60% !! Nearly that many students have mental issues!!

I wonder what the percentage is for the faculty??

New Concerns Arise About Mental Health Of College Students

August 25, 2016 5:46 PM By Dr. Mallika Marshall

Filed Under: Dr. Mallika Marshall, MIT

BOSTON (CBS) – New concerns arise about the mental health of students on college campuses all across the country.

Dr. Gene Beresin, a psychiatrist and Executive Director of The Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital, says 50% to 60% of college students have a psychiatric disorder. 

“What I’m including in that is the use of substances, anxiety, depression, problems with relationships, break-ups, academic problems, learning disabilities, attentional problems,” says Dr. Beresin. “If you add them all up 50% doesn’t seem that high.”

Some undergraduates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) agree.

“People go through tough times,” says Dane Erickson, a rising junior from Naples, Florida. “It’s really stressful sometimes here at school.”

“I know a couple of friends who had a difficult first semester last year,” explains Maddie Burgoyne, a rising sophomore from Michigan.

Dr. Beresin says the suicide rate in college in astronomical. “A college student kills himself every day,” he says.

Maddie is also concerned about the higher than average suicide rate a MIT. “I think that’s something unique to MIT,” she says, “you can’t blame the institute itself. The type of student that goes here often puts a lot of pressure on themselves.”

Dr. Beresin says the brain doesn’t fully mature until age 26 so college students are put in a difficult situation.

“Living alone, not being prepared to be on your own,” says Dr. Beresin. “Peer pressure. I mean, the ability to kind of freely use alcohol or drugs and make those decisions on your own without supervision.”

And for international students, the challenges are even greater.

“There are a lot of new factors that play when you come to college especially for international students who don’t know the area at all but yeah, it can be overwhelming at times,” explains Andrea Jaba, an MIT freshman from the Philippines.

But Andrea has at least one strategy she learned from upperclassmen to help her keep her sanity.

“You better join a lot of clubs aside from academics so you don’t drown yourself in all that stress,” says Andrea.

And some colleges are being proactive. For the first time, MIT is requiring incoming freshman to complete an online simulation program that will teach them the warning signs of depression, suicide and other psychiatric issues before starting classes.

40% of Europeans have mental illness

This might explain how the criminal French leaders are elected!  It may also explain why the Europeans have such odd beliefs about many issues - from socialized health programs that actually lead to death panels to other dumb ideas.

Mental Illnesses!   Who woulda thunk!



Nearly 40 percent of Europeans suffer mental illness

By Kate Kelland

LONDON
Sun Sep 4, 2011 7:17pm EDT


LONDON (Reuters) - Europeans are plagued by mental and neurological illnesses, with almost 165 million people or 38 percent of the population suffering each year from a brain disorder such as depression, anxiety, insomnia or dementia, according to a large new study.

With only about a third of cases receiving the therapy or medication needed, mental illnesses cause a huge economic and social burden -- measured in the hundreds of billions of euros -- as sufferers become too unwell to work and personal relationships break down.

"Mental disorders have become Europe's largest health challenge of the 21st century," the study's authors said.

At the same time, some big drug companies are backing away from investment in research on how the brain works and affects behavior, putting the onus on governments and health charities to stump up funding for neuroscience.

"The immense treatment gap ... for mental disorders has to be closed," said Hans Ulrich Wittchen, director of the institute of clinical psychology and psychotherapy at Germany's Dresden University and the lead investigator on the European study.

"Those few receiving treatment do so with considerable delays of an average of several years and rarely with the appropriate, state-of-the-art therapies."

Wittchen led a three-year study covering 30 European countries -- the 27 European Union member states plus Switzerland, Iceland and Norway -- and a population of 514 million people.

A direct comparison of the prevalence of mental illnesses in other parts of the world was not available because different studies adopt varying parameters.

Wittchen's team looked at about 100 illnesses covering all major brain disorders from anxiety and depression to addiction to schizophrenia, as well as major neurological disorders including epilepsy, Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis.

The results, published by the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ENCP) on Monday, show an "exceedingly high burden" of mental health disorders and brain illnesses, he told reporters at a briefing in London.

Mental illnesses are a major cause of death, disability, and economic burden worldwide and the World Health Organization predicts that by 2020, depression will be the second leading contributor to the global burden of disease across all ages.

Wittchen said that in Europe, that grim future had arrived early, with diseases of the brain already the single largest contributor to the EU's burden of ill health.

The four most disabling conditions -- measured in terms of disability-adjusted life years or DALYs, a standard measure used to compare the impact of various diseases -- are depression, dementias such as Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia, alcohol dependence and stroke.

