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Friday, October 29, 2010

Today's Headline: Mental Illness updated


Several days ago, I started another blog, Mental Illness Updated, but no it took me only two or three days to realize that the headlines about mental illness belonged on Headline Hunting. Mental health, basically is about thinking processes, how well one sees and interacts with the world. When trying to segregate it into its own neat little compartment it is not having its due justice. (The opposite image is a bit of art I created myself many years ago. I painted the picture with watercolors and made a fabric frame to match. At the I was entertaining myself by making home made frames.)

Hence forth Headline Hunting will have to do with mental health as well as all other aspects of life, mentally healthy or mentally ill, that have to do with news on subjects that are important enough for me to give them an hour or so of my time. To begin here, I will start all over and in succeeding days all items on Mental Illness Updated will be pasted here. In this way, I don't fear that the topic will be shunned. Who in their right mind will want to taint their mental health with mental illness, and who in their wrong mind will believe they dwell a bit on the topic? But, hopefully, Headline Hunting will not spoof either.

(Day one of Mental Health Update)
This is a new blog and will henceforth be all about what is being studied, written, taking place concerning Mental Illness. It is one facet of health care that cannot remain unclear. All other health care shrinks in comparison. If the mind is not properly working, how can any healing take place:
that is the underlying theme of this blog.

According to TribLive, Lifestyles and writer Matthew Santoni The first inpatient center for diagnosing children with Bipolar illness is being opened at the University of Pittsburg's Western Psych Center. "Pittsburgh is becoming a leader in diagnosing and treating a pediatric disorder that, 30 years ago, psychiatrists didn't think existed in children.

The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center's Western Psychiatric Institute will become home to the nation's first inpatient facility for diagnosing and treating bipolar disorder in children, which doctors gradually are recognizing as a deadly problem.

Research increasingly shows that bipolar disorders -- often taking the form of swings between depression and mania, changing levels of activity and sleep, and appetite disorders -- can manifest in young children and teenagers in worse forms than in adults and lead to higher rates of attempted suicide in young people, said Dr. Rasim Somer Diler, medical director of UPMC's Inpatient Child and Adolescent Bipolar Services, or in-CABS.

"Up until 1978, kids were not actually considered to be capable of depression," Diler said. "Thanks to recent studies, we now know bipolar disorder exists in both adolescents and children."

Up until the last twenty years or so, this was a condition that was thought not to exist. Manic Depression, or Bi-polar illness was thought to have an onset at around the age of twenty or twenty-one.

That idea never made sense to me. What did that child do with their inherited mood discrepencies during elementary school and during high school and adolescence? Hide them under their bed as if they were a boogie man? The potential for the personality is born with the child, how it is developed makes all the difference. And certainly these children should not have to wait until early adulthood to get a diagnosis.

What about school dropouts, sexual promiscuity, run ins with authorities, shouldn't these be considered and taken care of in the formative years.

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