Social Work Today E-Zine

When the death of Freddie Mac chief financial officer David Kellerman looked to be a suicide, people wondered whether it was driven by economic stress. In a recession this severe, people ask, does the suicide rate go up? The sad truth is, nobody knows.

Thanks to the power of modern disease surveillance, we can watch flu pandemics unfold before our eyes, minute by minute. Yet there is no equivalent way to monitor suicides.

“People everywhere are wondering if suicides are spiking in response to economic woes, yet we have no reliable system for tracking suicide rates in real-time,” says Matt Wray, PhD, a sociologist at Temple University and a former Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Health and Society Scholar at Harvard University.

“There are good reasons to believe rates are rising—perhaps even sharply—but there is no way to know for sure,” he says. According to Wray, official data on suicides are collected by counties and states and forwarded to the National Center for Health Statistics for aggregation and public release, but this is a labor-intensive and time-consuming process. The last year for which national suicide statistics are available is 2005. Under the present reporting system, it will be 2012 or later before we know what happened during the 2008-2009 recession.

However, the questions surrounding David Kellerman’s tragic death make a few things clear, asserts Wray. “With 30,000 Americans each year taking their own lives, we need a national system for better and more timely suicide reporting. The National Violent Death Reporting System, run by the Centers for Disease Control, is a step in the right direction, but this program has been slow to expand—only 17 states are currently involved—and data still take about three years to process. I think the new administration ought to find a way to use stimulus funding to improve on that.”

— Source: Temple University

The pain that can accompany cancer—both ongoing pain and short but sometimes violent bursts of pain—tends to be worse among nonwhites than among white patients, researchers from the University of Michigan Health System have found. The study appears in The Journal of Pain and Symptom Management.

Researchers prospectively analyzed data from surveying 96 people with advanced cancer over six months. Nonwhite participants reported much more severe consistent pain and “breakthrough” pain-flares of moderate to severe pain than whites. Nonwhite participants also reported a higher incidence of pain interfering with general activity, mood, and walking ability.

“Our findings suggest the burden of cancer pain is unequal with nonwhite patients carrying a larger load,” says lead author Carmen R. Green, MD, director of the Pain Medicine Research, and an associate professor of the department of anesthesiology and health management and policy.

In measures of consistent pain at its least, nonwhites reported scores around 4.75 on a scale of zero to 10, with zero representing no pain and 10 representing pain at its most severe. Those numbers are similar to white respondents’ scores of consistent pain at its worst, suggesting a noteworthy gap between the two groups.

Breakthrough pain also was worse for nonwhites than whites. For instance, nonwhites reported average scores of about 4.5 for breakthrough pain at its least at the three-month time point in the study, compared with an average score of about 2.8 among whites. The gap in pain scores between nonwhites and whites tended to decrease over the course of the six-month study.

Among women in the study, breakthrough pain was found to be higher on average than for men, and women’s most recent pain flares also were stronger on average than men’s flares.

— Source: University of Michigan Health System

In a statement issued from the National Youth Leadership Council’s (NYLC) office in St. Paul, Minn., NYLC founder and CEO Jim Kielsmeier celebrated President Obama’s signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act:

“I applaud the President and Congress for their vision and leadership in passing the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. … We look forward to innovative education programs that expand high-quality service-learning practices and strengthen communities nationwide.

With schools around the country facing severe budget cuts, it is imperative that the Corporation for National and Community Service takes bold steps to help fill these growing gaps. We call on the Corporation, as the federal agency that supports service-learning across the country, to provide the financial support for K-12 Learn and Serve America programs so that high-quality programs continue to grow.

When service-learning is a K-12 teaching strategy, students gain leadership skills and apply their academic skills to make meaningful differences in their communities. With early exposure to service as an integrated part of their schooling, students often become interested in national service following their high school or college experiences, and go on to be life-long service leaders.

Now is the time to build a generation of engaged citizens who will strengthen communities around the country and world—both in their first 12 years of schooling, and beyond.

We applaud both the President and Congress for their leadership in passing this landmark legislation and look forward to working with our colleagues to make real the vision behind this Act.”

— Source: National Youth Leadership Council

With 76 million baby boomers on the retirement horizon, “we need to develop a new paradigm where instead of seeing aging as loss, we see aging as something that involves gain," says John Krout, PhD, professor of gerontology and director of the Gerontology Institute at Ithaca College. He explains that a growing body of research shows the aging brain is not all a story of decline.

Under Krout’s leadership the Gerontology Institute recently launched a Center for Creativity and Aging—The Linden Center. “The Linden Center responds to a public imperative, on the local and national level, to explore and understand how older people can continue to flourish creatively and remain engaged,” says Krout. The center will provide grants to faculty and students funding research, model programs, internships, and public education on creativity in the later stages of life. Additionally, the center will develop community-linked programs involving elders exploring creative arts for the first time, as well as engaging college students with elders.

