Positive Quiddity: Max Factor

Max Factor (15 September 1872– 30 August 1938), born Maksymilian Faktorowicz, was a Polish businessman. He was the founder of cosmetics giant Max Factor & Company, he largely developed the modern cosmetics industry and popularised the term make-up in noun form based on the verb.

Creation of an Empire

[In 1908], Factor moved his family to Los Angeles, California, , seeing an opportunity to provide made-to-order wigs and theatrical make-up to the growing film industry. Initially he established a shop on South Central Avenue, advertising the business as “Max Factor’s Antiseptic Hair Store”. Founding Max Factor & Company in 1909, he soon became the West Coast distributor of Leichner and Minor, two leading theatrical make-up manufacturers. Greasepaint in stick form, although the accepted make-up for use on the stage, could not be applied thinly enough, nor were the colors appropriate, to work satisfactorily on the screen during the early years of movie-making.

Factor began experimenting with various compounds in an effort to develop a suitable make-up for the new film medium. By 1914 he had perfected the first cosmetic specifically created for motion picture use — a thinner greasepaint in cream form, packaged in a jar, and created in 12 precisely-graduated shades. Unlike theatrical cosmetics, it would not crack or cake.

With this major achievement to his credit, Max Factor became the authority on cosmetics for film making. Soon, movie stars were eager to sample the “flexible greasepaint”, while movie producers sought Factor’s human hair wigs. He allowed the wigs to be rented to the producers of old Westerns, on the condition that his sons were given parts. The boys would watch the expensive wigs.

Factor marketed a range of cosmetics to the public during the 1920s, insisting that every girl could look like a movie star by using Max Factor cosmetics.

In the early years of the business Factor personally applied his products to actors and actresses. He developed a reputation for being able to customize makeup to present actors and actresses in the best possible light on screen. Among his most notable clients were Ben Turpin, Gloria Swanson, Mary Pickford, Pola Negri, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, Norma Shearer, Joan Crawford, and Judy Garland.  As a result virtually all of the major movie actresses were regular customers of the Max Factor beauty salon, located near Hollywood Boulevard.  Max Factor's name appeared on many movie credits, and Factor appeared in some cameos.

He became a United States citizen in 1912.

In 1920 Max Factor gave into Frank Factor’s suggestion and officially began referring to his products as "make-up". Up until then, the term "cosmetics" had been used: The term ”make-up” was considered to be used only by people in the theatre or of dubious reputation, not something to be used in polite society.

Death

In 1938 Mr. Factor was traveling in Europe on business with his son Davis when during a stopover in Paris he received a note demanding money in exchange for his life. An attempt was made by the police using a decoy to capture the extortionist but no one turned up at the agreed drop-off point to collect the money. Factor was so shaken by the threat that he returned at the behest of a local doctor to America, where upon arrival he took to his bed. Factor died at the age of 65 in Beverly Hills, California, in August, and was originally interred in the Beth Olem mausoleum at the Hollywood Cemetery in Los Angeles, California. His remains were moved many years later to Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery in Culver City, California.

Honors and Tributes

The Academy of Motion Picture, Arts, and Sciences presented Max Factor with an honorary Academy Award in 1929 for his contributions to the film industry. Additionally, Max Factor is honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame (at 6922 Hollywood Boulevard). Max Factor is mentioned in the classic song, "Hooray for Hollywood." In a reference to his creation of Clara Bow's heart-shaped lips, the song states, "To be an actor / See Mr. Factor / He'll make your pucker look good!"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor,_Sr.

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Development of Panchromatic

The introduction of sound-on-film led to the replacement of the old noisy carbon lights with tungsten lights, which were much hotter and created a softer light. At the same time the orthochromatic film, which until that time had been used by the industry, was replaced by super-sensitive faster Panchromatic film which noticeably darkened skin colors. These developments required six months of intensive development to create make-up compatible with the new environment. Because they had been designed for black and white film the existing products were unsuitable for everyday use. This new panchromatic make-up was trademarked in October 1929.

[Factor was given a technical Academy Award for this improved makeup].

Development of Pan-Cake

The development of Technicolor film required the company to develop a new line of products as its existing panchromatic make-up left a slight sheen on the skin which reflected surrounding colors. As a result of how bad they looked in color many actors and actresses refused to appear in color films. Because Max Factor was recovering from being hit by a delivery van at the time, Frank Factor took the lead in the two years it took to develop a suitable make-up, initially called the "T-D" and then renamed the "Pan-Cake" series. It was sold in a solid cake form and applied with a damp sponge which offered the advantage of concealing skin imperfections under a transparent matte finish. Its first appearance was in the film Vogues of 1938.

