Taking stock of research on sleepless soldiers

Public release date: 16-Oct-2013
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Contact: Alexander Brown
alexander.brown@springer.com
212-620-8063
Springer Science+Business Media

Review article looks at recent research about insomnia among military personnel and veterans

Various behavioral treatment options are helping to treat the sleeplessness experienced by one in every two American soldiers who have been deployed in recent military operations. So says Dr. Adam Bramoweth of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Pittsburgh Healthcare System, and Dr. Anne Germain of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the US. This review of research on deployment-related insomnia among military personnel and veterans, conducted since 2010, is published in Springer's journal Current Psychiatry Reports.

Insomnia is reported by up to 54 percent of the two million men and women who have served in various American combat efforts since 11 September 2001, compared to up to 22 percent of civilian adults. Although it is possible that a person's insomnia may develop prior to joining the military, it can also occur during the service period, or post-deployment when the soldier returns to civilian life. Studies have found that deployment-related stressors like combat exposure, mild traumatic brain injury, irregular sleep/wake schedules and the adjustment of returning home, all contribute to sleeplessness. Soldiers who suffer from insomnia while being deployed have a bigger chance of developing traumatic stress reactions such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorders, and even committing suicide. Also, it contributes to physical war-related injuries.

The research duo highlighted the need for additional research to better understand the underlying psychological, socio-environmental, physiological and neural reasons that cause chronic insomnia among military personnel. All of this is recommended in an effort to help further develop effective treatment options in the process.

If researchers are able to identify individual characteristics and biomarkers of people who are more vulnerable to chronic insomnia, this information could help inform strategies for prevention and early detection, as well as interventions to enhance sleep resilience within the military context. Early identification and timely interventions are important in order to reduce the impact of deployment on sleep, to improve recovery from insomnia and to ultimately help prevent the onset of related psychiatric conditions.

Behavioral interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and imagery rehearsal therapy often yield positive results in trying to reduce the effects of insomnia and nightmares, respectively. These treatments can be delivered during in-person sessions with clinicians, brief follow up sessions via telephone, or online and mobile resources. Training was recently rolled out to prepare providers in the Veterans Health Administration to use cognitive behavioral treatment of insomnia. The goal is to eventually educate 1,000 clinicians in an effort to bridge the gap between veterans who need treatment, and available providers. Training of clinicians in military settings and other non-VA clinics is equally important to meet the needs of our service members and veterans.

"Training providers to be knowledgeable about insomnia and behavioral treatment options is a vital component to the treatment of chronic insomnia and managing its impact on other disorders," say the authors, who believe more research is needed on methods to increase access to care. "In addition to research and clinical efforts specifically for service members and veterans, research and clinical efforts directed at military family members are also important components in providing the care needed and promoting health and recovery among service members and their families."

###

Reference:

Bramoweth, A.D & Germain, A. (2013). Deployment-Related Insomnia in Military Personnel and Veterans. Current Psychiatry Reports. DOI 10.1007/s11920-013-0401-4.

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Public release date: 16-Oct-2013
[


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Contact: Alexander Brown
alexander.brown@springer.com
212-620-8063
Springer Science+Business Media

Review article looks at recent research about insomnia among military personnel and veterans

Various behavioral treatment options are helping to treat the sleeplessness experienced by one in every two American soldiers who have been deployed in recent military operations. So says Dr. Adam Bramoweth of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Pittsburgh Healthcare System, and Dr. Anne Germain of the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine in the US. This review of research on deployment-related insomnia among military personnel and veterans, conducted since 2010, is published in Springer's journal Current Psychiatry Reports.

Insomnia is reported by up to 54 percent of the two million men and women who have served in various American combat efforts since 11 September 2001, compared to up to 22 percent of civilian adults. Although it is possible that a person's insomnia may develop prior to joining the military, it can also occur during the service period, or post-deployment when the soldier returns to civilian life. Studies have found that deployment-related stressors like combat exposure, mild traumatic brain injury, irregular sleep/wake schedules and the adjustment of returning home, all contribute to sleeplessness. Soldiers who suffer from insomnia while being deployed have a bigger chance of developing traumatic stress reactions such as depression and posttraumatic stress disorders, and even committing suicide. Also, it contributes to physical war-related injuries.

The research duo highlighted the need for additional research to better understand the underlying psychological, socio-environmental, physiological and neural reasons that cause chronic insomnia among military personnel. All of this is recommended in an effort to help further develop effective treatment options in the process.

If researchers are able to identify individual characteristics and biomarkers of people who are more vulnerable to chronic insomnia, this information could help inform strategies for prevention and early detection, as well as interventions to enhance sleep resilience within the military context. Early identification and timely interventions are important in order to reduce the impact of deployment on sleep, to improve recovery from insomnia and to ultimately help prevent the onset of related psychiatric conditions.

