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THE UNIVERSITY OF DARYA KANSAN
MONDAY, AUGUST 17 2009
MEDICINE
Six step program works to cure depression
BY KRISTEN LISZEWSKI
kliszewski@kansan.com
In his book, "The Depression Cure," published June 1, Stephen Hlardi, associate professor of clinical psychology, said the most effective way to cure depression was to make just a few simple changes to daily lifestyles and habits.
Ihardi used Therapeutic Lifestyle Change, or TLC, a research program on depression he conducted with his colleagues at the University, to write the book. TLC combines six primitive lifestyle elements — exercise, omega 3 fatty acids, sunlight exposure, anti-rumination strategies, social support and sleep hygiene — to help heal victims of depression.
"I noticed across the globe that depression rates are higher in urbanized places, about one-in-four now."
lardi said. "So I thought, 'What's different about the way were living now?"
Hardi used historical evidence from published studies on the detection of diseases in large populations to show the differences in today's lifestyles and those a century ago. He also compared modern society to cultures that reflect a simpler way of life. For example, the American Amish have depression rates much lower than the larger American population.
Ihardi also used evidence from the Kaluli people of New Guinea, a population of about 2,000, where anthropologist Edward Schieffelin found only a small amount of depression symptoms in one person. These studies ultimately showed Ihardi that modern society's lack of the primitive lifestyle elements have ushered
in a vulnerability to depression.
Ilardi said people were willing to take the TLC approach because the six elements were all part of the world we were originally designed for.
One of the main focuses in "The Depression Cure" is how to bring these elements back into modern-day life. Ilardi suggested a prescriptive dose for each element. For example, he recommended people get at least 30 minutes of bright light exposure each day and increase their dosage of omega-3 fatty acid supplements. He said the TLC program was designed to re-focus people's natural habits away from the high-stress, sleep-deprived lifestyles they
"Our environment has mutated and so we need to be very clever about how to bring these elements back in the 21st century," Ilardi said.
lead today.
Iardi's research can be found not only in his book, but also in the classroom.
Danielle Hagen, Hillsboro senior, said Ilardi was one of the most engaging professors she had had. She said Ilardi incorporated the TLC program into a class discussion one day, describing omega-3 supplements, which promote better health. Hagen said Ilardi's research showed that the vitamins were beneficial, so she began using them.
"He really loves the omega-3 element," Hagen said. "He was so intense and excited about it that he convinced me to start taking the vitamins. Now my whole family does, because it really works."
Edited by Justin Hilley
CONTRIBUTED PHOTO
Stephen Ilardi advocates primitive lifestyle elements as a cure for depression.
RESEARCH
New policy makes scholarly articles free for everyone
BY KRISTEN LISZEWSKI kliszewski@kansan.com
The University has become the first public university in the U.S. to adopt an "open access" policy that allows professors' scholarly journal articles to be available for free online.
The approved policy joins the University with Stanford, Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which also have open access policies.
Open access at the University was proposed by a group of faculty members led by Andrew Peterson, evolutionary biologist and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, who wanted his students to have access to primary research literature. He said that before open access, students could access research articles only on the University campus network because the libraries were paying for subscriptions to scholarly journals.
"A lot of academics around the world are getting frustrated and worried about how commercial scientific research publication has become," Peterson said. "That is, if you want to access a publication in a scientific journal, chances are that you, or your university, will have to pony up a nice fat payment to get that access."
SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, helped to coordinate a petition across the U.S., calling on universities and researchers to support open access policies such as the one the University adopted. In the association's petition statement, it said that students relied on access to academic journals for education and research, but that many colleges struggled with the high costs of subscriptions.
Rebecca Smith, director of library communications and advancement, said that from a budgetary standpoint, the library was responsible for providing access to scholarly journals across a number of fields to support the teaching, research and learning of the entire campus.
"It is becoming more and more cost prohibitive, whether electronically or in paper form, a cost that grows in a rate that far outpaces inflation," Smith said. "This policy is, in a sense the grass-root effort to deal with the burgeoning cost of access to scholarly communications."
Under the open access policy, articles produced by University faculty will be filed as digital copies in KU ScholarWorks, a free database created in 2005 that already houses and preserves more than 4,400 articles. The articles are available for free to anyone around the world.
Ada Emmett, associate librarian for scholarly communications, said that when professors wanted their research to be published, they typically gave up all their copyrights and allowed the commercial journals to sell the access to research articles. The commercial journals then made a profit from those published research articles. Emmett said faculty were not compensated and neither was the University, which funded the faculty's research.
Emmett said the new policy would allow professors to retain some of their copyrights, which in turn would allow them to submit a copy of their research to the University scholarly archives, where it would be available for free to everyone. However, a professor could also give some of those copyrights to a scholarly journal that could still publish the article for paying subscribers. This way both students and faculty could benefit from a parallel system.
"It's an old system that isn't working for today," Emmett said. "The University is paying to view articles of research that its own professor conducted. When a professor gives the articles to a publisher for free, the publisher is making profit by selling it back to my institution."
Emmett said that since the policy
was approved, Oregon and Kansas State universities had approached the University because they were intrigued by the movement. She said she expected more institutions to follow.
"It will have a ripple effect," Emmett said. "KU has been on the cutting edge of reform in open access and scholarly communications for over 10 years, so people look to KU as a public research university to see what we're doing."
Peterson said academia was not
about profit, so the idea of limiting readership to those who paid journal subscriptions started to irritate him. He said that from his perspective, these limits were the seed that started it all.
"My hope is to see much greater visibility and citation of KU scholarship," Peterson said. "If we can remove the barriers to access, then many more people around the world can read and contemplate what we do."
Edited by Adam Schoot
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