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I just wanted to take a minute to thank sheepwoman for responding to so many of my posts.It's people like you that make all of this a little easier.You're the first other person I've ever talked to that has went longer than my son without sleep.It's just nice to know there's other people out there going through the same things
(-slw)
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Depression & Mental Health FAQs
US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) estimated 40 million Americans living today will suffer from major depressive illness during their lives. Seasonal affective disorder is major depression that appears in the fall or winter and goes away in spring, thought to be caused by lack of sunlight.
Postpartum depression occurs within four weeks of a women giving childbirth. Most new mothers suffer from some form of the �baby blues.� Postpartum depression, by contrast, is major depression, thought to be triggered by changes in hormonal flows associated with childbirth. Catatonic depression is a rare form of major depression characterized by (at least two): Stupor, excessive motor activity, extreme negativism, peculiarities in voluntary movement, and repetition of other people's words or actions. - mcmanweb.com
Psychotic depression is a rare form of depression characterized by delusions or hallucinations, such as believing you are someone you are not and hearing voices.
According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 18.8 million American adults, or about 9.5 percent of the US population age 18 and older in a given year, have a depressive disorder. Depression is a chronic illness that exacts a significant toll on
America's health and productivity. It affects more than 21 million
American children and adults annually and is the leading cause of
disability in the United States for individuals ages 15 to 44.
Lost productive time among U.S. workers due to depression is estimated
to be in excess of $31 billion per year. Depression frequently
co-occurs with a variety of medical illnesses such as heart disease,
cancer, and chronic pain and is associated with poorer health status
and prognosis. It is also the principal cause of the 30,000 suicides
in the U.S. each year. In 2004, suicide was the 11 th leading cause of death in the United States, third among individuals 15-24.
According to the World Health Organization, depression is presently on track to becoming the world's second-most disabling disease (after heart disease) by the year 2020. Depression is responsible for some $87 billion a year in lost productivity in the US (a conservative estimate), and according to Bank One, is responsible for most lost work days in its employees after pregnancy and childbirth. Additionally, one million people worldwide die by their own hand, most as a result of a mood disorder. Finally, the linkage between depression and a host of physical illnesses makes it arguably the world's greatest killer.
Research presented at the 56th Annual Conference of the Canadian
Psychiatric Association shows a marked link between bipolar disorder
and migraines. The odds of migraine in persons with bipolar disorder were 40% higher than the general population. Data
obtained from 36,984 people aged 15 and over, who screened positive for
manic or depressive episodes with migraine, were compared against those
who screened positive for mania but who didn�t suffer from migraines. Amongst
males, 14.9% of those with manic episodes were also diagnosed with
migraines compared with 5.8% of the general population. Amongst
females, 34.7% had both migraines and bipolar disorder compared with
14.7% who only had migraines.unquote.gif While the research was
skewed towards persons who were already diagnosed with bipolar
disorders, what does it mean for people who suffer from migraines but
who may have an undiagnosed bipolar disorder?
Migraines and headaches aren�t fully understood but the manifestations are very real and debilitating for their sufferers: Throbbing pain Nausea Heightened sensitivity to light or sound Seeing dots, wavy lines, flashing lights, or blind spots Difficulty with speech, sensation, or movement
An estimated 2.1 million
American adolescents have experienced major depression within the last
year, according to a new comprehensive government study. Researchers
surveyed more than 67,000 young people ages 12 to 17 and found that one
in 12 had suffered from serious depression in the previous year.Nearly
13 percent of girls had struggled with depression, compared to less
than 5 percent of boys. Odds of depression increased with age -- just 4
percent of 12-year-olds experienced depression but that climbed to 11
percent for older teens.
Our DF Members
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Current Research on the Link between Exercise and Depression
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Jan 29, 2008 - It's only been a few weeks since you made that New Year's
resolution to exercise more, but already you're finding reasons to skip
days - maybe even weeks.
