Science and Health

Students, Faculty Forge a Thoughtful Path to a Mindful Future

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 07:00:00 +0000

Students, Faculty Forge a Thoughtful Path to a Mindful Future Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/07/2022 - 00:00

Clint Talbott

Students, staff and faculty sit on meditation cushions learning a compassion practice. They inhale, breathing in the suffering of others, then exhale, giving compassion and healing to themselves and others.

This exercise is part of the Mindful Campus Program, an eight-week mindfulness series that the Renée Crown Wellness Institute began developing in 2019 and launched in spring 2021 to improve the well-being of students. Designed, in part, by students, the series strives to help participants live more fully in the moment, improve participants’ mental health and wellness and boost their ability to confront big societal issues.

Students, faculty and mindfulness experts designed the program. Using data from the 2021 series, which was also the focus of a research study — which drew about 150 student participants — the team aims to analyze and hone the eight-week program.

Kourtney Kelley (Psych’20), senior project manager and professional research assistant for the Crown Institute, helped design the Mindful Campus series using Youth Participatory Action Research, a method in which young people are trained to conduct systematic research to improve their lives, their communities and the institutions intended to serve them.

As she noted, “It’s not just research about students and what students are going through. Students are involved.”

This method of research “allows the voices of young people to be central and guiding within the research process,” said Sona Dimidjian, director of the Crown Institute and a professor of psychology and neuroscience.

“The whole tenet is that, as a researcher, I don’t know what the community needs, and I need to learn in partnership with students and campus partners from the ground up,” added Caitlin McKimmy (MPsych’20), a graduate research assistant in Dimidjian’s laboratory.

Natalie Avalos, assistant professor of ethnic studies, noted the series includes instruction, idea-sharing and practice.

One goal is to help participants see how they might use mindfulness and compassion practices to support anti-racism and social justice, “explicitly linking them and then going on from there,” Avalos said.

Avalos added that students assume teaching and co-mentorship roles in the Mindful Campus Program: “Hierarchies of power shifted, and I think students really responded to that and really appreciated that.”

McKimmy concurred: “At the heart of this project — and this is really an important part of the Crown Institute — is having undergrads at the table where their voices are central.”

Another team is working to adapt the Mindful Campus series into a for-credit class at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ and to make that curriculum available to students from any CU campus and other campuses, as well as community members.

Cody Moxam (Psych’23), an honors student in psychology and neuroscience, completed the series and is now part of an interdisciplinary team of students and faculty co-designing the for-credit course. He said students and faculty “set aside our personal agendas to truly work on a course designed for the well-being of its participants.”

“We were able to integrate our experience as students — and as people — with the research literature to thread together an experience that would change students’ lives for the better,” Moxam said. “Values of community, social justice and mindfulness were imbued in our team interactions from the very start.”

Michele D. Simpson, a Crown Institute faculty affiliate, research associate and associate teaching professor, underscored that point, saying that her motivation in joining the Mindful Campus Program was not to simply boost mindfulness on campus, but also to expand it into different communities on and potentially off campus.

Voicing a guiding vision for the Mindful Campus Program, Simpson said, “Mindfulness belongs to everyone. Wellness is a right of everyone.”

Illustration by Keith Negley

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The Mindful Campus Program, designed by students and faculty, aims to help students improve their own wellness and that of the community

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CU Researchers Rethink Mental Illness

Anonymous — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 07:00:00 +0000

CU Researchers Rethink Mental Illness Anonymous (not verified) Mon, 11/07/2022 - 00:00

Lisa Marshall

In the dream clinic of the future, patients struggling with mental illness might — in addition to sharing their feelings with a therapist — have their brain scanned to pinpoint regions that may be misfiring.

Instead of prescribing multiple drugs to treat myriad symptoms, a doctor could recommend one therapy targeted squarely at genetic culprits underlying them all.

And thanks to telemedicine and support from trained peers, anyone who needs treatment would receive it, regardless of their location or income.

Such a dream is within reach, say ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ geneticists, neuroscientists and psychologists who are joining forces to imagine new ways of diagnosing and treating mental illness.

Their work comes as 1 in 6 children and 1 in 5 adults experience a diagnosable mental illness each year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI). More than half will be diagnosed with a second or third in their lifetime, and about a third will have four or more.

Most will take multiple medications — some that work, some that don’t, many of which have unpleasant side effects.

Well over half will get no care at all.