It was an immediate hit and its advantages led to women stealing it from the film sets and using it privately. Its only disadvantage for everyday use was that it could not be used at night as it made the skin too dark under all except under the powerful lights used in film studios. While Max Factor wanted to reserve the product for film use, Frank Factor was open to the commercial possibilities and began developing lighter shades. At the time the company was only able to produce enough to meet studio demand, which delayed commercial release until production could be increased. The company used the release of Vogues of 1938 in August 1937 and five months later The Goldwyn Follies, the second film to use the make-up, to commercially release Pan-Cake to the public, backed by a color-based national advertising campaign. It immediately became the fastest and largest selling single make-up item to date, as well as the standard make-up used in all Technicolor films

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Factor#Development_of_Panchromatic

High Market Risk

A Demon of Our Own Design (2007) is a book by veteran Wall Street risk manager Richard Bookstaber, about, as the subtitle says, "markets, hedge funds, and the perils of financial innovation."

The theme of the book is that the world financial system is vulnerable to singularities—disasters arising out of apparently trivial details, as implied by chaos theory and its Butterfly effect.. He discusses the critical and often underappreciated role of liquidity in the markets and presents a theory of 'normal accidents' arising from the combination of tight coupling and complexity. Bookstaber reviews accidents such as Three Mile Island, ValueJet and Columbia as examples of 'normal accidents' that have corollaries in the financial markets.

The efficient market hypothesis comes under attack in this book using biological and evolutionary analogies. He suggests that overspecialization to an environment leads one vulnerable to change. Therefore, the best adaptive approach is often to have a 'coarse' approach that may ignore fine grained stimuli.

Risk management, however sophisticated it is or can become, won't end this vulnerability. To the contrary, "the more intricate risk-management structures may actually make the system worse."

The dust jacket of the book carries a detail of [the painting] "The Fall of Icarus," by Jacob Peter Gowy.

Bookstaber had a front-side seat for such crises as the stock market crash of 1987 and the demise of Long-Term Capital Management and his book is built around themes drawn from those experiences.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Demon_of_Our_Own_Design

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 Editorial reviews summarized on Amazon.com:

“Mr. Bookstaber wrote one of the best books about the causes of the financial crisis, A Demon of Our Own Design, and did so before the crisis erupted.”-- Floyd Norris, New York Times (June 25, 2009)

"A risk-management maven who's been on Wall Street for decades…Bookstaber's book shows us some complex strategies that very smart people followed to seemingly reduce risk—but that led to huge losses." (Newsweek)

"Mr. Bookstaber is one of Wall Street's 'rocket scientists'--mathematicians lured from academia to help create both complex financial instruments and new computer models for making investing decisions. In the book, he makes a simple point: The turmoil in the financial markets today comes less from changes in the economy--economic growth, for example, is half as volatile as it was 50 years ago--and more from some of the financial instruments (derivatives) that were designed to control risk." (The New York Times)

"Bright sparks like Mr Bookstaber ushered in a revolution that fuelled the boom in financial derivatives and Byzantine 'structured products.' The problem, he argues, is that this wizardry has made markets more crisis-prone, not less so. It has done this in two ways: by increasing complexity, and by forging tighter links between various markets and securities, making them dangerously interdependent." (The Economist)

"He understands the inner workings of financial markets...A liberal sparkling of juicy stories from the trading floor..." (The Economist)

"…smart book…Part memoir, part market forensics, the book gives an insider's view…" (Bloomberg News)

"Like many pessimistic observers, Richard Bookstaber thinks financial derivatives, Wall Street innovation and hedge funds will lead to a financial meltdown. What sets Mr. Bookstaber apart is that he has spent his career designing derivatives, working on Wall Street and running a hedge fund." (The Wall Street Journal)

"Every so often [a book] pops out of the pile with something original to say, or an original way of saying it. Richard Bookstaber, in A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation, accomplishes both of these rare feats." (Fortune)

"a must-read amidst the current market chaos" (BusinessWeek.com)

"Bookstaber is a former academic who went on to head risk management for Morgan Stanley and now runs a large hedge fund. He knows the subject and has written a lucid and readable book. To his aid he calls mathematics (from Bertrand Russell to Godel's theorem); physics (particularly Heisenberg's uncertainty principle); and even -- meteorology." (Financial Times)

"The book covers a lot about risk management that is relevant to capital markets conditions today and the liquidity crisis." (Financial Times, Saturday 25th August)

"...an insider's guide to markets, hedge funds and the perils of financial innovation.  We saw plenty of those in 2007."  (The Sunday Telegraph, Sunday 25th November 2007)

"I cannot recommend this book too highly. It is a clear exposition of what the combination of derivatives, leverage and hedge funds can do to the markets.

