Category: Health

By Tami Seretti, as told to Keri Wiginton

For me, one of the hardest things about psoriasis is that people can see it. And sometimes they have really odd reactions to it. When my disease is active, some people tell me I need to use a certain soap or shampoo, as if I don’t bathe. Psoriatic disease of the joints is the exact opposite. You can’t see it. People will tell me it doesn’t look like there’s anything wrong with me.

They’ll ask, “Why is this so hard for you?”

I’ve felt like I was at war with myself. I’ve had my thumb joints replaced because of psoriatic disease. I’ve lost my hair. I basically went bald, which is not the best thing for a woman.

I’ve spent a lot of time hiding. But I finally got to a point where I decided I was done.

I was done feeling ugly.

I was done feeling dirty all the time.

And once I accepted my condition — and met others going through the same thing — I felt like I needed to talk about it.

I have a lot more self-esteem now that it seems like the whole world knows.

No Longer Hiding

I used to avoid sleeveless shirts because I’d get psoriasis under my arms. I’d have to cancel plans at the last minute because I wouldn’t be able to wear clothes. I have inverse psoriasis. That means I get it in my skin folds and groin. And who wants to say, “I can’t wear underwear because it cuts into the broken skin in my legs.”

But I finally came out and said, “This is me. This is what I have. This is what I live with. If you want to know about it, I can tell you. If you don’t, that’s fine. Just don’t insult me.”

My friends said my past actions made a lot of sense when I finally opened up about my condition. That was such a relief. I started to feel better about myself. Plus, I started to feel better physically. I didn’t have as much itching and burning because I didn’t have as much stress.

I’d held that in for so long, not realizing I was being my own worst enemy by hiding.

Finding the New Me

I used to go to the gym two or three times a week for hours. Nothing was going to stop me from my workouts. I just pushed through my joint pain. Then I would end up in the bed for 3 days. But one day, a few years ago, I said “This is crazy. I need to find a new hobby and stop hurting myself.”

That’s when I became a “One to One” mentor for the National Psoriasis Foundation. It’s a program that pairs people like me — someone who’s lived with psoriasis for years — with someone who’s just been diagnosed. It’s my new passion. I want to make sure that the next person’s road isn’t quite as hard as mine was.

I get a lot of comfort from helping others. When I found out I had psoriasis, no one I knew openly talked about it. I felt so alone. Now, I have a community to belong to.

Don’t get me wrong. My husband is a fantastic cheerleader. But to sit with somebody who actually has it, who actually knows what I’m talking about, is the most amazing feeling in the world.

It Gets Better

You may think that your diagnosis is the end, but it’s actually the beginning. Now you know what’s causing your symptoms. You’ll find a medicine that works, and you’ll feel better. You’ll have a life again. You might not have the life you used to have, but you can have one that’s meaningful and productive.

Nobody believes me when I tell them that, but it really is true. I used to be a wallflower, always standing in the back. Now I meet with my state representatives or I go to Capitol Hill to talk about what it’s like to have psoriasis. I do all of these things that I never thought I’d be able to do.

And there’s a major difference in my symptoms pre- and post-diagnosis. My scalp used to be thick with scales. I would get psoriasis so bad in my ears that I couldn’t hear. I went to the emergency room once because I couldn’t put any weight on my ankles. 

It took me a while to find a treatment that worked. But now I take a medication that has me about 85% clear with no new joint pain. I’m calling that a win. Some of my psoriasis is still visible, like on my scalp and ears. But now I look in the mirror and I’m not embarrassed. That’s a big thing for me.

Mentally, I feel the best I have in 20 years.

Tami Seretti, 53, was diagnosed with psoriasis when she was 27 and psoriatic arthritis at 38. She is active with the National Psoriasis Foundation. She also advocates for Clara Health’s Breakthrough Crew and the Arthritis Foundation. She lives with her husband, mom, three cats, and a dog in Center Township, PA.

Sept. 29, 2022 — The Biden administration has announced $8 billion in public and private commitments toward fighting hunger and improving nutrition in the United States.

“This goal is within our reach,” President Biden said Wednesday during the first White House summit on hunger in 50 years. “In America, no child should go to bed hungry. No parent should die of disease that can be prevented.”

The White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health comes as food costs are rising, supply chain issues remain from the pandemic, and food-related ailments continue. The administration announced a “bold goal” of ending hunger by 2030 and increasing healthy eating and physical activity.

