A study of suicide notes left by children and young teens

In 2010 more people died by suicide than were killed in war, by murder, or in natural disasters. In Norway, the location of a heart-rending new study of suicide notes left by children and young teens, suicide is the second leading cause of death for this age group. We need urgently to do more to understand why so many young people are taking their own lives.

The researchers Anne Freuchen and Berit Grøholt predicted that, given their immaturity, the young authors of suicide notes would show signs of confusion. Also, because diagnoses of mental illness are lower in children and young teens, the researchers predicted that the notes would show fewer signs of inner pain compared with notes left by older teens and adults.

In all, Freuchen and Grøholt had access to 23 suicide notes left by 18 youths (average age 14; 5 girls) who took their own lives between 1993 and 2004. They also interviewed the children's parents and referred to police reports. For comparison, the researchers also interviewed the parents of 24 youths who died by suicide during the same period but did not leave a note.

Analysing the notes revealed ten themes, each of which was present in three or more of the notes: they were addressed to someone (most often parents); the author gave reasons for the suicide; they declared their love; expressed a settlement with themselves (e.g. "it's better for me to be dead"); expressed a settlement with someone else (e.g. "I do this for you, dad"); asked for forgiveness; expressed good wishes (e.g. "good luck in the future"); expressed aggression (e.g. "you bastards"); over half included instructions (e.g. "give Peter Playstation 2"); and just under half expressed inner pain.

Contrary to their predictions, Freuchen and Grøholt said that "the notes are coherent and do not reveal confusion or overwhelming emotions. The children and young adolescents emphasise their consciousness of what they are about to do and they take full responsibility."

According to the parental interviews, the children and teens who left the notes had not sought help with the issues that led to their suicide. At the same time, they had communicated their thoughts about suicide more often than those who didn't leave notes. One has to wonder why this did not trigger more effective preventive action. Similarly, three of the notes took the form of school essays, and yet none of them were acted upon by school authorities.

The fact that many of the notes conveyed declarations of love and gave explanations suggests, the researchers said, that the authors were well aware of the implications of their actions. "These children and adolescents somehow retain their dignity," the researchers said. "They act like decent people do, they bear their pain alone, and even manage to take care of others by leaving detailed instructions with respect to giving away their assets."

The researchers do not extract many practical lessons from their findings, other than calling for more research into parent-child/teen relationships in the hope of developing preventative strategies. Moreover, they cautioned that it is not possible to generalise or draw conclusions from this small sample. Another methodological limitation is that the suicide notes are from an era that pre-dates the rise of social media (which can be a source of threat, a support, and an outlet), so it's not clear how relevant insights from this study are for young people today. 

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/ (accessed 31.10.13)

Anne Freuchen, and Berit Grøholt (2013). Characteristics of suicide notes of children and young adolescents: An examination of the notes from suicide victims 15 years and younger. Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359104513504312

Further reading. The mental health charity Young Minds has a helpline for parents: http://www.youngminds.org.uk/

Mindfull is a new website for 11 - 17 year-olds who are feeling down or depressed: http://www.mindfull.org/

Psychologist suicide: Practising what we preachhttp://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_25-editionID_215-ArticleID_2102

Το «σερφάρισμα» των ηλικιωμένων συμβάλλει σε καλύτερη ποιότητα ζωής

Βρετανοί ερευνητές κατέληξαν σε αυτό το συμπέρασμα αφού μελέτησαν τη συμπεριφορά ανδρών και γυναικών άνω των 50.

Στη μάχη κατά του καρκίνου συμβάλλει η χρήση του Διαδικτύου. Αυτό τουλάχιστον υποστηρίζουν Βρετανοί ερευνητές που μελέτησαν τη συμπεριφορά ανδρών και γυναικών άνω των 50 και κατέληξαν στο συμπέρασμα ότι αυτοί που «σέρφαραν» περισσότερο είχαν κατά 50% αυξημένες πιθανότητες να συμμετάσχουν σε αθλητικές δραστηριότητες.

Επίσης, όπως προέκυψε από τη μελέτη, οι άνθρωποι αυτοί έτρωγαν περισσότερες μερίδες φρούτων και λαχανικών καθημερινά (ποσοστό αυξημένο κατά 24%) ενώ οι πιθανότητες να είναι καπνιστές μειώνονταν κατά 44%.

