Deciding to go into therapy is a big move, one that people sometimes struggle with for a variety of reasons. But now that you’ve realized therapy would be helpful for you, how to find a therapist? It’s important to know what outcome you’re hoping for and what you feel you need help achieving. It will take a little research to determine which professionals your insurance will cover and how you’ll pay any out-of-pocket costs, but asking the right questions can help you ensure you have a qualified therapist who’s also the right fit for you. Know your options While numerous types of therapy exist, perhaps the best known is cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), which is used to treat a number of mental health issues, from anxiety to eating disorders. It focuses on uncovering unhealthy patterns of thought and exploring how a person’s thoughts, feelings and behaviors affect each other, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). “Cognitive behavioral therapy is going to be an approach to treatment that looks at or tries to understand current functioning problems and address what’s maintaining those and how might a person’s current behaviors and cognitions be contributing to those challenges,” said Lynn Bufka, a clinical psychologist in Maryland and the American Psychological Association’s associate chief for practice transformation. Another type is relational psychotherapy, often focused on couple…  read on >  read on >

Consistently good sleep is important for everyone, but it is particularly important for patients with schizophrenia, a new study suggests. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, along with collaborators in Italy, used wrist monitors to measure activity and rest in 250 people, including 150 patients with schizophrenia, in both outpatient settings and in psychiatric hospitals. The investigators found that the schizophrenia patients had erratic sleep patterns, dysregulated transitions between sleep and wake cycles, and excessively rigid daily routines that were predictive of worse symptoms. “Regulating sleep and wake cycles is important for your overall health and our findings can also be extended to people without underlying mental health conditions,” said senior study author Dr. Fabio Ferrarelli, an associate professor of psychiatry at Pitt. “Most people can benefit from better sleep hygiene and paying attention to their daily routines by incorporating activity and variety in their daily lives.” Well-established research literature suggests that people suffering from schizophrenia have trouble falling asleep and get poorer rest than people without mental health conditions. Sedatives used to manage schizophrenia symptoms can extend sleep to 15 hours per day. Getting too much sleep like this can have a negative effect on symptoms. “It’s important to be mindful of how drugs that we prescribe to patients affect their health more broadly,” Ferrarelli said in a Pitt news release. “Our study shows…  read on >  read on >

The kids, no matter how they are conceived, are all right. That is the main takeaway from a new study by British researchers that found no real differences in the psychological well-being of kids who were born via sperm/egg donation or surrogacy and those born naturally by the time they reached the age of 20. “Children born through third-party reproductive donation — egg donation, sperm donation or surrogacy — are well-adjusted and have positive relationships with their parents right up to adulthood,” said study author Susan Golombok, former director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge. For the study, the researchers followed 65 families with children born via assisted reproduction from infancy until the child turned 20. Moms and kids were interviewed and filled out questionnaires about their relationships. Their answers were compared to those of 52 families of children conceived naturally during the same period. The bottom line? “The absence of a biological [genetic or gestational] connection between children and their parents does not interfere with the development of positive relationships between them or the psychological well-being of the child,” Golombok said. The new findings are consistent with previous assessments the researchers made at ages 1, 2, 3, 7, 10 and 14, she added. Kids aren’t all that fussed about how they were born, but it may be better to…  read on >  read on >

A teenager’s brain power appears to have little bearing on whether they will become overweight or obese as adults. British researchers found that, on average, sharper teens weighed only slightly less in adulthood than siblings who scored lower on tests of thinking skills, according to a new study published April 13 in the journal PLOS Medicine. The difference amounted to just under a half-pound for a 6-foot-tall adult, said lead author Liam Wright, a senior research fellow in population health at University College London. “We found a very small association that in practice means that, on average, siblings with higher cognitive ability are unlikely to weigh much less than siblings with lower cognitive ability,” he said. The research refutes prior studies that have linked low cognitive scores in teens to higher risk of obesity in later life. That’s because those earlier studies looked at general populations, and didn’t take into account other powerful factors besides smarts that could influence a person’s weight, Wright said. “The problem with comparing people from the general population according to their cognitive ability and BMI is that unobserved factors may explain the association,” he said. (BMI, or body mass index, is an estimate of body fat based on height and weight.) To account for those unknown factors, Wright and his colleagues analyzed data on 12,250 siblings from more than 5,600…  read on >  read on >

In a disappointing finding, a new report shows that suicide rates in America are on the upswing again after a momentary, and minute, decline. According to researchers from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the suicide rate increased from 10.7 people per 100,000 people in 2001 to 14.2 per 100,000 in 2018. The rate then dropped to 13.5 per 100,000 through 2020, but rose again to 14.1 per 100,000 in 2021. Why suicide rates rose, then dropped, then rose again isn’t entirely clear, said senior study author Sally Curtin, a statistician at CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics. “We’re not exactly sure what happened, because we know that many of the suicide risk factors increased, depression increased and money problems increased, we know all that,” she said. And early numbers from the first half of 2022 show that the suicide rate continues to climb, Curtin added, so the short-lived decline might just have been a blip. “Unfortunately, the suicide rate bounced back after a couple of years of decline,” she said. “If you look at the long, long picture, 20 years, it’s been almost steadily increasing.” For the study, Curtin’s team used data from the U.S. National Vital Statistics System. The researchers found that suicide rates among women increased between 2020 and 2021, but that increase was significant only for women aged 75…  read on >  read on >