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Elena has a psychiatric disability: bipolar (manic/depressive) disorder. Daniele suffers from depression. Both are serious cognitive disorders that have significant effects on learning, especially learning online. One of the problems students with psychiatric disabilities encounter is finding support in online environments, especially when 10, 50, 100, or even 6000 kilometers away from the originating university. Students with disabilities represent a growing number of students in postsecondary education. As the opportunities for online education continue to grow exponentially, so do the number of students with cognitive disabilities, like Elena and Daniele. Unfortunately, this is often a forgotten group because of ignorance and fear in society. Taking online courses is an important option for all students. As we will see, at the same time an online course can be difficult for students with disabilities, it also has advantages. Access to online instruction needs to be made available to students with cognitive disabilities just as it is for students with learning, mobility, PTSD, and traumatic brain injury disorders. The fundamental question, then, of this paper is "what can be done to improve access, retention, and success for the 14% of postsecondary students with cognitive impairments taking online classes?" Targeting specific types of impairments is not an efficient option, given that even the same kinds of impairments often present themselves in different ways. Rather, this paper develops a conceptual framework around work done by the Center of Applied Special Technology in the application of recognition, strategic, and affective brain networks to improve instruction related to cognitive impairments including attention and memory, language, executive function, problem solving, and social interaction. Additionally, I recommend turning the locus of support for students with cognitive impairments 180°, addressing support for students at the instructional level rather than the institutional level, which usually takes the learner out of the classroom. This has the negative effect of making the students feel like they are not part of the class, and it delays support until the disabilities office has time to help the learners. This just-in-time approach based on instructional strategies personalizes instruction, minimizes frustration, and encourage persistence-leading to better learning and success. Caveat: Statistics and the nature of the problems described here describe the situation in the United States of America and are not meant to make assumptions of the postsecondary situation in Western Europe.] [Note: There may be a follow up presentation at this ECEL conference on some research conducted related to this topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Genome Wide Association Studies (GWAS) are developed to find direct or indirect relations from given genomic configurations to physical characteristics or specific diseases. In order to build new GWAS, avoiding the complexities of field based studies, a statistical technique called meta-analysis can be used. Bad or unknown data quality has been largely identified as a major problem in meta-analysis since it generates lack of confidence and inhibits its exploitation. This paper addresses GWAS data quality issues and presents a domain specific model for data quality assessment, which has been developed taking into account meta-analysis requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bipolar disorder is a relatively common and disabling psychiatric disorder that is characterised as being principally a disorder of ‘mood’. What is of some interest is that ‘mood’ is a conceptually fuzzy term that remains generally unexplicated in the clinical literature, and also appears highly ramified in vernacular usage. The current paper reports an empirical investigation of how ‘moods’ feature in therapy talk involving a clinical psychologist and bipolar clients, drawing upon ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and membership categorisation analysis. Analysis is presented that describes some perspicuous instances of ‘moods’ operative as kinds of devices; as collections of various categories that are vernacularly rendered, reflexively organised, normatively accountable descriptions of conduct. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the differences of EEG power and coherence between bipolar disorder patients and healthy subjects in the resting state. Observations are focused on the prefrontal cortex area by calculating intrahemisphere and inter-hemisphere coherence. EEG data acquisition are conducted by using wireless Emotiv Epoc on AF3, AF4, FC5, FC6, F7 and F8 channels. The power spectral analysis shows that in bipolar disoder there is an increase of power in the delta, theta and beta frequencies, and power decrease in the alpha frequency. The coherence test results show that both intra-hemisphere and inter-hemisphere coherence in bipolar disorder patients are lower than healthy subjects. This shows the lack of brain synchronization in bipolar disorder patients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In late 1997 the Food and Drug Administration issued new guidelines that allowed pharmaceutical companies to air prescription drug ads on television. These guidelines have played an important role in promoting the pharmaceutical industry as one of the major "engines" of medicalization (Conrad 2005, 2007). One arena in which there has been a dramatic increase in direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals (DTCA) is the marketing of psychotherapeutic drugs, especially for depression, but also more recently for anxiety and bipolar disorder (Relmen and Angell 2002). Because medicalization is thought to reduce blame and stigma attached to deviant conditions such as mental illness (Conrad 2005, 2007; Conrad and Schneider 1992), the rise of DTCA for depression drugs may be altering public conceptions of mental illness in general and depression specifically. The purpose of this paper is to examine this possibility by assessing changes in attitudes toward persons with mental illness (schizophrenia and major depression) from 1996 to 2006, one year before and nearly ten years after the FDA's new guidelines, taking advantage of the Mental Health Modules in the General Social Survey (GSS) in these years. We believe this to be an important direction for research since, to date, researchers have yet to assess whether the rise of medicalization and DTCA might affect public attitudes such as the stigma associated with mental illness. