DAILY LOBO new mexico
FRIDAY
October 31, 2014 | Volume 119 | Issue 53
The Independent Student Voice of UNM since 1895
Food trucks benefit GPSA’s scholarship program By David Lynch
UNM’s Graduate and Professional Student Association utilized something all college students would gladly spend money on in order to fund a new scholarship – food. On Thursday four food trucks from local businesses settled in Cornell Mall for GPSA’s Food for Thought fundraiser. The event was sponsored by GPSA and UNM Food. Chloë Winegar-Garrett, the programs chair for GPSA, organized the event and said it was the first time the student government organization has done anything like this. “It was hard to expect anything, but our goal was 100 people and I think we’ve already surpassed that,” Winegar-Garrett said. The event is the primary fundraiser for GPSA’s newly established Graduate Summer Scholarship, which will send 100 grads to summer school in 2015 in order to complete their studies early or on time. Ten percent of all profits from the Food for Thought event are going to the scholarship. Food for Thought will be an ongoing event. GPSA’s plan is to bring in different food trucks once a month while rotating businesses, said Texanna Martin, president of GPSA. The next food truck event is planned for Nov. 26.
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William Aranda / Daily Lobo / @_WilliamAranda
Soo Bak Korean Seoul Food employee Ann Atkinson, far right, hands food to UNM sophomore Jolynn Alarid, far left, and UNM senior Jabez Ledres during the Food for Thought drive at Cornell Mall on Thursday afternoon. GPSA and UNM Foods sponsored the food drive to fund the Graduate Summer Scholarship.
Ending homeless cycle begins with aid By Matthew Reisen and Jonathan Baca
This is part of a weekly series about homelessness. Jason Westman has been homeless in Albuquerque for nearly 20 years. He has been diagnosed with PTSD and has a history of alcohol abuse, and though he’s tried to get treatment, he never stays on it for long. During the warm months he sleeps on the streets, begging for change and occasionally staying at a shelter. But every winter, Westman said he usually commits a low-level crime like breaking a window so he can go to county jail, get out of the cold and get three meals a day for a few months. “A lot of guys I know do the same thing,” Westman said in an interview conducted from the Metropolitan Detention Center. “In a lot of ways it’s easier. No one cares about us, they don’t know what to do with us. They’re just happy to get us off the street.” Westman’s story is not unique, and many times it is the police and the legal system who are the first to deal with the city’s homeless people who suffer from addiction and mental illness. Some state politicians, however, are seeking to change laws and enhance the justice system in order to help, not hinder, homeless people.
Looking to change the laws State Sen. Gerald Ortiz y Pino, a Democrat, said a bill coming up in the next session of legislature will address the needs of how the jail system deals with mental illness and its prevalence in the homeless population. A variation of Kendra’s Law, the bill will allow the jail to hold an inmate in observation and have a psychiatrist determine if they need pharmacological or therapeutic help once they are released, he said. Made to address mentally ill homeless and drug addicted homeless, Ortiz y Pino said the idea behind Kendra’s law is mandated outpatient treatment or assisted outpatient treatment. After being released, if a patient is prescribed medicine and refuses to take it or won’t attend therapy, a judge can then order them to take their medication or attend sessions in a court of law, he said. “That’s where it gets a little dicey. Some of them have taken pills in the past, they’ve taken medicine in the past,” Ortiz y Pino said. “They don’t like them because they leave them feeling dopey or they still hear voices, a lot of them have strong side effects.” There is no such non-compliance law in place yet here in New Mexico, and for that reason Ortiz y Pino said he knows its launch will require a whole new adaptation of the court and jail system.
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Lauren Topper / Daily Lobo / @lauretopps
MRI images taken at UNM’s The Mind Research Network of Healthy Controls, left, and Schizophrenia Patients, right. Red and yellow indicate stronger connectivity in those brain regions.
Network studies brain shifts By Lauren Topper After the successful completion of the Human Genome Project in 2003, scientists turned their attention to the wiring of the human brain, considered the next unmapped frontier. At The Mind Research Network (MRN), the lab of Dr. Vince Calhoun is making headway on a project investigating the “chronnectome” of the brain — an indepth look at how regions of the brain change in connection with one another, and how that may relate to different diseases, particularly mental illness. The brain can be divided into many different regions, each having their own unique functions. Since the brain is incredibly dynamic, it is changing to reflect that, Calhoun said. According to one of Calhoun’s papers published in Neuron, even while a person is at rest their brain may be changing its internal connections due
to small changes in someone’s state of mind. Through the use of MRI imaging, the lab particularly focuses on what is going on in the brain during periods of “rest,” when the subject is not asked to perform any kind of task. One of the researchers in Calhoun’s lab, Ph.D. student Eswar Damaraju, said the major advantage of their approach is that instead of essentially lumping together all the brain scans collected in a person at rest by averaging them, their method teases out the changes in connectivity that can occur over that time. They have already identified several patterns of connectivity that reoccur across patients. “We observed that these dynamic connectivity patterns can reliably be clustered into five to seven stable connectivity patterns that reoccur within and across subjects,” Damaraju said. Calhoun said his lab has access to an archive of thousands of brain scans that can be used
for this project, some of which are from patients with mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Damaraju said the lab has imaged the brains of 149 schizophrenia patients, and they are comparing connections in the brain of these patients with patterns observed in normal subjects. “We show that they (schizophrenia patients) spend a lot more time in one of the states than the healthy control subjects,” said Calhoun. “So there’s a lot of interesting findings there.” Calhoun said he hopes that the chronnectome project can be used to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of patients with mental illness, providing information on a specific person’s illness and how best to treat them on an individual basis. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, while schizophrenia only afflicts about 1 percent of the
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