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In an effort to create safer environments for potentially suicidal individuals, researchers at the Harvard School of Public health demonstrate how physicians can broaden their treatment of such patients to address not only their mental illness but also the patients' access to guns and other lethal means. Such an approach could dramatically reduce suicide fatalities. read more

A new study shows that older people's mental skills start declining years before death, even if they don't have dementia. "These changes are different and separate from the changes in thinking skills that occur as people get older," said study author Valgeir Thorvaldsson, MSc, of Goteberg University in Sweden. "We found accelerated changes in people's mental skills that indicated a terminal decline phase years before death." read more

Childhood bedwetting occurred twice as often in adults with schizophrenia than in their unaffected brothers and sisters, according to a new study from researchers at NIMH. Their report appears in the September 2008 issue of the journal Brain. In the study led by NIMH's Thomas M, Hyde, M.D., Ph.D., the mothers of 211 adult schizophrenia patients and of 234 unaffected adult brothers and sisters were asked to recall their children's bedwetting history. For additional comparison, mothers of 355 other adults without schizophrenia were also asked to recall their children's bedwetting. read more

Psychotherapy is a crucial part of treatment for many mental disorders, but it can be difficult to identify the right approach for an individual. To that end, NIMH is funding eight new projects designed to evaluate, refine and improve psychotherapy-based treatments. Projects range from developing and piloting novel approaches for treating specific mental disorders, to conducting large, multi-site clinical trials to test treatments and treatment combinations for both adults and children. The new grants are described below. read more

Adolescents with bipolar disorder who received a nine-month course of family-focused therapy (FFT) recovered more quickly from depressive episodes and stayed free of depression for longer periods than a control group, according to an NIMH-funded study published September 2008 in the Archives of General Psychiatry. read more

Vietnamese-Americans ages 56 and older are twice as likely as whites to report needing mental health care and also less likely to discuss such issues with a professional, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the Los Angeles Times reports.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that shows a continued high rate of youth suicides in 2005, the year after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issued a "black box" warning on antidepressant medications, demonstrates an urgent need for further study into the cause of this trend. The results show that the spike in teen suicides which occurred in 2004 was not an anomaly.