Relationship Problems – Get Solutions

I  am happy to give readers of this blog an opportunity to get answers to problems they may be having with relationships or, more generally, communication with others. This Monday I’m going to be interviewing Cannon Thomas,  a psychologist who is an expert in communication issues, especially as it relates to people with mood disorders. I will of course be …

Forum Technical Problems

For some reason, this week, when I have tried to access the discussion forum, I have been unable to do so, using my Google Chrome web browser. I know that earlier this week, there were a lot of problems with Internet access generally because of an ongoing war between spammers and an anti-spam service, but I am not sure if …

Escape from Depression

I met a young woman yesterday who got me thinking about the reasons why I feel so strongly about the work I do as a psychiatrist, helping people with chronic mood problems. She came in for help with what she described as a “mild but chronic depression.” She had already seen one psychiatrist, and he had not been terribly helpful; …

St. John’s Wort

St. John’s Wort is a plant which has been shown in many well controlled clinical trials to be more effective than placebo in treating mild to moderate depression (not transient sadness). In fact the evidence supporting its effectiveness is better than the evidence supporting the effectiveness of some FDA approved anti-depressants.  It does not, in our experience, work as well …

Awareness and Acceptance

The New York Times has had a series of well written articles on the topic of mindfulness. The most recent article notes that brain scans show that mindfulness can change the way our brains function, and help us improve attention, reduce stress hormones and even bounce back faster from negative information. The increased ability to bounce back from negative information that comes from …

The Gift of Hope

I have never been able to find the short article in the Journal of the American Medical Association that talked about a miraculous treatment for many ailments of the human mind and body… The article was about “hope.” When we have it there is hardly any problem we can’t tackle, and when we lack it every challenge seems insurmountable. This …

MoodSurfing Forum – Reviews

Thank you to all members of our discussion forum who responded to my request for feedback. It was very helpful. By and large people felt that the new version of Bublaa – which we use to host the forum – was working alright (aside from the awkwardness around setting up a Bublaa account and then requesting membership in the MoodSurfing …

Trojan Horse Medications

From time to time we are asked to review the care that people with cycling moods have received, trying to figure out, from a complicated story of medication changes and mood cycles, what to do to get someone out of a period of deep pain and dysfunction. A few years ago I did such a review on a young man …

Kindling

What do small sticks used to start a fire have to do with bipolar moods? Not much… Kindling in the context of this post refers to a phenomenon that is well documented in some people with seizure disorders and which may have relevance to some people with bipolar moods. Bob Post, who was for many years Chief of the Biological …

On the Borderline

I am writing a presentation for the UCSF Bipolar Program on the topic of the relationship between Borderline Personality Disorder and Bipolar Disorder and I thought I would jot down some of my thoughts in a quick post. Borderline personality disorder involves a “pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity” which begins by early adulthood …

Recruiting Summer Intern

MoodSurfing.com is recruiting for a summer intern to help with – * Creating content for this website * Miscellaneous administrative work * Editing and updating content from this site in order to publish the book version of MoodSurfing by the end of this year, or the beginning of next.  The ideal candidate will have a strong background in psychology, a …

Compulsions, Addictions and Secrecy

I got an urgent call yesterday from somebody that I’ve been seeing for several years.  His fiancee had just left him.  They had been having problems for several months, problems mostly rooted in his ambivalence about commitment.  She went on his cell phone and found evidence that he had been having flirtatious conversations with seven different woman over the last …

Small Rewards

A young woman who was scheduled to go on a big trek in the Himalayas was not doing the training she needed to in order to have a good experience. She had been depressed for the last few months and this was probably a manifestation of that mood. She told me that she felt she “should be doing much more.” …

Fish Oil Update

Since so many people with bipolar and depression take fish oil we thought we would pass on some information in a summary form from Consumer Labs. The full information is available if you subscribe. Consumer Labs is the only source of reliable information about supplements (the only place that does any testing) and if you take supplements we strongly encourage …

Conversations

I am glad to let you know that I just set up the first of what I hope to be a series of interviews with experts of interest to readers of this blog. I am very much indebted to Dr. Descartes Li for his willingness to be the first participant. Please let me know your thoughts (peter@gatewaypsychiatric.com). I am also …

Creative Tension

I was inspired to write today’s post after watching a video sent out by a colleague as her “Valentine’s Day gift” to a group of mental health professionals interested  in women’s issues. The video was from the TED series (strongly recommended) and had to do with the challenge of having a long-term passionate relationship. The author was a delightful, French …

A Protest

So many of us have to deal with things that are not fair – depression, unsupporting spouses, financial reversals, weight gain, etcetera, it can be tempting to launch a protest of some kind against the unfairness. These protest actions don’t have to be obvious at all, but they can have powerful effects, nonetheless. A few women recently told me, “I …

Hot Button Issues in a Relationship

Dealing with a partner with emotional or psychological issues is tricky. We spent some time today trying to figure out an approach that would work for one woman and her partner. This is what we came up with. It may help you if you are navigating in turbulent waters in your relationship. The link will take you to the video …

Myths of Weight Loss

In a recent article published in the the New England Journal of Medicine, David B. Allison, who directs the Nutrition Obesity Research Center at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, wrote a summary of what is definitely known and what is not known about obesity and its treatment. We thought that we would add a summary of this important and controversial …

Season Specific Interventions

One of the challenging things about bipolar moods is the constant process of shifting priorities and directions that is involved in “moodsurfing”. A young man we’ve been working with for a couple of years has a very seasonal pattern to his moods. Most of the time, the focus of our work is trying to help him emerge from a constant …