“We definitely have a mental health crisis on our hands,” said June Gruber, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience who co-authored a “call to action” in American Psychologist in 2021 proposing how the crisis could be addressed. “But we are also on the cusp of big changes in the way we understand mental illness … moving away from one-size-fits-all labels to something more personalized and accessible.”

Early Diagnosis Through Brain Imaging

About half of people with mental illnesses begin to show some signs before age 14, and 75% show signs before age 24, according to NAMI.

Yet most patients wait until a crisis occurs before seeking help.

“It’s critical to get the right diagnosis and the right treatment to the right person at the right time,” said clinical neuroscientist and psychologist Roselinde Kaiser (MPsych’08; PhDNeuroSci, Psych’13), assistant professor in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience. “But we tend to wait until folks are in urgent need before we do anything … and the way we treat them often has more to do with what has the least side effects rather than what’s going to be the most effective.”

Kaiser envisions a day when everyone undergoes a mental health check-up every six months, much like we do for dental health. Clinicians would start with low-tech surveys, cognitive exams and the use of tests to measure heart rate, perspiration and other physiological responses to stress.

When serious red flags arise, just as a patient with a bad back undergoes imaging to get a reliable diagnosis, someone might have a brain scan to confirm their risk of mental illness — and what kind.

“We have really good biomarkers for lots of other complicated medical illnesses, but we don’t have anything for psychiatric disorders at this point,” said Kaiser.

To help identify patterns in the brain that could serve as biomarkers, or measurable signs, she launched a study following 140 adolescents for two years. Each participant laid back inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine and played a video game in which they gambled. Meanwhile, the fMRI measured blood flow to regions of the brain associated with reward and “executive function,” or self control.

In subsequent months, the teens filled out daily mental health surveys on their phones and had their movement tracked via GPS.

Previous studies show that people with poor executive function — the ability to plan, self-regulate and organize thoughts — are more likely to experience mental illness.

“But what has been really hard has been determining what kind of mental illness a person is experiencing or will experience,” Kaiser said.

She found that youth whose brain scans showed heightened sensitivity in the nucleus accumbens — a brain region associated with reward — along with poor executive function were far more likely to experience bipolar symptoms (depression along with mania) in the coming months. Meanwhile, those with blunted reward sensitivity along with poor self-regulation were more likely to experience unipolar depression, or depression without mania.

This matters because the drugs and interventions prescribed for each are very different. Yet because each person’s experience is unique, making such distinctions via talk therapy alone can be difficult.

“Neuroimaging may be a really useful tool for looking under the hood to see what is going on now and predict what could be coming in the future,” said Kaiser.

Precision Medicine Through Genetics

Andrew Grotzinger, an assistant professor of clinical psychology and researcher with the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, notes that when it comes to mental illness, multiple diagnoses are the norm, rather than the exception.

This can leave patients feeling unlucky and discouraged and taking multiple medications with serious side effects. Research shows more than 60% of people who go to the doctor for mental health reasons receive prescriptions for two or more medications, and more than a third receive three or more.

“If you had a cold, you wouldn’t want to be diagnosed with coughing disorder, sneezing disorder and aching joints disorder,” he said. “There has to be a better way.”

Genetics, he believes, could pave the way for a more precise system of diagnosis that accounts for the underlying genes different disorders have in common.

“By identifying what is shared across these issues, we can hopefully come up with ways to target them in a way that doesn’t require four separate pills,” he said.

His lab is making progress.

In a spring 2022 study, Grotzinger and his colleagues analyzed publicly available data from hundreds of thousands of people who submitted their genetic material. He looked at genes associated with 11 disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, anorexia nervosa, obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourette syndrome, post-traumatic stress disorder, problematic alcohol use, ADHD and autism.

While there is, he stressed, no gene or set of genes underlying risk for all of them, his team did find that subsets of disorders share a common genetic architecture.

For instance, 70% of the genetic signal associated with schizophrenia is also associated with bipolar disorder. Anorexia nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder have a strong, shared genetic basis. And anxiety disorder and major depressive disorder share many underlying genes.

Instead of prescribing multiple drugs to treat myriad symptoms, a doctor could recommend one therapy targeted squarely at genetic culprits underlying them all.

They also found that people with internalizing disorders, such as depression, tend to have genes associated with low physical movement throughout the day, while compulsive disorders such as OCD and anorexia tend to correlate with genes associated with higher movement.