Μάλιστα το εντυπωσιακό στοιχείο της έρευνας είναι ότι όσοι από τους συμμετέχοντες στην έρευνα χρησιμοποιούσαν περισσότερο το Διαδίκτυο υποβάλλονταν σε εξετάσεις του παχέος εντέρου σε διπλάσιο ποσοστό.

Τη συσχέτιση ανάμεσα στη χρήση του ίντερνετ και συνήθειες που προλαμβάνουν την εμφάνιση του καρκίνου επιβεβαίωσε και ο επικεφαλής της έρευνας Δρ. Κρίστιαν βον Βάγκνερ, ο οποίος έκανε επίσης έναν ενδιαφέροντα διαχωρισμό.

Όπως υποστήριξε «η χρήση του Διαδικτύου είναι υψηλότερη στις νεότερες ηλικίες, μεταξύ των ανδρών, των λευκών, των πιο ευκατάστατων και των πιο μορφωμένων».

Στην έρευνα συμμετείχαν 5.943 άτομα που απάντησαν σε ερωτηματολόγια αρχικά το 2002 και στη συνέχεια κάθε δύο χρόνια, μέχρι το 2011.

Οι ερωτήσεις αφορούσαν τη χρήση του Διαδικτύου, την υποβολή σε εξετάσεις που σχετίζονται με τον καρκίνο του στήθους και του παχέος εντέρου, τη φυσική δραστηριότητα καθώς και τις διατροφικές συνήθειες.

Η έρευνα δημοσιεύτηκε στο περιοδικό «Επιδημιολογία του καρκίνου, βιοδείκτες και πρόληψη».

Πηγή: American Association for Cancer Research

ΠΗΓΗ:

http://portal.kathimerini.gr/4dcgi/_w_articles_kathciv_1_23/10/2013_524554 (accessed 28.10.13)

The dementia timebomb

The brain of an Alzheimer's patient (left) shows significant signs of shrinking compared to a normal brain.

Dementia is a gradual decline of how the brain functions. It is incurable, and slowly interferes with a person's ability to carry out the normal tasks of daily living.

What is dementia?

Dementia is an umbrella term used to refer to a collection of symptoms that can result from a number of different diseases of the brain. There are many different types of dementia, but all tend to cause problems with memory, language skills, information processing, mental agility, understanding and judgement.

Dementia can also trigger other mental health problems such as personality changes, anxiety, mood swings and depression. In more advanced dementia, the person may lose the ability to get up and move, or the interest to eat or drink.

How common is dementia?

There are about 800,000 people in the UK formally diagnosed with dementia

Currently only 43% with the condition get a diagnosis

Approximately one in 20 people over the age of 65 have dementia

By the age of 80 about one in six are affected, and one in three people in the UK will have dementia by the time they die

There are over 17,000 people in the UK under the age of 65 who have dementia

(Source: Alzheimer's Society)

It is a progressive condition that gets worse over time and a person with dementia must increasingly rely on carers as it advances. There is currently no cure although there are treatments that can slow the progression of some types of the condition in some cases. Usually, only about one in three people show a positive response to such drugs.

There are around 100 different types of dementia. However Alzheimer's disease is the most common form, affecting 62% of those living with dementia. Many of these people will have a mixed pattern of dementia with the second most common type - vascular dementia - also contributing to their condition. This occurs due to the damage done to the small blood vessels in the brain.

The number of people with dementia is steadily increasing. While around 800,000 people have been diagnosed with the condition in the UK today, the Alzheimer's Society predicts this number will increase to one million by 2021 and 1.7 million by 2051.

Many others remain undiagnosed, especially in the early stages of dementia, so these figures may be much higher. This rise in numbers is attributed to advances in public health and medical care that enables people to live much longer than they used to. While one in 25 people aged 70 to 79 has a form of dementia, this rises to one in six people over the age of 80.

What causes dementia?

Dementia is caused by damage to brain cells, which stops them from communicating effectively with each other. Gradually brain cells die, leading to the shrinkage of the brain typically seen in brain scans in some types of dementia.

In neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's, a gradual build-up of proteins inside and around brain cells can be seen. In Alzheimer's, these proteins form tangles, and sticky clumps known as plaques. It used to be thought that these were the cause of the brain dysfunction but more recent theories liken these plaques and tangles to the "ashes after the fire". In other words, they are the residual damage after the disease has swept through the brain.

