Sibling Bullying: Are Parents in denial about sibling aggression?

Siblings routinely pick on one another, but when does bickering become bullying - and what can parents do about it?

Sibling relationships can be difficult, and never more so than in childhood. But society often regards the scrapping and squabbling, the play fighting and not-so-playful fighting as a normal part of growing up.

"The public brushes off aggression between siblings as just rivalry," says Corinna Tucker of the Carsye Institute, University of New Hampshire.

Tucker is the lead author of a new study on the issue for the journal Pediatrics. Almost a third of the 3,600 children questioned said they had been the victim of some sort of sibling aggression in the past 12 months.

This included a range of acts from theft and psychological abuse to physical assault, either mild or severe. In comparison, research suggests that up to a quarter of children are victims of schoolyard aggression every year.

Corinna Tucker uses the term "sibling aggression" in her study, but psychologists are increasingly reaching for a familiar label for the bad stuff that goes on between brothers and sisters - bullying.

This is defined by experts as intentional acts of aggression, repeated over a period of time, where an individual or group is in a position of power over someone.

So sibling relationships would seem the perfect breeding ground for bullying, since children live together for a long period of time and there is usually an intellectual and physical power imbalance.

Although there might not be an outright malevolence, there is often reason for jealousy.

"A sibling relationship is emotionally intense - it's one of those relationships where you can love them and you can hate them at the same time," says Tucker.

"And siblings are natural competitors for family resources and parents' attention."

Laura - who grew up in a house she shared with four siblings and a foster brother - did not consider it bullying at the time, but now thinks the term captures what went on in their house in Ohio.

"My older brother - I would say he beat up on all of us," she says, her voice breaking. Although he never hurt them badly, he liked to wrestle his sisters, pinning them to the floor.

"He was bigger and stronger than us - he could put us in very powerless situations. It was really scary."

For her brother, she believes, the activity gave him a momentary sense of control at a chaotic time for the family. Her mother, who had depression, had left home.

The children were all particularly mean to the youngest sister Tracy who had been the focus of their mother's attention. In the afternoons, after school and before their father came home from work, they would tease Tracy until she phoned her mother to try to get them to stop.

"I remember us saying to her: 'Mum can't do anything about it - she isn't coming here,'" recalls Laura. "And my dad - I think he was so overwhelmed that he only ended up dealing with the most serious things."

Her father later told Laura that he had sent her foster brother back to the orphanage because he was being bullied so much by Laura's middle sisters, a pair of twins.

Research led by Dieter Wolke at the University of Warwick on large samples of British and Israeli schoolchildren has found that half the children who suffered from sibling bullying also suffered bullying at school - and that this group was particularly at risk of unhappiness or developing behavioural problems.

"If you only have sibling bullying or school bullying you are about 2.7 times more likely to have behaviour problems, but if you have both then it's 14 times more likely," says Wolke. "And the point about this is that you don't have any escape. It's 24/7."

Little is known about the long-term effects of sibling bullying but Jan Parker, a family psychotherapist and a co-author of Raising Happy Brothers and Sisters, is certain that they can be "serious and lifelong".

"We're very familiar with discussions on the impact of [school] bullying," she says. "I don't think it takes a great imaginative leap to understand the impact of it happening within your own home. You feel that you are not only let down by the person bullying you, but also by the adults in your life that are letting it go unchecked."

While sibling fights are normal, parents need to be aware of a pattern developing over time, she says. Parents are advised to talk to the children about what's happening. If they are worried, they could speak to a health professional.

They should also consider what might be causing the problems. "There is one known predictor - it's when siblings perceive there to be a wide disparity between how they are treated and how their brother and sister are treated," she says.

Robin Kowalski spoke to Health Check on the BBC World Service - listen again to the programme on iPlayer or get the Health Check podcast.

Bullied Children Suffer Lasting Psychological Harm as Adults

Bullied children grow into adults who are at increased risk of developing anxiety disorders, depression and suicidal thoughts, according to a study led by researchers at Duke Medicine.

The findings, based on more than 20 years of data from a large group of participants initially enrolled as adolescents, are the most definitive to date in establishing the long-term psychological effects of bullying.

Published online Feb. 20, 2013, in JAMA Psychiatry, the study belies a common perception that bullying, while hurtful, inflicts a fleeting injury that victims outgrow.

"We were surprised at how profoundly bullying affects a person's long-term functioning," said William E. Copeland, PhD, assistant clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Duke University and lead author of the study.