Behavioral interventions such as cognitive-behavioral therapy and imagery rehearsal therapy often yield positive results in trying to reduce the effects of insomnia and nightmares, respectively. These treatments can be delivered during in-person sessions with clinicians, brief follow up sessions via telephone, or online and mobile resources. Training was recently rolled out to prepare providers in the Veterans Health Administration to use cognitive behavioral treatment of insomnia. The goal is to eventually educate 1,000 clinicians in an effort to bridge the gap between veterans who need treatment, and available providers. Training of clinicians in military settings and other non-VA clinics is equally important to meet the needs of our service members and veterans.

"Training providers to be knowledgeable about insomnia and behavioral treatment options is a vital component to the treatment of chronic insomnia and managing its impact on other disorders," say the authors, who believe more research is needed on methods to increase access to care. "In addition to research and clinical efforts specifically for service members and veterans, research and clinical efforts directed at military family members are also important components in providing the care needed and promoting health and recovery among service members and their families."

###

Reference:

Bramoweth, A.D & Germain, A. (2013). Deployment-Related Insomnia in Military Personnel and Veterans. Current Psychiatry Reports. DOI 10.1007/s11920-013-0401-4.

---

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| E-mail



| Share

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AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert! system.

Source: http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2013-10/ssm-tso101613.php
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U.S. House passes bill to reopen government, increase debt limit (reuters)

Share With Friends: | | Politics - Top Stories News, News Feeds and News via Feedzilla.

Source: http://news.feedzilla.com/en_us/stories/politics/top-stories/334584597?client_source=feed&format=rss
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Harry Belafonte Sues Martin Luther King, Jr. Estate

Harry Belafonte sued the estate of Martin Luther King Jr. Tuesday over the fate of three documents he tried to sell at auction.

The lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan seeks unspecified damages and a court declaration Belafonte is the rightful owner.

The documents are an outline of a Vietnam War speech by King, notes to a speech King never got to deliver in Memphis, Tenn., and a condolence letter from President Lyndon B. Johnson to King's wife after the civil rights leader's 1968 assassination.

PHOTOS: Obama, Oprah, Foxx, Honor Martin Luther King Jr.

According to the lawsuit, Belafonte was preparing to auction the items in 2008 when the estate "astonishingly" blocked it.

The lawsuit cited the close relationship between Belafonte and King, saying the pair "worked on strategies and collaborated on issues that would transform American society" while they "forged a deep and enduring personal friendship." It said King and his widow, Coretta Scott King, gave Belafonte a number of items and it noted that Coretta Scott King, who died in 2006, mentioned Belafonte in her autobiography, saying "whenever we got into trouble or when tragedy struck, Harry has always come to our aid, his generous heart wide open."

Belafonte said he delivered the documents for auction to Sotheby's Inc. in early 2008 and the auction house has held them pending a resolution of the dispute between the estate and Belafonte.

The lawsuit said Belafonte had held the Vietnam War speech outline since 1967, when King left it behind after working on it in Belafonte's apartment. It said the Memphis speech notes were found in King's suit pocket after he was assassinated. According to the lawsuit, Coretta Scott King offered the notes to Belafonte but he suggested they instead be given to one of King's longest-serving confidants. When that man died in 1979, his widow delivered the notes to Belafonte, it said.

STORY: Oliver Stone, Jamie Foxx Circling Martin Luther King Jr. Biopic for DreamWorks, Warner Bros.

The letter from Johnson was given to Belafonte by Coretta Scott King about a decade ago after she admired the collection of historic documents on a wall of his home, the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit said King frequently gave drafts and copies of his speeches, correspondence and working papers to friends and fellow civil rights activists and that his estate has made a series of "disturbing and illegitimate challenges to Dr. King's gift-giving" in recent years.

Miles J. Alexander, a lawyer for the Atlanta-based King estate, said he had not yet seen the lawsuit.

"I have no comment I can make right now," he said.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/thr/music/~3/7SOVPIYnPIA/story01.htm
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'Game of Thrones' Parody Turns King's Landing Into Renaissance Park (Video)

What if Eddard Stark was never the lord of Winterfell, but instead ran a Renaissance theme park?

That's the premise of a hilarious new video splicing together scenes and overdubbing lines from the first season of HBO's Game of Thrones. The plot doesn't make much sense, but who cares? Here's what's certain: Eddie Stark must turn a rag-tag gang of employees -- including Terry (Tyrion) and Denise (Daenerys)  -- into competent workers to save the fair.

