Providentia

Marijuana for Trauma Program Underway in Nova Scotia

Since first opening in June, the Marijuana for Trauma centre in Sydney, Nova Scotia has allowed trauma sufferers to access medical marijuana that would otherwise be denied them.    Originally established to help veterans dealing with the symptoms of posttraumatic disorder, centre staff report that the list of patients now includes non-veterans as well. 

"We have cancer patients that are coming through, people that are in constant pain," said volunteer Joe MacGillivray. "People that just had surgeries."   He added that patients looking for an alternative to heavy pain medication are finding that marijuana is much more effective, both for relieving pain and avoiding the mental confusion that often comes with drugs such as Oxycontin and Dilaudid.   In an interview with CBC news, MacGillivray reveals that he is a veteran and a PTSD sufferer himself and found that marijuana helped relieve many of his most upsetting symptoms.   "Before, I tried suicide twice," he said. "I still have my days like everybody else, but it doesn't hit as hard and it's a little more easy to deal with."

At the centre, volunteers like Joe MacGillivray and centre president, Vince Rigby, help patients deal with medical providers licensed to provide medical marijuana.   This includes helping with the proper dosage,, learning about the best marijuana strains,  and dealing with the legal barriers that can often deter people in need.    There are presently eighty patients being helped through the centre but at least another thirty are still on the waiting list.  According to Rigby, many family doctors are extremely reluctant to prescribe medical marijuana to their patients due to the stigma associated with it.   Even when prescriptions are given, doctors often fail to provide instructions on how marijuana can be used most effectively.    That's when places like the Marijuana for Trauma Centre are most needed.

Canada's Marijuana for Medical Purposes Regulations (MMPR) came into effect in April, 2014.    The requirements for being approved as a marijuana provider are rigorous and often take more a year to gain approval.   Under the regulations, anyone seeking to use marijuana for medical purposes needs to obtain a recognized medical document from a health care provider before registering with the licensed provider of their choice.   Since existing drug legislation bans providing marijuana through a storefront, patients can only purchase marijuana in dried form and in limited quantities (less than a 30-day supply).

Despite the availability of places such as the Marijuana for Trauma centre, many chronic pain and trauma patients in Canada still find themselves in a legal quandary regarding medical marijuana.  People living far from large cities often need to travel long distances to get access and can even face arrest if they fail to prove that the marijuana in their possession was legally obtained.   The Federal government under the current administration has long opposed decriminalization of marijuana and even using it for medical purposes remains controversial for many politicians. 

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Smartphones and The Future of Health Care

Can smartphone technology be used to provide better mental health care for people in crisis?

Part of the difficulty in dealing with people experiencing mental health problems is getting them the help they need when a new crisis develops.   Even for people with chronic mental health problems, there can be long periods when their symptoms are under control, at least as far as living a normal life is concerned.    Though there are often warning signs that can indicate potential problems developing,  spotting these signs can be extremely difficult for mental health professionals who don't see their clients until after their condition has become severe enough for them to need professional help.   By this point, treatment becomes much harder because of the delay involved.   Also, people in clinics or hospitals are usually less comfortable than they would be in more familiar settings such as at home which can also make their condition worse.

But what if there were a way of detecting these warning signs earlier?   If people in crisis can get help sooner then they could potentially avoid going into the kind of downward spiral that can make it so much harder to recover.   And possibly prevent the need for expensive treatment in the first place.    

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

Bullying and Your Child's Health

Using multilevel modeling,  a new study published in the Journal of School Violence examined how different types of bullying, involving both peers and teachers, relate to psychosomatic health complaints. Data were obtained via the Stockholm School Survey of 41,032 ninth- and eleventh-grade students in the years 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2010. Results showed that students involved in bullying as either a bully, a victim, or both a bully and a victim displayed poorer psychosomatic health than those not involved in bullying. Victims of peer-bullying also reported significantly poorer health than perpetrators. Two class-aggregated measures of bullying remained positively associated with ninth-grade student health complaints even when their individual-level analogues were taken into account. Thus, both the proportion of victims of teacher-bullying and peer-bullying in the school class appeared to generate health problems that go beyond the directly exposed students. However, an interaction revealed that the latter association was confined to female students only.