You know all the benefits of a healthy lifestyle: In addition
to the weight loss, which would obviously be nice, exercise has been
linked to reduced depressive symptoms and reduced risk for heart
disease. Yet the temptation of sitting on the couch and watching TV
instead of going for a short jog is just too great.
You're not alone. According to the surgeon general, more than
60 percent of American adults don't exercise regularly and 25 percent
aren't active at all. The Center for Disease Control says that 34
percent of Americans are overweight and more than 72 million people
were obese from 2005 to 2006. Inertia has become a national emergency.
For decades, psychologists around the world have studied why
people exercise - and why they don't - and there's a growing body of
work dedicated to helping you get up off the couch.
Preferring to be sedentary is not necessarily an innate human
trait. In fact, most children are actually quite active, and people
generally stay active all the way through high school. But many of them
stop being active when they reach college.
McMaster University (Ontario, Canada) psychologist Steven Bray
noticed this trend and decided to look at what was stopping students
from continuing physical activity during the transition to college. He
tracked 127 students and found that most students in their first year
of college do, in fact, participate in significantly less exercise than
they did the year before.
Bray found that about a third of college students were active
in high school and continued to stay active throughout their first year
of college. Another third was active in high school but was no longer
active after going to college. And the final third is made up of people
who were inactive in high school, the majority of which stay inactive.
"A lot of times it has to do with being too busy with
school-related things, but it also comes down to changing social
patterns," Bray says. "They get to be friends with people who are less
active than they used to be. … And so there may be a culture of
inactivity that starts to take place at first-year university."
But why do some freshmen manage to stay fit while others
quickly put on the "freshman 15?" Bray found that students' sense of
power in life - self-efficacy, in psychological jargon - is closely
related to their level of physical activity. Their inability to cope
with the environmental and social changes they face at college was a
big reason why many stopped exercising. Many students, for example, are
athletes in high school but are not talented enough to play on college
sports teams.
Not only do they lose out on the vigorous exercise of playing
sports, but they often lose their motivation to train, Bray says, which
is why he argues that universities can help their students adapt by
providing more intramural and club sport opportunities. For many, this
change to a sedentary lifestyle then becomes something that persists
through the rest of college and even into adulthood.
"Personally, I believe that if we can teach people to adapt,
that's going to be more successful and probably more efficient than
having them adopt" new healthy habits later in life, he says.
And it's not just college. This rule applies to many of life's
transitions - moving into the workforce, switching jobs or moving,
getting married, having kids. In each of these moments, there is a
chance for people to give up on exercise, possibly for good.
"What it comes down to at each of those points is if we have
the skills to be flexible and keep believing that these things are good
for us. … I can keep it a priority and make it something I schedule the
rest of my life around," Bray says. "Unfortunately, [exercise] is one
of the first things that goes when we get busy with other things."
Reasons for stopping exercise might not be the same across all age groups.
Rachel Newson, a psychologist at Flinders University in
Australia, looked at this question of what motivates and prevents
exercise in adults 63 and over. Barriers to exercise in Newson's study
included "adverse weather conditions" and "not knowing what you're
physically capable of." But the most common reason her participants
didn't exercise was because of physical ailments and painful joints.
On the other hand, motivators for Newson's participants ranged
from "I want to get out of the house" to "I want to be physically fit"
to "I like to be competitive," and the most common responses were ones
related to health and physical fitness, suggesting "that older adults
are clearly aware of the potential health benefits of exercise," Newson
writes.
Even adults who are fully healthy, have adapted to their
environment, and live in a climate ideal for exercising, find plenty of
reasons to sit on the couch instead. Clearly, other factors are at
play. For one thing, it helps to have the right kind of intentions.
Jochen Ziegelmann, a psychologist at Berlin's Freie
Universitat, has done work looking at goal-setting as it relates to
exercise. He and a number of other psychologists who have done similar
studies have found that participants who made implementation intentions
("I will walk to my friend's house and back every Monday, Wednesday,
and Friday") were more likely to continue exercising after two weeks
than were people who set goal-intentions ("I will exercise in my free
time").
