Overspending OCD?

Q: Is overspending a form of OCD?
A: In and of itself, no. Then again, I don't want to give an absolute answer without knowing all the facts of your situation. Overspending can certainly be a component of some OCD-like behaviors. For instance, many folks who hoard will chronically overspend on seemingly useless items.* Someone with a contamination obsession could be overspending on clothes if they will wear them only once.
Overspending as it is traditionally regarded would not qualify as OCD. It may be compulsive, but not in the manner that repetitive checking and washing are. One could be addicted to shopping as they would be to a drug. Likewise, overspending is often a hallmark of a manic episode in bipolar disorder. I hope this helps.
Be well,
Michael
*I refer to hoarding as OCD-like because I regard hoarding as a separate condition that just looks like OCD. However, it is officially considered OCD.
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This Love is Dangerous

Q: Eleven years and counting I have been in an abusive relationship. My SO was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder with antisocial traits. I have looked this up on your site, but feel things have progressed to Narcisistic Borderline Personality Disorder. Now, is there any hope or any use of me continuing on with trying to get my SO to seek medical and therapy intervention when he won't even acknowledge that he has a bonafide psychiatric condition? Or should I just try and escape before he kills me? It's that close. Right now he is rapid cycling all over the place. He cannot even function in activities of daily living or even remember the simplest task that needs to be done for the day. I am at a loss here. I have tried to talk with the M.D. and psychologist but neither is aware of his condition. There has been no intervention on either of their respective sides. This man is not medicated and is a danger to himself.

A: Get away from this man before he kills or injures you! Of all the psychiatric diagnoses, personality disorders are nearly impossible to treat. There is no medication or therapeutic intervention that can save your significant other from himself. The fact that he refuses to acknowledge having a problem in his personality style precludes any hope of therapeutic intervention. Having antisocial personality traits almost guarantees failure. No matter what he may tell you, or how he may try to manipulate you to stay, get out! Please contact me if you need referrals to resources.
Be well and stay safe,
Michael
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High Anxiety

Q: I am 21 years old and have recently began experiencing high anxiety and panic. This has never happened to me before and it started out small and is getting worse. I think it's all in my head, and when I think about or talk about panic, it makes it worse. When I am at work I get nervous and scared for no reason and driving makes me very nervous depending on how far I commute. I don't know what to do. I need some suggestions and tips that I can do myself to relax because I have no insurance and cannot afford private therapy. I would deeply appreciate any advice. Thank you.Freaking Out

A: Dear Freaking Out,First, take heart because you're in swell company with millions of other Americans who suffer panic attacks. I commend you for taking positive steps now to address your symptoms.

You are right to say that it's all in your head. Panic disorder is a game that your mind plays with you, and you have to outsmart it. The fact is that panic attacks live off your fear of them. That's why just thinking about them can send you into one. Let's look briefly at the components of panic.

Anxiety is an evolutionary development that helped our hunting-and-gathering ancestors survive. When you go into panic mode, also known as fight-or-flight mode, a number of physiological changes take place. Blood rushes from your head to your extremities, resulting in dizzyness, light-headedness, and/or feeling "unreal" or "otherworldly." Your breathing becomes shallow, resulting in a sense of "breathlessness." These are helping you to fight or flee a life-threatening situation. Many people become sweaty; the moisture makes us slippery and difficult for a predator to grasp. The thing to remember here is that anxiety was designed to save us, not hurt us.

Today, we aren't in the literal jungle anymore, but our physiology hasn't caught up. Hence, many people get a small flash of dizzyness or shallow breathing and interpret that they are having a heart attack. Others feel a rush of adrenaline and feel "out of this world," and interpret those sensations as "going out of my mind." They fear they might lose control and run around wildly killing strangers. Others may first have a disturbing "cognitive intrusion" or thought and begin to feel the physiological sensations. In any event,all of these misinterpretations only increase the anxiety and, voila, you have yourself in a panic attack.

