Can Treating Depressed Mothers Affect the Brains of their Babies?

By Jim Windell

This is Your Brain. This is Your Brain When you are Lonely.

By Jim Windell

           This holiday season is going to be different for many people. I know that in our family there won’t be the large Christmas Eve party that we’ve enjoyed for the past 25 years. There will be no family gathering on Christmas morning to open gifts. And there will be no New Year’s Eve parties.

            Of course, there will be Zoom interactions, text messages about our gifts and an exchange of photos on our phones. But for many people, for instance the people we usually visit during the holidays at care facilities and prisons, there will be a feeling of special isolation and – likely – the desolation of loneliness.

Singing Eases Stress for Preterm Babies and Anxious Moms

By Jim Windell

            About one of every 10 infants born in the United States is premature – commonly referred to preemies. Babies who are born prior to the 37^th month of pregnancy usually weigh much less than full-term babies and because they did not have enough time in the womb to develop they are often beset by various health problems – breathing difficulties, feeding problems, hearing and vision problems and other developmental delays.

What’s so Bad about Teenage Depression?

 By Jim Windell

Which Depressed Young People May Benefit from Exercise?

By Jim Windell

If an individual owns a handgun, is he or she more at risk of suicide? If you are a therapist working with depressed clients or with those people who have other risk factors for violence, that question could have life or death consequences. Previous research on this question has either been conducted with small samples or over a limited period of time. The eight authors of this study, led by David M. Studdert, LL.B., Sc.D., planned and carried out a very ambitious study that looked at more than 26 million California residents over a 12-year period. The researchers, who were affiliated with Stanford University School of Law, Standard School of Medicine, the University of California at Davis, and other colleges, used survival analysis to estimate the relationship between handgun ownership and mortality, including death by suicide. The results were reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in early June, 2020.

Of the individuals followed in this study, 676,000 acquired one or more handguns during the study period, and 1.4 million died over the length of the study. Of those who died, almost 18,000 died by suicide and nearly 6,700 were suicides by firearm. The researchers found that rates of suicide by any method were higher among handgun owners. It turns out that the risk of suicide by firearm among handgun owners peaked immediately after the first acquisition of a gun, however, more than half of suicides by firearm among handgun owners occurred more than one year after they acquired a handgun.