April 5, 2018 by DEREK Food
– Last week, my Twitter feed was dominated by news about a “new organ” that has recently been discovered. Given how many centuries we’ve been conducting autopsies, this newsflash was rather hard to believe. The interstitium is not new, exactly, but its role has been greatly expanded. Once believed to a dense layer of collagen, it turns out these fluid-filled spaces might aid the spread of cancer tumors to lymph nodes.
Describing depression isn’t easy. It’s more than sadness. It’s emptiness, hopelessness, a place so deep and dark that trying to explain it to someone who hasn’t experienced it can feel impossible. But one artist described depression through photography, though, and it might give you a glimpse into the mind of people suffering from this oftentimes debilitating illness.
We're the Big Blue Apple.
One in five New Yorkers have a mental health disorder, and at least 8% suffer from symptoms of depression, a new report by the city Department of Health says.
“Major depressive disorder is the single greatest source of disability in NYC,” the report says. "At any given time over half a million adult New Yorkers are estimated to have depression, yet less than 40% report receiving care for it.”
"I think it's partly the changing of the seasons, but fall is also filled with so much scheduling and newness," said Borchard, founder of Project Beyond Blue, an online community for people affected anxiety and depression.
Borchard is not the only American stressed out by this season. While some people welcome pumpkin spice lattes, football games and changing leaves with open arms, others dread the annual anxiety-level increase that comes with busier schedules and shorter days.
Posted: Thursday, September 24, 2015, 8:40 AM
Learning that your teen has depression can be terrifying for a parent – concerns range from getting the right treatment to general safety. It was estimated in 2013 that 8 percent of high school students attempted suicide one or more times in the previous 12 months, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
And now, a reanalysis of data in The BMJ last week found that Paxil, one of the most prescribed antidepressants on the market, is ineffective and even harmful for treating major depression in adolescents.
The new findings are in contrast to the original study from 2001. Researchers of the original industry-funded study found Paxil, just one of a group of serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, was safe and effective. The reanalysis showed that a number of adolescents from the original study did experience increased thoughts of suicide. But the suicidal thoughts were simply counted as generic adverse events and not clearly presented in the results.
For a long time, there have been some indications that these medicines may raise the rates of thoughts of self-harm in adolescents. This led the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 2007 to issue a “black box” warning about increases in suicidal thoughts. In December 2014, the warning was revised to state that attempts at self-harm decreased in patients ages 24 and older with anti-depressant use, but there was no change on the warning for adolescents.
During this nearly decade long discussion, most psychiatrists and many other mental health professionals felt that the warnings were too strict. As a result, they thought many teens were not getting the help that they needed – while others worried that these medicines were possibly harmful.
What has followed in the wake of this latest reanalysis are stories in the press which have raised the issue of the safety and effectiveness of some antidepressant medications for adolescents.