The most successful treatment I have used in my practice is symptom induction. In this technique, the client will try to bring on their most disturbing physiological (not psychological) symptoms 3-5 times per day, or when they are starting to have a panic attack. The idea here is not to scare yourself, but rather to try to make your heart pound for about 10 seconds, make yourself feel dizzy for a bit, and so forth. This is a desensitization technique that has worked miracles for many.

This technique is part of cognitive-behavioral therapy treatment for panic disorder. Other essential elements are cognitive restructuring to help you reinterpret events and sensations more realistically.

Another bit of insight: A large majority of my clients with panic disorder exhibit a lack of assertiveness in their interpersonal relationships. I had noted this anecdotally for some time, but now there is research supporting this.

Finally, I would encourage you to visit this wonderful web site from the Centre for Clinical Interventions and the Department of Health in Western Australia, Panic Stations. This is a goldmine. It is a free set of 12 self-help modules for panic attacks, and it's free!
Be well,
Michael
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What, Me Worry?

Q: I am a worry wart and always have been. But now I feel completely stressed out. Are there any books you'd recommend to help me deal with this?
Scott V.

A: Scott, the good news is that there really is NOTHING to worry about. Worrying about anything has never changed the outcome, ever. What it does is paralyze us from taking action and, ultimately, wasting our real life away because we're trapped in our heads. And maybe that's what your worrying is enabling you to do, to avoid parts of the reality around you, but that's an issue you could deal with in a therapeutic context. But for now, here are two titles I'd recommend.

Feeling Good, The New Mood Therapy by David Burns, MD. A great intro to cognitive-behavioral therapy for all our distorted thinking.

Wherever You Go, There You Are by Jon Kabat-Zinn, PhD, a wonderful and comforting guide to living in the present moment.
Be well,
Michael
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Youthful bad behavior often continues through life, study says

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Ian Colman, an epidemiologist in the University of Alberta School of Public Health, has determined that people who exhibited bad behaviour in their early teenage years were far more likely than their well-behaved classmates to leave school early and experience problems as adults such mental illness, family conflict and financial troubles.
For his research, Colman utilized data from an ongoing, long-term study, known as the 1946 British Birth Cohort, which tracked 5,000 British citizens born within one week of each other in March 1946.
Colman focused on questionnaires filled out when the test subjects reached the ages of 13 and 15, and looked at indications of conduct problems at school, including disobedience, lying, truancy, responding poorly to discipline and being restless or daydreaming.
The results of the questionnaires were grouped into three categories-those with severe conduct problems, those with mild conduct problems and those with no conduct problems-and compared to the test subjects' outcomes as adults.
Of the 29 per cent of the study subjects who exhibited some form of teenage behavioural conduct, children with mild and severe behavioural problems were respectively twice and three times as likely to experience problems in adult life than their well-behaved counterparts.
"This research suggests that conduct difficulties in adolescence are not just a short-term problem that disappears when children grow up and mature," said Colman. "This study suggests that adolescent-conduct problems are often indicative of more serious problems in creating and maintaining positive social relationships, and this inability to function pro-socially has a long-term effect on the young adult's ability to maintain good mental health, stable employment and a happy family life."
While the findings, which will be published in the Jan. 24 edition of The British Medical Journal, were not unexpected, Colman says he was surprised by how effective even mild adolescent behavioural problems were in predicting a life of hardship.
"They were more likely to leave school early, be involved in a teenage pregnancy and/or in adulthood abuse alcohol, be divorced and have lower paying jobs," he said.
Colman said his study adjusts for factors that influenced this association, including the family social class, an impoverished environment, cognitive ability, symptoms of depression and anxiety and gender. He explained that while males were more often associated with undesired adolescent behaviour, females involved in the same test group who exhibited the same inappropriate teenage conduct also experienced negative outcomes as an adult at a similar rate, which more often, however, manifested themselves in the form of mental-health issues.
This research into problem adolescents builds on a mounting body of evidence that points to the financial price paid by society in terms of the resultant overarching cost of education, welfare, crime, and health care, the latter of which will be one of the focuses of Colman's next study.
"We want to look at how physical health translates into life expectancy because obviously this is painting a very poor picture and we suspect for some kids that will translate into an earlier death," he said.
Colman also plans to explore the silver lining that emerged in the study, which saw a good portion of problem adolescents right the ship.
"Not every kid has this terrible road in front of them," he said. "There are going to be success stories emerge from these groups.
"I think we need to look at what's different about those kids and single out what were the things that supported them in getting their lives back on track."

