Deborah Does Navel-Gazing

Treating Depression: Dont Go it Alone

Deborah — Mon, 05 May 2008 19:56:30 +0000

I think Ive come up with a great way to save money on medical bills. Lets face it, they can be ridiculously high, and not everything is covered by insurance. Even though I have good medical insurance from UC Berkeley, we still get billed $50 for emergency room visits, $35 higher than the copay at the doctors office.

I can only assume the higher copay for the emergency room is to discourage you from going there. Because, you know, its such a blast. If Lawrences pediatrician had been willing to meet us at his office on Saturday a month ago when he dislocated his toe, do you think I would have said, “Naw, wed prefer to wait in the emergency room for a few hours instead, trying to keep a bored and hurting child amused. Thanks anyway, Doc.” Actually, believe it or not, our insurance company wanted us to to get permission from the doctor before going to the emergency room. As you might guess, I said, “Screw that,” and called the doctor while we already on our way there. I mean, for crying out loud, part of my sons toe was sticking out at a right angle.

Read on

What do you do if your child is being bullied?

Deborah — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 20:04:01 +0000

I described in my last SharePost how I had been bullied for years during my childhood, both physically and emotionally. As you can imagine, it’s painful to dredge these memories up, although to be honest, I wonder if they ever really went too far under the surface. I think that this is the real danger of bullying. Even if the child makes it through a bullied childhood physically intact, there is no way that he or she is not affected emotionally and mentally by the bullying. Any adult who’s been bullied carries the scars, and their self-image and sense of self worth can be forever distorted by it. The overweight boy who was called “fatty” may grow up to be fit and athletic, but to some extent, he’ll always see himself the same way that other children did.

But let’s go back to the present, to what a child that you may know is going through. The child who’s enduring the bullying suffers emotionally, in every way you can think of. His self-image takes hit after hit, and he feels impotent and helpless to control the situation. None of us, adult or child, do well emotionally when we have no control over our daily lives. Being bullied can lead to depression and anxiety, and in some truly tragic cases, it can cause a child to commit suicide.
Read on

Childhood Bullying and Depression

Deborah — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 20:10:14 +0000

I was bullied through much of my childhood, beginning when I was seven years old, which was when we moved from New Jersey to a wealthy town in Connecticut in which sports were worshipped. I was, to put it mildly, not very good at sports. Not only was I somewhat uncoordinated, but my Attention Deficit Disorder (or complete lack of interest) caused me to space out when the phys-ed teacher was explaining the rules of whatever game we were about to play. When we were subsequently playing, of course, I wouldn’t have any idea what was going on and would screw things up for my team. Or I’d be daydreaming in left field and miss a ball coming right at me.

Read on

Why Suicide Rates Increase in the Spring

debgray — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:39:49 +0000

We often hear that suicide rates are highest during the holidays. I even heard a character in a Christmas TV movie warn about the risk during the last holiday season. Seems to make sense, in a way. After all, the holiday season even has its own syndrome - the holiday blues. Many people are stressed out, and for anyone who’s alone and depressed, the contrast between the ideal of the holidays and reality can be hard to take.

Here’s the problem - the prevailing wisdom is wrong. In fact, we’re not heading away from the most dangerous time of the year for suicide, we’re heading towards it. Suicide rates are actually at their highest during late spring and early summer, and at their lowest around the holidays. There does appear to be a jump on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day, which is thought to be due to the holiday season ending and harsh reality settling in.

Read on

Depression - Talking to a Man about Depression

debgray — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:17:41 +0000

I discussed in an earlier SharePost how the mental health community is beginning to accept the idea that men tend to exhibit depressive symptoms differently than women. Instead of feeling sadness, a man may feel angry or irritable. Instead of losing interest in activities he previously enjoyed, a man may drink too much or engage in risky behavior.

Now that it’s easier to recognize depression symptoms in a man we know, our next step is to talk to him about it. However, that’s easier said than done. I was involved with a man who went through bouts of depression. It was understandable - he had had a rough childhood and had a parent who was mentally ill. I knew when he was going through a bout - he would drink heavily. But when I would bring up the topic, he would insist that he wasn’t depressed - he was just “in a funk.”

