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Inspiration has been linked with people at risk of developing bipolar disorder for the first time in a study led by Lancaster University.

For generations, artists, musicians, poets and writers have described personal experiences of mania and depression, highlighting the unique association between creativity and bipolar disorder – experiences which are backed up by recent research. But, until now, the specific links between inspiration – the generation of ideas that form the basis of creative work – and bipolar disorder has received little attention.

New research by Professor by Steven Jones and Dr Alyson Dodd, of Lancaster University, and Dr June Gruber at Yale University, has shown people at higher risk for developing bipolar disorder consistently report stronger experiences of inspiration than those at lower risk.

The paper ‘Development and Validation of a New Multidimensional Measure of Inspiration: Associations with Risk for Bipolar Disorder’, published in PLOS One this week, found a specific link between those people who found their source of inspiration within themselves and risk for bipolar disorder.

Professor Jones, co-director of Lancaster University’s Spectrum Centre, said: “It appears that the types of inspiration most related to bipolar vulnerability are those which are self-generated and linked with strong drive for success.

“Understanding more about inspiration is important because it is a key aspect of creativity which is highly associated with mental health problems, in particular bipolar disorder. People with bipolar disorder highly value creativity as a positive aspect of their condition. This is relevant to clinicians, as people with bipolar disorder may be unwilling to engage with treatments and therapies which compromise their creativity.”

As part of the study, 835 undergraduate students were recruited to complete online questionnaires from both Yale University in the U.S. and Lancaster University in the U.K.

They were asked to complete a questionaire which measured their bipolar risk using a widely-used and well-validated 48-item measure which captures episodic shifts in emotion, behaviour, and energy called The Hypomanic Personality Scale (HPS).

They also completed a new questionnaire developed by the team which was designed to explore beliefs about inspiration, in particular the sources of inspiration – whether individuals thought it came from within themselves, from others or the wider environment. This measure was called the the EISI (External and Internal Sources of Inspiration) measure.

The students who scored highly for a risk of bipolar also consistently scored more highly than the others for levels of inspiration and for inspiration which they judged to have come from themselves.

Researchers say, although this pattern was consistent, the effect sizes were relatively modest so, although inspiration and bipolar risk are linked, it is important to explore other variables to get a fuller picture and to conduct further research with individuals with a clinical diagnosis of bipolar disorder.

The research team is currently inviting UK-based individuals with a diagnosis of bipolar disorder to take part in an online survey exploring associations between inspiration, mood and recovery.

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The benefits of incorporating approaches from positive psychology into existing understandings of mental health problems have recently been promoted by several policy development in UK.

However, the research in this area is still very limited. The aim of the study was to develop the evidence for a brief intervention that targets goal-setting and planning skills (GAP) to improve well-being.

A total of 82 service users were recruited through a large mental health trust in the Greater London area.

A cross-over design was used, with participants initially randomly allocated to either the intervention or a waiting-list control group.

Participants allocated to the waiting-list condition were offered the intervention after they had completed their measures as controls and follow-up measures were taken from all participants 1 month after completing the intervention.

The initial intervention group consisted of 11 males and 11 females with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia, 8 bipolar disorder, 4 mood disorder and 1 other. The control group consisted of 15 males and 19 females with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia, 7 bipolar disorder, 9 mood disorder and 3 other.

The groups did not differ significantly on any demographic or clinical variables.

Outcome measures were: positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), satisfaction with life (SWLS), Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) and a measure of outcome expectancy and efficacy for goals (OutEff).

At post treatment, the GAP group were significantly higher on SWLS and OutEff than controls and significantly lower on NA.

PA showed a trend to be higher and BHS showed no effect.

At follow up with all participants receiving GAP, SWLS, OutEff, PA and BHS all showed improved scores, but NA no longer showed any benefit.

According to the authors, the findings support the value to users of mental health services of interventions that are not symptom focused, but rather focused on enhancing positive aspects of people’s experience.

on line any mental health support group @ http://www.bipolar4lifesupport.co

The benefits of incorporating approaches from positive psychology into existing understandings of mental health problems have recently been promoted by several policy development in UK.

