One out of every five adults who attempt suicide never met the criteria for a mental illness by the time the attempt happened, new research shows. “This finding challenges clinical notions of who is at risk for suicidal behavior and raises questions about the safety of limiting suicide risk screening to psychiatric populations,” concluded a team led by Dr. Maria Oquendo. She’s past president of the American Psychiatric Association and a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. The study, published Feb. 21 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, focused on data from nearly 2,000 Americans ages 20 to 65 who had all had a history of suicide attempt. The study found that 6.2% had no history of a mental illness prior to or after their attempted suicide. Another 13.4% had made a first attempt at suicide prior to the onset of any mental illness diagnosis. Some did not meet the criteria for a mental illness until years after the attempt, the study found. That means that a total of 19.6% of adults with a lifetime history of attempted suicide had no prior evidence of mental illness beforehand. For doctors, this means that they may need to be ask patients questions regarding any prior attempt at suicide, because it may have happened in the absence of a diagnosed mental illness. According to the researchers, a…  read on >  read on >

Weather disasters driven by climate change are stressing out U.S. teenagers, a new study warns. Teens with the most firsthand experience of events like hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts and wildfires were more likely to show signs of mental distress than peers who hadn’t been confronted with the effects of climate change, researchers report. “We know that climate change has and will have catastrophic impacts across the globe, but we were alarmed to find that climate-related disasters already were affecting so many teens in the U.S.,” said lead researcher Amy Auchincloss, an associate professor of epidemiology in Drexel University’s Dornsife School of Public Health in Philadelphia.  “For example, within the past two years, many school districts in our study were subject to climate disasters for over 20 days,” Auchincloss added in a university news release. Researchers said this was the first large-scale attempt to look at the mental health of adolescents following multiple disaster events. For their study, researchers drew on federal survey data for more than 38,600 high school students from 22 public school districts in 14 states. The largest share of the districts were located in the southern and western regions of the country. The districts had been affected by 83 federally declared climate disasters within the past 10 years, researchers said. These included 24 hurricanes, 23 severe storms, 20 wildfires, 10 floods, four…  read on >  read on >

Data from dozens of studies supports the notion that mental health crises are a big factor behind rising rates of maternal deaths during and around pregnancy in the United States. “We need to bring this to the attention of the public and policymakers to demand action to address the mental health crisis that is contributing to the demise of mothers in America,” said Dr. Katherine Wisner, who led the review. She’s associate chief of perinatal mental health at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C. “The rate of maternal mortality in the United States is 2-fold to 3-fold greater than that in other high-income countries,” her team noted in the study, which was published Feb. 21 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry. Could mental health issues play a role in many of these tragedies? To find out, Wisner and her colleagues looked at data from 30 recent studies and 15 historical references. They found that: Mental health risks rise during pregnancy. The period in and around a pregnancy is “associated with elevated risk for new-onset or relapse of maternal psychiatric disorders,” the researchers reported. For example, 14.5% of pregnant mothers develop depression while pregnant, and another 14.5% battle the illness during the three months after delivery Many pregnant women face risks for suicide, opioid overdose. The data showed that suicide or opioid overdose together account for nearly…  read on >  read on >

Of course grief can ravage your mind, but science shows it can also weaken your body, leaving you open to illness. “As humans, we are strongly motivated to seek out social bonds that are warm, dependable, friendly and supportive,” explained George Slavich. He directs the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.  “Losing someone close to us terminates that bond and the social and physical protection they provided, which historically could have put the body at an increased risk of physical danger,” he added in a UCLA article. Much of that danger comes from a hypervigilant, but in some ways weakened, immune system. As Slavich explained, after the loss of a loved one, your brain and body react as if they’ve lost a key line of defense. The immune system escalates its would-healing capabilities (priming for potential threats) but at the same time lowers its guard against viruses. That’s why folks are vulnerable to colds and flu when they’re hit by grief or other stressors, Slavich noted. Bodily inflammatory responses also rise, he added, and that can lead to “feelings of sickness, fatigue, loss of pleasure and social and behavioral withdrawal.” Physical pain might also result from grief. One study found that heightened production of immune system proteins could make grieving people more sensitive to…  read on >  read on >