"This psychological damage doesn't just go away because a person grew up and is no longer bullied. This is something that stays with them. If we can address this now, we can prevent a whole host of problems down the road."

A previous longitudinal study of bullied children, conducted in Finland, found mixed results, concluding that boys had few lasting problems, while girls suffered more long-term psychological harm. That study, however, relied on registry data in the health system that didn't fully capture psychiatric records.

Copeland and colleagues had a much richer data set. Using the Great Smoky Mountain Study, the research team tapped a population-based sample of 1,420 children ages 9, 11 and 13 from 11 counties in western North Carolina. Initially enrolled in 1993, the children and their parents or caregivers were interviewed annually until the youngsters turned 16, and then periodically thereafter.

At each assessment until age 16, the child and caregiver were asked, among other things, whether the child had been bullied or teased or had bullied others in the three months immediately prior to the interview.

A total of 421 child or adolescent participants -- 26 percent of the children -- reported being bullied at least once; 887 said they suffered no such abuse. Boys and girls reported incidents at about the same rate. Nearly 200 youngsters, or 9.5 percent, acknowledged bullying others; 112 were bullies only, while 86 were both bullies and victims.

Of the original 1,420 children, more than 1,270 were followed up into adulthood. The subsequent interviews included questions about the participants' psychological health.

As adults, those who said they had been bullied, plus those who were both victims and aggressors, were at higher risk for psychiatric disorders compared with those with no history of being bullied.

The young people who were only victims had higher levels of depressive disorders, anxiety disorders, generalized anxiety, panic disorder and agoraphobia.

Those who were both bullies and victims had higher levels of all anxiety and depressive disorders, plus the highest levels of suicidal thoughts, depressive disorders, generalized anxiety and panic disorder. Bullies were also at increased risk for antisocial personality disorder.

The researchers were able to sort out confounding factors that might have contributed to psychiatric disorders, including poverty, abuse and an unstable or dysfunctional home life.

"Bullying is potentially a problem for bullies as well as for victims," said senior author E. Jane Costello, PhD, associate director of research at Duke's Center for Child and Family Policy.

"Bullying, which we tend to think of as a normal and not terribly important part of childhood, turns out to have the potential for very serious consequences for children, adolescents and adults."

Costello and Copeland said they would continue their analysis, with future studies exploring the role sexual orientation plays in bullying and victimization.

Adult Psychiatric Outcomes of Bullying and Being Bullied by Peers in Childhood and Adolescence. JAMA Psychiatry, 2013 DOI:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2013.504

BiPolar Disorder: Cannabis increases neuro-cognitive performance

According to a study published online in the journal Psychiatry Research, individuals with bipolar disorder who used cannabis showed higher neuro-cognitive performance than patients who did not use cannabis.

The Researchers; The Zucker Hillside Hospital in Long Island, NY, in collaboration with a team at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City.

They examined the difference in cognitive performance among 50 individuals with bipolar disorder who had a history of cannabis use, with 150 bipolar patients who had no history of cannabis use.

Both groups of patients were similar in age at bipolar onset. In addition, the groups did not differ in racial background, age, or highest education level achieved.

The team discovered that patients who used cannabis showed superior neuro-cognitive performance than those who did not. However, patients who used cannabis did not differ considerably on estimates of premorbid IQ.

The researchers explained: "Results from our analysis suggest that subjects with bipolar disorder and history of (cannabis use) demonstrate significantly better neurocognitive performance, particularly on measures of attention, processing speed, and working memory.

These findings are consistent with a previous study that demonstrated that bipolar subjects with history of cannabis use had superior verbal fluency performance as compared to bipolar patients without a history of cannabis use.

Similar results have also been found in schizophrenia in several studies."

They concluded, "The data could be interpreted to suggest that cannabis use may have a beneficial effect on cognitive functioning in patients with severe psychiatric disorders.

However, it is also possible that these findings may be due to the requirement for a certain level of cognitive function and related social skills in the acquisition of illicit drugs."

What is Bipolar Disorder?  
Bipolar disorder, more commonly known in the past as manic depression or manic depressive illness, is a mental disorder in which the patient has mood instability, often severe. In severe cases the illness can be very disabling, psychologically and socially.

An individual with bipolar disorder typically has unusual shifts in mood, energy, and the ability to function - these changes can last for weeks and sometimes months.

The fluctuations present in bipolar disorder are much more severe than the "ups-and-downs" we all go through. The changes are much steeper and last longer.

They can damage relationships, destroy job prospects, and undermine school performance. Some patients find their symptoms so unbearable that they attempt to commit suicide.