However, the research in this area is still very limited. The aim of the study was to develop the evidence for a brief intervention that targets goal-setting and planning skills (GAP) to improve well-being.

A total of 82 service users were recruited through a large mental health trust in the Greater London area.

A cross-over design was used, with participants initially randomly allocated to either the intervention or a waiting-list control group.

Participants allocated to the waiting-list condition were offered the intervention after they had completed their measures as controls and follow-up measures were taken from all participants 1 month after completing the intervention.

The initial intervention group consisted of 11 males and 11 females with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia, 8 bipolar disorder, 4 mood disorder and 1 other. The control group consisted of 15 males and 19 females with a primary diagnosis of schizophrenia, 7 bipolar disorder, 9 mood disorder and 3 other.

The groups did not differ significantly on any demographic or clinical variables.

Outcome measures were: positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), satisfaction with life (SWLS), Beck Hopelessness Scale (BHS) and a measure of outcome expectancy and efficacy for goals (OutEff).

At post treatment, the GAP group were significantly higher on SWLS and OutEff than controls and significantly lower on NA.

PA showed a trend to be higher and BHS showed no effect.

At follow up with all participants receiving GAP, SWLS, OutEff, PA and BHS all showed improved scores, but NA no longer showed any benefit.

According to the authors, the findings support the value to users of mental health services of interventions that are not symptom focused, but rather focused on enhancing positive aspects of people’s experience.

online any mental health disorder support group @ http://www.bipolar4lifesupport.co

In a study of crimes committed by people with serious mental disorders, only 7.5 percent were directly related to symptoms of mental illness, according to new research published by the American Psychological Association.

Researchers analyzed 429 crimes committed by 143 offenders with three major types of mental illness and found that 3 percent of their crimes were directly related to symptoms of major depression, 4 percent to symptoms of schizophrenia disorders and 10 percent to symptoms of bipolar disorder.

“When we hear about crimes committed by people with mental illness, they tend to be big headline-making crimes so they get stuck in people’s heads,” said lead researcher Jillian Peterson, PhD. “The vast majority of people with mental illness are not violent, not criminal and not dangerous.”

The study was conducted with former defendants of a mental health court in Minneapolis. The participants completed a two-hour interview about their criminal history and mental health symptoms, covering an average of 15 years. The study, published online in the APA journal Law and Human Behavior, may be the first to analyze the connection between crime and mental illness symptoms for offenders over an extended period of their lives, said Peterson, a psychology professor at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, Minn.

The study didn’t find any predictable patterns linking criminal conduct and mental illness symptoms over time. Two-thirds of the offenders who had committed crimes directly related to their mental illness symptoms also had committed unrelated crimes for other reasons, such as poverty, unemployment, homelessness and substance abuse, according to the research. “Is there a small group of people with mental illness committing crimes again and again because of their symptoms? We didn’t find that in this study,” Peterson said.

In the United States, more than 1.2 million people with mental illness are incarcerated in jails or prisons, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. People with mental illnesses also are on probation or parole at two to four times the rate for the general population.

In addition to interviews with offenders, the researchers reviewed criminal history and social worker files to help rate crimes based on their association with symptoms of schizophrenia disorders (hallucinations and delusions), bipolar disorder (impulsivity and risk-taking behavior) or major depression (hopelessness and suicidal thoughts). The ratings were: no relationship between mental illness symptoms and the crime, mostly unrelated, mostly related or directly related.

A crime could be rated as mostly unrelated or mostly related to mental illness symptoms if those symptoms contributed to the cause of the crime but weren’t solely responsible for it. For example, an offender with schizophrenia who was agitated because he heard voices earlier in the day later got into a bar fight, but he wasn’t hearing voices at the time of the altercation, so the crime was categorized as mostly related.

