Mental health workers walk off job

Mental health workers walk off job
Mar 19, 2008 3:36 PM

Forty four Wellington mental health workers employed by Wellink Trust are walking off the job for four hours on Wednesday, in protest at what they say are low pay rates.

The support staff are all members of the Service and Food Workers Union.

Union spokeswoman Maria Bishop says workers are asking for a pay increase of 3% and management are offering 1%.

She says Wellink talks a lot about respect and dignity for its clients, but seems to have little respect when it comes to the pay of its own staff.


http://tvnz.co.nz/view/page/536641/1647701

Officials exploring how best to serve veterans' mental health care needs

HARLINGEN — Texas veterans returning from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to seek mental health care in record numbers, officials testified before a Texas House committee Tuesday.

And community mental health facilities need to be prepared, they said.

A bill under consideration in Congress could increase funding for veterans’ mental health care. If that happens, experts say the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs should team up with community centers to provide that care.

“It would be a timely solution for (the VA) to contract with our local community centers,” said Bob Brown, board member of the Texas Council of Community of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Centers. “We’re already treating some veterans with mental health needs.”

Members of the state House Committee on Defense Affairs and State-Federal Relations invited local officials and veterans to testify on veterans’ mental health needs and the VA disability ranking system.

The committee is examining these issues and will prepare an in-depth report before the 2009 Texas legislative session, said committee Vice Chairman state Rep. Juan Escobar, D-Kingsville.

Although funding for veterans’ health care comes from the federal government, state lawmakers can help influence the Texas delegation’s decisions in Congress, committee members said.

According to a 2006 survey that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association, nearly 20 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq in 2003 and 2004, and 11 percent returning from Afghanistan, reported mental health problems.

During the first year back at home from war, 35 percent of Iraq veterans sought mental health care, according to the JAMA report.

So far, the Rio Grande Valley’s public mental health center, Tropical Texas Behavioral Health, has only treated a small number of veterans, because only people with a diagnosis of severe depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia qualify, said Terry Crocker, the center’s chief executive officer.

In 2003, lawmakers made the criteria for state-funded mental health care stricter, meaning that many veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder or anxiety disorders don’t qualify, officials said.

“There’s a significant amount of need outside those three diagnoses,” Crocker said.

The Valley’s two veterans clinics already offer mental health services that are specifically geared toward Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, said VA system spokeswoman Kathryn Petravage. Both clinics have psychologists and social workers on staff, as well as a psychiatrist, trained to treat post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health issues.



http://www.themonitor.com/news/health_8986___article.html/mental_veterans.html

Doctors urge stomach bug sufferers to stay at home

Cases of a highly infectious stomach bug sweeping Britain have doubled in a year, with doctors warning those affected not to return to work until two days after symptoms have gone.

An estimated 100,000 people a week are catching norovirus, which causes sudden vomiting and a range of other symptoms such as diarrhoea, a raised temperature, headache and aching limbs.

The Health Protection Agency (HPA) said the number of cases this season was the highest since 2002, when a virulent strain of the virus, also known as winter vomiting disease, was identified.

Employees should also stay away from GP surgeries and hospitals and remain at home for 48 hours after the symptoms have gone, the Royal College of General Practitioners warned.

Professor Steve Field, the college chairman, said the number of new cases each week may top 200,000 across the UK.

"GPs are seeing a huge number of cases of patients with the norovirus," he said. "Our advice for those affected is to stay at home, take paracetamol and drink plenty of fluids. You should also wash your hands regularly so as not to infect anyone else and, if possible, stay at home two days after the symptoms have gone."

The virus can be spread by contact with an infected person, by consuming contaminated food or water, or by contact with contaminated surfaces or objects. It is also possible to catch it from the air around someone incubating the disease.

The number of laboratory cases reported to the HPA between early September and early December in England and Wales was double that of the same period in 2006.

In 2000, 288 cases were reported to the HPA, rising to 1,845 in 2002. In 2007 there were 1,325 cases, compared with 685 in 2006. But most go unreported, so the actual number is far higher. The HPA estimates that there are between 600,000 and 1m norovirus cases in the UK every year.

The HPA said the rise could be due to a number of factors, including the norovirus season starting "uncharacteristically early" last year, with a greater number of cases from the first week of November. It said that improved reporting and testing may explain the increase as well.

The latest outbreak contributed to a sharp increase in the number of people contacting NHS Direct, the health service's 24-hour helpline. Over the 11-day Christmas and New Year period about 270,000 people used the service to assess their symptoms. More than one-in-20 wanted to discuss abdominal pain or vomiting - well above the normal rate.

"This was in keeping with reports about the rise of norovirus and other related viruses," a spokeswoman said.