Dyslexia: Is it Big in Japan?

Many psychologists and cognitive scientists are convinced that Dyslexia is a complex cognitive disorder that only affects people trying to learn and read particularly difficult languages, ones which are full of exceptions to their own grammatical rules and which are more conceptual and not graphical in nature.

With this in mind, Dyslexia is thought to be very rare or non-existent in oriental languages because of the graphical nature of their language and writings.

Below is an extract from The Asahi Shimbun article that not only considers Dyslexia an issue in Japan but has first hand knowledge of the difficulties incurred by students.

Satoru Inoue

"Satoru Inoue and other people in Japan with dyslexia, a learning disorder that makes reading and writing difficult, have begun speaking out about their experiences by writing books and appearing in documentary films.

"I'd like teachers to know that children have the right to learn,” Satoru said, explaining why he wrote the book. “I want to do what I can so that there are fewer people like me."

Awareness of the disorder has been slow to develop in Japan, while support has been lagging that of Western countries.

Since the support is limited, many only become aware that they have dyslexia after reaching adulthood."

A Second extract from the same article:

"Like Satoru, Hiroko Sunanaga reached adulthood not knowing that she had dyslexia.

Her daily life is now featured in "DX (Dyslexia) na Hibi: Bin-chan no Baai" (DX days: The case of Bin-chan), an 81-minute documentary.

Sunanaga, whose nickname is Bin-chan, is now in her 30s.

A professor at an art university in London, where Sunanaga was studying in her early 20s, was the first person to suggest she had dyslexia."
 
Read the full article here

Autism: France's treatment 'shame' - The Mother's at Fault!

In many countries, the standard way of treating autistic children is with behavioural therapy, stimulating and rewarding them to develop the skills they need to function in society, but France still puts its faith in psychoanalysis, and an increasing number of parents are now demanding change.

For autism campaigners, it is one of the most serious health scandals of our times.

How for decades France turned its back on the latest scientific thinking, and treated autism as a form of psychosis.

How, as a result, tens of thousands of children were misdiagnosed, or worse, not diagnosed at all, and consigned to lives of misery.

And how, to this day, in its approach to autism, the French medical establishment continues to believe in the powers of psychiatry and psychoanalysis, long after the rest of the world has switched to alternative methods of treatment.

"It is an out-and-out disgrace," according to Daniel Fasquelle, a member of parliament who campaigns on the issue.

"Every day I am contacted by parents with the same story, how their child's autism was not detected in time, so they never had the treatment that they needed.

"Thousands of children could have been saved. They do it everywhere else. Why not here? It is France's shame."

The row over autism in France has festered unreported for years but recently it has become public.

Independent associations have been created, lobbying for a move away from psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and over to the "behaviourist" treatments that prevail elsewhere.

In early March, these groups scored an important victory - with a ruling from the health ministry that calls into question the use of psychoanalysis as a treatment for autism.

But the psychoanalysts are not taking it lying down. From their point of view, behaviourism is a form of superficial social conditioning that does not address root causes and they resent the way they have been typecast as the villains of the piece, when their aims are as sincere as those of their opponents.

"One thing that never pays in the field of autism is triumphalism," said Lauriane Brunessaux, a child psychiatrist. "Autism is far too complex, and we understand it so badly.

"Today it is the behaviourists who are being triumphalist."

The behaviourist approach to autism was developed in the 1970s and 80s in the US and Canada, and it is now the norm in most of the world.

Under the so-called ABA method (Applied Behavioural Analysis), autism is treated as primarily an educational, rather than a medical, problem.

With a set of rewards (which can be granted or withheld) and with plenty of individual attention, children can learn to function in society, and be much less of a burden on their families.

"If you diagnose early, and then give the right treatment between the ages of two and seven, 70% of autistic children can acquire functional language skills. Here in France, we are way off that figure," says Fasquelle.

"And the same pattern continues later in life. In the UK, there are 17 times more university students with autism than in France. It is unacceptable."

Fasquelle and autism associations argue that the blame lies with a medical establishment that remains fixated with Freud.

"Today everyone knows that autism is a neuro-developmental problem. It is not a psychosis or mental disorder," says Muhamed Sajidi, president of the association Conquer Autism.

"But in France it is the psychiatrists, heavily influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, who remain in charge and they have shut themselves off from all the changes in our knowledge of autism."

Sajidi set up the association after his life was "destroyed", as he puts it, by the medical establishment's failure to diagnose his son Sami's autism.

