Below you'll find a list of all posts that have been categorized as “Depression”
Is it helpful or hurtful? Is it easy or hard? Do I give more or get more? Can it change my life? Can it change the world? Empathy is a much-maligned skill set that mostly just makes life a little bit easier. It doesn’t mean becoming a doormat, or completely subsuming your own feelings for those of others. Only someone …
There is no such thing as an illness that is “all in your head”. Just because the current level of medical science can’t understand what’s happening in the brain-body connection doesn’t mean your symptoms don’t exist. Research is beginning to find more and more ways that “mental” illnesses are caused by “physical” stimuli, and vice versa. This insight leads to …
What is catastrophism? Even if it’s realistic to know that there are forces able to wipe out your home, job, possessions, and community in a single stroke, worrying about the catastrophe maybe coming today or tomorrow can harm your health without improving your chances of escape. Anybody going in for medical checks and tests knows the feeling, but now, if …
Tips for managing holiday stress How’s your holiday spirit? Dreading that time of year again, with all its mental health challenges? Have you already started planning how you will handle possible mood swings, holiday anxiety, or seasonal affective depression? For many, if not most people, the holidays can be bittersweet. My own parents died many years ago, but it’s at …
Here comes the end of Daylight Savings again, the signal of darker mornings and longer nights to come. Even in “sunny California” the winter months are darker and people can struggle. Seasonal Affective Disorder is a real phenomenon, and it shouldn’t be brushed off. Increased hours of darkness can lead to episodes of depression, sleeplessness, and even thoughts of suicide. …
Bipolar disorder is a chronic disease that can present lifelong challenges. However, remission rates and even complete recovery can and have been seen. Finding the factors associated with recovery from bipolar disorder can give us all hope, and also provide health care workers with specific strategies to enhance the possibilities of recovery. A recent Canadian study using data from the …
Fish oil supplementation for major depression continues to garner positive reviews from scientists and clinicians. A recent review of the past few years of data shows significant positive effects without negative side effects for a variety of patients with differing diagnoses. Some recent findings: Systemic inflammation is increasingly recognized as an associated factor in many mental illnesses. MoodSurfing has investigated …
A newly released documentary Faye, about the actress Faye Dunaway has been screened at the recent Cannes Film Festival. According to a review published on the website Deadline, the film “gets to it right away” with questions early on about why she was such a “difficult” person to work with on a movie set. Dunaway herself believes that her bipolar …
Exercise is widely recommended as a first-line treatment for depression of all types. Many people have personal experience of feeling better and healthier when they integrate an exercise routine into their lives, and there are many studies showing measurable effects of exercise on clinical depression. However, most of these studies are small, and there are few solid conclusions that can …
Divorce is almost always a wrenching and emotionally challenging life experience. When one of the spouses has a disability, such as a diagnosis of major depression or bipolar, the questions to be addressed can be complex and difficult to settle. We are not attorneys and this post should not be understood as legal advice, but we do want to suggest …
We use the image of “surfing” your moods to describe the experience of bipolar’s ups and downs, but we don’t mean this to imply that the mood waves of bipolar are chaotic and completely unpredictable. On the contrary, people who keep a careful log of their moods over time find clear patterns to their ups and downs. However, these patterns …
Doing nothing? Daydreaming? Your brain is still working away Neuroscientists have discovered that brain activity occurs in “networks”: a coherent interaction of different brain regions. The networks are activated harmoniously or cooperatively, depending on what you are doing. One network, connecting several different brain regions, becomes activated when we are at rest, doing “nothing” or just daydreaming. This has been …
Invest your energy for greater returns and more energy Depression can feel like a deep hole that you just can’t get a foothold to climb out of. But some people have found that even from deep inside the hole, there is a way to get at least a toehold, which can lead to another fingerhold, and so on, until you …
Patients in recovery from major depressive episodes may need help learning to process positive information and stimuli. Researchers found that people with a history of major depressive disorder spend more time processing negative information than healthy controls, and they may have less control over which information they process. This negative bias suggests that people recovering from depression may need to …
Suicide continues to be a leading cause of death for Americans, especially younger people, where homicide and accidents lag far behind suicide in fatality rates. Budgets for suicide research and suicide prevention are woefully small, and stigma is still a barrier to seeking help, both for suicidal people and for their family members and supporters. However, amidst all the bad …
Loneliness is implicated in shortened lifespans, worsened physical and mental health, addiction, economic disruption and homelessness, among others. Its spread constitutes a true public health crisis in the USA, and intervention is urgently called for. However, at present, only individual efforts are offered as a solution. Reach out. Make sure your elderly relatives are getting a phone call regularly. Join …
We’re coming up on a time of year that for many (maybe even most) people offers significant challenges. Now is the time to plan ahead for the difficulties you typically face during the holiday season, and call to mind coping strategies that have worked for you in the past, or new ones that you want to try. Depression is a …
Addiction is a potent topic for debate in our debate-happy society, but, as with so many of those topics, the debates usually generate more heat than light. That’s why we are glad that the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have put out this handy, easy to read guide about addiction, separating fact from myth. Addiction is an …
Exploring the links between stress, anxiety, and depression Stress and mental illness The stress response is unfortunately very familiar to modern people. We all know that when something bad happens, our brains flood our bodies with chemicals that would have been useful in the remote past, stimulating the “fight, flight, or freeze” response. Useful for dealing with a hungry sabre-toothed …
If you have an episode of depression, how can you tell if it is bipolar or unipolar depression? The simple answer is, you have bipolar depression if you have ever experienced an energized (not necessarily pleasant) state that qualified as a hypomanic or manic episode. And if you only have had depressed episodes, you are considered to have unipolar depression. …
