Lifestyle Choices

• ‘I want my coach to help me to perform better, but he only shouts at me all the time.’
• ‘I am working so hard to hear: “Yes, that was great!” but all I hear is: “No, boy, not like that! That is wrong!”‘

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Depression Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT)

CBT works on the basis that there is a close connection between thoughts (cognitions), feelings and behaviour. The treatment focuses on patterns of thinking that are negative and examines their underlying dysfunctional beliefs. For example, a person who i_sdepressed may have the belief: “I’m useless”. The underlying belief could be: “If I am not as competent as my colleague, I might as well resign from my job”. While the person in distress likely holds such beliefs with great conviction, with a therapist’s help, the individual is encouraged to view such beliefs as hypotheses rather than facts and to test out such beliefs. Furthermore, those in distress are encouraged to monitor and record the maladaptive thoughts which pop into their minds (called “negative automatic thoughts“). (more…)

Wile drug treatments have demonstrated their effectiveness in treating biological symptoms such as poor appetite, interrupted sleep, low energy and psychomotor retardation, they have little effect on psychological symptoms, for example, pessimism, low confidence, feelings of hopelessness, guilt, self-hatred and the like. These should be addressed using psychological approaches. The most common approach is Supportive Psychotherapy. (more…)

You Are Not Alone

Many teens suffer from depression, therefore you are not alone. There are effective treatments and hence no depression is a hopeless case. You need to be patient with yourself. It takes time for the mind to heal just as it takes time for the body to heal. Wishing that the depression will disappear is not going to work. It will not go away immediately but it will, eventually. Continuing with treatment and therapy will ensure that that day will come even sooner. In the meantime, try to relax yourself, sort out your feelings and thoughts, and allow your mind and emotions to recover. (more…)

If feelings become so painful and overwhelming that you feel like harming yourself or others, you need to get help right away. Speak to a parent, an adult or a doctor. Ring the

SOS or teenage helpline for crisis counselling. In the meantime, the following suggestions can offer some solace until you find someone you can talk to:

Many teens who have attempted suicide (and survived) say that they did it because they had mistakenly felt that there was no other solution to the problem they were experiencing. At the time, they could not see another way out — but in truth, there is always a way out, even if they could not see it there and then. No matter how horrible you are feeling now, these emotions can, and will, pass. (more…)

There are many self-help activities that can help elevate the mood of seniors:

• Mild exercise — going for a walk is a pleasant way to pass time and keep the blood circulating and the joints supple.
• Music — listen to one’s favourite songs and sing along. Better still, invite friends for a sing-along session. It is more fun when done in the company of others.

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This is the most important step of all, for no house can be a real home unless those who live there hold ideals that are kind, noble, and good. Without high ideals it is easy for even the best of homes to drift apart. There must always be some things that will hold the family together, such as family worship, in which all the members may share. These happy occasions are not likely to come by accident but must be carefully planned by the parents. (more…)

Many parents hold to the foolish idea that money is the important thing in life. As a result they neglect their children and fail to spend sufficient time in their training. This is a serious mistake. Money is always useful, but material wealth alone will never guarantee a happy home. In fact, it might have the opposite effect.

Although a good bank account might be a fine asset to any well-trained young person, it could be a menace to one who has never had adequate training. When such a person inherits a large fortune, he may quickly lose it on useless investments. Or as it sometimes happens, he may try to dominate those around him by giving or withholding money. In the end no one is happy. (more…)

Is any other place so dear to the human heart? Wherever we go, our thoughts ever turn to the one spot we can always call our own. No matter how humble, our fondest dreams are centered there. It need not be a mansion or lavishly furnished with the latest appliances. Although these may be desirable, they are not essential to true happiness. As the poet has said:

“Be it ever so humble. There’s no place like home.”

This kind of home is a shelter from the storms of life. It is the one place where the family can enjoy an atmosphere of peace and rest. Such a home will give depth and meaning to all we do, say, or think. If that home is blessed with children who grow into mature and happy young people, there is no lovelier sight in the world. (more…)

Almost every healthy person at some time has had a desire to be married. This is the most natural thing in the world.