“When you think about it, it makes sense,” said Grotzinger, noting that depressed individuals often present as fatigued, while those with compulsive disorders can have difficulty sitting still.

In all, the study identified 152 genetic variants shared across multiple disorders, including those already known to influence certain types of brain cells. A follow-up study, expanding the work to include three additional substance abuse disorders, is underway.

Future research, informed in part by brain imaging research, could ultimately help determine what those genes do and lead to new treatments that target those upstream processes.

It’s years away, but in the future Grotzinger and Kaiser imagine patients also having their DNA tested to help find their ideal treatment.

“My hope is that we can not only start to reduce polypharmacy but also identify new interventions for the many people who aren’t currently responding to standard practices,” Grotzinger said.

Increasing Access

Dream clinic of the future aside, Gruber stresses that existing medications and therapies do already work for many people.

“The problem is, we are ineffective in providing them to the people who need them most,” she said, noting that people of color or low-income people are often underserved. “It’s a real tragedy.”

Pre-COVID-19, 67% of adults and up to 80% of youth with mental health needs went without services each year, either because they couldn’t afford it or lived in a place where there were no counselors.

“Neuroimaging may be a really useful tool for looking under the hood to see what is going on now and predict what could be coming in the future.”

With in-person offices shut down, the COVID-19 pandemic, with all its tragic consequences, forced the field to think outside the box, bringing telemedicine from the fringes into the spotlight.

“We are moving toward a time when no longer does someone have to overcome the insurmountable obstacle of making an appointment and getting to it — where we can rapidly provide telehealth to all people across state boundaries,” said Gruber.

She believes that going forward, “lay counselors” will also play a critical role in filling the gap at a time when 77% of counties in the U.S. have a shortage of mental healthcare providers.

Lay providers have no formal mental health training but often share a cultural background or similar mental health challenges. They can serve as a bridge between people in need and clinicians or even provide support themselves.

One international study co-authored by ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ psychology professor Sona Dimidjian, director of the Renée Crown Wellness Institute, found that community members who got three weeks of intensive training, plus follow-up supervision, could effectively counsel people with depression with measurable and lasting results.

Dimidjian is now working on follow-up research in Colorado assessing a program in which mothers who have experienced and recovered from postpartum depression support moms in the thick of it.

“For nearly a century, the standard for treatment has been a single patient, single provider in a physical office,” said Gruber. “It’s time we throw aside some of our archaic models of what kinds of treatments work and who can deliver them.”

Through a project called Emerge, Gruber and her students collected data — via laboratory tests, smartphone apps and remote surveys — on 762 young adults before and after the beginning of the pandemic in 2019. They found that not only did many experience increased depression and anger early on, but a general decrease in life satisfaction persisted a year later, suggesting COVID may have long-term mental health implications.

But she has also witnessed an unexpected upside: Mental illness, once shunned and seldom talked about, has come out of the shadows.

“It has finally come into the mainstream as a common topic of conversation, and there is a recognition that many of us will endure some kind of mental health disorder in our lifetime,” said Gruber. “With that destigmatization comes great hope.”

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Illustrations by Keith Negley

Using brain imaging, genetics, telemedicine and collaboration, researchers at ��ý�Ļ��Ʒ are finding new ways to help stem the growing crisis.

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Podcast: Talking Birds with Nathan Pieplow

Anonymous — Fri, 01 Mar 2019 17:51:18 +0000

Podcast: Talking Birds with Nathan Pieplow Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 03/01/2019 - 10:51

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Colorado is a great place to see — and hear — birds: Some 500 species have been observed here, more than in all but a handful of other states.

Here, Coloradan Editor Eric Gershon speaks with Nathan Pieplow, a former editor of the journal Colorado Birds, who teaches writing and rhetoric at CU. Pieplow is also the author of the Peterson’s Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America (forthcoming in April). You can find the book’s companion website at petersonbirdsounds.com.

Photo by Peter Burke.

Here, Coloradan Editor Eric Gershon speaks with CU professor Nathan Pieplow, author of the Peterson’s Field Guide to Bird Sounds of Western North America (forthcoming in April).

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Science and Health

Students, Faculty Forge a Thoughtful Path to a Mindful Future

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CU Researchers Rethink Mental Illness

Early Diagnosis Through Brain Imaging

Precision Medicine Through Genetics

Increasing Access

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Podcast: Talking Birds with Nathan Pieplow

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