Once you have set your goals for implementing your exercise,
it is easier to keep a certain exercise part of your routine. Then, you
must be able to motivate yourself even on the days when you're feeling
tired or bored or distracted. That's called self-control.
Roy Baumeister, a psychologist at Florida State University,
has spent his career looking at self-control and decision making, and
he has found that self-control is not an unlimited resource - the more
you use your self-control, the more difficult it becomes to control
your actions.
So if you spend all day trying to avoid the Snickers in the
vending machine or trying not to say anything mean to your devilish
child, you might not have the same stamina you normally would when you
get home for an evening run.
"Stamina counts as a measure of self-control," Baumeister
writes, "because it involves resisting fatigue and overriding the urge
to quit."
Baumeister's team has done numerous experiments to test this
theory, but many of them are similar. They have one set of participants
complete an activity that depletes their self-control - such as
watching a funny movie while trying not to laugh or resisting cookies
and eating radishes instead - while another group does a similar
activity that has no self-control component (they get to eat the
cookies and laugh). Then, Baumeister tests the self-control of both
groups with a second task, such as the mentally challenging Stroop
test, a common tester of self-control, or by seeing how long
participants can hold onto a handgrip, which focuses on physical
stamina.
Baumeister relates the idea of self-control to a muscle that
becomes more exhausted the more you use it, and his studies "all
pointed toward the conclusion that the first self-control task consumed
and depleted some kind of psychological resource that was therefore
less available to help performance on the second self-control task."
A recent study by University of Kentucky psychologists Suzanne
Segerstrom and Lise Solberg Nes supports this idea that controlling
your emotions is hard work. They had participants either eat from a
plate of cookies and chocolates while avoiding a plate of carrots or
eat from the plate of carrots while avoiding the sweets. The heart rate
variability of the participants who had to use their self control and
avoid the tempting sweets (they even made the cookies warm and freshly
baked) was higher than it was in those who didn't have to avoid that
temptation. Then, all the participants were asked to work on difficult,
or even impossible, anagrams.
The participants who had used up their self-control by
avoiding the cookies and chocolates were less determined to finish the
impossible anagrams.
"People are aware that they are sometimes vulnerable to saying
the wrong thing, eating the wrong thing, or doing the wrong thing, but
they may be unaware of their own self-regulatory capacity at any given
time," Segerstrom and Solberg Nes write.
Baumeister says he doesn't know how far the muscle analogy
goes for self-control. He says his team hasn't pushed anyone to the
state of self-control exhaustion in the laboratory. But it appears that
people begin to conserve their self-control as they approach exhaustion
in the same way they would if they were getting physically tired. Plus,
people seem to be able to exert self-control despite depletion if the
stakes are high enough (like great athletes are able to do so even when
they're exhausted).
There is even research suggesting that glucose depletion is
related to depletion of self-control, much like a muscle. And, also
similar to a muscle, research has shown that focusing on a task that
requires self-control - exercising or managing your money, for example
- improves other self-control-related tasks, such as cutting down on
smoking and drinking or helping out with household chores.
"These peripheral improvements suggest that you're
strengthening a core muscle rather than just working on the behavior,"
Baumeister says.
Recently, they have done work to test whether, like a muscle,
you can exercise your self-control to make it stronger. They gave
students a variety of self-control tasks to do every day - sit up and
stand up straight whenever you think of it; do all minor activities,
such as brushing your teeth, lifting a cup to your mouth, and using a
computer mouse with your non-dominant hand; don't swear - and then they
tested the students' progress on self-control tasks. Their results have
been mixed so far. Many participants have been able to improve their
self-control, but some have not. Baumeister says the results are
promising, but it still needs more study.
"This has not only theoretical interest, but also practical,"
Baumeister says. "If we can actually make people stronger, then that
would be a good, useful finding." And it might help you work up the
strength to get off the couch.
