Greetings everybody, 

Hope you had an awesome, if not productive week or maybe you are a recent graduate or student and just soaked up some sun rays either or we have a treat for you today.

It has been a couple of weeks since the election but cast your minds back to how the parties had a shared view on the state of the nations mental health. Then we got to talking to some fellow colleagues and we realised that our knowledge on what mental health is and the forms in which it manifests  was very shallow as was our colleagues. We reached the conclusion that we needed a crash course in mental health  and then we decided that we should share what we found with you guys!
Firstly, what has the government promised on the mental health front? Simply put, five defining aims: 

1. Take mental health as seriously as physical health
2. Legislation to ensure that mental and physical health condition are given equal priority
3. Ensuring the presence of therapists in every part of the country to provide treatment. 
4. Increased funding for mental health care, along with easier access and improved waiting time standards for people experiencing mental ill-health
5. Ensure women have access to mental health support during and after the pregnancy. 

Thats all well and good but what is mental health, how do you begin to define a concept that you cannot see physically? Well we always say one of the best and sure fired ways of understanding something is being able to first define it. The World Health Organisation defines mental health as...

'The state of well-being in which every individual realises his or her own potential, can cope with the normal stresses of life, can work productively and fruitfully, and is able to make a contribution to her or his community.'- WHO

Pretty broad to be honest, and as such treating and identifying the symptoms of mental health is not easy. Many believe that mental health only refers to cases such as depression and OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), very understandable as these are the conditions that are often recycled by the media. With that we continue to the next stage of our crash course: the types of mental health. 

Note: we have categorised mental health disorders in accordance to a source and their are other ways to categorise mental health issues. 

Mental health issues:

1. Anxiety disorders: anxiety is something that all of us experience at some time usually sourced from our daily routine. However, when the mechanisms for anxiety regulation break down it could lead to over-expression of anxiety. This disorder often exits when an individual feels an inability to control  surrounding circumstances. 

Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD): this is commonly seen in TV programmes. Anxiety in such cases leads to the individual repeating words or phrases and/or carrying out ritualistic behaviour repeatedly. For more information on this disorder along with potential treatments click here.  

Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: This occurs after traumatic events such as war, rape, child abuse, natural disasters or post hostage situations. Symptoms range with this disorder however flashbacks, depression and numbing of the emotions are common signs of PTSD. This disorder was tackled in a previous Biology Behind on our blog for more details click here. In addition to this to learn on how to seek medical advice visit the NHS page here.

Generalised anxiety disorder: characterised by an exaggerated fear of daily routines and activities. Such individuals can suffer from fatigue, trembling and nausea. 

Image sources for anxiety: Child anxiety  Anxiety brain Power words for anxiety 60 seconds of a panic attack

2. Mood disorders: The majority of us understand the concept of moods and know that they fluctuate from day to day and are influenced by experiences. In the case of these disorders the fluctuations that individuals experience are way out of balance. 

Clinical depression: Depression is the big gun in the mental health world, as it is a common symptom in other mental health disorders. This disorder causes people to lose enjoyment from day to day life, if left unchecked or if it has managed to become serious enough it can lead to suicidal thoughts and death. Similar to cancer, and many other medical conditions depression shows no bias towards age, gender or pre-existing health conditions. Whats frustrating is that treatment for this condition is largely successful but people rarely seek medical treatment due to the stigma that depression carries with it. This idea that depression isn't serious, that it is a personal weakness or that you are just sad and lazy, is what makes depression a dangerous mental illness. For more information click here. 

Image sources for depression: Depressed brain Lonely man

Bipolar Disorder: Defined as an illness with one or multiple episodes of severe mania and depression. It often causes the person to experience extreme mood swings from over the top happiness to desperately low sadness and hopelessness. 

3. Schizophrenia disorders: These are serious brain disorders that causes significant disruptions in cognition and emotions. Thereby, affecting language, thought and the sense of ones 'self'. The symptoms of such disorders often include hearing internal voices. For more information click here.