The last major European study of brain disorders, which was published in 2005 and covered a smaller population of about 301 million people, found 27 percent of the EU adult population was suffering from mental illnesses.

Although the 2005 study cannot be compared directly with the latest finding -- the scope and population was different -- it found the cost burden of these and neurological disorders amounted to about 386 billion euros ($555 billion) a year at that time. Wittchen's team has yet to finalize the economic impact data from this latest work, but he said the costs would be "considerably more" than estimated in 2005.

The researchers said it was crucial for health policy makers to recognize the enormous burden and devise ways to identify potential patients early -- possibly through screening -- and make treating them quickly a high priority.

"Because mental disorders frequently start early in life, they have a strong malignant impact on later life," Wittchen said. "Only early targeted treatment in the young will effectively prevent the risk of increasingly largely proportions of severely ill...patients in the future."

David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacology expert at Imperial College London who was not involved in this study, agreed.

"If you can get in early you may be able to change the trajectory of the illness so that it isn't inevitable that people go into disability," he said. "If we really want not to be left with this huge reservoir of mental and brain illness for the next few centuries, then we ought to be investing more now."













Europe

Strange Things Happen in the Porta Potty

There are weird people everywhere and even if Russia has more than its fair share, and Germany a whole nut box of fruit loops, the US has some serious nut cases also.



Poopy peeper explains why he's not a perv



Monday, June 27, 2011 3:39:55 EDT PM
Luke Chrisco. (Eagle County Sheriff/HO)



A man accused of hiding out in porta-potties to watch women doing their business at a Colorado yoga festival told a local TV station the experience wasn't as bad as people think.

"It seems terrible, but it didn't actually smell that bad or anything," Luke Chrisco told FOX31 Denver during an interview from jail.

"There's bacteria in there, but to me it's just normal ... we all have bodily fluids," he told the station. "I still would have done it even if it smelled a little weird, because where there is muck, there is gold."

Police arrested the 30-year-old man after a woman at a Boulder yoga festival on June 17 noticed "movement in the tank" of a porta-potty, investigators said.

A nearby man confirmed that he saw a man in the waste tank, covered in a tarp. He locked himself inside the toilet tank, until he flung the door open and ran.

A security guard tried to stop the feces-covered man, but he got away.

Police said Chrisco was arrested nearly a week later, on Thursday, as he panhandled at a gas station.

Chrisco admitted that he moved from the waste tank of a vacant porta-potty to a "busy one" to watch women above him.

"I was at the yoga festival, doing a little bit of yoga, and I'm just seeing all these goddesses," Chrisco said. "It seems crazy, but I just felt like I was being blessed by their energy, even though it was unintentional."

Chrisco admitted to police that he has spied on as many as 200 women, including through bathroom peepholes at businesses and restaurants. Police said they contacted business owners to seal the holes.

Chrisco is charged with unlawful sexual contact and criminal invasion of privacy.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
crazy

Mental Illness: Western Civilizations Fault

I am slightly at a loss for words, and for that matter coherence in my thoughts ... I guess it is true, mental illness.

We do not sell young girls panties in vending machines.

We do not have an entire underground business selling children that everyone knows about, understand exists, and we all pretend it doesn't.

We do not repress every emotion for the sake of productivity, nor do we work as passionately, yet we do work more than any people in any country on earth.  Perhaps we do emphasize certain values that place us at greater risk for certain diseases, but the trade off is, we are not a society of sexual deviants who pretend while at work and then unmask themselves in their treatment of women and children. 

We do not condone the behavior you find in many countries where they have little mental illness - in fact, there are so many holes in this story ... what do people do in Japan or Korea or ..., when they have problems that overwhelm them?  Easy, if we did what they do, we would have so few people with mental illnesses.  Further, because we shine the light on our imprefections, willingly or otherwise, all of the unseen are seen - unlike in Japan where an entire class of people are marginalized and unseen politically, economically, or perhaps medically.

Western values cause mental illness?

Thank God for our values, I really do not want your values - we happened to have won several wars to prevent those values from being forced upon us.  Does that mean our values are inherently better and healthier ... pretty much.  There are some issues, for sure, but not even in the same league.




The Times
August 10, 2006




Western values 'are causing mental illness'


THE rapid spread of Western business practices in Japan has caused widespread mental illness and is responsible for a deepening demographic crisis, government officials say.

Statistics indicate that 60 per cent of workers suffer from “high anxiety” and that 65 per cent of companies report soaring levels of mental illness.