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First grade success can predict depression later

Students' successes in the first grade can affect more than their future report cards. In a new study, University of Missouri researchers found links among students' weak academic performance in the first grade, self-perceptions in the sixth grade, and depression symptoms in the seventh grade.
"We found that students in the first grade who struggled academically with core subjects, including reading and math, later displayed negative self-perceptions and symptoms of depression in sixth and seventh grade, respectively," said Keith Herman, associate professor of education, school and counseling psychology in the MU College of Education. "Often, children with poor academic skills believe they have less influence on important outcomes in their life. Poor academic skills can influence how children view themselves as students and as social beings."
In the study, MU researchers examined the behaviors of 474 boys and girls in the first grade and re-examined the students when they entered middle school. Herman found that students who struggled academically with core subjects, such as reading and math, in the first grade later showed risk factors for negative self-beliefs and depressive symptoms as they entered sixth and seventh grade. Herman suggests that because differences in children's learning will continue to exist even if all students are given effective instruction and support, parents and teachers should acknowledge student's skills in other areas
"One of the main ways children can get others to like them in school is by being good students. Children with poor academic skills may believe that they have one less method for influencing important social outcomes, which could lead to negative consequences later in life. Children's individual differences will always exist in basic academic skills, so it is necessary to explore and emphasize other assets in students, especially those with lower academic skill relative to their peers," Herman said. "Along with reading and math, teachers and parents should honor skills in other areas, such as interpersonal skills, non-core academic areas, athletics and music."
The researchers also found the effect of academic proficiency on self-perceptions was significantly stronger for girls. Girls who did not advance academically believed that they had less control of important outcomes, a risk factor for symptoms of depression.
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Sexual communicating through sweat

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A new Rice University study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that socioemotional meanings, including sexual ones, are conveyed in human sweat.
Denise Chen, assistant professor of psychology at Rice, looked at how the brains of female volunteers processed and encoded the smell of sexual sweat from men. The results of the experiment indicated the brain recognizes chemosensory communication, including human sexual sweat.
Scientists have long known that animals use scent to communicate.
Chen's study represents an effort to expand knowledge of how humans’ sense of smell complement their more powerful senses of sight and hearing.
The experiment directly studied natural human sexual sweat using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Nineteen healthy female subjects inhaled olfactory stimuli from four sources, one of which was sweat gathered from sexually aroused males.
The research showed that several parts of the brain are involved in processing the emotional value of the olfactory information. These include the right fusiform region, the right orbitofrontal cortex and the right hypothalamus.
"With the exception of the hypothalamus, neither the orbitofrontal cortex nor the fusiform region is considered to be associated with sexual motivation and behavior," Chen said. "Our results imply that the chemosensory information from natural human sexual sweat is encoded more holistically in the brain rather than specifically for its sexual quality."
Humans are evolved to respond to salient socioemotional information.
Distinctive neural mechanisms underlie the processing of emotions in facial and vocal expressions. The findings help explain the neural mechanism for human social chemosignals.
The understanding of human smell at the neural level is still at the beginning stage. The present work is the first fMRI study of human social chemosignals.
The research, co-authored by Chen and Wen Zhou, graduate student in the Psychology Department, appeared in the December 31 issue of Journal of Neuroscience.
The research was supported in part by the National Institutes of Health.
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Smoking during pregnancy can lead to aggressive kids