In short, A Demon of our Own Design is a guide to the dangerous financial markets we have created for ourselves by the clever innovations of structured finance, derivatives, credit default swaps and other newfangled products that are a mystery to the ordinary investor and even plenty of the sophisticates in the investment business. To understand the demonic risks we're taking, read this book."--Forbes.com

http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Our-Own-Design-Innovation/dp/0470393750/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1426573258&sr=1-1&keywords=a+demon+of+our+own+design

Toward Sustained Fusion

PPPL and General Atomics Scientists
Make Breakthrough in Understanding
How to Control Intense Heat Bursts in
Fusion Experiments
By Raphael Rosen, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory

March 13, 2015 -- Researchers from General Atomics and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory (PPPL) have made a major breakthrough in understanding how potentially damaging heat bursts inside a fusion reactor can be controlled. Scientists performed the experiments on the DIII-D National Fusion Facility, a tokamak operated by General Atomics in San Diego. The findings represent a key step in predicting how to control heat bursts in future fusion facilities including ITER, an international experiment under construction in France to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion energy. This work is supported by the DOE Office of Science.

The studies build upon previous work pioneered on DIII-D showing that these intense heat bursts – called “ELMs” for short – could be suppressed with tiny magnetic fields. These tiny fields cause the edge of the plasma to smoothly release heat, thereby avoiding the damaging heat bursts. But until now, scientists did not understand how these fields worked. “Many mysteries surrounded how the plasma distorts to suppress these heat bursts,” said Carlos Paz-Soldan, a General Atomics scientist and lead author of the first of the two papers that report the seminal findings back-to-back in the same issue of Physical Review Letters this week.

Paz-Soldan and a multi-institutional team of researchers found that tiny magnetic fields applied to the device can create two distinct kinds of response, rather than just one response as previously thought. The new response produces a ripple in the magnetic field near the plasma edge, allowing more heat to leak out at just the right rate to avert the intense heat bursts. Researchers applied the magnetic fields by running electrical current through coils around the plasma. Pickup coils then detected the plasma response, much as the microphone on a guitar picks up string vibrations.

The second result, led by PPPL scientist Raffi Nazikian, who heads the PPPL research team at DIII-D, identified the changes in the plasma that lead to the suppression of the large edge heat bursts or ELMs. The team found clear evidence that the plasma was deforming in just the way needed to allow the heat to slowly leak out. The measured magnetic distortions of the plasma edge indicated that the magnetic field was gently tearing in a narrow layer, a key prediction for how heat bursts can be prevented.  “The configuration changes suddenly when the plasma is tapped in a certain way,” Nazikian said, “and it is this response that suppresses the ELMs.”

The work involved a multi-institutional team of researchers who for years have been working toward an understanding of this process. These researchers included people from General Atomics, PPPL, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Columbia University, Australian National University, the University of California-San Diego, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and several others.

The new results suggest further possibilities for tuning the magnetic fields to make ELM-control easier. These findings point the way to overcoming a persistent barrier to sustained fusion reactions. “The identification of the physical processes that lead to ELM suppression when applying a small 3D magnetic field to the inherently 2D tokamak field provides new confidence that such a technique can be optimized in eliminating ELMs in ITER and future fusion devices,” said Mickey Wade, the DIII-D program director.

The results further highlight the value of the long-term multi-institutional collaboration between General Atomics, PPPL and other institutions in DIII-D research. This collaboration, said Wade, “was instrumental in developing the best experiment possible, realizing the significance of the results, and carrying out the analysis that led to publication of these important findings.”

http://www.pppl.gov/news/2015/03/pppl-and-general-atomics-scientists-make-breakthrough-understanding-how-control-intense

A+ Alzheimer's Advance

Alzheimer’s Breakthrough Uses

Ultrasound Technology

12 March 2015 -- Queensland Brain Insitute

Queensland scientists have found that non-invasive ultrasound technology can be used to treat Alzheimer’s disease and restore memory.

