Feeling depressed?

Natural News reports that

Instead of grabbing the nearest bottle of antidepressant or alcohol, people crippled by anxiety and depression should consider lifestyle changes based on older, simpler, and wiser times. By making life simpler and more meaningful, a person could improve his or her mental health far better than resorting to pharmaceutical drugs.

...The Therapeutic Lifestyle Change Project...
investigated low-tech societies like the American Amish and the Kaluli natives of Papua New Guinea. He found that depression is virtually unknown among those people. After studying the similarities between these depression-free societies, Ilardi identified six variables found in all of the groups. He used these variables to develop what he called the Therapeutic Lifestyle Change Project.

Participants implemented half a dozen changes in their lifestyles. They followed a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids, took up a daily dose of physical exercise, obtained plenty of exposure to natural sunlight, slept for sufficient periods during the night, participated in social activities where they could connect with other people, and performed useful tasks that kept them too busy to think of negative thoughts.

Read more here.

"Just this once!"

Emily Waltz reports in IEEE Spectrum,

Brain Stimulation Gives New Hope For Treating Psychiatric Disorders
Addiction, OCD, PTSD and depression: All of these conditions might be improved by stimulating one deep brain structure

Read more here.

Good advice!

Anxiety, depression, and the presidential candidates

Why are Hillary and Donald running for president? In the Wall Street Journal Peggy Noonan opines that Hillary is the depression candidate and Trump is the anxiety candidate. Stuart Schneiderman disagrees.

when you are depressed you might very well throw tantrums, the better to buck up your flagging self-esteem. Freud once noted that depression was anger turned against yourself. He was wrong about that—depression is learned helplessness—but he pointed to the fact that people who are depressed often try to cure their condition by striking out in anger. The correct term would be impotent rage, because it’s better to be enraged and to hide your impotence than to show the world that you are helpless.

...As for the rationale behind the Hillary candidacy, I find it intriguing that Noonan pictures Hillary alone in her house in Chappaqua, watching television. That is, without a husband and without Huma. But, now that Huma is going to be single, perhaps she can move in to Hillary’s place in Chappaqua, to keep her company. As of now, it appears that Hillary and Huma share a suite when they travel for the campaign. Hillary is effectively never alone. Her shadow is always there.

If I may disagree with Noonan, I think that Hillary has a “darker purpose.” She is running in order to vindicate and validate her life. She entered into a marital arrangement with Bill Clinton in order to advance herself, to gain power for herself and to advance the cause of feminism. When you sell out at that level, you are sorely in need of a large payoff.

Hillary’s surrogates keep saying that she is tough enough for the presidency. They thought the same of Barack Obama, one of the weakest presidents in memory. Foreign leaders never respected Obama and they surely do not respect Hillary.

And that spells a general anxiety about the nation’s prospects. Putting the military in the hands of someone who is weak and ineffectual—we’ve done that already. How is it working out?

...Trump did go to Mexico. Hillary did not. Trump traveled to Lousiana, Hillary did not. Trump puts himself out there in front of the press. Hillary refuses to do a press conference.

Trump would be foolish if he was not afraid of winning a job he is unqualified for, but he is looking a lot less afraid than the dowager empress of Chappaqua.

Hillary is pretending to be confident and in command. But, by avoiding all difficult situations she is looking like a coward. And that makes people anxious.

Surely, Trump is more bluster than courage, but, compared with the feckless Hillary and our current coward-in-chief, he looks like a tower of strength. Thus, as a cure for anxiety.

Read more here.

Did they turn on depression, or turn off happiness?

Amy Ellis Nutt writes in the Washington Post about

A treatment for Parkinson’s disease reveals a brain switch for sadness.

The patient’s facial expressions revealed her roller-coast of emotions as an electrical pulse fired into her brain triggered symptoms of depression. When the electrical pulse was turned off, her despair subsided. (The New England Journal of Medicine ©1999)
Read more here.

I hope this isn't you

Dr. Joy Bliss writes at Maggie's Farm,

A good, personal description of one form of what we put under the umbrella label of "depression":

Having anxiety & depression is like being scared and tired at the same time. It's the fear of failure, but no urge to be productive. It's wanting friends, but hate socializing. It's wanting to be alone, but not wanting to be lonely. It's caring about everything, then caring about nothing. It's feeling everything at once, then feeling paralyzingly numb.

You're depressed? Maybe you should get vaccinated!