For the abstract

Minnesota Family Killed in "Unspeakable" Murder-Suicide

As the rest of the country marks Suicide Prevention Month, the suburb of Greenwood, Minnesota has been scarred by the discovery of five bodies bearing signs of traumatic injuries in a Greenwood home.  The five bodies are all members of the same family and are believed to have been killed in a murder-suicide.

Dead are Brian Short and his wife Karen, both of whom were in their forties, and their three children, Cole, Madison, and Brooklyn, aged 17, 15, and 14.  Police had initially declined to provide details of how they died but the gruesome story slowly unfolded.    Apparently Brian Short, a former nurse and businessman, had shot and killed his three children as they lay sleeping in  their bedrooms.  His wife attempted to call 911 but Short tracked her to another bedroom and shot her.  He then went into the garage and shot himself.

While police declined to discuss potential motives for Brian Short's actions, one source told reporters that the killings were "unspeakable" and that Short was apparently suffering from financial and mental health problems.  Records indicate that he was the litigant in a federal lawsuit filed by a New Jersey-based company and that they were already planning to move out of their expensive home as a result.  No suicide note had been left behind and neighbours are still speculating on what could have driven Brian Short, a man they all described as congenial, to do such a thing.   Active on Facebook and Twitter, Short often provided details of his family including snapshots of his daughter's soccer games and even pictures of the family dog.

On the nursing site started by Brian Short, the notice of their deaths is still posted.  "It is with great regret and a very heavy heart that I have to share some very sad news with you," the notice read. "There is no easy way to say this. We just found out this afternoon that Brian and his family have passed away. The news is calling it an apparent murder-suicide, but this has not been verified by the authorities and details have not yet been released.  No matter what the details are, the results are still the same," the notice continued, "A very tragic loss for the extended families, friends, co-workers, and this nursing community."

Friends and neighbours of the Shorts were quick to tell media of their own shock and grief over the deaths.  Toni Plante, whose daughter went to school with the youngest Short daughter had texted Karen Short when she saw that Brooklyn Short had been away the first day of school.   She received no response.  "This is just too sad," she said. "They were the nicest people in the world. There was nothing snooty about them at all. They were just down to earth."

Police are still investigating.

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The Road to Happiness

Happiness often sneaks in through a door you didn't know you left open.  John Barrymore

We all want to be happy.  In fact, "the pursuit of happiness" is one of the fundamental rights demanded in the Declaration of Independence, right along with "life" and "liberty."   But staying happy tends to be difficult as we grow older and we find ourselves wrapped up in all the complex problems we face in our day-to-day lives.    With all the daily hassles, job pressures, financial woes, and the aches and pains that come with being human, happy has a way of being elusive. 

Even defining what we mean by happiness can be tricky.   Depending on what is happening  at any given moment, happiness can range from simple contentment to the kind of joy that only occurs at key points in our lives.   If we simply define happiness in terms of the amount of positive emotion we happen to be feeling at any given moment,  research suggests that happiness tends to increase over time unless health problems develop.   As we grow older, we (usually) become better at regulating our emotions and also acquire more memories of positive moments in our lives.  

Still, research looking at how happiness grows and changes across lifespan has yielded conflicting conclusions about when people are most likely to be happy.  While cross-sectional studies comparing adults in different age groups have suggested that happiness is highest in late adolescence or early adulthood, longitudinal research suggest that happiness is greatest in seniors.   One study using longitudinal data from the Midlife in the United Status research project found that positive affect was relatively stable across adults in their mid-20s to late thirties, declining during the 40s, and slowly rising afterward to hit its peak from 60 to 69.  All of which suggests that those proclaiming "60 is the new 40" may be right after all. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.