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Say what you will about the shady characters in Game of Thrones – the lords and ladies of Westeros have impeccable accents. That's not the case here -- and that's half the fun of the video.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/live_feed/~3/TrnIYH3DUOA/story01.htm
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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.'</em>s Comic Book Easter Eggs: Episode 4

Chloe Bennet as Skye. Photo: ABC/Ron Tom

The fourth episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. didn’t dive into the Marvel comics canon overtly — which is probably a good thing as far as the show is concerned. It’ll need to carve out its own universe and identity if it’s going to be a success. But the comic-booky vibe was still there, lurking, Gollum-like. You just have to know where to look. “Give me examples,” you say? Well, all right, then.

Skye saying “bang” when she pulls the trigger

Onomatopoeia comes banging and clanging into the show. This line isn’t a direct reference to any Marvel book I can think of, but it does cut to the heart of the comic book experience. One of the things non-comics readers often think of when — if — they think of comics at all is the use of words, written in bombastic type, as sound effects.

Maybe it’ll be obvious to you once I say it, but comic books don’t have sound; they have visual conventions designed to convey sound, just as a whole other set of visual conventions convey movement. In the latter case, lines emanating in the direction from which motion originates signify that motion. The more aggressive the line—heavier rule, longer length—the faster or more aggressive the movement.

Sound is different. Words spoken by a character get printed inside an oval, usually white, with a little point aimed at the person speaking. (By convention, thoughts appear in a little cloud, connected to the thinker by circles of decreasing size.) Sounds made by other stuff — objects, explosions, cars peeling out, rockets taking off, etc. –appear as onomatopoetic words or phrases near the action in the frame.

You know the obvious ones, especially if you watched the old Adam West Batman show from the 1960s: bam, pow, crash, and so on. In fact, those are familiar enough that when mainstream publications run articles about comic books, they tend to put them in the headlines as signifiers. As in, “Bang! Pow! Comic Books Grow Up!” I think I actually reported one of those in the 1990s. Sorry.

I bring this up because novice comic book readers often express trouble figuring out how to process all this visual information. What do they read first? The dialog? The narration squares? The sound effects? Or do they look at the pictures? The troubling answer is that unlike any other medium, all those things happen in parallel on only one sensory channel. The writer and artist Scott McCloud thinks way more deeply about all this in his books on comics; they’re worth a read.

Anyway, more creative writers use more creative sound effects. I enjoy stuff like “Kra-ka-foom!” (That’s a monster hitting a volcano.) Or “Vassszhh!” (That’s an alien ray gun.) Or one of my favorites, a classic: “phut!” (A silenced pistol firing.)

In comics, sound effects fell out of favor for a while — avant-garde writers and artists abandoned them in droves by the 1980s. Watchmen forgoes them completely, and The Dark Knight Returns uses them sparingly (the sound of a kryptonite bomb-tipped arrow being fired by the archer Green Arrow: “ktanngggg”). More recently, some comics have tried to deploy them more creatively; Grant Morrison’s recent run on Batman built them into the scene, as smoke from an explosion, let’s say. And a badguy created by Kevin Smith actually spoke the sounds as the effects appeared.

So maybe I’m reading too deep — heaven forefend — but I like the idea that Skye says “bang” when she pulls the trigger of a gun because deep down she knows she’s living a comic book life.

No telepathy

When Melinda May says that no credible evidence exists for telepathy or precognition, she’s shutting a door. That little riff is notable not for what it refers to in comics but what it pointedly does not: the X-Men. From Professor X and Phoenix on down, the mutant community of Marvel Comics is heavily populated with people whose brains do nifty stuff. You have your telepaths, of course. Before Jean Grey assumes the cosmic power of the Phoenix (and eventually destroys a solar system) she goes by Marvel Girl, a telepath who also has the power of telekinesis, moving stuff with your mind.

(I always thought it’d be cool if telekinesis took just as much energy as if you had to get up and move a thing with your body. Like, if you were too lazy to get up and find the remote control with your body, you’d be too lazy to do it with your mind, too.)

The X-Men and most if not all of the Marvel mutants are off limits for S.H.I.E.L.D., since they’re owned not by Marvel Studios or its parent company, Disney, but by Fox. Fans (and the head of Marvel’s film division) often pine for a future when all the contracts will resolve with every Marvel character under one cinematic roof. May’s remark doesn’t preclude that, but since Fox’s X-Men have been reading minds since the 1960s in movie time, bringing them in line with the Avengers-verse would seem to require a reboot and modernization, or a retcon. (That’s a retroactive continuity change, when you change backstory.)

