Update on Bizarre Outbreak of Tourette-like Symptoms in New York

Back in November, I noted that there was a bizarre outbreak of Tourette-like symptoms in  a number of high school girls in LeRoy, New York.  Since that time, the number of people affected has increased, and controversy has continued to swirl around that cause of the outbreak.  While some have argued that the cases are due to conversion disorder (“mass hysteria”),  others have sought a more organic basis.  Erin Brockovich has been conducting her own investigation into the possibility that environmental contaminants are responsible.  As of today, there is no evidence that environmental contaminants are the likely cause, but investigations are not complete.  Others have claimed that PANDAS  (now called PANS) is the cause (i.e., an autoimmune response to infection gone awry).  An article by Alison Motuk in Nature provides some of the background on this case and the possibilities that are being explored.   The following segment and other news clips linked at the end of the segment give a sense of how complicated this situation has been:

On a positive note, although the cause of the mystery is still unresolved, some of those affected are now getting better.

 

Climate Change Obsessions?

Sarah Harvey reports that doctors in New Zealand have observed that some patients with OCD are getting developing obsessions and compulsions relating to climate change:

More than a quarter of patients with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) in a recent study in Australia were found to have obsessions which directly related to climate change. The majority were male.

The patients were found to be carrying out rituals, such as checking lights, stoves and taps were turned off, so they could reduce their global footprint.

[...]

Two participants were convinced increased air temperatures would result in rapid evaporation of the water leading to their pets dying of thirst if they didn’t check that the water bowls were full.

Another patient was continually checking skirting boards, pipes, roofs and wooden structures for problems they were convinced were caused by global warming.

Study authors Mairwen Jones, Bethany Wootton, Lisa Vaccaro and Ross Menzies said: “While these behaviours are not particularly unusual for people with this condition, it was the rationale they provided for carrying them out that was surprising.

“Instead of checking and rechecking so as to prevent fire or flood, the rituals were specifically performed so as to reduce their global footprint, or respond to climate change-induced negative events.

“While it is not particularly surprising that some people with OCD may have concerns related to climate change, what is surprising is the extent of these concerns.”

Read more on Stuff.

I wonder how much and what kind of media coverage climate change issues got in New Zealand.  And whether these same individuals also have shown a tendency to develop obsessions or compulsions about other “scares” covered by the media.

Have any of my readers outside of New Zealand encountered this type of obsessive-compulsive behavior? If so, please use the Comments section to let me know.

Carousel image credit: NASA

The Benefits of Exercise on OCD Symptoms

Noted in The Yeshiva World:

In a review of three separate meta-analyses, investigators at Arizona State University found that patients who participated in at least 21 minutes daily of aerobic exercise experienced a reduction in anxiety (Petruzzello SJ et al; 1991). A more recent study from Canadian researchers at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg noted that regular exercise may help people who suffer from OCD, phobias and other psychiatric disorders. When the investigators examined studies of anxiety disorder and exercise dating back to 1981, they found that strength training, running, walking, and other forms of aerobic exercise help relieve mild to moderate depression and may also help treat anxiety and substance abuse.

I’m looking forward to seeing how my daughter’s dissertation study comes out. And if you have a child who has, or may have, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, you may want to consider enrolling them in a similar study on the benefits of exercise.

Office for Civil Rights Data Suggests Racial and Disability Status Disparities in Discipline, Restraint, and Seclusion

The Office for Civil Rights Data Collection  (CRDC) aggregates data nationally.  They recently released a report, which I’ve uploaded here. The report contains some statistics that come as no surprise to advocates but are still very disturbing.  I’ve pulled out a few of the figures in this post.

Let’s start with racial disparities in discipline. As the following figure illustrates, African-American students represent 18% of students in the CRDC sample, but 35% of students suspended once, 46% of those suspended more than once, and 39% of students expelled.

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In contrast to African-American students, the rates of discipline in Hispanic students appears to be comparable to their rates in the general sample. Asian-Pacific students have lower rates of discipline compared to their rates in the general sample. White students make up 51% of the general sample, but only 39% of those being expelled.