University of Queensland researchers discovered that the innovative drug-free approach breaks apart the neurotoxic amyloid plaques that result in memory loss and cognitive decline.

Welcoming the findings today at UQ’s Queensland Brain Institute, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk said they could have a wide impact for the community.

“The Government’s $9 million investment into this technology was to drive discoveries into clinics, and today’s announcement indicates that together with the Queensland Brain Institute, it was a worthwhile investment,” Ms Palaszczuk said.

“I want my Government to encourage more of this type of innovative research.

“Our Advance Queensland initiative aims to increase research and discoveries like this and to put this state’s research at the forefront internationally by supporting local researchers and helping to keep them in Queensland.

“These exciting findings will hopefully be of benefit to all Australians in the future.”

QBI Founding Director Professor Perry Bartlett said the discovery – a result of ‘game-changing’ work performed at the Queensland Brain Institute’s Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research – was made possible through the support of the State and Federal Governments and philanthropic support led by the Clem Jones Foundation.

“The farsighted investment of government and philanthropic partners has allowed us to build the research excellence and capacity required to make major discoveries such as this,” Professor Perry Bartlett said.

“I believe the work opens up an entirely novel avenue for future therapeutic treatment.”

Clem Jones Centre for Ageing Dementia Research director Professor Jürgen Götz said the new treatment method could revolutionise Alzheimer’s treatment by restoring memory.

“We’re extremely excited by this innovation of treating Alzheimer’s without using drug therapeutics,” Professor Götz said.

“The ultrasound waves oscillate tremendously quickly, activating microglial cells that digest and remove the amyloid plaques that destroy brain synapses.

“The word ‘breakthrough’ is often mis-used, but in this case I think this really does fundamentally change our understanding of how to treat this disease, and I foresee a great future for this approach.”

Alzheimer’s affects more than two-thirds of dementia patients, and approximately a quarter of a million Australians.

The total number of dementia cases in Australia is expected to rise to 900,000 by 2050.

“With an ageing population placing an increasing burden on the health system, an important factor is cost, and other potential drug treatments using antibodies will be expensive,” Professor Götz said.

“In contrast, this method uses relatively inexpensive ultrasound and microbubble technology which is non-invasive and appears highly effective.

The approach is able to temporarily open the blood-brain barrier, activating mechanisms that clear toxic protein clumps and restoring memory functions.

“With our approach the blood-brain barrier’s opening is only temporary for a few hours, so it quickly restores its protective role,” Professor Götz said.

Research has been conducted using mice with an Alzheimer’s model, with the next step being to scale the research in higher animal models ahead of human clinical trials, which are at least two years away.

“This treatment restored memory function to the same level of normal healthy mice,” Professor Götz said.

“We’re also working on seeing whether this method clears toxic protein aggregates in neurodegenerative diseases other than Alzheimer’s and whether this also restores executive functions, including decision-making and motor control.”

Findings of the research, “Scanning ultrasound efficiently removes amyloid-β and restores memory in an Alzheimer's model”, are published in the journal Science Translational Medicine.

http://www.alphagalileo.org/ViewItem.aspx?ItemId=150641&CultureCode=en

Loneliness Shortens Life

Prescription for living longer:
Spend less time alone
New study finds isolation a risk factor for all ages, incomes
Brigham Young University, March 11, 2015

Ask people what it takes to live a long life, and they’ll say things like exercise, take Omega-3s, and see your doctor regularly.

Now research from Brigham Young University shows that loneliness and social isolation are just as much a threat to longevity as obesity.

“The effect of this is comparable to obesity, something that public health takes very seriously,” said Julianne Holt-Lunstad, the lead study author. “We need to start taking our social relationships more seriously.”

Loneliness and social isolation can look very different. For example, someone may be surrounded by many people but still feel alone. Other people may isolate themselves because they prefer to be alone. The effect on longevity, however, is much the same for those two scenarios.

The association between loneliness and risk for mortality among young populations is  actually greater than among older populations. Although older people are more likely to be lonely and face a higher mortality risk, loneliness and social isolation better predict premature death among populations younger than 65 years.

“Not only are we at the highest recorded rate of living alone across the entire century, but we’re at the highest recorded rates ever on the planet,” said Tim Smith, co-author of the study. “With loneliness on the rise, we are predicting a possible loneliness epidemic in the future.”

The study analyzed data from a variety of health studies. Altogether, the sample included more than 3 million participants from studies that included data for loneliness, social isolation, and living alone.

