shot. There are days that I open my eyes and my first thought is one of dread. Joy feels alien. Sunlight makes me wince. I often wonder if the one cell that my father gave me held all his pain as well. I often wonder if I didn't pass it on to my son.

In another nondescript envelope are some photos of my dad as a kid. As I rifled and sniffled one photo jumped out at me - like I'd never seen it before. Suddenly on a mission, I found another photo from another box and laid the two side by side. My dad at 15. My son at 15. I never noticed how much they looked alike.

I'm crying again. I'm still not sure for whom.