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study approaches East Asian colonialism with the psychoanalytic concept of 'melancholia'. Through exploring the cases of two famous comic series, one South Korean and the other Japanese - Nambul and Zipang, this paper delves into the triadic structure of East Asian colonialism which has affected memory, interpretation and representation of modern history in East Asian societies. Both works in this study are alike in the respect of dealing with imaginary war stories, (re)constructing alternative history, and presenting nationalist revision of historical experiences. Moreover, their view of pre-existing history involves melancholia, which Freud regarded as pathological sentiment and attitude to the loss. Their melancholic despair and the revision of history in both Nambul and Zipang lead us to pay attention to the triadic structure of non-Western colonialism in East Asia. It is a crucial key of understanding how colonial history is remembered and represented. It affects modernity in East Asian societies in these days as well as in colonial times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bipolar disorder is a common chronic recurrent psychosis and it mainly relies on doctors' experience to determine the patient's condition currently. In this paper, we aimed to find a useful methodology to diagnose the mental state and guide medical treatment by using speech signal processing. Methods: Firstly, the feature classes were extracted (e.g., Pitch, Formant, MFCC, GT). Secondly, class separability criterion based on distance (the Between-class Variance and Within-class Variance) was adopted as an evaluation criteria to get the features assessment, and then, we found LPC played a core role on the all features. After comparing the classification of traditional neural networks and support vector machine (SVM), SVM was adopted as the main tools for classifying the mental state, and the kernel parameters of SVM have been set by the genetic algorithms (GA) in a training process. According to the experiment, we have found that the recognition rate of SVM classifier for a single patient were up to 90% and multi patients' rate of 50%. Considering the different result between the two rates, we adopted Gaussian mixture model (GMM) to improve the recognition rate of multi patients, and then, we found that the GMM classifier yields the best performance with a classification rate of 72%. Conclusion: The newly proposed methodology provide a good method for helping diagnose bipolar disorder, although the algorithms are still open for improvement. Significance: This work proposes new methodology for diagnostic classification of bipolar disorder with speech processing for the first time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose We examine the consequences of self-stigmatization for mental health patients' everyday social interactions. Past research demonstrates that people with mental illness who self-stigmatize have much lower self-esteem, efficacy, and personal agency, leading to the likely adoption of roleidentities that are at the periphery of major social institutions. We further research on self-stigma by examining the likely interactional consequences of enacting a highly stigmatized self-identity, and the affective tone of the interactions the highly self-stigmatized would likely have. Design Using affect control theory (ACT), we generate predictions related to the interactional consequences of self-stigmatization. We use the Indianapolis Mental Health Study and Interact, a computerized version of ACT, to generate empirically-based simulation results for patients with an affective disorder (e.g., major depression and bipolar disorder), comparing simulations where the focal actor is a person with a mental illness with either high or low self-stigma. Findings Self-stigma dampens patients' behavioral expression, leading the highly self-stigmatized to enact behaviors that are lower in goodness, powerfulness, and liveliness. Their corresponding emotional expressions from these types of interactions are similarly dulled. Even though these likely interactions are the most confirmatory for people with high levels of self-stigma, they lead to interactions that are behaviorally and emotionally flat or neutral. Implications and Originality This piece has implications for the literature on the social interactional and life course challenges faced by psychiatric patients and contributes to the self-stigma literature more broadly. This work will hopefully inform future research involving the collection of non-simulation-based data on the everyday interactional experiences of people with mental health problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after Carrie Fisher's death, participants (N=305) completed a survey via Mechanical Turk that addressed responses to her mental health disclosures prior to her death, identification and emotional responses while viewing/reading her interviews/writings, and mental health-related outcomes (stereotypes of bipolar disorder; social distance; willingness to seek mental health treatment). The more openly Fisher was perceived as disclosing, the lower stigma reported by people who did not have a mental health condition. Perceiving that her disclosures had lowered public stigma was associated with lower stereotypes and social distance, and greater willingness to seek treatment. Identification with Fisher was associated with lower stereotypes, but only for those with a mental health condition, suggesting lowered self-stigma. Finally, emotional responses to her interviews/writing suggest that compassion lowered social distance and that her humor may have increased comfort about seeking treatment. Implications of the findings for media and celebrity health disclosures are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of the extant research on representations of mental illness in the media have focused on stigmatization, and rightly so. Stigmatized representations are widely documented across mediums and the negative effects of these portrayals on individuals with mental illness are serious. However, recent health communication scholarship has identified another trend in mediated portrayal of mental illness whereby these diseases are trivialized. One component of trivialization is the idea that the symptoms of a mental illness are actually beneficial to the individual. The aim of the present study was to develop a scale of symptoms of benefits. Results across three studies support the existence of a reliable and valid two-factor scale whereby symptoms demark individuals with a mental illness as either exceptional or fortunate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The recent disclosure by Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. of the U.S. House of Representatives of his diagnosis of bipolar disorder has called attention to the medical condition, treatment issues and the impact of the disorder upon employment. Zimmerman, Galione, Chelminski, Young, Dalrymple and Ruggero (2010) have identified a relationship between bipolar disorder and the length of time that persons who were diagnosed with this disorder were absent from work. This presentation examines the definition, treatment issues, barriers to employment and employment strategies for persons with bipolar disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eye tracking systems have become increasingly popular in computer vision applications. In this study, a video-based pupil detection system and neuropsychological tests for the system are developed for diagnosing of neuropsychiatric disorders. An Active