Recognizing the Symptoms of Depression

 

Craving Carbs in Winter: Is It Depression?

If winter weather triggers carbohydrate cravings, you're not alone.  Many people snack more on carbohydrate-containing foods in winter, sometimes in an unconscious effort to boost their mood, says Judith Wurtman, PhD, a former scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-author of The Serotonin PowerDiet. 

How can you tell if your seasonal carbohydrate cravings are in the normal range or a possible symptom of winter depression?  

Carbohydrate Cravings: What's Known?

If you're on a weight loss diet that emphasizes boosting protein and cutting down extremely on carbohydrates, that might explain your craving, whatever the season, says Evelyn Tribole, RD, a dietitian in Newport Beach, Ca., and author of Healthy Homestyle Cooking. 

She's seen this kind of carbohydrate craving in dieters she counsels. "It's a survival mechanism," she says. "You don't want to kill for a piece of broccoli, but you'd kill for a piece of bread." It's a clear signal, she says, that your body needs more carbs and not an abnormal craving.

“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”

At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts . In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.

But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.

It was not an issue I had seriously considered before. Most of my patients, who are adults, developed their psychiatric problems after they had a pretty clear idea of who they were as individuals. During treatment, most of them could tell me whether they were back to their normal baseline.

The NAMI website states it's hard to get the right treatment for BPD because of how intensive the therapy needs to be.  The most helpful treatment has proven to be Dialectical Behavior Therapy which consists of one-on-one therapy and group therapy each week for a year. Most insurance’s will cover 20 visits at the least, (including Medicaid) or at the most, up to 50 visits. To get through the correct treatment for BPD would take about 104 visits.  Unless you're wealthy, it would be pretty much impossible to get the right help.

     I live in Michigan where there is help through the county, but it is either group DBT or through county health insurance.  You can get one-on-one (probably 20 visits) and not necessarily DBT.  Because of a rule through the ‘Community Support & Treatment Service’,  you can only go to one if you decide to go,  but you can't get both treatments together.

     Recently I've had to start looking into individual insurance companies and I've discovered many of them don't even have any out-patient mental health coverage for individual plans.  This even includes insurance such as Blue Cross as a whole, no individual plans have mental health out-patient, at least not  Michigan Blue Cross. The ones that do have it are more costly and the ones I looked into being about $200 with a co-pay of about $40. So again, unless you are rich... it is extremely hard to get mental health coverage.

“I’ve grown up on medication,” my patient Julie told me recently. “I don’t have a sense of who I really am without it.”

At 31, she had been on one antidepressant or another nearly continuously since she was 14. There was little question that she had very serious depression and had survived several suicide attempts. In fact, she credited the medication with saving her life.

But now she was raising an equally fundamental question: how the drugs might have affected her psychological development and core identity.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - For people suffering from depression that doesn't respond to treatment with one type of antidepressant, switching to a different type may be the best treatment, according to a new report.

Relatively new antidepressants such as Prozac and Zoloft, for example, are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors or SSRIs. In recent clinical trials, only about a third of depressed patients achieved remission with SSRI treatment, the authors explain, but there is little consensus among psychiatrists about the best treatment for patients when an SSRI doesn't work.

To look into this, Dr. George I. Papakostas from Harvard Medical School, Boston, and his associates conducted an analysis of four clinical trials that compared a switch to a second SSRI versus a non-SSRI antidepressant for SSRI-resistant major depression.

The pooled data included 1496 patients who had not responded to treatment with one SSRI and were subsequently randomly assigned to treatment with another SSRI or a non-SSRI antidepressant.