For him, as for many others, one of the worst aspects is how blame for autism has been laid at the door of the child's parents, and more especially of the mother.

"The first time I went to see a doctor when my (autistic) son Gael was three and we thought there was a problem, the psychiatrist asked me if I had wanted him - if it had been a wanted pregnancy!" says Candy Lepenuizic, a British woman married to a Frenchman.

"Then she asked what sort of dreams I had had while I was pregnant with him. And suggested the whole family have a course of psychotherapy.

"At that point I got up and walked out. It was only because I had been warned this might happen that I did not burst into tears."

Such horror stories are typical in French families of autistic children.

"The whole idea was that it was la faute à maman (the mother's fault). It was the 'refrigerator mum', or there was some problem with the family dynamic," says Lepenuizic.

"They thought that if the child was failing to communicate with the outside world, it was because of some trauma in the womb or in very early life. There was a family malfunction, and we had to cure it!"

Critics say this emphasis on psychoanalysis and relationships meant that autistic children were not spotted till far too late. And that, in turn, meant that their chances of effective treatment were sharply reduced.

Some 60% of autistic children in Sweden attend school, Sajidi says.

"Today only 20% of autistic children in France are in school, and often only part-time. The rest are either in psychiatric hospitals, or in medico-social centres, or living at home - or in Belgium," says Sajidi.

"Many families are sending their children to Belgium, where it is much easier to set up behaviourist treatment centres.

"Things are changing now, because parents are refusing to be taken for a ride by the professionals. But the real tragedy is with France's autistic adults, many of whom are in a state of total incomprehension or even self-mutilation.

"Seventy-five percent of families with autistic children end in divorce, and normally it is with the mother that the autistic person stays.

"Today these poor elderly women are looking after their adult children with no knowing what will happen when they die."

If Sajidi and other campaigners are beginning to feel the wind turn, it is because the health ministry is finally beginning to fund pilot schemes for behaviourist schools, as well as early diagnosis centres.

In its recent report, the ministry also effectively outlawed a practice known as "packing" where autistic children are wrapped in damp cloths in order to reconnect with their bodies. Campaigners say the treatment is both barbaric and ineffective.

The fundamental problem, campaigners argue, is that the psychiatric profession is resisting calls for change, because the fewer patients there are, the less they earn.

"They have a financial interest in institutionalising autistic children," says Sajidi.

Lepenezuic says: "The state pays. The child doesn't get any better - but who cares? It's being looked after by the state, and the doctors are making a lot of money. Why would they change the system?"

But on the other side of the fence, such charges are deeply resented.

Child psychiatrists like Lauriane Brunessaux believe that the associations have grossly distorted the debate, and are engaged in a battle to "discredit psychoanalysis and the whole notion of the unconscious".

Defenders of the French system argue that the situation was never as one-dimensional as the behaviourists have claimed.

First of all, they say, there have been plenty of success stories emanating from a psychoanalytical treatment of autism. They just have not been so loudly trumpeted.

Secondly, it is not as if the behaviourist approach is itself beyond criticism. In the US and Canada, argues Brunessaux, there have been studies that raise serious questions over its true scientific validity.

"The only real scientific reference for behaviourism is the electric shock experimentation on rats carried out by (US psychologist) Burrhus Skinner in the 1940s.

"Obviously the methods of reward and punishment today are totally different. But that is the background to behaviourism," she says.

For leading French psychoanalyst Eric Laurent, there is a deeper problem.

"Changing behaviour is one thing. But what do you do with the trouble that lies behind it? It is all very well to focus on the skills that can be transmitted via an intensive behaviourist approach, but that leaves a whole dimension out of the picture," he says.

As for the charge that psychoanalysts are responsible for family breakdown, Laurent is equally dismissive.

"The idea that you had to wait for psychoanalysts to come along for there to be hatred inside families is ridiculous. Hatred has always been there.

"Psychoanalysis is being used as a scapegoat - though we should not perhaps mind that, as being a scapegoat is part of the role of psychoanalysis," he says.

What angers people like Brunessaux and Laurent is that while on their side of the debate they are quite prepared to admit the effectiveness of behaviourism - as one of several possible approaches to autism - the behaviourists are dogmatically tied to their system and theirs alone.

Whoever is ultimately in the right, what the autism row perhaps shows most clearly is the changing nature of French society.

Once, families did what they were told. The state was ultimately benevolent, and had massive resources to dispense. If doctors chose institutionalisation, then who was to argue?

