Category Archives: Children

Mummy’s boys versus macho boys and mental health

August 31, 2010

According to research carried out by Carols Santos, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social and Family Dynamics and recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, boys who are close to their mothers have better mental health.

The study followed 426 boys at middle school and assessed how much they embraced so called masculine stereotypical qualities such as being tough, autonomous and emotionally stoic and whether this had an effect on their mental health.

Santos measured the mental health of the boys using the Children’s Depression Inventory.

What the research revealed was that adolescent boys tended to favour hyper-masculine stereotypes the further they advanced into adolescence.

However, they were less emotionally stable than those who were close to their mothers and did not show the same traits such as acting tough and keeping their emotions in check. Interestingly, the level of closeness to the father didn’t have the same effect.

“If you look at the effect size of my findings, mother support and closeness was the most predictive of boys’ ability to resist [hypermasculine] stereotypes and therefore predictive of better mental health” Santos is reported as saying in Time.com.

The research didn’t reveal why boys who were closer to their mothers had better mental health. “It could be, men see close relationships with their sons as an opportunity to reinforce traditional gender roles” said Santos.

The BBC quoted Santos as saying “Helping boys resist these behaviours early on seems to be a critical step toward improving their health and the quality of their social relationships.”

The BBC recently reported on a different study, this time by Professor Sharon Lamb from the University of Massachusetts which says that today’s superhero is not a good role model for young boys.

The study was also presented at the American Psychological Association meeting and involved surveying 674 boys aged between 4 and 18 to ascertain what they watched on TV and what they read.

“Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity” said Professor Lamb.

Perhaps it’s best summed up by Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University. Time.com quotes Way as saying:

“We have come to view fundamentally human attributes such as empathy, emotional skills and the desire for intimate relationships as being girlish or gay. They are not girlish or gay skills — they are human skills, or at least they should be.”

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Anxiety – depression linked to increased brain activity in childhood

August 31, 2010

A new study from the US has pinpointed areas of the brain that could possibly predict whether or not a child is likely to develop anxiety and depression during adolescence.

“Children with anxious temperaments suffer from extreme shyness, persistent worry and increased bodily responses to stress” says Ned H. Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, who led the research.

“It has long been known that these children are at increased risk of developing anxiety, depression, and associated substance abuse disorders.”

The researchers looked at the brains of 238 young rhesus monkeys using Positron emission tomography (PET) scans and found that increased activity in the Amygdala part of the brain and in the hippocampus could predict anxiety later on.

It has already been found in previous research that young monkeys behave very similar to young children when they are anxious.

“We believe that young children who have higher activity in these brain regions are more likely to develop anxiety and depression as adolescents and adults and are also more likely to develop drug and alcohol problems in an attempt to treat their distress” says Kalin.

The researchers also looked at the genetic profiles of the monkeys and found that increased activity in the hippocampus area was inherited whereas increased activity in the Amygdala was not.

“We expected that all of the brain regions involved in anxious temperament would be similarly affected by genes and environment, but found that activity in the anterior hippocampus was more heritable than in the amygdala,” said the researchers.

“Even though these structures are closely linked, the results suggest differential influences of genes and environment on how these brain regions mediate AT and the ongoing risk of developing anxiety and depression.”

The findings, which have been published in the Aug. 12 edition of the journal Nature, could lead to new ways of identifying and treating children who are at risk.

“My feeling is that the earlier we intervene with children, the more likely they will be able to lead a happy life in which they aren’t as controlled by anxiety and depression. We think we can train vulnerable kids to settle their brains down,” Kalin said.

The researchers are now measuring brain activity in young children who are already showing signs of anxiety and depression to confirm their findings.

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Teens smoke to relieve stress report more signs of depression

August 31, 2010

Teenagers who are lighting up a cigarette in order to feel better are not only risking their physical health but are harming their mental health too. Canadian researchers are claiming that many teenagers who smoke in order to “self medicate” have elevated symptoms of depression.

The research, which is part of a long term study into nicotine dependence in teens (NDIT), was led by Michael Chaiton from the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit of the University of Toronto along with his co-author Jennifer O’Loughlin of the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre.

“This observational study is one of the few to examine the perceived emotional benefits of smoking among adolescents. Although cigarettes may appear to have self-medicating effects or to improve mood, in the long term we found teens who started to smoke reported higher depressive symptoms” said lead author Chaiton.
The study involved 662 teenagers from grades 7 to 11 who came from a mixture of French and English, rural and urban secondary schools and from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The teens completed up to 20 questionnaires which asked questions relating to their energy levels, sleeping patterns and emotional states.