“We need to think of our aging population as a rich resource and I think boomers are the leading edge of a potential revolution in old age. They will change how our institutions relate to older adults and how we define old age for our family and ourselves. They [boomers] are astute politically and will demand solutions to their problems and the issues they care about, particularly about their quality of life; they will not retire to the front porch,” says Krout. “Boomers present new and exciting opportunities for greater creativity in all walks of life.”

— Source: Ithaca College

Children who can stay focused and don’t sweat the small stuff have a better shot at good health in adulthood—and this is especially true for girls, according to a new study reported in Health Psychology.

“Certain characteristics already evident early in life are likely to spark positive or negative emotions, and also influence biological and behavioral responses to stress,” says lead author Laura D. Kubzansky, PhD, of the Harvard School of Public Health. “Some traits may contribute to developing healthier behaviors and better social relationships, and ultimately more resilience in midlife.

Kubzansky and coauthors tracked 569 individuals (60% men, 40% women; 80% white, 20% black) from the National Collaborative Perinatal Project from age 7 to their mid-30s to see if certain personality traits influenced later health. Trained observers rated the 7 year olds on 15 different behaviors. These behaviors were then assigned to three different personality attributes: attention, distress-proneness, and behavior inhibition.

To determine adult health, the participants rated their health and reported whether they had any of the following illnesses: heart disease, diabetes, cancer, asthma, arthritis, stroke, bleeding ulcer, tuberculosis, or hepatitis.

For all the participants, superior attention spans and having a more positive outlook in youth affected health the most. These effects were greater for women, the researchers found. The authors suggested that women may be more sensitive to interactions among emotion, behavior and biology and, therefore, be more predisposed to certain health risks, such as heart disease, although additional research is needed to understand this more completely.

“This longitudinal study provides more evidence that behavior and emotions generally linked to certain temperaments play a crucial role in long-term health,” Kubzansky said.

— Source: American Psychological Association

Children who grow up with a parent with a drinking problem have been shown to suffer from depression, anxiety, acting out, and academic and social difficulties. Some of these problems begin as early as age 2; however, the few prevention programs that exist for children of alcoholic parents are typically aimed at students in middle school or older.

Andrea Hussong, PhD, a clinical psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, hopes to change that. Along with her colleagues in the UNC College of Arts and Sciences’ psychology department, Hussong is developing an early prevention program called Families First, designed for families of preschool-age children who are living with a parent with a drinking problem.

The preschool years are an ideal developmental period for intervention because risk behaviors such as aggression may become more difficult to change if they are not addressed before children enter elementary school, Hussong says.

“Many of the young children with whom I have worked in community mental health care were struggling to find ways to cope with parent alcoholism and problem drinking before they entered school,” Hussong says. “Our goal is to work with families one on one to address issues common to healthy family development for all of us—promoting positive relationships with children, effective discipline practices, and healthy emotional and social development.”

“We know that signs of emotional distress in early childhood predict greater risk for substance use in adolescence and young adulthood,” Hussong says. “My work has been aimed at connecting the dots along this developmental pathway to identify and evaluate whether there is an ‘internalizing pathway’ to substance use disorders.”

— Source: University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Mothers of multiples have 43% increased odds of having moderate to severe depressive symptoms nine months after giving birth compared with mothers of single-born children, according to researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Researchers examined the relationship between multiple births and maternal depressive symptoms and found that multiple births increased the odds of maternal depression. The results are published in Pediatrics.

“Our findings suggest that 19% of mothers of multiples had moderate to severe depressive symptoms nine months after delivery, compared to 16% among mothers of singletons,” says Yoonjoung Choi, DrPH, lead author of the study and a research associate with the Bloomberg School’s department of international health.

Choi and colleagues used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Birth Cohort, a nationally representative sample of children born in 2001. They measured depressive symptoms in mothers using an abbreviated version of the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression (CES-D) scale. Researchers examined the association between multiple births and maternal mental health. They also found that, among the mothers of both singleton and multiples, only 27% reported talking to a mental health specialist or a general medical provider when experiencing depressive symptoms.

“The low numbers of women receiving mental health counseling despite symptoms reinforces the need for facilitating better referral of patients with depressive symptoms,” says Cynthia Minkovitz, MD, MPP, senior author of the study and an associate professor with the Bloomberg School’s department of population, family and reproductive health. “Pediatric practices should make an additional effort to educate new and expecting parents of multiples regarding their increased risk for maternal postpartum depression. Furthermore, well-child visits are potentially valuable opportunities to provide education, screening and referrals for postpartum depression among mothers of multiples.”

— Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health