If you want to talk to a man about depression, or have already tried, you may be realizing that it’s a tough subject. The biggest stumbling block may be the threat that being depressed poses to a man’s masculinity. (By the way, I absolutely hate generalizing about any group of people, but unfortunately it’s essential here). If we look at some of the icons of manhood - John Wayne, James Bond, Clint Eastwood - they all have one thing in common. They’re stoic and unemotional. Not the best role models for a man when he’s struggling with depression. Following their example, he would never talk about how he feels about anything, let alone something like depression.
Read on

Antidepressants are No Better than Sugar Pills? Well…

debgray — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:16:44 +0000

Antidepressants in the SSRI family don’t appear to be any more effective than a placebo in treating any but the most severely depressed people. That’s the conclusion of a study published last week in the Public Library of Science Medicine. The study analyzed trial results, both published and unpublished, of six widely prescribed SSRIs. The researchers found that a placebo worked just as well as the SSRIs for people with mild or moderate depression.

I don’t find these conclusions particularly surprising. To my mind, there are very few situations in which someone with mild depression should be prescribed an antidepressant. Actually, I can’t think of even one, but bear in mind that I’m not a doctor. However, I think that most doctors would agree that other approaches are as effective, such as talk therapy and exercise. Whether or not moderate depression should be treated with antidepressants is a little more complicated. My take on it is that antidepressants shouldn’t necessarily be the first line of defense.
Read on

The Antidepressant Saga Continues

debgray — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:18:36 +0000

I had my quarterly appointment with my psychiatrist the other day. As planned, I told him that I would like to switch to a new antidepressant. I felt that Wellbutrin, which I had been taking since 2000, was exacerbating my overall anxiety level. I showed him my nails, which were bitten down to the quick. Although I’ve been biting my nails since I was a child, normally I can stop for a year or so, but it’s been over seven years since I had long nails - since I started the Wellbutrin. And my husband made a point of agreeing when I told him that I thought I’d been more anxious overall since I started the Wellbutrin, so I knew that it had been (painfully) obvious to him also.

I detailed my past antidepressant history for my doctor, with the thought that this might help him choose a new medication for me. In addition to Wellbutrin I had also taken Norpramin for most of the first decade that I was on antidepressants. Norpramin is a tricylic antidepressant that had been very successful in banishing my depression, but it’s a decade-old medication with side effects including dry mouth and teeth decalcification. During one year of that decade I had taken Prozac, but went back to Norpramin since the Prozac made me feel flat emotionally (although it did help my obsessive compulsive disorder).

Read on

Antidepressant Side Effects

debgray — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:17:43 +0000

I’ve never been officially diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), partly, I believe, because there have been so many other disorders for my doctors and I to focus on (depression, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Attention Deficit Disorder, anyone?). Looking at the description of GAD, though, I am pretty sure that I have had at least mild anxiety disorder most of my life. I’m definitely a worrier, although I’ve learned to control it to some extent, and I have had tension knots on my neck since I was a teenager. And I’m really, really bad at relaxing. It’s almost impossible for me to relax unless I’m physically exhausted. I used to think that it had something to do with my ADHD, but I’m beginning to think that’s not the culprit.

Another tipoff is my nail biting. I’ve bitten my nails as long as I can remember, down to the quick. I’ve tried to stop many times, and have even succeeded, sometimes for a year or more, but the majority of my life has been spent with virtually no nails. It took me a long time to figure out why I could stop sometimes and why I couldn’t, but I think I’ve finally hit on it. I think that when I go through periods of heightened anxiety, I start biting my nails again. When I am going through those fairly rare periods of low anxiety, it’s a snap to stop.

Read on

Depression in the Golden years

debgray — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:16:35 +0000

For many older adults, the “golden years” are indeed golden. My parents, who are both over the age of 65, are enjoying their retirement here in Northern California. My father is supervising the building of their new house and my mother runs a website she created for senior women. They go to baseball games and symphonies, among other activities, and spend a lot of time taking their grandchildren to museums of all kinds. I think they probably would be a good commercial for vitamins marketed to seniors.

Unfortunately, for some seniors, the golden years are more like leaden, especially if they’re living with depression. Not only can depression suck all the enjoyment out of life, as it can at any age, but depression can also be dangerous to an older adult’s physical health.

Read on

Antidepressant Studies - Getting the Whole Picture

debgray — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 16:15:23 +0000

You can stop feeling like it’s your fault that you haven’t found an antidepressant that works. Not that you should have ever felt that way anyway, but most depressed people blame themselves for everything that goes wrong in their lives.

But this one is definitely not your fault, and probably not your doctor’s either, for that matter. Last week a paper published in The New England Journal of Medicine showed that publication bias put antidepressants in a more positive light than was warranted by the evidence. To put that in plain English, when drug makers ask the FDA to approve a drug, they have to submit all studies that have been done for that drug, even the ones that show the drug to be less than successful. However, they are under no obligation to publish all the studies in medical journals. They can, and apparently did in this case, cherry-pick the studies and only submit the positive ones for publication. Not only that, some of the negative studies that were published were slanted to make them appear more positive.

Read on