The other most common symptoms reported were dental pain, fever and respiratory tract disorders. Increased use of NHS Direct's website bumped up the number of people using the service over the 11 days to 1,122,874, which was 61% up on the same time last year.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/04/health

Health and fitness

American Singles Golf Association: Monthly meeting second Thursday. Golf event, fourth Saturday. "Nine and Dine" 4:30 p.m. Friday, Hilton Head National, starting in April. For dinner, call 705-5885. For golf, call 705-5980.

Babies' Alumni: For parents, parents-to-be, infants and toddlers. 671-6771.

Gift of Life Trust Fund-Organ Sharing Program: 671-4600.

Hilton Head Island Ski Club: Meets one to two times monthly. 363-5635.

Hilton Head Power Squadron: 6:30 p.m., second Monday, Yacht Club of Hilton Head Island. 682-2233. www.hhsps.org.

Island House Clubhouse: Rehab for adults with mental health disorders. 682-2900.

Kickin' Asphalt Bicycle Club: Bicycle touring in and around Beaufort County. Ron, 682-4998.

La Leche League of Bluffton/Hilton Head: 10:30 a.m., third Monday, Bluffton library. Mandy Rosenberry, 689-2776.

Meditation group: 7 p.m. Tuesdays, Island Soma Therapy, 18 Executive Park Road No. 3. 422-2900.

Mental Health Association Beaufort-Jasper: Information, referral, direct service, and emergency assistance. 682-2900.

Mental Health Clinic: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., daily, Dillon Road.

681-4865.

Palmetto Rowing Club: Competitive and recreational rowing. 842-6984.

Pregnancy Center & Clinic of the Low Country: 9 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday-Friday, 1 Cardinal Road, Suites 1 & 2. 689-2222.

Nonprofits/Activist Organizations

AARP: For information, call 671-4721.

Advocates Working for Animals and Respect for the Environment: Bimonthly. 842-8090.

Girl Scouts Eastern South Carolina Service Area 631: Adult leader/volunteer meeting, second Tuesday, 7 p.m., All Saints Church on Main Street. Phyllis Neville, 681-3646.

Greater Bluffton Pathways: 5 to 6:30 p.m., second Tuesday, Bluffton Library. Karen Heitman, 705-3378. www.greaterblufftonpathways.org.

Habitat for Humanity: Board of directors meeting, third Tuesday, 21 Brendan Lane, Bluffton. 757-5864.

Hilton Head Art League: Call 681-5060.

Hilton Head Citizens for Life:

7 p.m. first Wednesday at PSD No. 1, 21 Oak Park Plaza.

Hilton Head for Peace: 4 p.m. vigil Fridays, Folly Field and U.S. 278. Taylor, 681-4010.

Hilton Head Heroes: Volunteers needed to welcome the families of children with a life threatening illness to our Heroes home in Sea Pines. 686-6856 or 671-4939. www.hhheroes.com.

Hilton Head Humane Association: A no-kill shelter located at 10 Humane Way, Hilton Head. Open 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. Thurs.-Sun. Closed Tuesday. Open 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wed. 681-8686

Hilton Head Island/Bluffton NAACP: 7 p.m., first Thursday, Mt. Calvary Missionary Baptist Church. 342-2801.

Hilton Head Hospital Auxiliary: Assists patients at Hilton Head Regional Medical Center through a volunteer program. 2 p.m., second Monday, hospital board room. 689-8246.

Hilton Head No. 1 Public Service District: Open board meeting, 3 p.m., fourth Tuesday, 21 Oak Park Plaza. 681-5525.

La Dolce Vita: 7 p.m., third Thursday, Palmetto Electric, Hardeeville. Jim Cacciola, 705-2771.

Literacy Volunteers of the Lowcountry: Adult basic literacy tutoring and English language instruction for immigrants. 686-6655 or come to 9 Town Center Court from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m., weekdays.

Safe Kids of Hilton Head and Bluffton: Monthly meetings to reduce preventable child death and disability resulting from injury in children. 342-5828.

SHARE Senior Citizens Center:

8 a.m. to 4 p.m. daily, 6 Office Park Road. 785-6444.

Religious groups

Estudia la Biblia en Español: En la casa de Maureen Hueyo, Lunes 7 p.m., starting in Sept. en 64 Heritage Lakes Dr., Bluffton. Maureen Hueyo, 836-3455, o Juliana Martel, 342-3499.

Christian Men's Tuesday Lunch Group: Interdenominational. 12:15 to 1:15 p.m., Tuesday, First Presbyterian Church. Meet for lunch, video presentation, and discussion. Rick Turner, 757-7710.

Christian Women's Clubs: After 5 Connection (dinner), 6 p.m., third Tuesday, Palmetto Hall Plantation. 681-4113.