 

Mass Murder in Michigan (Part Two of Two)

Continued from  Part One

But who was Andrew Kehoe?   While newspapers often referred to him as a "demented farmer,"  his motivation for bombing  the Bath school, along with his other crimes, likely stemmed from a need for revenge against people he felt had wronged him.

What we do know  is that he was born in 1872 and had a fairly unremarkable upbringing as the youngest of thirteen children.   After his mother died  when he was five, his father subsequent remarried and Andrew apparently had frequent fights with his stepmother.    While the circumstances of his stepmother's death when he was fourteen took on new significance following the Bath disaster (there were suspicions at the time that the stove fire which killed her had been the result of tampering),  there was no real evidence of Andrew's involvement.    After going on to study electrical engineering, Andrew married Nellie in 1912 and settled down on the farm they purchased together.    Though the farm was mortgaged, their life seemed idyllic enough despite their lack of children.

People who knew Kehoe described him as "a man you'd never think would do such a thing" but they also recalled that he was meticulous and fastidious about his appearance.   He would often change his shirt more than once a day despite the often backbreaking work that went into farming.  There were also stories about his terrible temper,  and that he had  once beat a horse to death for not pulling a plow hard enough (he also once shot a neighbour's dog for being on his property).   After being elected as treasurer of the Bath school board, Andrew often clashed with other board members over his calls for lower school taxes.  Many of his suggestions for saving money made little sense and would only have led to the school losing its certification.   He even accused the school superintendent, Emory Huyck, of mismanaging school funds on several occasions (Huyck would later be killed in the same explosion that claimed Kehoe's life).   

At the same time, Kehoe served as Bath Township clerk though he was defeated in the 1926 election, something that may have triggered his revenge scheme against the Bath community.   That Nellie Kehoe was suffering from chronic tuberculosis and was unlikely ever to recover only added to his woes.    Her chronic illness, along with the impending foreclosure on his farm, may have been the last straw for Kehoe.   After months of planning, he stole the explosives he needed and his gruesome revenge scheme finally unfolded.

 In the inquest that followed the Bath tragedy, numerous questions were asked about how Kehoe had been able to plant hundreds of pounds of explosives around the school without anyone becoming suspicious.   Staff admitted often seeing him in the days preceding the blast, but school administrators had assumed the frugal Kehoe was conducting repairs on the school building to save costs.  Participants of a PTA meeting that have been held in that same building on May 17 reported hearing someone walking around the building but had thought nothing of it though it was likely Kehoe putting the final touches on his revenge scheme.     Some speculated that the school administrators and others associated with the school that Kehoe had blamed for his financial woes had been the real targets for his rage.   

In spite of the devastation surrounding the deaths and destruction brought on by the explosions, the people of Bath township weren't down long.   Classes continued to be held in the same building that once housed the makeshift morgue and children were often seen playing not far from the wreckage of the school.   With generous donations from across the country, including money raised by the Michigan government, plans for a new school were drawn up with the cornerstone being laid by November of that same year.  In the dedication speech at the groundbreaking ceremony, Dean John Phelan of Michigan state college praised the community spirit that helped the community recover.  As for Kehoe's body, it was claimed by one of his sisters and later buried in an unmarked grave.   

Still, the notoriety over the Bath explosion was hard for the residents to accept.   A ghoulish tourist trade sprang up with people visiting to gawk at the site of the destroyed school and other reminders of what had happened.   Bath acquired the somber nickname of "the town of dead children", something that devastated survivors.   In a newspaper interview given in late 1927, town cobbler Felix Marseh described what it was like to deal with the ghoulish visitors:

"Sundays are days of horror,"  Marseh said.  "The automobiles come like swarms of beetles.  They park right up to the very doors fighting to get parking space nearest the house that lost the most children.  Then they start a dash to the door and begin asking their questions. -  How many children did you lose?  Were they badly mangled?  Did they live long after they were hit?    Then they trot down to the schoolhouse - what's left of it -  they've whittled it away and carried away bricks until there's hardly anything left to tear down.   They write their names down on the blackboards of the very rooms where those little kids were blown to pieces."   Marseh concluded by comparing the tourists to "a swarm of flies around carrion."

