Since it is going back-to-school season, I thought I’d educate you on some alarming statistics about depression among college students. Here are the facts, just the facts:

One out of every five young people and one out of ever four college students or adults suffers from some form of diagnosable mental illness.

About 19 precent of young people contemplate or attempt suicide each year.

Suicide is the third leading cause of death among people ages 15-24, and the second leading cause of death in college students ages 20-24.

Over 66 percent of young people with a substance use disorder have a co-occurring mental health problem.

With another hurricane on the warpath up the East Coast of the U.S. this week, many people are scrambling for shelter and safety. Evacuations are taking place, and while everyone is rightfully focused on their physical safety, our emotional health is at risk during times of increased stress too. There are ways you can better cope emotionally with an impending hurricane — to brace yourself emotionally from the significant amounts of stress you’re about to endure.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that a hurricane is a fairly short natural event. For most people, it means having to deal with a couple of days of moving out of the area and then moving back. While the effects of the hurricane may endure much longer — especially if your home was damaged or destroyed — the actual hurricane itself tends to move fairly quickly through each region.

The impact of having to deal with the significant damage of your home or even losing it altogether can be much greater than the stress of getting out of the hurricane’s path. People who lose part or all of their home go through a typical grief reactions — grieving the loss of all that they’ve accumulated or built.

“What you call people is how you treat them. What you call my sister is how you will treat her. If you believe she’s ‘retarded’ it invites taunting, stigma. It invites bullying and it also invites the slammed doors of being treated with respect and dignity.”
–14-year-old Nick Marcellino, Rosa’s brother, in testimony to the Maryland General Assembly

Say what you will about New Jersey. Yeah, we are called the Soprano state, and, yeah, everyone in Jersey is rumored to have an attitude. You got a problem with that? But I couldn’t be more proud of its recent legislation.

The U.S. Senate passed the bill known as Rosa’s Law in August 2010, and in September it goes before the House. Terms such as “mental retardation” and “mentally retarded” will be removed from federal education, health, and labor laws. Additionally, “a person with a disability” is preferred rather than a “disabled person.” New Jersey passed a similar law in June.

The federal government removed “feeble-minded” and replaced it with “mental retardation” over 40 years ago. It was time for a more positive change.

Are two heads better than one? Maybe. Perhaps this doesn’t come as a surprise, because we all know on some level that even one “head” can be better than others in terms of memory. New research into “group memory,” or “social memory” sheds some light on how remembering together can be more or less effective. In part, it depends on the group’s “executive functioning”.

Memory research has come a long ways since the early research many of us learned in psychology classes. There is the famous Bell Laboratories research into short-term memory which resulted in the famous axiom of “7 plus or minus two” – which refers to how many “slots” we can utilize “in our head” in real-time, keeping it there to “process,” sequence, manipulate.

This is essentially considered “working memory” in the new parlance, but this early research is the basis for our (original) 7-digit telephone number. Beyond that (i.e., with the introduction of area codes) those whose limit is recalling 7 digits comfortably, learned to “chunk” the information so that 212 or 415 area codes were remembered as a unit, so as to take only slot. Essentially, this is human RAM, while other reasoning skills rely on this as part of our larger “processor.”

Now back to humans and human memory…

I’m pleased today to introduce our newest blog, Epidemic of Addiction, with Dr. Jeffrey Junig. Addictions to substances — like alcohol, cocaine, opioids, prescription drugs and other kinds of drugs — remain a serious problem in modern society. It’s a telling sign that society pays little attention to drug addicts, believing that theirs is a self-made bed in which to lie upon.

But like any mental illness, addiction is not something a person ever asks for. Addiction often creeps up on a person as they’re living their everyday lives, starting out not so much as a problem at first. It can quickly snowball, though, and become a problem before a person ever realizes it.

Here is it. The last day of August. When you think back to the last three months of summer, how do you feel?

Did you get to do everything you wanted to do? Read every book you wanted to read? Spend a few days relaxing and doing nothing too?

Sometimes we get sucked into this “I need to accomplish everything and be perfect” hole. And when we’re there, we don’t know how we winded up where we are or why we wanted to be there in the first place.

There’s a theme in this week’s top posts that have to do with perfectionism and also truth. I think we all strive to seek truth, what’s true for us and how to accept ourselves and be comfortable with who we are. Yet, there’s this crazy sense of push and pull between who we are (what’s true) and who we think we’re supposed to be (perfection).

How do we find balance between trying to better ourselves and accept our flaws in the process?

Here’s hoping that these five posts might send you on the path to get you there.

