Tag: Oral Session 2 SW

Systematic Review of Mental Illness Measures and Diagnosis in the United States

Presenter(s): Megan Olivera

Faculty Mentor(s): Lynette Danley

Oral Session 2 SW

The purpose of this study is to conduct a systematic review of current psychological assessments used primary in the United States intended to address mental illness symptomology or bring about a mental illness diagnosis for patients. Measures included in this study to assess mental illness symptomology or bring about a mental illness diagnosis by clinicians include the Mood Disorder Scale (MDQ), Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale (GAD-7), Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS), Hamiliton Depression Rating Scale(HAM-D), Hamiliton Anxiety Scale( HAM-A), and the Bipolar Spectrum Diagnostic Scale(BSDA). This review will have specific attention paid to language used in addressing mental disorders or symptomatology, the structure of said assessments and research, and their design. Effectiveness levels, potential harms, and benefits of the most common mental illness assessments commonly used will be discussed and explored in regard to the language used on said assessments. Implications of these findings will provide evidence for where current assessments used by mental health experts may be lacking in. This information will be useful to not only professionals wanting to reinvent how we screen for mental illness, but also informative for individuals who likely will at some point come across one of these assessments.

Analyzing Treatment of Schizophrenic Patients within Morningside Hospital from 1955- 1958

Presenter(s): Rachel McGill

Faculty Mentor(s): Kristin Yarris

Oral Session 2 SW

Mental health affects all individuals directly or indirectly and remains a significant problem within the global burden of disease. As there is not a test for a schizophrenia diagnosis, nor a direct form of treatment, it has proved difficult to diagnose and control in patients even now. When looking to analyze the history of mental health, the Morningside Hospital in Portland provides original documents of patient records with various psychiatric diagnoses, with a heavy concentration of schizophrenic patients. Morningside Hospital ran from 1883- 1986, and through a contract with the US Interior, Alaskan patients were transported to Morningside as a mental illness was seen as a crime in Alaska. By using patient records from 1955-1958 donated by Dr. William Burke, a doctor at the hospital, diagnostic coding, and interviews, an outline of patient treatment were analyzed. Shown through the findings with patients being treated with ECT, electroshock therapy declined from 1955 to 1958 and the use of Thorazine increased during this period. While we have moved away from the controversial treatment of shipping mentally ill patients from Alaska to Morningside, the mental health industry is still facing financial problems, many state hospitals are now closed, and community outreach programs are stretched to the breaking point. Through this research, there is optimism that recognizing the past will be used to model the future. In the future, it will remain paramount that how mental disorders are perceived, diagnosed and treated continues to evolve and grow to reduce mental health’s global burden of disease.

Morningside Hospital: A Historical Case Study for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Depression in Mid-Century American Psychiatry

Morningside Hospital: A Historical Case Study for the Diagnosis and Treatment of Depression in Mid-Century American Psychiatry

Gabriella Farland

Faculty Mentor(s): Kristin Yarris & Mary Wood

Oral Session 2 SW

Morningside Hospital was an inpatient psychiatric hospital in Portland, Oregon operating from the early 1900s through the 1960s. A significant portion of the hospital’s patient population were Native Alaskans, due to insufficient public mental health infrastructure in the then-territory. Morningside serves as a case study for examining the practices of American Psychiatry at the height of the institutionalization of those deemed mentally ill. This research uses archival materials from UO Special Collections, namely, the DeWitt Burkes papers (1955-1958) as primary source evidence to historically analyze how depression was diagnosed and treated at Morningside in the 1950s. I analyze the way in which depression-related disorders were diagnosed by psychiatrists in this period using the first version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-I) and the treatments that followed. Using narrative analysis of psychiatrists’ notes, I examine the tensions around framing depression as reactive rather than neurochemical, ultimately illuminating the inadequacy of DSM-I language as a classificatory scheme. Using basic statistical analysis of psychiatrists’ meeting minutes, I present the frequency of depression, showing diagnostic trends by gender, age, and race. Given that depression is so prevalent in American psychiatry and U.S. society today, this historical case study offers a critique on the development of diagnostic language and treatment, while revealing the problems gendered and racialized constructs have created in both institutionalization and community mental health care over time.

Overwhelmed and Undermined: The Use of Psychoactive Substances and the Problem of Meaninglessness

Presenter(s): Shane Cooney

Faculty Mentor(s): Steven Brence & Caroline Lundquist

Oral Session 2 SW

Today, the opioid epidemic pervades every corner of society. Accordingly, drug use and addiction have been dealt with extensively as social phenomena, with the latter also being studied by psychologists and other medical professionals. Neither, however, has been thoroughly examined as an existential phenomenon. The scale of this crisis is symptomatic of a much deeper problem, viz., the problem of meaninglessness. What consequences follow from the realization that life has no inherent or absolute meaning; that life is, as Albert Camus describes in The Myth of Sisyphus, absurd? In this essay, I argue that drug use and abuse can be seen as problematic responses to the meaninglessness consequent of the absurd. Exploring Camus’ notion of absurdity and drawing on my experiences with addiction, I situate drug use within the context of the absurd, highlighting how the use of psychoactive substances is, either consciously or unconsciously, an attempt to escape the absurdity of existence. I then discuss the limitations of Camus’ account of the human need for meaning and propose potential alternatives, which can be found in Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning and in Camus’ novel The Plague. The aim of my project is to analyze drug use vis-à-vis meaning, so that we may gain insight into why some people begin and continue to use drugs, which, as I suggest, is the starting point for understanding addiction. Without answering this principal question, our attempts to mitigate the problem of addiction will always remain somewhat tangential.

The Effect of Delta Frequency Music on Insomniac Sleep Onset Latency

Presenter(s): Faith Collins

Faculty Mentor(s): Don Tucker

Oral Session 2 SW

Insomnia, a common sleep disorder, is associated with difficulties initiating sleep (i.e., sleep onset latency). Pharmacological interventions provide moderate relief, but because of habituation and growing problems with substance abuse and addiction, there has been a push by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to identify non-pharmacological interventions for such conditions. One possible intervention for insomnia is listening to music to improve sleep onset latency. This study is a 3-week intervention in which participants will listen to 45 minutes of slow, rhythmic music as they are falling asleep. Tononi et al., (2010) administered brief tones at 0.8 and 2 Hz (delta frequency), a rate that approximates the natural cellular oscillation of cortical neurons during sleep. They found these tones improved sleep slow waves. Thus, we hypothesize that delta frequency music will improve sleep latency and catalyze the transition into slow wave sleep, similar to the results reported by Tononi, (2010). An a priori power analysis suggested this study will require 10 subjects. The inclusion criteria are aged 18- 65, and a Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) score >5. The exclusion criterion is a yes response to any item on the Self- reported Comorbidity Questionnaire (SCQ). A repeated-measures multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) including within and between interactions will be utilized. The independent variable is group (normal sleepers and insomniacs). Dependent measures include pre- post-PSQI score, sleep onset latency in minutes, a Likert scale sleep quality report, and a sleep log of sleep onset and sleep time in minutes.