Among the key proposals:

• Expand free school meals to 9 million more children by 2032
• Allow more people to get food stamps
• Help with transportation for people who don’t live near grocery stores and farmers markets
• Increase money for nutrition programs helping seniors
• Reduce food waste, since a third of all food in the United States goes to waste, the White House says.

Many of the efforts need congressional approval. Biden can take some action through executive order.

The Washington Post reported, “The pervasiveness of diet-related diseases creates broader problems for the country, White House officials said, hampering military readiness, workforce productivity, academic achievement and mental health.”

The newspaper also reported that the U. S. Department of Agriculture says that 10.2% of U.S. households were “food insecure” in 2021. That means they didn’t have enough food to meet everyone’s needs.

CNN said that more than 100 organizations have committed to help pay for Biden’s initiatives, including hospitals, health care associations, tech companies, philanthropies, and the food industry. 

At least $2.5 billion will go to start-up companies focused on finding solutions to hunger and food insecurity, according to the White House. 

Sept. 29, 2022 — People who didn’t get the monkeypox vaccine were 14 times more likely to get infected with the virus, data from the CDC says.

“There have been limited data on how well the Jynneos vaccine performs against monkeypox in real-world conditions,” CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky said. “These new data provide us with a level of optimism that the vaccine is working as intended.”

CNN reported that health officials are optimistic about the effectiveness of the two-dose Jynneos vaccine – and the possibility of eliminating the current outbreak in the country.

“We are cautiously optimistic about the study and think if we continue to get vaccines out to those that are at highest risk for disease, and if we continue to promote the behavioral changes that we know work, that the combination of those two will allow us to continue to see decreases in cases and hopefully eliminate the current monkeypox outbreak in the United States,” one senior health official told CNN.

The findings don’t account for changes in behavior or other factors, like the durability of the vaccine and how long protection might last.

“What it doesn’t let us do is fully disentangle pieces of this that may be behavioral change pieces that may be related to sexual networks or to who people are coming into contact with,” the official said. “We know that at the start of the monkeypox outbreak, a lot of gay and bisexual men changed their behaviors.”

More than 800,000 doses of monkeypox vaccine have been administered in the United States. The CDC says 1.7 million men who have sex with men are at highest risk.

CDC data show that the average of daily new cases has been coming down since mid-August.

Last spring, Craig Miller descended into a depression that was even deeper and darker than the one that led to a carefully planned suicide attempt at age 20. Now 46, the married father of two young girls says a lifetime of grappling with serious depression has taught him to interpret a suicidal thought as “a red flag that something needs to change.”   

Miller responded this time by cleaning out and reorganizing every drawer in the master bedroom of his home in central Massachusetts – a symbolic way, he says, of sorting through his thoughts and emotions. “It meant I’m putting things in order,” says the author of 2012’s This Is How It Feels: A Memoir – Attempting Suicide and Finding Life.

Then Miller got a text from a concerned friend who suggested he jot down a list of 10 things that make him grateful to be alive. Miller rolled his eyes. 

“I’ve been through this since I first considered suicide when I was 8 years old,” about 2 years after a neighborhood man, he says, began molesting him in the crawlspace beneath his family’s house. “I wrote that list a million times.” 

But then Miller was struck by a new thought, “one that got my gears going.” Instead of acknowledging the people and moments that made his life worth living, he wondered about the lists his wife and daughters would write. Instinctively, he knew his name would be at the top. “That’s what made me slow down,” he says. “They would be destroyed by me leaving. That’s the thought I plugged into. That’s the one that worked for me.”

Miller is one of millions of Americans who have what the suicide prevention community calls “lived experience” – a suicide attempt that did not end in death. (The term “suicide survivors” is reserved for family and friends left behind by someone who takes their own life.)

The Semicolon as a Symbol of Solidarity

In 2020, more than 45,000 people in the U.S. died by suicide, the 12th leading cause of death, according to the CDC. But that’s just a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.2 million who attempted to take their own lives. Many now sport a tattoo of a semicolon – ; – signifying a pause in life, not a period at the end of it. The punctuation mark has become a sign of solidarity among those who have attempted or contemplated suicide and sympathetic supporters calling attention to mental health issues.

For some, waking up alive after a suicide attempt is not a happy ending. Nathan Lipetz of Vancouver, Canada, thinks the media too often takes a light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel approach to lived experiences, glossing over the lingering root causes of depression and mental illness that led to the attempt.

