Lifestyle Choices

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…)

Besides wrinkles, which come to us all, many people may have their faces marred by rough scars, of diverse origin, or permanently marked as a result of acne or chickenpox. There are three treatments which may correct some or all of these problems, depending upon their extent. They are — chemical face peel, dermabrasion, and collagen implants. (more…)

Read

There are thousands of self-help books available that actually have some very good advice. While some of the advice may not apply to your situation, most books at least have one nugget of knowledge that can be useful. Visit your local bookstores and libraries, and read as much as you can. The internet also has useful information to offer although care must be exercised as some sources of information may not be reliable. If in doubt, one should check with one’s mental health provider concerning the validity of information obtained from the internet. Some people have a problem when they read self-help books. (more…)

Keep a Diary

Each day, confide in your diary. This is a way of expressing your feelings. You may not always have friends with you, but your diary can take the place of friends for the time being. Write freely about what most bothers you. Make a list of things you are most grateful for each day. Looking at the good side will help you to have a balanced view of yourself, the world and your future. If you have not made it a habit to keep a diary, start one today. It is therapeutic. (more…)

Express Your Feelings

Depressed feelings need to be expressed. Keeping a tight lid on one’s feelings will, in the long run, intensify the feelings and drive one to deeper levels of depression. If you have a friend or a confidant, speak to him candidly about how you feel. The tendency in depressed people is to withdraw from others and this adds to their sense of isolation. Loneliness is not good for depression. It can worsen depression. So resist the tendency to withdraw into your own world. (more…)

Alcohol

Depression sometimes drives people to drink and sometimes alcohol abuse leads to depression. In any case, drowning your sorrows will not help you overcome depression in the long run. Some seek out their doctors for sleeping tablets. Merely taking sleeping tablets will not relieve one of depressive symptoms. There are many depressed patients with chronic insomnia. Despite being given sleeping tablets, their insomnia does not get better. What they need are antidepressant medications. Long-term, regular use of sleeping tablets may result in dependence and tolerance whereby there is a need to take higher and higher doses to achieve the same effect. Hence the depressed person should not just look to sleeping tablets but should seek psychiatric help and obtain antidepressant medications instead. (more…)

Consultation Room Etiquette

Need for Privacy

If the patient seems hesitant about speaking to the psychiatrist, it could be that there are things he wishes to discuss in private. If you sense this could be the case, excuse yourself from the consultation room. Your presence may hinder disclosure of sensitive information. It goes without saying that after the consultation, you should not check with the professional what had been discussed in your absence. Most, if not all, caregivers I have dealt with do not have such a problem. (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…)

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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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…)

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…)

Unemployment

As higher social beings, we need to feel useful to society. I don’t mean in any grand way necessarily, but we want to feel that what we do has a use at least to somebody, we want to feel needed. When you are unemployed it is difficult to avoid a feeling of uselessness that may creep over you as the weeks and months drag on. To live for a long time without a feeling of a function in life eats at the soul and can create bitterness, hopelessness and depression. This may then create a vicious circle, for when you are depressed you do not have much energy for looking for work. Even if you do, your depressed energy is going to fail you should you get an interview, since the one thing that almost any employer wants is enthusiasm. (more…)

The reduction of certain chemicals (biogenic amines) in the brain is thought to be related to depressive mood. There is some evidence that the level of biogenic amines falls in the ageing brain,which could increase susceptibility to depression.

As the brain gets older, more and more brain cells die. At the same time the arteries may get narrower, so that the blood and oxygen supply to the brain is limited. The brain becomes more vulnerable when the oxygen supply is reduced because of a respiratory condition, or when diet is inadequate. These and other factors may be related to longer reaction times, more inflexibility, increasing caution and decreasing ability to adjust to new situations, all of which are commoner as you get older. But it is important not to assume that these effects are physically caused, as depression causes the same effects and is changeable. The loss of the capacity to adjust to new situations may make any changes, such as moving house, much harder than before the advent of old age. (more…)

If you have a history of depression in your family, statistically the chances are higher that you may be prone to periods of depression. How much of this correlation is hereditary and how much environmental cannot be answered quantitatively. Although there has been some dogmatic insistence on hereditary factors by geneticists, and on environmental factors by psychotherapists, most will at least agree that susceptibility to depression is affected by both heredity and by early environment, whatever the proportions. These influences weave a complicated and inextricable pattern: a depressed parent may pass on hereditary qualities of susceptibility to the children, but the children will also learn by copying the behaviour of their parent. Depression occurs much more frequently in certain types of personality, and personality is affected by hereditary factors, by copying parents and by reactions to the family environment. The family environment is affected by the general culture, which may be more or less depressive. (more…)

For a child, a parent is an all-powerful figure. The baby is completely dependent on this huge person for physical care (food, cleaning and physical warmth) and emotional care (stimulation, sensitivity and emotional warmth). As a baby it is often very frustrating to be in such a dependent position, especially when you cannot make yourself understood. Theproblem comes when you express frustration, anger or hostility and your parent cannot handle it. A parent that can handle it reacts with warmth, even if it is a warm anger followed some time later by more gentle warmth. But if a parent has difficulty with the baby’s aggression, the baby knows it. (more…)

Just as every home has different sets of patterns of what should be expressed and what repressed, so cultures and sub-cultures vary in the unwritten rules of what is, and what is not, permitted. It would be interesting to compare statistics of the incidence of depression in more or less repressed cultures. But this is not possible, firstly because definitions of depression are so variable, and secondly because the more repressive political regimes will not allow the publication of any statistic which might put the management in bad light. Thirdly, repression is qualitative as well as quantitative — what is repressed in one country may be freely expressed in another and vice versa. (more…)

Many drugs have a depressant effect on the mind and body. Others have a stimulant effect, lack of which makes you feel depressed when you stop taking the drug.

Alcohol

Although alcohol relaxes the muscles, reduces anxiety and often removes social inhibitions, it can be a stimulant or a depressant—it tends to accentuate an existing mood. Sad people often become morose, especially when drinking alone. Whatever your mood at the time of drinking, afterwards, during the hangover, you may have a headache, feel lethargic and in low spirits.

Both alcoholism and depression are often mechanisms for avoiding feelings. Some genetic studies suggest that depression and alcoholism tend to go together in families, but that more men become alcoholic while more women become depressed. Depressives and alcoholics are the most likely to attempt or commit suicide. People who can cope while drinking regularly may get depressed when they stop drinking. (more…)

The brain consists of about ten thousand million neurones, ornerve cells, each cell having the capacity to conduct a tinyelectric charge to others, via seven or eight thousand interconnections. The tail of each cell spreads into thousands offibres, each ending with a swelling called a terminal button.The electric charge passes from the head of the cell to the tail,and ends in the thousands of terminal buttons. Between theterminal buttons of one cell and the head of the next cell aremicroscopic gaps called synapses. The electric current can not jump the synapse, but instead causes a change in the chemicals within the synapse, this change then causing a current to start in the head of the next cell. These chemicals are called neurotransmitters because they effectively transmit electrical charge from one neurone to the next. A few neurotransmitters have been isolated. They are divided into two groups, called the monoamines and the catecholamines. (more…)