Vol. 06-28
June 21, 2006
The American Mental Health Counselors Association (AMHCA) and the American Counseling Association’s (ACA) effort to gain Medicare reimbursement for state-licensed mental health counselors took one step further on June 13, 2006, with the introduction of S. 3500, the Rural Hospital and Provider Equity (R-HoPE) Act of 2006. Continue reading
Vol. 06-27
June 09, 2006
The adult offspring of depressed parents are far more likely than those of non-depressed parents to have psychiatric and medical problems, such as cardiovascular disease, according to a study reported in the June American Journal of Psychiatry.
The study found that the rates of anxiety disorders, major depression, and substance use disorders were about three times that of offspring from non-depressed parents 20 years after a baseline survey. In addition, adult children of depressed parents had about five times the rate of cardiovascular illness as children of non-depressed parents. The study’s lead author and investigator Myrna Weissman, Ph.D., is a professor of epidemiology in psychiatry at the College of Physicians and Surgeons and the School of Public Health at Columbia University. She first began following her sample of 151 children from depressed and non-depressed parents in 1982 in their homes in New Haven, Conn. Continue reading