“You see articles that say it gets better for everyone, but I don’t really think it does,” says Lipetz, 21, who estimates he has tried to end his life at least 8-10 times. Since 2013, he has been hospitalized for months at a stretch and prescribed 19 antidepressants and mood stabilizers.

Nothing worked until earlier this year, when Lipetz visited a West Palm Beach, FL, rehab center that administered ketamine, the psychedelic drug that has recently been shown to reduce symptoms of depression. A study published in The Journal of Clinical Psychiatry in September found that 72% of patients who received 10 IV infusions of ketamine saw their mood improve; 38% said they were symptom-free.

“It’s been lifesaving,” says Lipetz, whose most recent infusion was in mid-September. “After a few weeks of ketamine, any thoughts of attempting suicide would just disappear. They’d pop into my head and would be gone just as fast. I’m not actively thinking of killing myself anymore.”

That glimmer of hope is encouraging at a time when mental health and suicidal thoughts have been made worse by the endless reach of social media, where rosy depictions of daily life are rivaled only by the nasty barbs of anonymous trolls.

Suicide Risk and Social Media

A recent 10-year study by Brigham Young University found that teenagers who used social media at least 2 hours a day were at a higher risk for suicide than emerging adults.

“Social media can be a great place to connect, get information, and socialize,” says Amelia Lehto, chief of staff of the American Association of Suicidology (AAS), a science-based organization that helps develop strategies to reduce suicidal behavior. “But it can also be a tool for distress, disconnection, and harm.”

“When people post on social media, we only see their outsides, and we compare that to what’s going on in our insides,” says April Smith, 49, whose depression and anxiety after a “really treacherous divorce” and her father’s death led her to jump off a Florida bridge 8 years ago. “I woke up to a flurry of activity … and was in disbelief. How did I survive?”

Smith was hospitalized with broken ribs and three broken bones in her legs. “I was significantly beaten up and in a lot of pain, but nothing that didn’t heal well in a reasonable amount of time.”

With the support of her mother, teenage children, and therapist, Smith spent 5 months in a group-based treatment facility. “I was terribly ashamed that I had chosen to voluntarily leave my children on this earth without me, but nobody important wrote me off,” she says. “Reentering the world after a major attempt is not easy, but there was a very, very small circle of people that I slowly started confiding in and trusting. They understood what I had been through – and that was super key to me. I started to feel so much less alone.”

Smith now lives in Virginia, where she runs a Facebook group for others who have survived attempts. The focus, she says, is to talk about the best ways to get the help needed to move forward, instead of dwelling on the specific aspects of their suicide tries. “I don’t allow people to share details of their attempts,” says Smith. “I teach them how to share their story in a way that doesn’t trigger or negatively affect the others.”

A New Way to Get Help Right Away

Accessing vital mental health services is essential for anyone who has tried suicide or is plagued by suicidal thoughts. But a survey published earlier this year in JAMA Psychiatry reported that 40% of Americans who had recently attempted suicide said they were not receiving any mental health care. The primary reasons cited by nearly 500,000 respondents: not knowing where to go, the high cost of treatment, and a lack of transportation.

Fortunately, a new, groundbreaking way to get help right away was launched in July: the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. The three-digit emergency phone number is the mental health equivalent of 911, a simple way to connect with operators who can send trained counselors – not police and ambulances – to assist callers within minutes.

“Suicide is often a time-limited event that peaks with intense suicidal thoughts,” says the AAS’s Lehto. “It’s such a critical moment. If the field can provide the support that’s needed in that moment, more and more lives will be saved.”

Suicide rates in the U.S. soared by 35% from 2000 to 2018, but dipped slightly in 2019 and 2020, according to the CDC. That’s an encouraging sign, one that hints at an important shift in the public perception of suicide. What was once a hush-hush topic, rife with shame and stigma, is now viewed with more empathy, as demonstrated after the recent suicide deaths of country legend Naomi Judd, former Miss USA Cheslie Kryst, rockers Chester Bennington and Chris Cornell, and fashion designers Kate Spade and L’Wren Scott. This summer, UCLA football player Thomas Cole shared the story of his attempt at the beginning of the year, while Los Angeles Clippers guard John Wall and Australian tennis pro Jelena Dokic talked about their battles with depression and thoughts of suicide. 

These high-profile incidents, coupled with increased public awareness of suicide’s prevalence nationwide, have prompted robust calls for better ways to stop the things that trigger attempts.