Today it is different. Thanks to the spread of knowledge, the internet, consumerism and the decline of the collective spirit - families for the first time feel emboldened to think, and act, for themselves.

Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: Online Therapy More Effective for Teens

Online therapy is more effective for exhausted teens with chronic fatigue syndrome than traditional in-person therapy, according to new research.

Exhausted teens fared better with behavioral therapists over webcams who gave addition support through email, compared with teens treated with exercise and in-person therapy sessions, according to the research.

Online-treated teens reported higher school attendance, more energy and better overall health, compared with their in-person treated peers, according to the study.

Researchers from the Utrecht University Medical Center in The Netherlands followed 135 teens over the course of a year. Half of the participants received standard treatments of exercise and one-on-one therapy sessions with a behavioral therapist, and the other half received online therapy through a program called FITNET - Fatigue In Teenagers on the interNET - created by the researchers.

"Web-based treatment has general advantages: it is available at any time, avoids face-to-face treatment barriers (i.e., treatment delay due to poor accessibility, inconvenience of scheduling appointments, missing school or work, travelling to or from a clinician's office), and reduces treatment time and costs," the authors wrote.

Chronic fatigue syndrome, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis, is a condition characterized by fatigue, impaired memory, muscle and joint pain, headaches, night sweats and psychological problems such as depression, anxiety and mood swings.

The disease can be debilitating and often causes missed work and school, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The cause of the disorder is not known and usually starts suddenly with flu-like symptoms.

After six months of therapy, 85 percent of the FITNET group reported no severe fatigue compared to only 27 percent from the standard treatment group, according to the study.

In addition, 75 percent of the FITNET group stayed enrolled in school full time compared to 16 percent from the standard treatment group.

The trend remained after a year of therapy.

"What is exciting about this trial is that these researchers have made the delivery of an effective treatment for CFS more convenient, more accessible, and possibly more cost-effective," Dr. Peter White, a chronic fatigue syndrome researcher at the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, who was not involved with the study, told WebMD.

White said many people suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome have a hard time finding treatment due to a lack of qualified therapists.

"FITNET offers a readily accessible and highly effective treatment for adolescents with chronic fatigue syndrome," the authors wrote. "The results of this study justify implementation on a broader scale."

No word on when chronic fatigue syndrome patients will be able to use FITNET themselves.
The Lancet published the study Thursday.

Some chronic fatigue syndrome researchers are skeptical of the results.

"I find it hard to believe that an Internet-delivered cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) programme can produce a 63 percent recovery rate over a six month period" Dr. Charles Shepherd, a medical advisor for the Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Association, a group that funds research for the condition, said in a statement.

"The success rate is far in excess of any other published clinical trial," he continued. He also said that the results are not consistent with chronic fatigue syndrome studies that had a larger sample size.

Chronic fatigue syndrome affects over 1 million Americans, according to the CDC. Missed work and school days, doctor visits and other healthcare costs related to the condition total $9.1 billion annually, according to a 2004 Neuropsychology Review study.

Who's in the know? To a preschooler, the person doing the pointing

If you want a preschooler to get the point, point. That's a lesson that can be drawn from a new study in Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science.

As part of their investigation of how small children know what other people know, the authors, Carolyn Palmquist and Vikram K. Jaswal of the University of Virginia, found they were able to mislead preschoolers with the simple introduction of a pointing gesture.

"Children were willing to attribute knowledge to a person solely based on the gesture they used to convey the information," says Palmquist. "They have built up such a strong belief in the knowledge that comes along with pointing that it trumps everything else, including what they see with their eyes."

The authors showed 48 preschoolers, half of them boys and half girls, a videotape of two women, four cups, and a ball.

In each of four sequences, one woman said she was going to hide the ball under one of the cups. The other woman covered her eyes and turned to the wall.

The "hider" placed a barrier in front of the cups, so the children could see she was hiding the ball, but not which cup she hid it under.

The barrier was removed, the other woman turned around. Then, each sequence took one of three forms. In the "baseline" condition, both women sat with their hands in their laps.

In another condition, each grasped a different cup, and in another, each pointed at a different cup. The children were asked: "Which woman knows where the ball is?" In two of the trials, one woman was the hider; in the other two, the other was.

When both grasped the cup or when neither touched a cup, the children gave the correct answer about three times out of four.

Grasping was not a meaningful gesture to the children, the authors guessed, or they may have associated grasping with searching for the ball.

When both women pointed, however, the children chose the right person only about half the time, statistically, by chance.