The youngsters were divided into three separate groups which consisted of those who had never smoked, those who did not use smoking to self medicate or improve mood, and those who did use smoking to self medicate.
The research revealed that the majority of youngsters smoke to relieve stress and loneliness, however, at the same time they often felt too tired to carry out tasks, had sleeping problems, and felt sad and depressed. Some also felt nervous and tense.

The researchers noted that those who self medicated using cigarettes are likely to have higher depression symptoms in the long term than those who had never smoked. They also found that those who claimed to get an emotional benefit out of smoking reported more signs of depression.

“Although cigarettes may appear to have self-medicating effects or to improve mood, in the long term we found teens who started to smoke reported higher depressive symptoms” said Chaiton.

“Smokers who used cigarettes as mood enhancers had higher risks of elevated depressive symptoms than teens who had never smoked,” says O’Loughlin, Chaiton’s co-author.

Dr. Chaiton said “It’s important to emphasize that depressive symptom scores were higher among teenagers who reported emotional benefits from smoking after they began to smoke”.

These finding have been published in the journal Addictive Behaviours.

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Therapy no longer stigmatised and considered acceptable for mental health problems

August 3, 2010

A recent survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) has found that the stigma that was once attached to psychotherapy is almost gone and that attitudes are now significantly different towards mental health problems than what they were six years ago.

The results showed that 94 percent of the 1,400 adults surveyed, consider it acceptable to have some form of psychotherapy for mental health problems like anxiety and depression and that it is now more acceptable to talk about emotional problems than it was in the past. Back in a similar survey in 2004, the figure was just 67 percent.

The survey also found that almost 90 percent of those taking part in the survey believed that counselling and psychotherapy should be made available to everyone on the NHS.

“This survey represents a significant shift in people’s attitudes towards therapy – practically a revolution – at a time when mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are far more common than was realised” said the association’s president, Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University.

“Mental health conditions currently affect one in six of the population at an annual cost to England alone of pounds 77bn. It’s no accident that the growth of the problem has encouraged mass support for more effective treatments” said Cooper.

According to National Statistics, 1.3 million people a year receive some form of treatment for mental health problems so the chances are you will be affected yourself at some point or will at least know someone close to you who is.

At the moment the most common treatment for depression is some form of anti-depressant drug. Currently, around 40 million antidepressant prescriptions are issued each year in the UK alone. However, drugs won’t treat the cause of the depression, only the symptoms. Counselling and therapy on the other hand can change the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

The BACP survey revealed that a whopping 83 percent believe that it’s better to have therapy and talk about your problems than to rely on medication.

Another change identified by the survey was that people are starting to seek help for mental health problems earlier than they used to and 95 percent recognise that getting help will help prevent their symptoms from getting worse.

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Teenagers who spend a lot of time online, more likely to develop depression

August 3, 2010

A recent study carried out by researchers in Australia and China has found that teenagers who spend several hours a day on the internet are more likely to develop depression than other teenagers who use their leisure time for other pursuits.

The study involved over 1,040 teenagers aged between 13 and 18, the average age of which was 15 years old. All the teenagers came from the Southern Guangzhou City in China and none of them had depression at the start of the study. However, just over 6 percent were identified as using the internet excessively.

Just nine months later 84 of the teenagers were identified as suffering from depression and the data showed that those who used the internet “excessively” were one and a half times more likely to have depression than those who didn’t.

Of course you may say that teenagers are at a difficult time of life and some may become depressed anyway, but in this case, the data was obtained after other factors that could contribute to depression had been ruled out.

The study was authored by Dr Lawrence Lam, a psychologist at Sydney’s University of Notre Dame’s School of Medicine and Zi-Wen Peng of the Ministry of Education and SunYat-Sen University in Guangzhou.

Warning signs that your teen is using the internet excessively is when they become anxious and agitated when not sat in front of their computer screens and who show little or no interest in socializing with their peers.

“They can’t get their minds off the Internet; they feel agitated if they don’t get back on after a short period of being away” the telegraph reports Dr Lam as saying in a telephone interview.

“They don’t want to see friends, don’t want to join family gatherings, don’t want to spend time with parents or siblings”.

The research has been published in the Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and the authors wrote:

“This result suggests that young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the internet pathologically could develop depression as a consequence”.

The researchers are therefore calling for screening of at risk individuals in schools as a way of identifying those who are at risk in order to enable early counselling and treatment.

What isn’t clear by the study is whether teenagers who are prone to depression use the internet more frequently or if excessive internet use triggers the depression.

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Are our children now suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder?

June 3, 2010

Children today have grown up with computers, mobile phones, gaming consoles, and all kinds of technological devices that keep them indoors and wired up to electronics. Is this causing them to suffer from a kind of Nature Deficit Disorder?

