A recent New York Times article entitled “How Exercise Keeps Us Young” prompted me to write this post. Those of us who are thinking about getting older may find the whole topic discouraging. There seem to be very few cultural models of successful aging (other than not doing it). The New York Times article summarizes a study that appeared in …
Chronotherapy for Depression
Chronotherapy for depression was recently shown to be effective in a fairly large and well designed study from New Zealand. What is chronotherapy? As discussed in the article, which appeared in Acta Scandanavica Psychiatrica, chronotherapy involves some combination of three separate sleep and wakefulness related interventions: Wake therapy. Wake therapy (previously known as “sleep deprivation” therapy, a harder sell to patients) …
Keith O’Neil Fights Stigma
Keith O’Neil is a former Super Bowl champion and the founder of the Forever Foundation, an organization whose mission is to educate the public about bipolar disorder and to de-stigmatize the illness. In September he spoke at the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation (formerly NARSAD) meeting in Washington, DC. From time to time I like to share information about people …
Bipolar Medications – Lyndsey
Long time correspondent Lyndsey, who has wrestled with bipolar mood swings for years, what it means, how it enhances life, and how it diminishes it, and who has also, at times, cursed the condition and the treatments she has received from her doctors, writes about medications. We don’t generally talk much about medications on this site, because we felt / feel …
Employment Rights and Bipolar
What are your employment rights if you have bipolar? Do you need to tell your employer? Should you tell your employer? What if you’re looking for a job, when can your potential employer ask you about bipolar? We ran across a nice summary with some very useful links on the Bipolar Network News website. Attorney Katharine Gordon writes – It …
Mindfulness Apps
Mindfulness apps have intrigued us for years. The New York Times recently two mindfulness apps. I was pleased to see that the ones they chose were the two apps that we find are the most popular these days: Headspace and Calm.com. I’ve updated the webpage that lists a number of apps and links that you may find helpful. But I thought …
Spock is Dead
Spock is dead. Leonard Nimoy passed away this past Friday at the age of 83. I have to date myself by saying that reruns of the original Star Trek series were a very important part of my adolescence. And I loved the character of Spock. Of course, I was a nerd at a time when that was not universally recognized …
CBT for Insomnia Reduces Suicidal Thoughts
CBT for insomnia (CBTi) is clearly preferable to taking sleeping medications for most people. Studies show that cognitive behavioral therapy is associated with greater improvements in sleep quality than sleeping medications, and that those improvements are more durable, and, particularly in the elderly, sleeping medications are associated with significant adverse effects, including an increase in mortality. But it can be a hard …
Mediterranean Diet is Anti Aging
The Mediterranean Diet appears to have an anti aging effect in a just published study. The study, in the December 2014 edition of the British Medical Journal, found that the Mediterranean Diet was associated with telomere length, a biological marker of aging. Telomeres are DNA sequences at the end of chromosomes that protect the chromosomes from damage and allow healthy cell …
Kathy Leichter and Here One Day
We had the absolute pleasure of talking with director Kathy Leichter about her experience of making her movie, Here One Day. Here One Day is an intimate look into Kathy’s mother’s experience with Bipolar Disorder as well as her own experience, as her daughter. Question: How did you come up with the idea of Here One Day? Kathy Leichter: I’ve been …
Performance Anxiety is Good
Although I have given thousands of presentations to professional audiences over the course of my career, when I was beginning that career I had severe dread of presenting. I would hardly sleep the night before a presentation and was visibly trembling as I went on to the stage (at least that’s how I saw it). Thinking back on that time …
Travel and Mood
Travel and mood are very much related. Often a trip is associated with a significant change in mood. This can be due to many factors. Getting out of a rut, experiencing new locations and meeting new people can bring you out of the depression. However there is also the possibility that travel may disrupt circadian rhythms in a way that leads …
Effective Communication
A friend recently asked for my advice about how to talk with his manager about some concerns he was having at work. He explained that these concerns were growing in intensity over the last few weeks, and he had yet to mention them because he did not want to “cause waves,” didn’t want to offend anyone, and didn’t actually know what to say …
Boredom
Boredom is one of the most common negative emotions, and yet relatively little explored in the psychology literature. A woman, Kate, wrote to me recently – “I am bored all time. I have very few friends. I can’t get motivated to do anything to move my life forward. I don’t know what to do except mess around on my computer, watch movies and generally …
Women and Hormones – Elisabeth
I am a woman diagnosed with bipolar II disorder and I suspect that I am also hormonally vulnerable. I wrote this blog because I wanted to share some of my newly gained understanding of women and hormones, and the influence of hormones on mood. Hormones are produced in the endocrine glands and released into the blood stream. They have many …
Lucky Marriage
What is a lucky marriage? Last week we were talking to a man who has had a year of challenges in his marriage. Ivan is a thoughtful and articulate man we have been seeing for about a year, and during that time the subject of his marriage has come up many times. He suggested that a lucky marriage is one …
Clutter Stress Depression
My post about getting things done sparked a lively interest and a bit of controversy. One of the careful readers of this site sent me a link to an article about clutter causing stress, particularly in women. New study shows a link between depression and the amount of stuff in your home. Interesting. I was curious that I didn’t know …
Sleep Fatigue and Depression
Yesterday I gave a presentation at UCSF to the Mood Disorder Clinic psychiatrists and residents: An Update on Bipolar Depression. Much of that material is focused on psychopharmacology and so I will be writing about that on the gatewaypsychiatric.com blog. However, one important pearly derives from a series of studies that identify a strong link between sleep and depression. There is frequent …
Getting Things Done
One of the perennial challenges for anyone with problems with depression or mood swings, and perhaps for anyone in our increasingly busy and frantic world, is how to not get overwhelmed by work and personal tasks.It is a challenge and we have historically relied on two sources of wisdom when we counsel people who are struggling with this:1. David Allen’s …
Bipolar in Order Study
Several readers of this blog have been intrigued by Tom Wootton’s “Bipolar in Order” site and the training program that he has developed to help people live well with bipolar. A few years ago I added a chapter to one of Tom’s books, and Tom and I have had a professional relationship for more than a decade. I don’t agree …