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Women who smoke during pregnancy risk delivering aggressive kids according to a new Canada-Netherlands study published in the journal Development and Psychopathology. While previous studies have shown that smoking during gestation causes low birth weight, this research shows mothers who light up during pregnancy can predispose their offspring to an additional risk: violent behaviour.
What’s more, the research team found the risk of giving birth to aggressive children increases among smoking mothers whose annual familial income is lower than $40,000. Another risk factor for aggressive behaviour in offspring was smoking mothers with a history of antisocial behaviour: run-ins with the law, high school drop-outs and illegal drug use.
Psychiatry professor and researcher Jean Séguin, of the Université de Montréal and Sainte-Justine Hospital Research Center, co-authored the study with postdoctoral fellow Stephan C. J. Huijbregts, now a researcher at Leiden University in the Netherlands, as well as colleagues from Université Laval and McGill University in Canada.
“Mothers-to-be whose lives have been marked by anti-social behaviour have a 67 percent chance to have a physically aggressive child if they smoke 10 cigarettes a day while pregnant, compared with 16 percent for those who are non-smokers or who smoke fewer than 10 cigarettes a day,” says Dr. Séguin. “Smoking also seems to be an aggravating factor, although less pronounced, in mothers whose anti-social behaviour is negligible or zero.”
The research was carried out as part of a wider investigation of children, the Quebec Longitudinal Study, which examined behaviors of 1,745 children between the age of 18 months to three and a half years. Aggressive offspring were characterized by their mothers as quick to hit, bite, kick, fight and bully others.
Although physical aggression is most common in preschool children, the researchers identified other prenatal factors associated with aggressive behaviour in children: mothers who are younger than 21, who smoke and who coerce their children to behave. The researchers also found that children from families who earned less than $40,000 per year were at an increased risk for aggressive behaviour.
In this category of families, heavy smokers had 40 percent chance of having highly aggressive children, compared with 25 percent for other mothers who were moderate or non-smokers. When income was greater than $40,000 annually, the gap between heavy smokers and others fell to 8 percent.
The effect of smoking on aggression in offspring remained significant – even when other factors were removed such as divorce, depression, maternal education and the mother’s age during pregnancy. Smoking during pregnancy is one factor that could be curbed to decrease risks of aggression and violent behaviour.
The research team recommends that low-income women, who are heavy smokers and who have a history of anti-social behaviour become a screening criterion for prenatal testing to determine what families need extra support to prevent development of aggressive behaviour.
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Religion helps self-control, study says

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Self-control is critical for success in life, and a new study by University of Miami professor of Psychology Michael McCullough finds that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.
In this research project, McCullough evaluated 8 decades worth of research on religion, which has been conducted in diverse samples of people from around the world. He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains within the social sciences, including neuroscience, economics, psychology, and sociology, that religious beliefs and religious behaviors are capable of encouraging people to exercise self-control and to more effectively regulate their emotions and behaviors, so that they can pursue valued goals. The research paper, which summarizes the results of their review of the existing science, will be published in the January 2009 issue of Psychological Bulletin.
“The importance of self-control and self-regulation for understanding human behavior are well known to social scientists, but the possibility that the links of religiosity to self-control might explain the links of religiosity to health and behavior has not received much explicit attention,” said McCullough. “We hope our paper will correct this oversight in the scientific literature.” Among the most interesting conclusions that the research team drew were the following:

Religious rituals such as prayer and meditation affect the parts of the human brain that are most important for self-regulation and self-control;

When people view their goals as “sacred,” they put more energy and effort into pursuing those goals, and therefore, are probably more effective at attaining them;

Religious lifestyles may contribute to self-control by providing people with clear standards for their behavior, by causing people to monitor their own behavior more closely, and by giving people the sense that God is watching their behavior;

The fact that religious people tend to be higher in self-control helps explain why religious people are less likely to misuse drugs and alcohol and experience problems with crime and delinquency.

McCullough’s review of the research on religion and self-control contributes to a better understanding of “how the same social force that motivates acts of charity and generosity can also motivate people to strap bomb belts around their waists and then blow themselves up in crowded city buses,” he explained. “By thinking of religion as a social force that provides people with resources for controlling their impulses (including the impulse for self-preservation, in some cases) in the service of higher goals, religion can motivate people to do just about anything.”
Among the study’s more practical implications is that religious people may have at their disposal a set of unique psychological resources for adhering to their New Year’s Resolutions in the year to come.
You can read more about McCullough's study at The New York Times.

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