What if depression is a response to infection? Turhan Canli, a professor of integrative neuroscience at Stony Brook University,

was intrigued by research showing a connection between depression and inflammation in the body, and he started to think about the known causes of inflammation — among them pathogens like bacteria, viruses and parasites.

He notes that the symptoms of depression are similar to those of infection: “Patients experience loss of energy; they commonly have difficulty getting out of bed and lose interest in the world around them. Although our Western conceptualization puts affective symptoms front-and-center, non-Western patients who meet DSM criteria for major depression report primarily somatic symptoms.”

And, he writes, we already know that infectious agents can affect our emotions — he points to Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that’s now somewhat famous (at least among science lovers) for its striking impact on its hosts. T. gondii can make rats like the scent of cat urine (causing obvious problems for the rats). In humans, it may have serious psychological effects — Dr. Canli cites research linking T. gondii with suicide. “Yet,” he writes, “large-scale studies of major depression and T. gondii or systematic searches to discover other potential parasitic infections have not yet been conducted.”

He believes researchers should compare tissue samples from depressed patients with those from non-depressed people, looking for evidence both of known pathogens and of new ones.

If successful, such a search could bring about big changes in depression treatment. “Imagine if we had identified one or multiple pathogens that all are associated with major depression,” Dr. Canli said. “That could mean that at some point in the future a patient would present himself or herself at the doctor’s office and the first thing they would do is run a workup on the blood or stool sample to identify exactly which particular pathogens might be present, and then develop a very targeted treatment program to address exactly those.”

One day, he suggests in his paper, research into infection and depression could even lead to a vaccine.

Read more here.

On depression, joy, life, and death

After Robin Williams committed suicide, The Academy of Motion Pictures tweeted this:



View image on Twitter
The Academy ✔ @TheAcademy
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Genie, you're free.
6:56 PM - 11 Aug 2014

Matt Walsh responds:

Free? I’ve seen a lot of this kind of rhetoric. Robin Williams is “in a better place,” he is “free,” he is “at peace,” he is “smiling down upon us,” he’s “happy.”

This all might seem pleasant enough, but have we stopped to think how it looks and sounds to those who may be contemplating this heinous deed themselves? Can we tell our friend to step away from the ledge after we just spoke so glowingly of Robin Williams’ newfound “peace” and “freedom”? This is too important a subject to be careless about. We want to say nice things, I realize, but it isn’t nice to lie about suicide.

It is not freeing. In suicide you obliterate yourself and shackle your loved ones with guilt and grief. There is no freedom in it. There is no peace. How can I free myself by attempting to annihilate myself? How can I free something by destroying it?

First, suicide does not claim anyone against their will. No matter how depressed you are, you never have to make that choice. That choice. Whether you call depression a disease or not, please don’t make the mistake of saying that someone who commits suicide “died from depression.” No, he died from his choice. He died by his own hand. Depression will not appear on the autopsy report, because it can’t kill you on its own. It needs you to pull the trigger, take the pills, or hang the rope. To act like death by suicide is exactly analogous to death by malaria or heart failure is to steal hope from the suicidal person. We think we are comforting him, but in fact we are convincing him that he is powerless. We are giving him a way out, an excuse. Sometimes that’s all he needs — the last straw.

Second, we can debate medication dosages and psychotherapy treatments, but, in the end, joy is the only thing that defeats depression. No depressed person in the history of the world has ever been in the depths of despair and at the heights of joy at the same time. The two cannot coexist. Joy is light, depression is darkness. When we are depressed, we have trouble seeing joy, or feeling it, or feeling worthy of it. I know that in my worst times, at my lowest points, it’s not that I don’t see the joy in creation, it’s just that I think myself too awful and sinful a man to share in it.

So this, for me, is always the most essential moral at the end of these kinds of sad, terrible stories: we are all meant for joy. We are all meant for love. We are all meant for life. And as long as we can still draw breath, there is joy and love to be found here.

Joy and love. There might not be much else for us on this Earth, but these are the only two things that matter anyway. These are the forces that brought the whole universe into being, and these are the forces that sustain it, and us, and all life.

Life. Life exists, and we are made to live it.

To quote Robin Williams playing a character quoting Walt Whitman:

“What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer. That you are here — that life exists.”

If you are thinking about suicide, don’t keep it inside. Tell someone.

Never give up the fight.

There is always hope.

Read more here.