“It’s never one thing,” says Jill Harkavy-Friedman, PhD, a New York City psychologist and senior vice president of research at the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP). “It’s always a combination of factors, mostly mental health issues, but also chronic pain, head trauma, genetics, and family history.”

‘I was intent. I wasn’t going to hesitate’

Peter Hollar was 21 and living with his mother in Olympia, WA, in the late 1970s when he found out his estranged father had killed himself in California. “It shook me to the core, of course,” says Hollar, now 65 and retired. “I can remember it like it was yesterday.”

Yet Hollar found himself contemplating the same fate in 2000, debilitated by an imploding marriage and “job stress through the roof,” he says. “There was a lot of torment, anguish, and pain.”

He developed a long-range plan to end the “overwhelming trauma” by jumping off a nearby bridge. “I was intent. I wasn’t going to hesitate.”

But as Hollar was driving to his destination that night, he suddenly felt as if he was in the grip of a higher power. “I’ve always had a spiritual part of my life, and I had been praying a lot in the 30 days before I headed to the bridge, reaching out for some kind of guidance,” he says. “I started thinking about my dad, and I said, ‘What will my loved ones think? Is this how I’m going to leave my two young sons?’”

When Hollar reached the bridge, he kept driving and crossed it. “I drove to a gas station and called my psychiatrist.”

A weeklong hospital stay was supplemented with medication, counseling, and a renewed sense of purpose. “I guess the bottom line is it wasn’t my time to go,” says Hollar, who later married “an amazing, awesome, wonderful” woman and moved to a Seattle suburb. “God did not want me to die. I had things left to do. Now things are better. I don’t have those feelings anymore.”

Navigating Emotional Turbulence

Of course, not everyone with lived experience feels that kind of closure. Their struggle to survive continues to be fought daily. “It’s not that you want to die, it’s that you’re willing to die to make your life different,” says Miller, who tells his story in Moving America’s Soul On Suicide, (masosfilm.com), an online documentary series developed in cooperation with six health care agencies, including the National Action Alliance for Suicide Prevention. “There’s no magic answer.”

The key is to somehow weather the emotionally turbulent storm instead of succumbing to the moment. Someone in crisis needs to know where to reach out for help, and friends and family members must learn to recognize signs of struggle and step up.

“If you notice a change in someone, trust your gut,” advises Harkavy-Friedman of the AFSP. “Ask how they’re feeling. Tell them, ‘I’m concerned about you.’ Have a conversation to find out what their stresses are and help them to get help. Call 988 or tell them to talk to a therapist.

“Be patient and persistent,” she says. “Don’t give up. Suicidal thoughts can be managed. I am ever the optimist.”

If you know someone in crisis, call or text the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline at 988, contact the Crisis Text Line by texting HELLO to 741741, or dial 911.  

Sept. 30, 2022 — The adage that the fastest, strongest sperm is the one that fertilizes the egg is being called into question after new research suggested that teamwork is a more powerful reproductive driver than survival of the fittest.

It is a long, challenging swim through the female reproductive tract that male sperm navigate, and they have a much better chance of reaching the egg if they swim together in clusters, report researchers from North Carolina A&T State University and Cornell University. 

The investigators observed that sperm swim together in groups as they make their way through the thick yet elastic fluid of the cervix, uterus, and fallopian tubes on the way to the egg.

Sperm, like schools of fish,  swim independently, but move in and out of the group along the way. To find out whether this collective swimming had any actual biological benefit, the scientists did experiments using bull sperm, which shares similar properties with human sperm.

The sperm were placed in a device that mimicked the physical environment of the cervix and uterus, and then the scientists tested how the sperm responded when they switched up the properties of the fluid and flow. They discovered three benefits to sperm traveling in clumps instead of going it solo and published the findings in Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

When the fluid is static, without any flow at all, the sperm can more effectively swim in a straight line when grouped together. At a moderate level of flow, clustering helps the sperm in aligning with one another so they can swim against the current much like a school of fish swimming upstream. When the flow is strongest, sperm are less likely to get carried away by the current if they’re swimming together.

The researchers’ discoveries about sperm movement can be used to help better understand why sperm may not make it and how scientists can improve fertility chances in couples who are struggling to conceive. The more researchers learn about which sperm are most successful in reaching the egg, the more they can apply those discoveries to assisted reproductive technology to help people get pregnant.