Community Bible Study: In-depth study classes: Bluffton day class, 9:15 to 11:15 a.m., Wednesday, Lowcountry Community Church, Buckwalter Parkway; Bluffton evening class, 7 to 8:30 p.m., Thursday, First Baptist Church of Bluffton; Hilton Head day, 9:15 to 11:15 a.m., Thursday, First Baptist Church of Hilton Head; Hilton Head evening, 6:55-8:30 p.m., Thursday, Christ Lutheran Church; teen Bible study for 9-12 grades, 6:45 to 8:30 p.m., (dinner provided) Monday, All Saints Episcopal Church; la Biblia en Español call Juliana Martel 842-8650. Nondenominational and open to visitors call 681-7664.

Wednesday Christian Men's Lunch Group: Interdenominational. Meet for video and discussion. 12:15 p.m., Wednesday, Christ Lutheran Church. Tom Gaffney, 842-3145.

Food, Friends, and Fellowship: Sharing the love of God through Jesus Christ; Simple Church of Hilton Head; no sermons; come as you are. 341-5066.

Girls' Night Out: Stonecroft Ministries, third Wednesday, Nov. & Dec. second Wednesday, Country Club of Hilton Head. Dinner, program, $20, free rides. 341-3300.


http://www.islandpacket.com/lowcountrylife/story/121264.html

A new plague facing women

On a February day in 2003, I walked into my GP's surgery and announced that if she didn't help me I would probably be dead by the end of the week. I wasn't sure, even then, what exactly I needed help for; only that I had reached a place of such bleakness and despair that I couldn't go on. I had lost any sense that my life was worth living, or that I would ever feel differently; simply being conscious, getting through the day, had become unbearable. I couldn't cope with the smallest decisions; often I didn't eat because the effort of deciding what I wanted and then preparing it seemed as daunting as running a marathon. I felt I had long ago used up all my inner resources; for weeks I had thought of nothing but how I could put an end to this empty pretence of a life.

I felt very stupid and ashamed in going to my doctor; I wasn't sure, even then, that my experience legitimately counted as an 'illness'. I thought she might tell me to get a grip and stop wasting her time; plenty of people had it much worse. I felt that I should have been able to pull myself out of it and piled guilt and blame on myself because I could not. Five years on, I can now see clearly that I was suffering from severe postnatal depression combined with chronic stress; having consulted psychiatrists and psychologists, I also understand that it formed part of a continuous pattern of extreme mood swings, including several previous episodes of depression, that had been part of my life since my late teens.

But at the time 'depression' was a distant concept to me; I knew it existed, because I had read about Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf, but I thought it was a condition that belonged to dead artists. I didn't equate it with my episodes of despair, which I suspected were due to some character flaw or weakness on my part, a failure to ride over the potholes of life with the necessary British pluck and fortitude. I certainly didn't talk to anyone about it, because I thought it would sound like a terrible admission of failure; instead I worked hard to hide it from everyone who knew me. People thought of me as strong and competent and I didn't want to disappoint them.

We are not comfortable talking about depression in our culture, which places so much emphasis on success and on the belief that achievement equals happiness. Collectively we have not made it easy to admit to depression, and as a result there are people who die each year by their own hand when they might have been helped, had they only known how to ask. According to the most recent study by the Office of National Statistics, one in six people in the UK suffers from 'significant' mental distress at any one time, of which the most common condition by far is mixed depression and anxiety. The Depression Report, a study published in 2006 by the Mental Health Policy Group at the London School of Economics, estimated that only a quarter of those who experience depression go on to receive treatment.

But it seems that this culture is gradually beginning to change. Over the past couple of years, a new openness has begun to replace the stigma that previously surrounded mental illness. In 2007, five of the leading mental health charities incorporated the findings of the Depression Report into the nationwide We Need To Talk campaign, successfully lobbying for greater investment in evidence-based talking therapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy, for NHS patients with depression. In 2006, Stephen Fry did for manic depression what Kylie has done for breast cancer with his insightful and frank documentary series, The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive, giving many people greater confidence to talk about their illness.

When I was asked last year by Random House to write a book about my experience of depression, I had no idea that two other books on the same theme, also by women journalists, would be published at the same time, but it is not surprising. Depression is on the rise, and it seems women are especially vulnerable. Thirteen years after the publication of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, the original bestselling account of depression by a young woman, 2008 sees a resurgence of the female depression memoir.

Novelist and former Elle editor Sally Brampton's Shoot the Damn Dog (Bloomsbury), which comes out later this month, recounts her experience of a severe, two-year clinical depression that included one suicide attempt, several admissions to psychiatric units and endless cocktails of antidepressant drugs before she finally began the slow climb back to normality. The Observer's Scotland editor Lorna Martin writes about her year in therapy in Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (John Murray, April). Though she didn't experience the extreme symptoms of clinical depression, Martin felt overwhelmed by the demands and stresses of modern life and writes feelingly of the benefits of 'talking cures' even when you're not about to jump in front of a train.