Image Source

4. Dementias: Another well known condition, that is frequently seen on television and is characterised by memory loss and a reduction in intellectual and physical functioning. For more information on the Biology Behind dementia please click here, for information on how to support someone suffering from this click here 

Image sources for dementia: Dementias handprint Erasing the mind

5. Eating disorders: These are serious, and at times life threatening conditions that tend to be chronic. For more information about this disorder or on how to identify signs and support either a child or a friend please click here 

Image sources for eating disorders: Mirror image Bulimia Binge Eating:

Well, there you have it a crash course in mental health disorders, governmental policy and what mental health is defined as! 
Some of the mental health disorders  described above may have been familiar to you and some may be totally new to you. Now that you have had a crash course we encourage you to look into any that were of particular interest to you. 
Finally, these issues are not to be taken lightheartedly as you have seen many of these issues can become life threatening and some carry a the symptom of feeling alone in this big world. If you feel as though some of the symptoms described above apply to you or someone you know, don't be ashamed or scared and get seen. 
That was our Friday post and we will see you here next Friday!! have an awesome weekend. 

Biobunch, 
over and out

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Greetings everybody! 

Welcome to the first Biology Behind of 2014!! In the post today we will be informing you about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder otherwise known as PSTD, this is the only major mental disorder in which the cause is known. For those of you who watched the Call the Midwife christmas special will be fairly familiar with this. So lets go!!

In 1678 the Swiss diagnosed patients as having nostalgia, the Spanish physicians termed the symptoms as "Estar Roto" meaning "to be broken"until recently this disease was finally defined as its own disease known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.  The following characteristics, are associated with PTSD.

Reduced Hippocampus: 

Image: Biological studies of post traumatic stress disorder.

One of the most common brain structures seen in post traumatics stress disorder patients is a reduction in the volume of the hippocampus, this reduction in cortical capacity has shown patients to have an inability to inhibit fear and associated negative responses.

The above picture, was taken from a study were 2 pairs of twins were used to investigate the effects of PTSD. On the left hand side there is a twin pair that has a combat veteran with PTSD and his counterpart who has not suffered from a traumatic event but has a high risk of PTSD and on the right is a control pair of twins of a combat exposed twin and a non combat exposed twin both without PTSD. Contrast A demonstrates smaller hippocampi in the veteran with PTSD than the veteran without PTSD. Contrast B however, compared hippocampal volumes in the pair of twin with the combat exposed PTSD suffereing twin. Finally contrast C compares the hippocampal volumes of no PTSD in high and low risk twins. From this it could be suggested that a reduced hippocampal volume could be a pr-existing vulnerability factor as apposed to a feature that occurs after a traumatic event.  

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There has been a possible link made between the severity of PTSD symptoms and the reduction of the hippocampus, this is seen in some studies that failed to observe the reduction in hippocampal volume that was seen in other PTSD patients because the selected subject in the study had less severe symptoms of PTSD. It is difficult to see this feature is children affected with PTSD and this may suggest that nerumaturational factors may have a role in hippocampal reduction. Magnetic resonance spectroscopic imaging, is able to quantify N-acetylaspartate, this is able to mark neuronal density was used in PTSD subjects and found neuronal reduction. However this is still be determined. 

Sympathetic nervous system: 

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Events such as the one seen above are often displayed as a cause of an exaggerated amygdala activation, you may remember the amygdala as the fear handling part of the brain. This activation is linked to noradrenergic hyper-reactivity which causes hyperarousal and re-experiencing symptoms (trauma related nightmares, flashbacks, narratives and odours) and cause the emotional and physiological reaction to traumatic cues.

A chemical protein called neuroprotein Y  is the response to this hyper activity, those with a high gene expression showed a lower anxiety and reduced amygdala reactivity to trauma related stimuli. In subjects, with low or blunted neuroprotein Y a response to  sympathetic activatio triggered PTSD symptoms. 

Shift in brain state:

When we say a shift in brain state it refers to a change in what data the brain processes, in PTSD this shift is from processing multimodal contextual and memory retention to a more  primitive amygdala-mediated, formation of time locked snesory associations and expression of a trauma specific defense response.

PTSD is not only common in soldiers traumatic events can happen to anybody therefore PTSD is not restricted it has been found in animals studies: 
Such as dogs serving in the war:

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So that was Biology behind...
Biobunch,
Over and out

  

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