Once you're off the couch, you have to figure out how to
exercise to best meet your goals. That's what Thomas Plante has been
working on for more than 20 years. Plante, a psychology professor at
Santa Clara University, has looked at the psychological benefits of
exercise in men and women. He focuses on keeping the exercise constant
- 20 minutes at about 70 percent of the participants' maximum heart
rate - and then he measures people's mood.
He has found that environment changes the type of
psychological benefits one gets. Exercising indoors and alone is
calming for many exercisers. However, if the goal of exercising is to
feel energized, then participants are better off exercising outdoors
and with friends.
"We think that's because you're enjoying it," Plante says.
"You're experiencing more, you're enjoying the experience, and you're
chatting and so forth during the exercise."
Many people look to personal trainers, not just to make
exercise more fun but also to help them stay motivated. But this
valuable exercise tool can also have unintended consequences.
Christopher Shields, a psychology professor at Acadia
University in Canada, looked at people in group exercise classes and
found that those with high proxy-efficacy (i.e. those who relied
heavily on someone else to help them exercise) have low self-confidence
when it comes to exercising on their own. This is an old psychological
principle that goes back to Albert Bandura's self-efficacy theory, but
it has real-life implications. It is insignificant if the people using
the trainers have the ability to continue exercising with a trainer
indefinitely. But if that is not possible, relying on a trainer can
cause regular exercisers to lapse into a routine of indolence when the
help disappears.
"Professionals working in the health and exercise field must
recognize the potential dilemma that may arise when individuals use
them as proxy-agents," Shields writes. He implores trainers to
"actively collaborate with participants to encourage planned
development for independence" while still under the trainer's
supervision. If people who use trainers practice not just the exercises
that they need to do but also the planning of the exercises, then,
Shields says, they will be more prepared to continue their exercise
routine after the trainer is no longer available.
Other tips are ones that you might already have as part of
your exercising routine. Plante has done some preliminary work looking
at the difference between exercising with a friend and exercising with
an iPod. He has found that there is little difference between the
enjoyment of the two forms of exercise. What matters is that you feel
close with your friend and that you are listening to peppy music.
Plante has also done work with virtual reality, and his work
has shown that people who wear a virtual reality headset while running
or biking enjoy their experience more than people who do the same
exercise while staring at a wall in a gym. Televisions provide a
similar boost in enjoyment.
"We're always looking for ways that are going to get people to
exercise regularly and what can make it more appealing to do," Plante
says. "And this is some evidence to suggest that this can help people
feel more engaged more rewarded by their exercise and so forth. And
that's probably a good thing."
Though it's true that we are always looking for more ways to
get people to exercise, Harvard professor Ellen Langer says it's
possible that some people are already getting more exercise than they
realize.
The surgeon general recommends at least 30 minutes a day of
moderate exercise or 20 minutes of vigorous exercise three times a
week. But those numbers are based on white-collar workers. Construction
workers, for example, spend most of their day lifting and pushing and
pulling. Trash collectors are often running from the truck to the
sidewalk. And hotel cleaning attendants are running around rooms
quickly and vigorously scrubbing bathrooms.
It's this last group that Langer and her student, Alia J.
Crum, looked at in a 2007 study. Langer and Crum went to a variety of
hotels to recruit volunteers from the cleaning staffs. They told one
group that the work they were doing was already enough exercise to meet
the surgeon general's daily requirements. Changing linen for 15 minutes
burns approximately 40 calories, they told the attendants. And
vacuuming for 15 minutes burns about 50 calories. The other group was
not given this knowledge. When they returned to the hotels four weeks
later, Langer and Crum found that the informed group showed a decrease
in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass
index.
It is possible that the people who were told about the health
benefits of their work made other changes to their behavior, such as
dieting or increased workload at the hotels. But all the room
attendants were asked to report on these activities, and they did not
report any changes. They simply became healthier just by being mindful
of what they were doing.