The ruins of the Kehoe farm, including the main house that had once been called one of the finest in the area, also became a tourist magnet.  The farm lay untouched for over ten years before being sold at auction to pay off the $4900 mortgage.    The land was completely plowed over, both to eliminate all traces of the farm and to ensure that Kehoe hadn't left behind any "surprises" in the form of hidden explosives for future owners of the property.    All reference to Andrew Kehoe were struck off the county records.   

Aside from lingering memories of the bombings, the most concrete legacy came in the form of the children who had spent months in hospital after the explosion.  Some were left permanently injured, having lost limbs or otherwise bearing the marks they would carry for the rest of their lives.   For Bath residents, it was often considered impolite to refer to their injuries or any other mention of "the Bath tragedy."    While it is still the worst mass murder of its kind in U.S. history, this is a legacy that the people of Bath would just as soon forget and some people even insisted on leaving the room whenever talk of Kehoe or the bombings started.

Still, later events such as 9/11 and the Oklahoma city bombing in 1995 had a way of  triggering these memories in many of the survivors.     In many ways, the Bath school bombing remains the most traumatic event in the lives of people who still remember.  As historian Glenn Wilkins,, a long-time member of the town points out,  "as horrible as the Oklahoma bombing was, it only touched a fraction of the people there whereas this (the bombing) touched just about everything in Bath township.  They either lost a child or had someone severely injured. "  

The Great Lisbon Earthquake

It was one of the most destructive earthquakes on record and, quite possibly, changed the course of European history.

The epicenter of the earthquake was in the North Atlantic about 200 kilometers southwest of the Portuguese coast and geologists now estimate the magnitude at almost 9 on the Richter scale. There was no warning when the tremors came in three devastating jolts on November 1, 1755 (All Saint's Day) beginning at 9:30 in the morning (local time). Although the earthquake subsided after only ten minutes, the devastation was only just beginning.

In the city of Lisbon, fires raged out of control for days and destroyed large sections of the city.  People fleeing the city attempted to escape any way that they could including aboard ships that were still moored on the Tagus river.  Unfortunately, the tsunami that followed the earthquake battered the coast and rushed up the river thirty minutes after the tremors ended. Many of the low-lying areas were swamped by three great waves that washed people, buildings, and ships out to sea. The maximum height of the waves was later estimated at thirty meters in some places.  Boats were capsized, buildings were drenched, and almost all the coastal areas of Algarve were heavily damaged.

Estimates vary concerning the total loss of life on that fateful day and range from 60,000 to 100,000.   =Lisbon, which had been one of the most heavily populated cities in Europe, lost as many as 90,000 out of a total population of 275,000 and countless more were left homeless.  Over eighty percent of all the buildings in the city were destroyed including priceless architecture and artwork. The Royal Hospital burned to the ground with hundreds of patients inside.  Although the worst of the damage was in Portugal, there was also heavy loss of life in the Moroccan cities of Fez and Mequinez.  The tremors were felt as far away as Spain, France, Switzerland and Italy.

While earthquakes are hardly uncommon in the region, nothing of that magnitude had ever been experienced before.  Portuguese troops were overwhelmed with the task of clearing the rubble and dealing with the thousands of corpses left behind.  They also dealt harshly with looters (with thirty-four public executions to deter others). bTo prevent the spread of disease, many corpses were loaded onto barges and buried at sea (to which the Church objected).  Able-bodied citizens were drafted to aid in the reconstruction work.

Word about the earthquake spread and countries across Europe promptly sent aid (making it the first truly international relief effort).  Due to transportation delays, months passed before that aid could reach Lisbon.  Portugal's economy was strained to the breaking point dealing with the expense of feeding and housing the thousands left homeless by the earthquake.  In discussing the aftermath of the disaster, the Marques de Pombal, then Portugal's chief minister, reportedly made the famous statement that their main task was to "bury the dead and to feed the living" (actually it was another prominent noble who said it first but Pombal, ever the politician, made the phrase his own).