Meanwhile, the size of the Japanese population is shrinking, and for the first time the Government has acknowledged that the falling birth rate is linked to job-related factors. Directors of the Japanese Mental Health Institute blame the same factors for rising levels of depression among workers and the country’s suicide rate, which remains the highest among rich nations.

Merit-based pay and promotion are of particular concern because they are at odds with the traditional system, built on seniority, that has reigned supreme in corporate Japan. In the harsh new atmosphere of cut-throat rivalry between workers, the Institute for Population and Social Security argues, young people do not feel financially stable enough to start families.

The trend is put down to Japanese companies’ attempts to globalise by adopting working practices more closely in line with US and British models. Larger numbers of temporary staff, a greater willingness to sack people and greater pay disparities are the downside.

A spokesman for the Mental Health Institute said that the emphasis on individual performance was driving Japanese workers — particularly those in their thirties — to mental turmoil. “People tend to be individualised under the new working patterns,” he said. “When people worked in teams they were happier.”





 
 
 
 
 
 
 
silly

Over the Hill: Age 27

Old age begins at 27: Scientists reveal new research into ageing
The Mail Online
5th March 2009

Old age is often blamed for causing us to misplace car keys, forget a word or lose our train of thought.

But new research shows that many well-known effects of ageing may start decades before our twilight years.

According to scientists, our mental abilities begin to decline from the age of 27 after reaching a peak at 22.

The researchers studied 2,000 men and women aged 18 to 60 over seven years. The people involved – who were mostly in good health and well-educated – had to solve visual puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols.

Similar tests are often used to diagnose mental disabilities and declines, including dementia.
The research at the University of Virginia, reported in the academic journal Neurobiology Of Aging, found that in nine out of 12 tests the average age at which the top performance was achieved was 22.

The first age at which performance was significantly lower than the peak scores was 27 – for three tests of reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation. Memory was shown to decline from the average age of 37. In the other tests, poorer results were shown by the age of 42.

Professor Timothy Salthouse said the results suggested that therapies designed to prevent or reverse age-related conditions may need to start earlier, long before people become pensioners.
He wrote: ‘Results converge on a conclusion that some aspects of age-related cognitive decline begin in healthy, educated adults when they are in their 20s and 30s.’

There is some good news, though. The report states that abilities based on accumulated knowledge, such as performance on tests of vocabulary or generalinformation, increase until at least the age of 60.

Brain Power

Study Suggests Why Gut Instincts Work

Mon Feb 9, 2009
LiveScience.com

Sometimes when you think you're guessing, your brain may actually know better.

After conducting some unique memory and recognition tests, while also recording subjects' brain waves, scientists conclude that some gut feelings are not just guesswork after all. Rather, we access memories we aren't even aware we have.

"We may actually know more than we think we know in everyday situations, too," said Ken Paller, professor of psychology at Northwestern University and co-researcher on the study.

"Unconscious memory may come into play, for example, in recognizing the face of a perpetrator of a crime or the correct answer on a test. Or the choice from a horde of consumer products may be driven by memories that are quite alive on an unconscious level."

The findings were published online Sunday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

The research, done with only a couple dozen participants, adds to a growing body of conflicting evidence about decision-making. In one study done in 2007, researchers found that quick decisions were better than those given lots of thought. But a study last year suggested neither snap judgments nor "sleeping on it" trump good old-fashioned conscious thought.

The new study

During the first part of the memory test in the new study, participants were shown a series of colorful kaleidoscope images that flashed on a computer screen. Half of the images were viewed with full attention as participants tried to memorize them. While viewing the other half, the participants were distracted: They heard a spoken number that they had to keep in mind until the next trial, when they indicated whether it was odd or even.

In other words, they could focus on memorizing half of the images but were greatly distracted from memorizing the others.

A bit later, they viewed pairs of similar kaleidoscope images in a recognition test.

"Remarkably, people were more accurate in selecting the old image when they had been distracted than when they had paid full attention," Paller said. "They also were more accurate when they claimed to be guessing than when they registered some familiarity for the image."

Splitting attention during a memory test usually makes memory worse.

"But our research showed that even when people weren't paying as much attention, their visual system was storing information quite well," Paller said.

The brain's role

During the tests, electrical signals in the brain were recorded from a set of electrodes placed on each person's head. The brain waves during implicit recognition were distinct from those associated with conscious memory experiences. A unique signal of implicit recognition was seen a quarter of a second after study participants saw each old image.

Other related research has shown that amnesia victims with severe memory problems often have strong implicit memories, Paller and his colleague, Joel L. Voss of the Beckman Institute, said in a statement.

"Intuition may have an important role in finding answers to all sorts of problems in everyday life," Paller said.





brain