There may be various reasons for this desire— love, sex, security, companionship, and so forth —but the urge is usually there. And yet it takes far more than a mere urge for one to be happy in marriage. Surely there must be some counsel that young and old can follow to avoid the mistakes so many are making every day. (more…)

Atopic eczema

Onset and inheritance

This type of eczema often starts in the first year of life, though rarely before three months, but may begin at any age. It affects at least one baby in 50 and is usually mild.

Fortunately it clears up in most children by the age of four or five but it may linger on after the age of ten or rarely into adult life. There may be a long gap when it seems to have settled only to reappear. Doctors are very wary about predicting what will happen: for example, in the case of a baby with atopic eczema, there may be an eighty per cent chance of it clearing by the age of five. But that means one in five will not clear and the parents of that one will naturally be disappointed and lose faith in their practitioner. It is best to show a cautious optimism stressing the fact that a great deal can be done to improve eczema. (more…)

Although money can’t buy it, anyone intelligent can learn to have good taste. You can spend like a drunken film star, but you risk an expensive clutter that hasn’t quite come off. If you pay someone else to design your home you risk something pretty expensive, lifeless and unlived in, or alternatively, an exuberantly camped-up setting with mouldings picked out in white and in which you feel uneasy.

So the first rule is Do it yourself. Because otherwise you’ll never learn.

Discovering your own good taste is an unpeeling process, eliminating the layers which other people have impressed upon you. One of the easiest ways to find out what you like is to get a pinboard and start sticking up anything which takes your fancy — a scrap of lace, photographs, postcards, a colour swatch, a cartoon. (more…)

I’ve read a lot about women who serenely cope with the three roles of full-time working woman, wife, and mother. However, I’ve never actually met one. All the ones that I know feel inadequate.

Going back to work after having children is a practical and emotional problem and both are interdependent. You risk worrying about them when you’re at work and about work when you’re at home, and end up being happy in neither situation.

Two requisites for a working mother are stamina and an understanding family Sympathetic they may be until it comes to your interests versus theirs, but they still want their evening meal on time and they don’t want to hear about the bus queue which made you late. (more…)

Full-time or part-time shop assistant: Hard on the feet but can be more interesting than office work if you like meeting people. Part-time work is often easier on Saturdays.

Stocking shelves in supermarkets, to prepare for the next day, is one example of evening preparation work. Ask the manager of your local supermarket if there’s anything going.

Welfare workers are largely women. Child care officers are needed (training from one to three years necessary) so are youth club workers, youth employment officers, young people’s advisers (being married is a qualification and it’s possible to do as little as thirteen hours a week work). (more…)

You can only be medically examined to support your statement with your consent. Rape is very difficult to prove medically. What does a doctor look for? Evidence of semen in the vagina and on clothes, as well as evidence of internal and external trauma, such as lacerations. You can telephone a friend or relative from the police station, and normally they would be allowed to telephone you back.

See a doctor: After you have informed the police go, or get someone to take you, to a hospital or doctor. You have three worries : (more…)

Stress during labour

Childbirth can be a time of intimacy, excitement, wonder and openness. It can also be a time of fear and pain, sometimes in a place that is forbidding and lacking in warmth. There may be all kinds of left-over feelings, which are usually repressed. First of all, the birth hurts you — it is quite natural for some women to be angry about this. Secondly, you may resent the way your delivery was handled. Unfortunately, the case history above is not an isolated example. I have heard of so many similar and worse cases that it sometimes makes me feel ashamed of my profession as a doctor. The resentment is usually related to lack of consultation on decisions. Medical interventions are sometimes carried out (for instance, routine episiotomies, injections to speed up the birth of the placenta) without any explanation of side-effects. If the side-effects occur, the natural reaction is anger, but this is often repressed, with the explanation that the doctor knows what is best. It is this attitude of the patient handing over authority to the doctor and the doctor taking assumed authority over another’s life that may lead to later feelings of resentment. Some women have told me they felt like a nonentity, going through a process that was designed by the hospital to maximize speed and efficiency. Others have told me that it felt like being taken over by machines and fingers. The residue of resentment may go very deep and is usually repressed, with a resultant depression of spirits in general. (more…)