The earthquake had a profound effect on European cultural thinking.  Theologians agonized over why God had permitted such a disaster in a predominately Catholic country (and on a holy day no less).   Many proclaimed that it was due to the "wrath of God" and further disasters were predicted.  Philosophers across Europe debated the implications of what happened.  Voltaire wrote a controversial work about the earthquake titled Poem on the Lisbon Disaster in which he openly condemned prevailing views about the nature of good and evil.  Using the calamity as an example, he introduced readers to his own pessimistic philosophy (he would expand on this further in his better-known Candide).   Early researchers including Immanuel Kant and the Marques de Pombal himself studied the Lisbon earthquake in depth and their published findings are considered to mark the beginnings of the modern science of seismology.

The psychological impact of the earthquake is harder to determine but the Great Earthquake certainly had a lasting effect on the survivors.  While the Royal family escaped unharmed (largely by chance since there were spending the holiday away from Lisbon), the Ribeira Palace was completely destroyed.  King Joseph I never really recovered from the devastation and, for him, the trauma took a most peculiar form.  Until his death in 1777, he would never allow himself to be inside a walled building and, at his urging, the entire royal court was moved to the "Real Barraca" (Royal Tent), a collection of tents and pavilions in the hills of Ajuda.  It was there that he presided over the rebuilding of Lisbon for the rest of his life.  Only during the reign of his daughter, Maria I, was the new Ajuda National Palace built on the site where the Royal Tent had stood.

Restoring Lisbon to its former glory took decades and the rebuilt sections of the city marked the first examples of earthquake-proof architecture.  The designs for the new buildings were tested in a most intriguing way. Scale models were built and troops were marched around them to simulate the effects of an earthquake (a low-tech solution to a practical problem). There were later earthquakes in the region with additional loss of life and property damage but nothing to the extent of what gone before (so far).

While many other natural disasters have occurred since the Lisbon earthquake, it remains a grim reminder of the enormous loss of life that can occur.  Improvements in transportation, communication and medicine may have enabled the rapid deployment of relief efforts but burying the dead and feeding the living is still a heartbreaking task for aid workers and survivors alike.

Click here for an eyewitness account of the earthquake.

Does GPS Help Drivers in the Early Stages of Dementia?

The initial symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) include attention deficits, memory loss and deficiencies in topographic and spatial orientation. People with AD may have way-finding difficulties in driving due to the deterioration of their navigation ability. Although the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been proven to be a useful aid for older people in driving, there is no evidence to suggest that the benefit could extend to drivers with AD. A new study published in the journal Gerontology aims to investigate the effectiveness of the GPS in assisting drivers with mild AD in finding their destination safely.   Twenty-eight drivers with mild to very mild AD, diagnosed by a general practitioner or a psychogeriatrician, completed all clinical and psychometric assessments including the Mini Mental State Examination, Trail Making Test B and Doors and People Test. During the driving assessment, 3 driving trials with different settings (normal, visual only and audio-only) of the GPS were administered to all participants. The participants were required to follow instructions from the GPS and perform a variety of driving tasks on a driving simulator. The driving performances of participants were assessed by criteria specific to AD drivers. The driving assessment criteria were first combined to form the overall driving performance score: a higher score indicated a better overall driving performance. The other outcome of this study was the success of participants to navigate to a predetermined destination. Results showed that the driving performance of participants was different among the 3 settings (F = 72.8, p < 0.001) and the pairwise comparison between the 3 settings was significant (p < 0.001). The driving performance score was highest in the audio-only setting (mean: 20.0, SD: 2.2), moderate in the normal setting (mean: 16.7, SD: 2.6) and lowest in the visual-only setting (mean: 14.3, SD: 3.3). When compared with the visual-only setting, drivers using the audio only setting (OR: 37.2, 95% CI: 9.2–151.2) and normal setting (OR: 37.2, 95% CI: 4.8–286.9) were more likely to successfully find their destination (p < 0.05).  The researchers conclude that  using single, simple auditory instructions with the absence of the visual output of the GPS could potentially help people with mild AD to improve their driving ability and reach their destination.