My own memoir, The Devil Within (Vermilion, May), is a retrospective account of recurring depression, intermittent highs and the eventual process of learning to manage my condition without medication (at 32, I was diagnosed with a form of bipolar disorder, or manic depression, a diagnosis which has helped enormously in understanding what happens to me and how best to treat it).

Most striking about our three books is that, contrary to the current trend of 'misery memoirs', we all appeared to be exemplary career women with enviable lives. We were successful journalists, Brampton and I were both working mothers, we all had good friends, were reasonably solvent and appeared to be doing well. The same experience is echoed by former Cosmopolitan and SHE editor Linda Kelsey, who published a fictionalised account of her clinical depression last year, Fifty is Not a Four Letter Word. Common to all our stories is the refrain that we felt fraudulent in being depressed, that we were aware how little we had to complain about, that we had, as Brampton has written, 'no reason to be sad'. Coupled with this was the feeling that we had to keep up appearances, that we mustn't let people down.

According to the most recent studies, women in the UK are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression, and figures from the National Institute of Mental Health in the US show the same ratio. One recent study showed the same ratio across nine other countries, regardless of ethnic background or economic status (though bipolar disorder, thought to have a stronger genetic link, shows fairly equal incidence between the sexes).

Various explanations have been suggested, most commonly that women are more used to talking about their emotions and more likely to seek help for depression, while men hide theirs in alcohol abuse or overwork, so the statistics are inherently inaccurate. But this theory seems counterintuitive when the accounts above suggest that modern pressures on women to prove that they can juggle careers, relationships, motherhood and still look 10 years younger make it less likely that we will admit to depression, something most of us still privately regard as shameful, a failure to cope with life.

New research suggests that the answer may lie in brain chemistry. Evidence suggests that serotonin, the neurotransmitter that regulates our moods and emotional processing, operates differently in men and women. (Low levels of serotonin are closely associated with mood disorders.) According to Catherine Harmer, research fellow at the Department of Psychiatry at Oxford University, it seems that the serotonin system in women is especially vulnerable. 'There are definite biological contributors to low serotonin in women,' she says. 'The serotonin system appears to be more sensitive in females, perhaps because of differences in responses to stress hormones and other hormonal fluctuations.'

The brain makes serotonin from the amino acid tryptophan, which we derive in small doses from food; when women diet, they experience a much greater drop in serotonin levels than men. The low-carbohydrate diets so popular among young women are especially dangerous. It seems women can't win - we're miserable because advertising and fashion tell us we're not thin enough, so we diet, our serotonin levels plummet and we end up properly depressed.

The good news is that research also shows that women respond well to tryptophan supplements; a study from Oxford's Department of Psychiatry showed that they 'induced a positive bias in emotional processing' among healthy female volunteers.

In other words, the supplements reversed the negative thought processes associated with depression, a similar effect to that of selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) antidepressants such as Prozac or citalopram. Harmer stresses, though, that the Oxford study was carried out on non-depressed volunteers and that there is not yet sufficient evidence from clinical trials on patients to draw conclusions, but that this is an area for further research.

I have been taking 5-HTP, a tryptophan supplement available from health food shops, for almost two years as part of a programme of nutritional medicine and in that time I have not experienced a return of that severe depression (though I still have fluctuations of mood, they have been nothing like as extreme). Nor have I suffered the distressing side-effects I had with SSRI antidepressants, as 5-HTP is a natural substance.

Antidepressant medication is undoubtedly highly effective for many people, but for others it can cause as many problems as it solves and there is concern among some experts that it is vastly over-prescribed - the most recent figures show that in 2006, 31 million prescriptions were issued for antidepressants in the UK, a rise of 6 per cent on the previous year. Nutritional medicine, by contrast, is safe and effective when prescribed by a qualified nutritionist, but the absence of large-scale clinical trials means that most evidence remains anecdotal or restricted to small samples and it is likely to be some time before it finds its way into mainstream treatments.

If the purpose of increased public acknowledgement and discussion of depression is to encourage more people to seek help before they find themselves, as I did, in real danger of irreversible harm, it should not be simply so they all end up on medication. By contributing to that conversation I hope that my book, and those of my fellow sufferers, will encourage people to approach their doctor, to ask questions, to try different treatments and, above all, to understand that their depression is an illness to be cared for and treated, not a personal failing to be ashamed of and concealed.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2008/jan/06/mentalhealth.healthmindandbodyreviews