Controlling for variables such as socioeconomic status, age, gender, and pre-existing health conditions, they found that the effect goes both ways. The lack of social connections presents an added risk, and the existence of relationships provides a positive health effect. The new study appears in Perspectives on Psychological Science.

Previous research from Holt-Lunstad and Smith puts the heightened risk of mortality from loneliness in the same category as smoking 15 cigarettes a day and being an alcoholic. This current study suggests that not only is the risk for mortality in the same category as these well-known risk factors, it also surpasses health risks associated with obesity.

“In essence, the study is saying the more positive psychology we have in our world, the better we’re able to function not just emotionally but physically,” Smith said.

There are many things that help to subdue the effects of loneliness. With the evolution of the internet, people can keep in contact over distances that they couldn’t before. However, the superficiality of some online experiences may miss emotional context and depth. Too much texting with each other can actually hurt a romantic relationship, for example. The authors of that texting study note, however, that saying something sweet or kind in a text is universally beneficial.

http://news.byu.edu/archive15-mar-loneliness.aspx

New Test for Oxygen Within Cells

Quick, Easy and Early Diagnosis
with Rare Earth Ions

Medicinal Chemistry

University of Copenhagen, March 9, 2015 -- Lack of oxygen in cells is an indicator of serious diseases such as cerebral haemorrhages, stroke and cancer. Regrettably, measuring real-time oxygen concentration in living tissue is difficult with current technologies. Now a chemist from the University of Copenhagen in collaboration with chemists from Oxford University has invented a compound which measures oxygen in cells and other biological material with high precision. The compound is based on rare earths emitting coloured light that vary in colour with the amount of oxygen present in the sample. Because emissions are in the visible range of the spectrum, it will be possible to measure oxygen using the optical microscopes already present in most hospitals.

Two papers to describe one novel method

Thomas Just Sørensen is Associate Professor at the Department of Chemistry, Nano-Science Centre, University of Copenhagen. Together with his English team and his Copenhagen partner, Tom Vosch, he has published the articles: ”Bimetallic lanthanide complexes that display a ratiometric response to oxygen concentration” in the periodical Chemical Sciences and ”Spectrally resolved confocal microscopy using lanthanide centred near-IR emission” in Chemical Communications. Both are Royal Society of Chemistry publications.

Proof of concept for easy quick and cheap oxygen measurements

According to Sørensen, the two articles constitute proof-of-concept that he is capable of measuring oxygen concentrations in an easy, quick and cheap manner but he is certain that development towards a useful technology will be speedy.

“We have made the microscope work already, and we are getting pretty good at synthesizing the rare earth containing molecules. Before the year is out, I am almost certain that we will see the first medical doctors using our method for measuring oxygen in cells”, says Thomas Just Sørensen.

Built-in control function makes for more precise measurements

Previous experiments have seen molecules which emit more light as the amount of oxygen diminishes. These, however, were incapable of measuring the amount of oxygen in cells, because one could not tell whether a large amount of light signal was caused by a low oxygen concentration or a large concentration of oxygen sensitive molecules. Sørensen’s new molecules solve this problem because they have a built in control-function.

The inventor who cannot see his own invention in action

The novel oxygen sensitive molecule is built with two rare earths, so called lanthanides. One lanthanide, europium, emits a constant red signal. The other, terbium, emits a green signal that increases with diminishing oxygen concentrations. Most physicians should be able to read the oxygen concentration with the naked eye, explains Thomas Just Sørensen.

“You simply deduct the amount of red light from the amount of green to get a precise reading of the oxygen level. Unfortunately, I cannot see how well my system works because I am red-green colour-blind. Lucky for me that optical microscopes are usually kitted out to convert colour values to numerical values”, smiles the inventor.

New method measures previously invisible phenomena

Oxygen-meters are already commercially available, but these are based on technologies which are poorly suited for biological samples, useless in a microscope and quite incapable of showing where the oxygen is located in a cell. Because Sørensen’s molecules work by way of a simple colour shift, they give a very exact indication of quantity as well as location of oxygen in a tissue sample or inside a cell. Furthermore, the microscopy technology developed by Vosch and Sørensen utilizes near infrared light which is highly compatible with biological studies, because it penetrates deeply into tissue, explains Sørensen.

“This is not just a method which is somewhat better. With this method you will be able to see things which used to be beyond measure. One example would be the difference in oxygen concentration inside and outside a cell”, says Thomas Just Sørensen.

Sørensen is particularly proud that the light signals are visible in an ordinary optical light microscope. Even though he readily admits that the microscope used for the initial testing is normal only when considered as individual components.