For the abstract

"Demon Attack" Blamed for South African Riot

It was meant to be a colourful ceremony presided over by South Africa's president, Jacob Zuma.   Instead it turned into a bizarre spectacle with hundreds of women screaming and crying uncontrollably over hallucinations of being attacked by demons.  

Every year in September, the Umkhosi woMhlanga or "Royal Reed Dance" is held at the Enyokeni Royal Palace in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa.   Thousands of young women come from all over Zululand and Swaziland to take part in the eight-day event.   Dressed in traditional beads which leave most of the body uncovered, the participating women are obliged to undergo "virginity testing" before the ceremony begins to ensure their eligibility.   

They then dance bare-breasted for the current Zulu king, Goodwill Zwelithini, who presides over the ceremony and each woman then deposits a reed in front of the king as they pass before him.  As in previous years,  President Zuma (himself a Zulu) attends the ceremony to show support for Zulu customs.  Long practiced in Swaziland, the Reed Dance was only introduced to South Africa in 1991 as a way to discourage young women from becoming sexually active too early.   Whenever a young woman is declared ineligible whether due to pregnancy or failing to pass the virginity test, the woman's family is fined a cow.  

While it is still uncertain what went wrong at the ceremony, guards were forced to escort the president from the palace as many of the women began pushing each other towards the area where Zuma and the king were sitting.   Some were crying and rolling on the ground and later needed medical treatment.    Though President Zuma later returned to his seat after ordered was restored, he was unable to give his planned speech since it was late in the evening.   The Zulu king was visibly upset by the incident and blamed what happened on "evil spirits."  

An investigation determined that some women had begun hallucinating at the very start of the festival, possibly due to the poor weather conditions that the thousands of women in attendance needed to endure.   Along with being unusually cold and damp for this time of year,  the women had little shelter despite being forced to listen to the king's lengthy speech.    There were also allegations that the disruption had been started when some women saw a snake or a large frog though this has been disputed. 

Religious leaders were later called in to chase away evil spirits and to help reassure authorities that the crowd was under control.

Whether or not this latest incident was caused by a form of mass hysteria,  the annual Reed Dance continues to be marked by controversy and tragedy.  Last year, nine women returning from the Reed Dance were killed in a bus accident caused by the unsafe transportation that many participants are forced to use.   To prevent further accidents the government has arranged a crackdown on all buses found to be unsafe.

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How is the Great Recession Affecting Children?

Beginning in 2007, the United States, along with most other countries around the world, experienced what has since become the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression.   In addition to a collapse of the housing market, an epidemic of foreclosures, and a dramatic increase in the unemployment rate.   News stories about the various causes of the Great Recession, including bank collapses, economic mismanagement, and government bailouts has shaken public confidence in the economy and has left countless people fearing for their own financial future. 

One of the most well-known measures of consumer confidence is the national Consumer Sentiment Index (CSI) published monthly by the University of Michigan.  Based on a monthly telephone survey asking people their opinions about a variety of economic subjects, including their own financial well-being, the CSI is considered to be a leading indicator of the general health of the economy and a way of predicting economic recovery.   At the height of the Great Recession in 2009, half of Americans surveyed reported that their financial situation was worse than the year before.   While we have seen a strong recovery since then, confidence is still shaky amid fears of another collapse.

But how has these fears brought on by the Great Recession affected children?   As adults lost their jobs and their homes, the emotional impact this has had on their children is just beginning to be understood.   While there have been numerous research studies looking at the psychological impact of job loss on families, it is far more difficult to measure what happens to children who are affected.    More recent research studies look at the impact of widespread job losses (due to plant closings or business failures in some communities) and later academic achievement in children but fail to examine children directly to determine how they are affected by economic changes. 

To read more, check out my new Psychology Today blog post.