Contour Snake model with ellipse fitting algorithm is proposed to extract the position (x, y) and radius (r) information of pupils in video sequences. The neuropsychological tests in this research are applied to three different groups, namely; bipolar disorder group, control group and schizophrenia group. In order to conduct the neuropsychological tests, a number of selected words are shown to the people on a computer screen. The pupil detection system is used to determine the duration and the coordinates of the screen where the eye looking at while reading the test words in real time. The information acquired from the tests is used as a feature vector in Support Vector Machines (SVM) for classifying the neuropsychiatric disorder (bipolar) and normal (control) groups. The information acquired from schizophrenia group is also presented for the same tests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Bipolarity is one of the most common genetically related mental health issues. The influence of genetics on bipolarity indicates the relevance of disclosure of bipolarity within families. Past research has indicated that such disclosure does not occur with the frequency that would be suggested by genetic patterns, and also indicates the difficulty that occurs for individuals when they develop symptoms of bipolarity in instances when family members have not disclosed their bipolarity to others in the family. Grounded in Communication Privacy Management Theory, the present study built on earlier research to examine disclosure patterns relating to bipolarity dependent upon the generational structure of the family in terms of bipolarity. Is disclosure of bipolarity affected by whether one's parent, child, or both have been diagnosed as or are suspected of having bipolar? Participants were obtained from websites for individuals who are bipolar and their family members. The survey instrument examined disclosure of various aspects of behavior related to bipolarity. The results indicate that the key factors affecting disclosure seem to be uncertainty, protection, identity, and stigma management. The more generations within a family that are bipolar, the more the topic is discussed. Growing up with a bipolar parent seemed to show a respondent the importance of talking about bipolarity. Uncertainty became particularly relevant when a family member was suspected of being bipolar but had not been diagnosed. Protection became particularly relevant when a parent feared that a child could be genetically predisposed to bipolarity. Protection overrode uncertainty, identity, and stigma concerns. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bipolar disorder is a mental illness with a significant negative impact on quality of life. People with bipolar disorder benefit when family and friends provide social support, but quantity and quality of support are often lacking. Prior research suggests the existence of multiple barriers that may prevent support-seeking or impede support provision. The current study provides a focused analysis of barriers to support-seeking and provision as identified in semi-structured interviews with people who have bipolar disorder (N = 29). These barriers include characteristics of bipolar disorder (e.g., its phasic nature), the stigma associated with mental illness, the desire for independence, lack of support-seeking skill, and fear of over-reaction by others. These and other barriers identified by interviewees are discussed with respect to their implications for improving the lives of people with bipolar disorder. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Particularly in the last decade, there has been an exponential increase in thinking about sub-threshold diagnoses (those that meet some but not all the standard diagnostic criteria, either in terms of severity or duration) in medical and psychological literature. Though sociologists have not paid specific attention to this trend, we argue it is central to understanding how diagnostic criteria change and how illness is conceptualized. The role of what we refer to as sub-threshold thinking in conceptualizing illness must understood, especially in light of the upcoming (2013) release of the 5th edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the professional guidebook for psychiatrists. Preliminary information indicates an increased push toward including sub-threshold diagnoses into illness categories, which would lower the threshold for diagnosis. We trace the discussion of sub-threshold symptoms for bipolar disorder and show how crucial this kind of change is for understanding how diagnostic categories evolve, specifically to encompass greater percentages of the population. Further, we searched academic and medical journals using terms related to sub-threshold diagnoses in bipolar disorder, depression, and schizophrenia, and found a remarkable increase in the number of studies that utilize these concepts from 1980 to the present day (particularly since 2000, when the most recent edition of DSM was released). We also suggest some consequences of this sub-threshold thinking, namely that relaxing the diagnostic criteria makes it more likely that people with less severe symptoms will be classified and treated as ill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presenting data collected through ethnographic interviews with 14 participants clinically diagnosed with bipolar disorder, this article explores how participants experience interaction, identity construction, and stigma, post diagnosis. Although there are competing mental illness career models, interview data suggest the experience of bipolar disorder creates a unique career model. The findings reveal that progression in the bipolar career and participant identity outcomes are contingent upon the strength of social networks, the type of coping strategy participants employ, and medication consistency. Outcome trajectories allow participants to accept a bipolar illness identity, reject a bipolar illness identity, or develop a "selective" identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a survey conducted in 2004, the United States Department of Justice reported that 61% of female inmates and 44% of male inmates in federal prisons were in need of mental health services. Despite this need, the survey also indicated that only 25% of federal inmates received mental health services. The purpose of this panel presentation is to briefly discuss ways in which the mentally-ill can effectively be diverted from the criminal justice system by utilizing mobile crisis teams. Following the topic of diversion, the main themes of the presentation will focus on what types of mental health services should be implemented (including a valid suicide risk assessment protocol and assessment for severe mental illness such as schizophrenia and bipolar mood disorder) and factors within the correctional system that facilitate and hinder the implementation of such services. Some of these factors include interdisciplinary communication among staff and the issue of adequate staff training.Word count 154 ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]