Less common types of dementia

Dementia with Lewy Bodies sees tiny balls of protein develop inside nerve cells. This causes 10% of dementia cases in older people and is strongly linked with Parkinson's

Fronto-temporal dementia is caused by damage to the frontal lobe of the brain. It is relatively uncommon

Illnesses that may lead to dementia include Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease, multiple sclerosis and Parkinson's

Vascular dementia develops when the arteries supplying blood to the brain become blocked. This disrupts the supply of oxygen and nutrients to the cells, which leads to very small strokes resulting in brain damage.

Many people with dementia have a combination of Alzheimer's disease and vascular dementia.

Scientists are investigating the genetic background to dementia. It does appear that in a few rare cases the diseases that cause dementia can be inherited. Some people with a particular genetic make-up have a higher risk than others of developing dementia. Risk factors include age, smoking, heavy drinking, poor diet, and a lack of exercise.

Why haven't we found a cure?

One of the main obstacles to creating effective treatments to dementia is that scientists still don't fully understand it. The condition appears to result from a complex interaction of genes, lifestyle factors and other environmental influences. Without knowing the exact mechanisms that cause damage, especially in Alzheimer's, it's impossible to target the disease process effectively.

The blood-brain barrier is another problem. It keeps your brain healthy by preventing toxins reaching the brain. But it can also stop treatments getting through or working effectively. Drugs may only partly cross the barrier as they are too large or awkwardly shaped, which means that dangerous doses would be needed for them to work.

Even if drugs were found that could target the proteins causing damage to brain cells in neurodegenerative disease, the damage may already have been done.

Scientists found recently that dementia may start to develop decades before symptoms show.

Finally, dementia is very difficult to diagnose. There is no single test to pinpoint the disease. A diagnosis is made on the clinical judgement of a patient's symptoms, history and results from a variety of tests, many of which are used to rule out other possible causes.

There is also a stigma attached to the condition, as well as fear, that can make some health professionals reluctant to give the diagnosis. Some experts argue that with no effective treatments, early diagnosis has no benefits.

Less than half of those living with dementia in the UK have received a formal diagnosis. This causes problems for drug trials, as scientists can only guess what type of dementia patients have, and can only confirm their diagnosis at post-mortem.

For information about diagnosis and available treatments, go to NHS Choices

SOURCE:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/0/21878238 (accessed 28.10.13)

Young children with autism are more trusting than other children

Young children with autism have difficultly deliberately deceiving other people, now a new study has shown that they are also more trusting than their neurotypical peers. These two characteristics may be related to the same underlying cause - namely, difficulty representing the mental states of others (known as "Theory of Mind"), although more research is needed to demonstrate this.

Li Yi and her colleagues tested 22 children with autistic spectrum disorder (ASD; average age 7), 27 neurotypical age-matched controls, and 26 IQ-matched neurotypical controls (average age 6). The children chose which of three boxes to look in for the reward of a sticker. When an adult stranger first looked in the boxes and indicated which box the sticker would be found, nearly all the children with autism looked in that box. By contrast only just over half the age-matched and IQ-matched neurotypical controls did so.

In another condition, the children hid the sticker in one of the boxes while one of the researchers was out of the room. On returning, this researcher pointed to an incorrect box as the location of the sticker. Again, the children chose which box to look in for the reward. This time the children with autism, just like the neurotypical controls, nearly always looked in the correct box (where they themselves had placed the sticker). This shows that their trust is not unqualified. It is specifically when they lack knowledge themselves that they are more trusting of other people.

Yi and her team said "to the best of our knowledge, our findings are the first to report ASD children's trusting tendency during the early years." They advised that more research is needed to explore the reasons for autistic children's high levels of trust. Apart from problems with Theory of Mind, other possible reasons include a tendency to forget previous instances of adults lying; or conversely perhaps they tend to experience encounters with more trustworthy adults than neurotypical children do. Another avenue for future research, Yi's team said, is to look for ways to teach children with autism not to be excessively trusting.