"People are mindless with respect to most other exertion,"
Langer says. "People see themselves when they're eating. They don't pay
attention to the amount of calories burned standing there and stirring.
… I think this study reveals that we potentially have far more control
over our psychological and physical functioning than most of us
realize."
Langer has an anecdote that she tells when talking about this
subject. She walks into a gym and sees a sign that says "Stairmaster on
third floor." Many people, Langer hypothesizes, would consider their
20-minute Stairmaster workout - and not their three-flight walk up to
it - their only exercise of the day.
So is it possible that most of us are actually getting more
exercise than we think" Think about a typical day where you walk to the
bus stop, walk to lunch, walk to the copying machine, walk through the
supermarket on your way home, and walk around the kitchen while cooking
dinner and setting the table. Even a Saturday of sitting around on your
couch and watching college football probably involves a walk down to
the store for some soda and chips and maybe a game of catch at
halftime.
Think about that the next time you're talking about sitting on your couch all day.
Sure, you want to look good in those tight designer jeans, but
the advantages of exercising don't stop at the waistline. There are
obvious cardiovascular benefits to regular exercise that can help
reduce the threat of heart disease. Plus, there is evidence suggesting
it might aid in the prevention and treatment of nervous system
disorders, and recent psychological research has shown that exercise
can help reduce symptoms of patients with major depressive disorder.
Jim Blumenthal of Duke University noticed anecdotally that
people felt better when they exercised and decided to look at whether
exercise could reduce depressive symptoms in patients. He started out
looking at non-depressed patients and found that regular exercise had a
positive effect on depressive symptoms in these patients. "But the
question was 'Really, what does that really mean?'" Blumenthal says.
"If someone's not depressed to begin with and they have reduced
symptoms, so what?"
So Blumenthal began to focus his research on patients with
major depressive disorder. He assigned patients to one of three
treatment groups: medication, exercise, or a combination of both. At
the end of four months, the patients assigned to just exercise showed
as much improvement as the other two groups. Just over 60 percent of
the exercising patients no longer classified as clinically depressed at
the end of the study, compared with 69 percent of the patients who were
given only medication and 65.5 percent of those assigned to both.
What's more, in follow-up studies, Blumenthal found that
patients who exercised had half the risk of being depressed six months
after the experiment as those who didn't.
Blumenthal says he is not ready to recommend that people with
major depression forgo their medicine in favor of exercise, but "I
still remain very optimistic about exercise being an alternative to
treatment for depression," he says.
Author: Ian Herbert
This article appears in the January 2008 issue of the Observer, the monthly magazine of the Association for Psychological Science.
Source: Katie Kline
Association for Psychological Science
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Depression & Mental Health FAQs 2
What is Clinical Depression? Clinical
depression can affect your body, mood, thoughts, and behavior. It can
change your eating habits, how you feel and think about things, your
ability to work and study, and how you interact with people. Clinical
depression is not a passing mood, a sign of personal weakness or a
condition that can be willed away. Clinically depressed people cannot
"pull themselves together" and get better. Depression can be
successfully treated by a mental health professional or certain health
care providers. With the right treatment, 80 percent of those who seek
help get better. And many people begin to feel better in just a few
weeks.
Depression a Big Factor in Poor Health World Health Organization Finds Depression Often Goes Untreated By Salynn Boyles WebMD Medical News Reviewed by Louise Chang, MD Sept.
6, 2007 -- Depression has a greater impact on overall health than
arthritis, diabetes, angina, and asthma, but it all too often goes
unrecognized and untreated, a report from the World Health Organization
(WHO) suggests. more... Depression a Big Factor in Poor Health
For Additional Information About Depression Write To: The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH)6001 Executive Boulevard, Room 8184, MSC 9663 Bethesda, MD 20892-9663
For free brochures on depression and its treatment call: 1-800-421-4211. or visit: http://www.nimh.nih.gov
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