According to Richard Louv, author of the award winning book “Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, our kids are missing out on a whole range of social and developmental benefits from exposure to the wilderness and are suffering from psychological symptoms as a result.

Louv reckons that the symptoms of Nature Deficit Disorder, which incidentally is a term he coined himself, includes depression, hyperactivity, loneliness and boredom and that getting closer to nature is a natural Ritalin for treating kids with hyperactivity problems.

It’s true; many children today living in flats and in cities, don’t get the same contact with nature as those who have been brought up in the countryside. Kids are spending more time indoors than they ever did before and just about everything they learn about nature is from a computer or television screen.

Louv was explaining in a recent interview with journalist Natasha Mitchell on the Australian radio programme “All in the Mind” that nature can come in many different forms for a child.

“A newborn calf; a pet that lives and dies; a worn path through the woods; a fort nested in stinging nettles; a damp, mysterious edge of a vacant lot.

“Whatever shape nature takes, it offers each child an older, larger world separate from parents. Unlike television, nature does not steal time, it amplifies it.

“Nature offers healing for a child living in a destructive family or neighbourhood. It serves as a blank slate upon which a child draws and reinterprets the culture’s fantasies.

“Nature inspires creativity in a child by demanding visualisation and the full use of the senses. Given a chance, a child will bring the confusion of the world to the woods, wash it in the creek, turn it over to see what lives on the unseen side of that confusion.

“Nature can frighten a child, too, and this fright serves a purpose. In nature, a child finds freedom, fantasy, and privacy: a place distant from the adult world, a separate peace” said Louv.

When he puts it like that it does seem as if our children are missing out and therefore future generations will suffer too.

Louv is now actively trying to encourage families and their kids to get back in touch with nature and is the co-founder and Chairman of Children and Nature Network USA.

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Depression in preschoolers is real says study

June 3, 2010

When we think of depression, we might imagine a sad old man or woman who sits alone day after day, night after night, staring into space, not saying much, feeling as though they have nothing left to live for.

Or, we might imagine a young burnt out executive for whom stress has got the better of him and he has sunk into a deep depression.

Or the image might be of a young mother juggling kids and work and the home, and who can no longer cope.

We may think of a younger adult or teenager who has become fed up and depressed and who is struggling to get their life on track.

The point is, we can think of any number of different people who can become depressed but how many of us would think about a very young child who hasn’t even started school yet? Somehow that doesn’t fit in with our perception of who is likely to be depressed.

Now, child psychiatrist Joan Luby from Washington University in St Louis argues that preschool depression is very real and that it is important that we identify it early on.

One of the problems in diagnosing depression in a preschooler according to Luby is that depression in a very young child may not manifest in exactly the same way as it does for an older person.

“It is difficult to imagine a child as young as preschool age suffering from clinical depression” notes Luby in her report.

“Unlike depressed adults, a depressed preschooler may not appear morbidly or obviously sad or withdrawn, and may have periods of brightening or apparently normal functioning during any given day.

“These features, as well as an inherent resistance to imagining that a preschooler may be depressed, make it more difficult to identify the disorder in young children” says Luby.

According to Luby it’s important that we identify depression in a preschool child as they are more at risk of developing depression later in life.

The problem is how would we treat depression in a child who is 3 years old? Do we give them anti-depressants? I would certainly hope not!

Apparently there’s a new type of therapy for treating preschool depression currently being tested out which is based on Parent Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT) and which has been modified to emphasise the child’s Emotion Development (ED).

Luby’s study has been published in the latest version of the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science.

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Could Pesticides Trigger ADHD?

June 3, 2010

A team of scientists from the University of Montreal and from Harvard, have discovered that exposure to organophosphate pesticides could be associated with an increased risk of ADHD in children.

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder or ADHD as it is more commonly known, is characterised by hyperactive and impulsive behaviour, lack of focus, difficulty in concentrating or carrying out tasks, and a number of other symptoms, all of which can affect a child’s relationships with family and peers and can have a negative effect on a child’s academic performance as well.

This latest study involved over 1,100 children from the US, each of whom had their urine analysed for the presence of pesticides.

Those who had high levels of pesticides in their urine were found to be more than twice as likely to develop ADHD as those who didn’t have detectable levels of pesticides.

“Previous studies have shown that exposure to some organophosphate compounds cause hyperactivity and cognitive deficits in animals” says lead author Maryse F. Bouchard of the University Of Montreal Department Of Environmental and Occupational Health and the Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center.

“Our study found that exposure to organophosphates in developing children might have effects on neural systems and could contribute to ADHD behaviours, such as inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity.”