Alien text

Longtime Marvel obsessives, the kind of people who write articles about comic book references in TV shows and bought and studied the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe, will remember the back pages of those comics that listed alien races. Number of appendages, average skin color and height, names of representatives. I remember being shocked to learn that the official representatives of humanity were Reed Richards and Ben Grim, Mr. Fantastic and the Thing of the Fantastic Four. Maybe I was hoping the job would be mine.

The Marvel Universe is full of aliens, of course. In Avengers, the aliens with which Loki allied himself, the Chitauri, were a version of longtime bad guys the Skrulls, shapeshifters locked in an eternal war with another race, the Kree. So let’s cross the Chitauri off the list of who the TV show’s aliens might be — S.H.I.E.L.D. would have recognized that text, right? Could be the Kree, or some version of them. But if I got to express a preference, I’d put in a request for the Dire Wraiths, another bunch of shapeshifters with barbed, brain-sucking tongues. Why? Because their main antagonist, the hero who fought them, was a cybernetic spaceknight named Rom, based on a poor-selling toy that was actually pretty charming.

Previous Comic Book Easter Egg recaps:

Episode 3

Episode 2

Source: http://feeds.wired.com/c/35185/f/661370/s/328c41e2/sc/17/l/0L0Swired0N0Cunderwire0C20A130C10A0Cagents0Eof0Eshield0Eepisode0E40C/story01.htm
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Kris & Bruce Jenner Are Keeping Up With Their Separation…Until They Can Divorce!!

WHOOOOAAAA!!!

It seems that this whole "we're just separated" façade may ACTUALLY be as false as the drama on Keeping Up With The Kardashians!!

Reports are coming in that Kris Jenner and hubby Bruce have absolutely NO PLANS to get back together!

In fact, as soon as the show stops filming in 2014, the pair will definitely be filing divorce papers!!!

Sources said:

“Bruce and Kris will file for divorce but not until the current contract for the shows comes to an end. No one would watch if there wasn’t drama, separation leaves it up in the air and will make viewers want to tune in. But once it’s over, it will be over for the marriage too — once and for all.”

WHAAAAATTTTT!!!

They're staying together for the RATINGS!?!?

Well… what else did we expect from the momager!?!

Amidst the back and forth drama, there have also been accusations flying left and right!

Kris is cheating, Bruce is going back to his ex Linda Thompson, Kris regrets divorcing Robert Kardashian… We can barely Keep Up with this whole situation!

One minute they're friendly, the next they hate each other!

It's making our heads hurt!!

Well, at least Kris isn't alone in her divorce, she can share in her pain with Khloe!

Which makes us wonder, how much of this whole debacle is true and how much of this is just drama for the show!?!

P.S. CLICK HERE to see an entire gallery of Kris & Bruce's pre-separation love!!!

[Image via WENN.]

Tags: contract, divorce, drama, dysfunctional families, ex, false, family, filming, gallery, gifs, hate, hurt, image, kardashian, keeping up with the kardashians, kris jenner, legal matters, marriage, ratings, reality tv, reports, separated, separation, show, together, viewers

Source: http://perezhilton.com/2013-10-16-kris-jenner-bruce-jenner-divorcing-after-keeping-up-with-the-kardashians-stops-filming
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Obama says will push immigration after fiscal crisis over

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama said on Tuesday that stalled immigration reform would be a top priority once the fiscal crisis has been resolved.

"Once that's done, you know, the day after, I'm going to be pushing to say, call a vote on immigration reform," he told the Los Angeles affiliate of Spanish-language television network Univision.

The president's domestic agenda has been sidetracked in his second term by one problem after another. As he coped with the revelation of domestic surveillance programs, chemical weapons in Syria, and a fiscal battle that has shut down the U.S. government and threatens a debt default, immigration has been relegated to the back burner.

But Obama, who won re-election with overwhelming Hispanic backing, had hoped to make reforms easing the plight of the 11 million immigrants who are in the United States illegally.

In June, the Senate passed an immigration overhaul, but House of Representatives Republicans are divided over the granting of legal status to those in the country illegally, a step many see as rewarding lawbreakers.

Although the president had sought comprehensive reform, he said last month he would be open to the House taking a piece-by-piece approach if that would get the job done.

Obama on Tuesday blamed House Speaker John Boehner for preventing immigration from coming up for a vote.

"We had a very strong Democratic and Republican vote in the Senate," he said. "The only thing right now that's holding it back is, again, Speaker Boehner not willing to call the bill on the floor of the House of Representatives."

Boehner said the sweeping Senate bill would not pass the House and has said the lower chamber would tackle the issue in smaller sections that would include stricter provisions on border protection.

(Reporting By Mark Felsenthal; Editing by Stacey Joyce)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/obama-says-push-immigration-fiscal-crisis-over-013802515.html
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