So how do we explain these data? And what do we do with them?

The data on disability and discipline are also of concern. CRDC’s data show that students with disabilities who are classified under I.D.E.A. are more than twice as likely to receive one or more out-of-school suspensions than their non-disabled peers.

Why the significant discrepancy?  If the students’ disabilities are related to behavioral problems, those problems should be addressed in behavior intervention plans with positive supports.  Why are we throwing children out of school at higher rates if they have disabilities?  Could it be that school personnel are looking to get a break from challenging students and so suspend them more readily?  Or is it the case that school personnel generally lack adequate training and skills to manage the behavioral features of some disabilities and don’t know what else to do?

Students with disabilities are also significantly more likely to be physically restrained than their non-disabled peers. Nearly 70% of restrained students have disabilities even though they comprise only 12% of the general sample.

Not surprisingly, African-American students with disabilities are significantly more likely to be subjected to mechanical restraints than other disabled students or their non-disabled peers:

When we look at the seclusion data for students with disabilities, it appears that Hispanic students with disabilities are at disproportionate risk of being put into seclusion rooms:

Disappointingly, the data collection does not provide any analysis of seclusion data on the basis of disability vs. no disability.   Since seclusion is only supposed to be use for emergency situations in which there is an imminent risk of injury to the student or others, such data might shed some light on how often these rooms are actually being used – or overused.

Keep in mind that these patterns may not accurately reflect the state of discipline your school district.  The report provides a comparison chart for  some major urban school districts  but they also note that their methodology in data collection may limit interpretations:

The CRDC has generally been collected biennially from school districts in each of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. The CRDC for SY 2009-10 was collected in two parts. Part 1 is beginning-of-year “snapshot” data and Part 2 is cumulative and end-of-year data. The 2009-10 CRDC contains information on about 7,000 school districts and over 72,000 schools in those districts. It is important to note that the CRDC does not include data from all school and districts in the nation, although it does include data from all districts with greater than 3,000 students and 85% of all students. The conclusions in this report therefore apply only to these districts and schools sampled.

In other words, we need to be caution in drawing any conclusions from the data.  But it’s always the case that we need to be cautious in drawing conclusions and that should not stop us from pointing to data that suggests discriminatory handling and asking, “What do we need to do better?”

Here’s a media report from Associated Press on the report and reactions to it.

Carousel image credit: © Battrick | Dreamstime.com

The lesson of the mismatched earrings

Today is my mother’s birthday and I miss her dearly. But this post is not about grief. It’s about a lesson she taught me a few months ago, shortly before her death.

Mom had excellent – and expensive – taste in clothes and jewelry, but I’ve never met anyone who lost as much jewelry as she did.

Anyway…. one day when my daughter and I went to pick her up to take her out for lunch, I noticed that her earrings didn’t match each other.  Being a psychologist and knowing that she was over 90 years old, my first thought was “Uh oh… is this cognitive decline?”  So during lunch, I casually asked her, “What’s up with the earrings, Mom?”

“Oh,” Mom said. “I lost the mates to these but I loved both pairs so much that I decided I’d just wear them together. I’m starting a new fashion trend!”

I chuckled over her attitude and confidence.

After Mom’s death, as we went through her belongings to sort things out, I came across those two mismatched earrings that she had worn that day.

They weren’t her most expensive earrings, but they now had sentimental value to me.

And so I took one of those earrings to my jeweler and had him make it into a ring that I wear on my hand.  I look at it and remember the lesson she taught me that day –  that we can grieve what we may have lost or we can enjoy what we have and start our own trend.

If you’re parenting a child with challenges, you  have a choice.  It’s understandable that you may grieve for a while over what you might have had or dreams for the future that seem lost. But if you continue to grieve over what might have been, you may miss out on enjoying the child you have.

Wouldn’t today be a good day to start your own trend?

Carousel image:  Mom in 2003.

 

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