Perfectionism Runs on Mindlessness

(360 Degrees of Mindful Living) – We try to make our homes spotless, our work and relationships perfect. But do we know why? This post addresses something we rarely question. What is the true purpose of perfection?

It probably comes as little surprise to anyone, but a small exploratory study done on 100 college students from a single university suggests that students who score higher on a test of narcissism also spent more time checking and updating their Facebook profile.

Facebook is currently the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users. More than 50% of Facebook’s active users log on to Facebook in any given day, while the average user has 130 social connections (what Facebook calls “friends”).

The researcher (Mehdizadeh, 2010) also examined the relationship between narcissism and self-esteem, as well as gender differences in how people use Facebook for self-promotion. “Self-promotion,” according to how it was used in this study, was defined as “any descriptive or visual information that appeared to attempt to persuade others about one’s own positive qualities. ”

Mehdizadeh looked at only five profile features in Facebook: (a) the About Me section, (b) the Main Photo, (c) the first 20 pictures on the View Photos of Me section, (d) the Notes section, and (e) the Status Updates section. The researcher, rating these items on her own, examined to the extent they were considered self-promoting according to the above definition.

What did the research find?

Two studies out last week demonstrate connections between practicing yoga and simple walking may work to help improve your brain health. Previous research has linked exercise to helping keep our brains healthy. The two latest studies independently found that walking and yoga may help our brain health in different ways.

To study the effects of walking on brain health, researchers followed a group of older adult “couch potatoes” — ages 59 to 80 — who joined a walking group, or stretching and toning group for a year…

Patrice was misery incarnate. Unlike some of my depressed patients, who lived the proverbial life of quiet desperation, Patrice did not hide her suffering. She wept. She moaned. She regaled our walk-in clinic with a kind of biblical keening, which, understandably, attracted the attention of our clinic director. He took me aside one day and said, as gently as possible, “You really need to do something with that lady.” He was right, of course, and thus far I had done little to help Patrice, despite months of treatment.

Aside from being poor and dealing with some physical limitations, Patrice had no discernible cause for her chronic depression. Her marriage was good, and despite her straitened
circumstances, Patrice lived in a modest but comfortable home. Unlike many depressed patients, Patrice herself had no “narrative”— no internalized account of how she came to be depressed. Her mood disorder was as much a puzzle to her as to me — the kind of illness that, in the 1960s, would have been called “endogenous depression”— arising, rather mysteriously, from within.

The other day I was driving when I heard a familiar song playing on the radio. It was Bob Marley’s Buffalo Soldier. In fact, as I type this I can hear it playing in my head.

The funny thing is that the sound automatically took me back to my childhood. My cousins and I were sitting in someone’s living room. The radio was playing. That song was on. And my older cousin was sitting on this huge comfy chair while the rest of us kids were sitting on the ground.

Why do I remember this seemingly mundane event?

My cousin spontaneously began belting out the song, dancing to the beat and being as silly as a kid can be. We rolled on the floor and laughed until our sides hurt. It was a memorable moment. We were young, spontaneous and free.

How does this relate to this week’s top posts?

Psychology, like most professions, holds many little secrets. They’re well known and usually accepted amongst the profession itself, but known to few “outsiders” or even journalists — whose job it is to not only report research findings, but put them into some sort of context.

One of those secrets is that most psychology research done in the U.S. is consistently done primarily on college students — specifically, undergraduate students taking a psychology course. It’s been this way for the better part of 50 years.

But are undergraduate college students studying at a U.S. university representative of the population in America? In the world? Can we honestly generalize from such un-representative samples and make broad claims about all human behavior (a trait of exaggeration fairly commonplace made by researchers in these kinds of studies).

Earlier this year, The Jed Foundation and the American Psychiatric Foundation launched one of the newest mental health resources on the Web, The Transition Year. Recently, I was able to talk with Courtney Knowles, the Executive Director of The Jed Foundation, to get the skinny on this one-stop shop and why its contents are so beneficial for both students and parents before, during, and even after the college years.

There’s a never-ending line at the bookstore. Posters announcing football schedules and Greek rush events are posted every couple of feet. Meal cards are being swiped every few minutes and music is blasting down the hall from the room where two longtime roommates are, once again, haggling over who’s in charge of buying the toilet paper.

Yep, it’s that time of year again: Class is officially in session for most colleges and universities throughout the nation.

For many teens, this means leaving the nest for the first stage of adulthood or catching up with friends and sharing summer adventure stories. For many parents, it’s a time mixed with bittersweet pride and, yes, a bit of breath holding.