For those who don’t already know, Organophosphates are known to be toxic to the body’s nervous system and were originally developed as a nerve gas for chemical warfare so it’s not surprising they would have an effect on a young child.

The worrying thing is that a researcher on the study, Marc Wiesskopf of the Harvard School of Public Health told Reuters that the levels of pesticides don’t even have to be high for ADHD symptoms to develop.

“What this paper specifically highlights is that this may be true even at low concentrations” he told Reuters.

What the researchers don’t know as it’s the very first study to make a link between pesticides and ADHD, is whether the pesticides trigger ADHD symptoms or whether people with ADHD are more susceptible to the effects of pesticides. The pesticides incidentally can come from food, water or air.

If pesticides are implicated in ADHD, as they seem to be, it’s advisable for parents to make sure they thoroughly wash any non-organic fruits and vegetables, particularly berries, and to take care when using any pesticides in and around the home.

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Adolescents coping with the stigma of mental illness

May 26, 2010

Being diagnosed with a mental illness is not a pleasant experience for anyone at the best of times but what about when an adolescent is diagnosed with a mental health problem, the experience must surely be much worse.

An increasing number of young people are being diagnosed with a mental health problem for which they receive medication but at the same time they also have to cope with the stigma that still surrounds mental health making them feel more isolated than ever.

Previous studies into stigma have generally focussed on adults but now, in one of the first studies to concentrate on adolescents between the ages of 12 and 17 who were taking medication, the researchers discovered that the majority of those involved, in fact a whopping 90 percent of these kids, had experienced some sort of stigma which led to shame, secrecy, and which limited their social interactions.

The study came from Case Western Reserve University Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences. The researchers noted that everyone suffers some sort of stigma whether from the public or from themselves and much is already known about adult stigma but the researchers were interested to find out if the adolescent experience of stigma was the same as adults.

The findings from this stigma study came from secondary data from a major study that investigated the subjective experience of adolescent psychotropic treatment.

Forty youngsters in the study reported that the attitudes of their parents and teachers at school either protect against or magnify their feelings of being different or ashamed because of their mental illness.

“Parents, who embrace and love their children for whom they are and accept the illness as part of their child’s being, help their children overcome these stigmas” said Derrick Kranke, the lead author on an article in Children and Youth Services Review article, ‘Stigma Experience Among Adolescents Taking Psychiatric Medications.’

The researchers also found that if at school, the kids felt ostracised by their peers and teachers, the effect could be devastating and lead to dropping out of school or even suicide.

It’s vitally important that we tackle stigma at all levels, particularly as it could prevent someone who really does need help from seeking that help with tragic consequences. Until we all learn that mental health problems do not discriminate against anyone and that everyone is at risk throughout the whole of their lives, stigma will persist.

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Playing in the mud makes kids less anxious and smarter

May 25, 2010

A story just out in the Montreal Gazette, states that not only will playing in the dirt make kids less anxious, it might also improve their cognitive function.

They are referring to a study presented at the 110th general meeting of the American Society for Microbiology in San Diego which found that mice that had been exposed to bacteria found in soil were able to navigate a maze twice as fast as other mice used in controls and with less anxiety.

It was three years ago that Dr Dorothy Matthews started to look into a particular bacteria found in soil known as Mycobacterium vaccae, apparently after British scientists published findings that when mice were injected with a version of the microbe it stimulated their brain cells into producing serotonin.

“Serotonin is a molecule that has a number of different effects, but one of them is modulating mood and decreasing anxiety,” Matthews, an associate professor of biology at The Sage Colleges in Troy, NY is quoted as saying by the Montreal Gazette.

“If you’re nervous, if you’re frightened, you just can’t think straight” said Matthews.

So basically Dr Matthews wondered if the bacterium might also have an effect on learning in mice and by the sounds of things she was right.

The mice that had been exposed to the bacteria were able to run round the maze twice as fast as other mice and exhibited less anxious behaviour such as wall climbing, stopping, grooming, and defecating amongst others.

Then when the bacteria were removed, the mice slowed down, although not to levels as slow as the controls mice, and the researchers believe that this could have been because of less serotonin, in other words, they experienced serotonin withdrawal.

The researchers concluded that as we have lost touch nature, we have also lost touch with an organism that might actually be highly beneficial to humans.

According to Mathews, we are exposed to these bacteria when we are outside but in the last 100 years or so we have become more urbanised and are not eating naturally grown foods and instead are eating foods that have been washed, processed or grown with pesticides.

She reckons that if children played outside more or if schools made time in the curriculum for kids to get out in nature, then their ability to learn new tasks could improve and their anxiety levels could decrease.

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