News
Earl W. Ridgell, MA, MS, LCPC is proud to provide ON-LINE Tele-therapy to our clients.
Additionally, we also hope to provide a sneak peek into what is being researched and how it may help our clients. Below are few snipets from well-known publications with links to the full article. Please come back to this page every once in a while to look for more news.
Is Burnout Actually a Form of Depression?
(Psychology Today)
How do we focus on work-life balance without downplaying clinical depression?
Posted Jan 20, 2020
How do we focus on work-life balance without downplaying clinical depression? (Grant N. Brenner, 2020). An arduous work environment, full of physical and emotional strain, takes a toll on even the hardiest. Long hours, poor sleep, challenging interpersonal interactions, lack of success, degraded self-care, trauma and harassment—and a myriad of other factors—make many workplaces toxic. The toxicity is managed with maladaptive coping strategies: Short-term relief, binge-watching TV, superficial relationships, the use of alcohol and other substances, comfort food, and other common factors add fuel to the fire. We can be tough, but stoicism coupled with denial means people often don’t realize what is going on until too late.
Read More on Psychology Today/em>
Emergency Department Study Reveals
Patterns of Patients at Increased Risk for Suicide
Posted Dec 13, 2019
NIH-funded research examined suicide and overdose risk in the year after an emergency department visit
A new study found that people who presented to California emergency departments with deliberate self-harm had a suicide rate in the year after their visit 56.8 times higher than those of demographically similar Californians. People who presented with suicidal ideation had suicide rates 31.4 times higher than those of demographically similar Californians in the year after discharge. The findings, published in JAMA Network Open, reinforce the importance of universal screening for suicide risk in emergency departments and the need for follow-up care. The study was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of the National Institutes of Health.
Being Yelled at: Our Brain on Alert in a Flash
Sight and hearing are the two main sensory modalities allowing us to interact with our environment. But what happens within the brain when it perceives a threatening signal, such as an aggressive voice? How does it distinguish a threatening voice from the surrounding noise? How does it process this information? To answers these questions, researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, studied brain activity during the processing of various emotional voices. They discovered that we notice a voice much faster when it is considered threatening than when it is perceived as normal or happy. Our attention is more focused on threatening voices to enable us to clearly recognize the location of the potential threat. This study, published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, demonstrates the resources leveraged by our brain when we sense danger to allow for adequate survival behavior.