Depression is very common in a mother after the birth of her child. Some mothers notice depression only at this time and at no other time in their lives. The reasons why depression is so much more common soon after giving birth are bothcomplex and conjectural, but can be conveniently divided into two groups: physical stress and emotional/psychological stress. Depression after childbirth generally takes one of three forms: maternity blues, postnatal depression, or post-natal psychosis.

These usually start two or three days after birth. You may quite suddenly get weepy and irritable, and then just as suddenly, you are out of them. They are very common and do not usually lead on to any longer-lasting depression.

This occurs after about 10 per cent of births. It may start soon after birth or it may start after an initial few weeks of happiness and high spirits. It is a common experience to feel more emotionally vulnerable for four to six weeks after giving birth —you feel more open and sensitive to everything. This period of greater openness is often remembered with pleasure, but sometimes, after four to six weeks, the physical and emotional demands of looking after a child twenty-four hours a day begin to get a mother down, and you may feel grey and exhausted for many months or even a year or more. A minority of mothers will go into a more severe depressive process which occasionally lasts years. (more…)

When you experience the death of someone close to you, or when you have lost somebody who has gone away or whom you have left, it is natural to grieve. In fact, a process of mourning is necessary in order for you to come to terms with the loss and adjust yourself to a life without the dead person.

GRIEF

Grieving openly is an acutely painful process which is not usually encouraged in western cultures. Even when people believe that grieving and openly demonstrating your feelings are good for you, their fear of the sheer power of the feeling of grief often makes them try to stop you or calm you down. The commonest alternative to grief is the prolonged numbness of depression which, unfortunately, can last years. Although the expression of grief differs in different individuals, there is a pattern to grief that is fairly common, consisting of three basic stages: numbness, despair and detachment. (more…)

FAMILY QUARRELS

Quarrels between husband and wife or between parents and children can create an atmosphere that is tense or depressed. There may be many reasons for the quarrels. A husband may strongly resent the fact that his mother-in-law has come to live with his family, or a wife may hate spending every Christmas with her husband’s family; both may repress the anger, in an attempt to avoid hurting their spouse’s feelings. Children of unstable marriages may become depressed when they see their parents fighting— they bottle everything up rather than risk adding to the fraught atmosphere.

Some families, in an attempt to stop the quarrelling, repress all emotional reactions. When you walk into such a household, you can feel the repression in the atmosphere, and it seems that it would be a relief if someone would say what they really felt. But within your own family, it is usually much harder to see what is happening. You may have had the experience of bitter battles in the past leading nowhere, and decided it was a better policy to keep quiet. Eventually the quietness becomes a way of life, and you hardly even notice the feelings you have underneath. Although many families survive in this depressed fashion, the quality of life is inevitably lowered. (more…)

Depression is about twice as common in women as it is inmen. There are probably many reasons for this, and some of them are connected with marriage. Recent research points out that married women more likely than married men to feel unhappy; to have are feelings of inadequacy; to have difficulty in sleeping; to fee apathetic or inert and to behave in a passive way; to have bouts of depression, and to have symptoms of mental ill- health in general. Unmarried women, on the contrary, tend to have better mental and physical health than both unmarried men and married women.

Men, on the other hand, tend to have better mental health when married than when not married. Unmarried men in the United States have a suicide rate twice as high as married men. Men who lose their wives are usually more prone to depression than women who lose their husbands, and men tend to remarry as soon as possible. Though it may not seem like it on the surface, the man may be more dependent than the woman, even though he may not play an obviously dependent role. He is more likely to get depressed when the marriage is over or when his conventional role as sole or main bread-winner is upturned. He may feel inadequate and helpless if he realizes that his spouse can and does manage well without him. (more…)