To make sure the preschoolers hadn't ignored the question and inferred they were being asked which cup they would look under, the experimenters showed eight other children the pointing sequences and asked: "Which woman hid the ball?"

In this case, the children got it right three out of four times. So the first group knew who hid the ball; they just thought the other woman must also have had some intelligence about the ball's whereabouts.

"From an early age, when children see pointing, they understand it as an important gesture used in contexts of teaching and learning," Palmquist explains.

"Generally people point because they have good reason to do it." As a species humans are "uniquely inclined toward cooperative communication," she notes.

"This finding fits into that framework. The children are already expecting that people will be helpful and knowledgeable, especially since they're using these cues."

New theory links depression to chronic brain inflammation

Chronic depression may be an adaptive, reparative neurobiological process gone wrong, say two University of California, San Diego School of Medicine researchers, positing in a new theory that the debilitating mental state originates from more ancient mechanisms used by the body to deal with physical injury, such as pain, tissue repair and convalescent behaviour.

In a paper published in the September online edition of Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Review, Athina Markou, PhD, professor of psychiatry, and Karen Wager-Smith, a post-doctoral researcher, integrate evidence from diverse clinical, biological and behavioural studies to create a novel theory they hope will lead to a shift in thinking about depression.

“In contrast to other biological theories of depression, we started with a slightly different question,” said Wager-Smith. “Other theories address the question: ‘What is malfunctioning in depression?’ We took a step back and asked the question: ‘What is the biology of the proper function of the depressive response?’

Once we had a theoretical model for the biology of a well-functioning depressive response, it helped make sense of all the myriad differences between depressed and non-depressed subjects that the biomedical approach has painstakingly amassed.”

According to the new theory, severe stress and adverse life events, such as losing a job or family member, prompt neurobiological processes that physically alter the brain. Neurons change shape and connections.

Some die, but others sprout as the brain rewires itself. This neural remodeling employs basic wound-healing mechanisms, which means it can be painful and occasionally incapacitating, even when it’s going well.

“It’s necessary and normal so that an individual can adapt, change behavior and deal with altered circumstances,” Markou said. Real problems occur only “when these restructuring processes go into overdrive, beyond what is necessary and adaptive, and for longer periods of time than needed. Then depression becomes pathological.”

The theory extends findings made by other researchers that the neurobiological substrates of physical and emotional pain overlap. Just as the body’s repair mechanisms for physical injury can sometimes result in chronic pain and inflammation, so too can the response to psychological trauma, resulting in chronic depression.

Markou and Wager-Smith argue that existing, conflicting views about depression actually describe different aspects of the same phenomenon. Psychoanalytic and sociological theories refer to the psychological transformation that occurs during a productive depressive episode.

Biomedical theories relate to the neural remodeling that underlies this psychological change. And neurodegenerative theories account for remodeling malfunctions.

“The big question, of course, is why aren’t all people affected the same way,” said Markou. “Why do some people deal effectively with stress, but others perpetuate a pathological state? This is an interesting question for future research.”

To read more follow this link ......New theory links depression to chronic brain inflammation | Science Blog

Childhood psychological problems create long-term economic losses

A first-of-its-kind study examining the long-term economic consequences of childhood psychological disorders finds the conditions diminish people's ability to work and earn as adults, costing $2.1 trillion over the lifetimes of all affected Americans.

People who suffer from childhood conditions such as depression and substance abuse are less likely to be married, attain less education and see their income reduced by about 20 percent over their lifetimes, according to findings published online by the journal Social Science & Medicine.

"This study shows childhood psychological disorders can cause significant long-lasting harm and can have far-reaching impact on individuals over their lifetimes," said James P. Smith, the study's lead author and corporate chair of economics at RAND, a nonprofit research organization. "Our findings illustrate what the enormous potential might be of identifying and treating these problems early in life."

Researchers examined information from a large study that has followed American families for more than 40 years and found evidence that the impact of childhood psychological problems have lasting impact across many measures of economic success. The study is unique because siblings from the same family were followed in the panel, allowing the researchers to compare one sibling with childhood psychological problems to a brother or sister who did not have such problems.

People who reported having psychological problems during childhood averaged $10,400 less income per year when compared to siblings who did not have similar problems. The lower income was partly a consequence of working an average of seven weeks fewer per year.

If about one in 20 adult Americans experienced these psychological problems during their childhood years (about the current prevalence), the total lifetime economic damages for all those affected would be $2.1 trillion. This estimate does not take into consideration the non-economic costs such has lower quality of life.

To read the full article click here