Childhood Adversity/Trauma

“No, cortisol in hair can’t ‘reveal future mental health risk’ in children.” HealthNewsReview gives a low rating to a recent story in the Guardian that reported that cortisol levels in children’s hair might be a useful mental health screening tool.

In an opinion piece for care2, Katie Medlock discusses how “mental illness” awareness campaigns have shifted, dangerously, “and ended up insinuating that people with mental illness could turn on ‘us’ at any time and should be feared.”

The Guardian covers research out of Australia that found that levels of the “stress hormone” cortisol in the hair of 70 nine-year-old children corresponded to the number of traumatic events experienced by the child. “Childhood is an imperative and sensitive period of development, and when things go wrong it can have lifelong consequences, not just on mental health, but also on general health.”

The Santa Cruz Sentinel reports on legislation being passed in California to go after physicians who overprescribe psychiatric drugs to foster youth. The proposed legislation also targets government agencies that fail to offer nondrug alternative therapies to help foster youth recover from traumatic childhoods.

Edward Machtinger, MD, director of UCSF's Women's HIV Program, nearly 84 percent of patients with HIV/AIDS died from trauma, such as physical abuse, neglect, substance...

Researchers in Finland reviewed questionnaires filled out by 911 primary and psychiatric care patients over 16 years of age. They found that more than...

A 48-year longitudinal study of 244 subjects, published in Schizophrenia Research, finds that those with schizophrenia-spectrum diagnoses had had the worst social functioning scores at...

Article Abstract: Although research supports the stigma and labeling perspective, empirical evidence also indicates that a social safety net remains intact for those with mental...

In a sample of 236 children recruited from the Environmental-Risk Longitudinal Twin Study, researchers from Duke University and King's College London found that children...

In a recent rodent study out of Rutgers University, researchers found elevated stress hormones and reduced learning and maternal behaviors in female rodents who...

-Two reports found Alaskans of aboriginal descent experiencing very high rates of many different types of trauma.

PsychCentral offers a take on noncompliance: "The moment we decide for others why they experience something as they do is the moment at which...

Experience shapes the brain, for better or worse. Richard Davidson & Bruce McEwen review the ways that adverse early experience create measurable changes in...

Researchers in Canada and the U.S. found that in a group of 147 female adolescents at risk for depression, actual transition to depression was...

Maternal antenatal depression is highly correlated with a history of the mother having been mistreated in childhood, and these two facts significantly increase the...

According to data drawn from 608 patients of an early intervention program in Dublin, presented at the 3rd Biennial Schizophrenia International Research Society (SIRS)...

Researchers at Cardiff University in Wales find that fear in infants is a predictor of guilt in later life, and write in Development and...