When the directly related and mostly related categories were combined, the percentage of crimes attributed to mental illness symptoms increased from 7.5 percent to 18 percent, or less than one in five of the crimes analyzed in the study. Of crimes committed by participants with bipolar disorder, 62 percent were directly or mostly related to symptoms, compared with 23 percent for schizophrenia and 15 percent for depression. Some participants may have described their mood as “manic” during a crime even though they could have just been angry or abusing drugs or alcohol, so the percentage of crimes attributed to bipolar disorder may be inflated, Peterson said.

Almost two-thirds of the study participants were male, with an average age of 40. They were evenly divided between white and black offenders (42 percent each, 16 percent other races), and 85 percent had substance abuse disorders. The study did not include offenders with serious violent offenses because the mental health court did not adjudicate those crimes, but the participants did describe other violent crimes they had committed. The study also did not examine how substance abuse interacted with mental illness to influence criminal behavior.

The researchers said programs designed to reduce recidivism for mentally ill offenders should be expanded beyond mental health treatment to include cognitive-behavioral treatment about criminal thinking, anger management and other behavioral issues. Programs to address basic needs also are essential to reduce recidivism for all offenders after incarceration, including drug treatment and housing and employment support, Peterson said.

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Researchers have identified mutations in genes that control epigenetic regulation, which may contribute to both schizophrenia and autism.

Schizophrenia affects about 1% of the adult population. Currently, schizophrenia can only be diagnosed by observing behavior and measuring the duration of the symptoms and functional impairment. There is little biological understanding of the disease, which has presented a barrier in developing more precise diagnosis and more effective treatments.

As schizophrenia can be inherited and because genomic technologies have vastly improved in recent years, research has now turned to investigating the genetic risk factors for the condition.

Previous research in this area has provided estimates for about a quarter of the genetic contribution to schizophrenia risk, and has revealed a genetic risk overlap with some other psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder.

Also, past research has found that some genetic variants are implicated in autism, intellectual disability and seizure disorder, as well as schizophrenia.

To further explore this link, and as part of a collaboration between Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories (CSHL) in New York, a team of researchers performed genetic sequencing on 171 Irish people who have at least one schizophrenic family member.

New genetic mutations identified

Analyzing the sequences, the team identified new genetic mutations that were present in people with schizophrenia, but not in their unaffected parents. This means that the mutations were new and not inherited.

DNA under a magnifying glass
The team identified new genetic mutations that were present in people with schizophrenia but not in their unaffected parents. This means that the mutations were new and not inherited.

First author, Shane McCarthy of CSHL, says: “We found that these types of mutations occurred more common than expected in people with schizophrenia and are likely to have functional consequences.”

“Such things can happen by chance, and we are all likely to carry a small number of apparently damaging mutations with no obvious health consequences,” senior author, Trinity College’s Prof. Aiden Corvin, told Medical News Today.

However, Prof. Corvin, further explains:

“Two things were of interest in this study, first that the genes where this was happening (AUTS2, CDH8, HUWE1) had already been implicated in autism and intellectual disability. When we tested whether this was a chance clustering we found this to be highly unlikely. Second, the genes appear to be involved in the same process, which is to control how DNA is used, or expressed as proteins. So they seem to be regulatory.”

What this means is that the genes have a common function – called chromatin modification – in regulating how other genes function. Prof. Corvin thinks that chromatin modification “may be an important molecular mechanism in explaining how developmental disorders of this type emerge.”

He adds that this process can be targeted by some treatments, so the team’s goal now is to further investigate this at a cellular level.

“I believe that treatments will emerge which target the underlying molecular problem,” he says, “rather than is the case now, the clinical diagnosis of autism or schizophrenia.”

Prof. Corvin concludes:

“This is a really exciting finding as it suggests that neurodevelopmental disorders such as schizophrenia and autism, which hitherto have been seen as different diseases may involve common underlying disease mechanisms. This may have implications in the future for how we conceptualize and treat these conditions.”

In 2013, Medical News Today reported on a study published in The Lancet that found four risk gene mutations common to bipolar disorder, attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder, autism, major depressive disorder and schizophrenia

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