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SOURCE:

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/ (accessed 28.10.13)

Yi L, Pan J, Fan Y, Zou X, Wang X, and Lee K (2013). Children with autism spectrum disorder are more trusting than typically developing children. Journal of experimental child psychology, 116 (3), 755-61 PMID:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23810631

Author weblink: http://zjys.com.cn/conference/11.html

Reading literary (but not pop) fiction, boosts our understanding of other people's minds

Literary fiction takes the reader on a journey into other worlds, other lives, other minds. A new study shows that this has an immediate effect on the reader's powers of empathy, as judged by simple lab tests. The same benefit was not found for popular fiction.

"Readers of literary fiction must draw on more flexible interpretative resources to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters," said the researchers David Kidd and Emanuele Castano at the New School for Social Research. "That is, they must engage Theory of Mind processes [ToM refers to our ability to represent and understand other people's thoughts and feelings]."

Across five experiments, involving hundreds of volunteers online, the researchers showed that reading a few pages of literary fiction (including works by Don DeLillo, Lydia Davis, Louise Erdrich, Alice Munroe and Dagoberto Gilb) boosted participants' immediate ability to discern people's emotions from pictures of their eyes or faces. In some cases, the benefit extended to superior performance on a Theory of Mind picture test that involved using visual or verbal cues to identify what a person was thinking or desiring. No such effects were found after reading non-fiction or pop fiction, including passages from Danielle Steele, Rosamunde Pilcher and Gillian Flynn.

The apparent benefits of reading literary fiction held even after controlling for a raft of other variables, including participants' education, gender, age and mood.

This isn't the first study to associate reading fiction with increased empathy. For example, a 2006 paper found that people who knew the names of more novelists (taken as a sign that they read more) tended to excel on lab tests of social awareness and empathy. However, such findings were possibly explained by people with greater empathy choosing to read more. By adopting an experimental design this new study avoids that problem. It also extends previous research by suggesting there is something special about literary fiction.

That the beneficial effects of reading were limited to literary fiction also poses a conundrum since the classification of fiction as literary is not entirely objective. For the present purposes the researchers drew on works that have been awarded or short-listed for literary prizes. The question remains - what is it about literary fiction, but not pop fiction, that improves readers' ability to recognise other people's thoughts and feelings? Comparison of the superficial linguistic characteristics of literary and pop fiction largely drew a blank, with the exception of frequency of negative emotion words.

The researchers' belief is that the active ingredient of literary fiction is the way such books "engage their readers creatively as writers ... The absence of a single authorial perspective prompts readers to enter a vibrant discourse with the author and her characters." However, they conceded that their findings "are only preliminary and much research is needed."

One weakness of the research is that the effects of reading literary fiction on the cognitive component of Theory of Mind (understanding/identifying another person's thoughts) were inconsistent and sometimes elusive. No benefits were found for the so-called "false belief" test, which the researchers suggested was due to the task being too easy, such that readers in all conditions excelled. On the other hand, benefits of literary fiction were found for only the easy version of the Yoni task (participants must identify one or more people's thoughts based on visual and verbal clues). The harder Yoni trials "may require a set of more advanced cognitive skills ... that are less easily influenced," the researchers said.

Another potential problem with the study is the way the texts were presented. It's not clear if the identity of the passages was hidden or guessed, and related to that, we don't know if participants developed expectations that their empathy skills would be improved after reading a piece of literary prose. Such expectations could have played a role in the observed effects.

Nonetheless, if replicated and elucidated in further research, there could be important educational and cultural implications to arise from these new findings, especially at a time when many policy-makers are calling for less emphasis on fiction in secondary education. For now however we're a long way from knowing exactly what aspects of Theory of Mind benefit from reading literary fiction and why. It's also not yet established how long the benefits last, and whether the effects of reading short passages (as in this study) is any different from the experience of reading an entire novel. 

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SOURCE

BPS RESEARCH DIGEST: http://www.researchdigest.org.uk/ (accessed 17.10.13)

David Comer Kidd, and Emanuele Castano (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science express, online.http://www.sciencemag.org/content/early/2013/10/02/science.1239918.abstract

Author weblink: http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=16180

Further reading. Reading novels linked with increased empathy: http://bps-research-digest.blogspot.co.uk/2006/10/reading-novels-linked-with-increased.html

The mind's flight simulator:http://www.thepsychologist.org.uk/archive/archive_home.cfm/volumeID_21-editionID_167-ArticleID_1441

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