“The detector and light source was the same as on light microscopes found at any hospital, but my colleague Tom Vosch has optimized the microscope to the point where everything is almost beyond the possible. They said it couldn’t be done, but it works”, says Thomas Just Sørensen.

http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2015/03/quick-easy-and-early-diagnosis-with-rare-earth-ions/

High Rural Suicide Rate

Youth Suicide Rate in rural Areas Is
Nearly Double the Rate in Cities
Study shows gun use has decreased,
hanging increased in this population
By: Emily Caldwell, Ohio State University

COLUMBUS, Ohio – March 9, 2015 -- The adolescent and young-adult suicide rate in the United States was almost twice as high in rural settings than in urban areas between 1996 and 2010, and new research suggests that the gap appears to be widening.

Of the nearly 67,000 suicides analyzed, the rate of suicide for both males and females living in rural areas was about double the rate in cities.

The research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, also showed that gun use has decreased and that hanging has become a more common method of youth suicide for both males and females. Suicide rates by firearm and hanging were both disproportionately higher in rural areas than in urban regions for both sexes.

The findings suggest there is an urgent need to improve access to and availability of mental health care in rural areas, researchers say. The authors suggest that incorporating mental health care into primary care settings, providing care via telemedicine and creating school-based interventions might help reduce youth suicides in rural areas.

“These kinds of surveillance studies can really help us identify areas to target our prevention efforts, and it’s clear we need to target rural areas for primary prevention of suicide,” said Cynthia Fontanella, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral health at The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center and lead author of the study.

Fontanella cited access barriers to health care, geographic isolation and disproportionate stigma associated with mental illness as potential reasons for the observed disparities. “Rural America is beautiful, and many individuals live in close-knit communities. But in terms of access to services and perhaps some other factors, the cards may be stacked against them.”

Fontanella and colleagues analyzed mortality data from the National Center for Health Statistics National Vital Statistics System. Between 1996 and 2010, 66,595 youths between age 10 and 24 died by suicide in the United States.

Among males, the rural versus urban suicide rate was 19.93 and 10.31 per 100,000, respectively, and for females, 4.40 and 2.39 per 100,000, respectively. When the researchers controlled for a number of other potential contributing factors, the rural and urban suicide rate disparity increased over time for males. The analysis also showed the suicide rate for young males is four times higher than for young females.

More than half of this population – 51.1 percent – committed suicide with a firearm, and 33.9 percent died by hanging. Poisoning accounted for 7.9 percent of suicides and other methods, such as jumping and transportation-related suicides, composed 7.1 percent of the deaths.

Clinicians have identified many risk factors for suicide over the years, but two in particular stand out, said John Campo, chair of psychiatry and behavioral health at Wexner Medical Center and senior author of the paper. About 90 percent of people who commit suicide suffer from a major psychiatric problem such as depression or bipolar disorder. Substance abuse, which can increase impulsivity and interfere with mood, is also frequently linked to suicides.

No studies have been done to try to pinpoint specific causes of this disparity in suicides based on where young people live. But these authors considered a number of potential contributing factors in the paper, all supported by previous research.

Between the dispersed nature of rural populations and a severe shortage of mental health practitioners, access to care is a major problem.

“If a rural child is depressed, it’s much harder to get state-of-the-art care. And it’s especially difficult to receive psychotherapy in a rural area,” Campo said.

States, 85 percent are in rural regions. And more than half of the counties in this country – all rural – do not have a single psychiatrist, psychologist or social worker serving the region.

This lack of access can compound the severity of illness, Fontanella said. People living in rural areas have to travel longer distances to see health care practitioners and wait longer for appointments, so by the time they receive care they may have developed more serious symptoms. And the culture of self-reliance in rural areas, as compared to urban living, may intensify the stigma associated with mental illness.

“There is a lot of pride around taking care of your own problems and turning to neighbors rather than professionals for help,” Fontanella said.

Because families living in rural areas tend to see a primary care practitioner for most of their health care, integrating mental health care into rural primary care settings – either with on-site practitioners or via remote video access – has promise, Campo said.

“It’s going to be hard to generate the numbers of mental-health providers to get where we need to go. So we need to address things qualitatively to improve the entire system of care, which will improve access,” he said.

This work was supported by the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences, which funds the Center for Clinical and Translational Science at Ohio State.

http://news.osu.edu/news/2015/03/09/youth-suicide-rate/