Mindcare Counselling Blog

A newly published paper from Rhode Island Hospital argues against the proposed changes to redefine the number of personality disorders in the upcoming Diagnostic Statistical Manual, 5th edition (DSM-5). In their study, the researchers found the current scoring used in the DSM-IV already captures the dimensional nature of personality disorders. The paper is published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry and is now available online in advance of print. The DSM-IV currently defines 10 different personality disorders. One of the proposed changes for DSM-5 would introduce a dimensional model to the categorical system, noted Mark Zimmerman, M.D., director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital and lead author of the paper. Zimmerman and the researchers argue that there already exists a dimensional component in the current DSM-IV that can be used to identify some traits of a disorder even when the full criteria are not met. Thus, according to DSM-IV the personality disorders c...

Brain development doesn't stop at adolescence as once thought The human brain doesn't stop developing at adolescence, but continues well into our 20s, demonstrates recent research from the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry at the University of Alberta. It has been a long-held belief in medical communities that the human brain stopped developing in adolescence. But now there is evidence that this is in fact not the case, thanks to medical research conducted in the Department of Biomedical Engineering by researcher Christian Beaulieu, an Alberta Innovates – Health Solutions scientist, and by his PhD student at the time, Catherine Lebel. Lebel recently moved to the United States to work at UCLA, where she is a post-doctoral fellow working with an expert in brain-imaging research. "This is the first long-range study, using a type of imaging that looks at brain wiring, to show that in the white matter there are still structural changes happening during young adulthood...

  Tags: computer assisted therapy , anxiety An emerging therapy known as cognitive bias modification, in which software helps subjects divert attention away fromand interpret situations more calmly, helped improve anxiety symptoms in a pilot-scale randomized controlled trial. A small clinical trial suggests that cognitive bias modification (CBM), a potential anxiety therapy that is delivered entirely on a computer, may be about as effective as in-person therapy or drugs for treating social anxiety disorder. The Brown University-led research also found that participants believed the therapy to be credible and acceptable. Participants in the pilot study, published in advance online in the journal   Depression and Anxiety,   improved their scores on a standardized measure of anxiety and on a public speaking task after completing two simple exercises twice a week for four weeks. The hope for CBM is that it can provide a new option for anxiety sufferers who cannot find or pay for a qualifie...

A team of over 250 researchers from more than 20 countries have discovered that common genetic variations contribute to a person's risk of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The study of more than 50,000 adults ages 18 and older provides new molecular evidence that 11 DNA regions in the human genome have strong association with these diseases, including six regions not previously observed. The researchers also found that many of these DNA variants contribute to both diseases.   IMAGE:   Patrick F. Sullivan, M.D., Ray M. Hayworth & Family Distinguished Professor of Psychiatry and professor of genetics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is principal investigator in... Click here for more information The findings, reported by the Psychiatric Genome-Wide Association Study Consortium and published online September 18, 2011 in two papers in the journal Nature Genetics, represent significant advances in the understanding the causes of these chronic, s...

Researchers from Taiwan have confirmed a bidirectional relation between schizophrenia and epilepsy. The study published today in  Epilepsia , a journal of the International League Against Epilepsy (ILAE), reports that patients with epilepsy were nearly 8 times more likely to develop schizophrenia and those with schizophrenia were close to 6 times more likely to develop epilepsy. Prior clinical studies have shown a prevalence of psychosis among epilepsy patients and studies of psychiatric illness have found a strong relationship between schizophrenia and epilepsy, suggesting a shared susceptibility between the diseases that may be a result of genetic, environmental or neurobiological causes. While a number of studies have established a bidirectional relationship between depression, mood disorder and epilepsy, the current study is the first to investigate this type of relation between schizophrenia and epilepsy. Using data from the Taiwan National Health Insurance database, the tea...