Serotonin map of brain could lead to better targeted antidepressants | Science. Research that aims to map the activity of serotonin in the brain could revolutionise the use of antidepressants and behavioural therapy for people with mental illnesses. The neurotransmitter serotonin has long been associated with mood, with drugs that boost the chemical in the brain helping to alleviate the symptoms of common illnesses such as depression and anxiety, but scientists lack a deep understanding of how it mediates different mood disorders.
By understanding the biology of serotonin, the hope is that drugs can be created that only target cells relevant to a particular disorder and behavioural therapies can be made more effective, reducing the need for antidepressants. Dr Jeremiah Cohen, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Brain Science Institute in Baltimore, said: “The ultimate aim is to understand the biology of mood and how groups of cells in the brain connect to produce our emotional behaviour. Most antidepressants operate broadly in the entire serotonin system. Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share. Robin Williams's death: a reminder that suicide and depression are not selfis... News broke today that Robin Williams had passed away, due to apparent suicide following severe depression. As the vast majority of people will likely have already said, this was terribly heart-breaking news.
Such an iconic, talented and beloved figure will have no shortage of tributes paid to him and his incredible legacy. It’s also worth noting that Robin Williams was open about his mental health issues. However, despite the tremendous amount of love and admiration for Williams being expressed pretty much everywhere right now, there are still those who can’t seem to resist the opportunity to criticise, as they do these days whenever a celebrated or successful person commits suicide.
You may have come across this yourself; people who refer to the suicide as “selfish”. People will utter/post phrases such as “to do that to your family is just selfish”, or “to commit suicide when you’ve got so much going for you is pure selfishness”, or variations thereof. Depression IS an illness. Reporting Robin Williams’ suicide: how not to kill your readers | Mary Hamilton. Yesterday, as I went to work news broke that the actor, Robin Williams, had been found dead in his flat in a suspected suicide.
Today, as I woke up, the newspaper front pages were being released on Twitter. The Sun and the Metro decided to go with details of how Williams killed himself, while the Mail and the Mirror focused on the reasons why. (Mail Online goes into excruciating detail on the methods Williams used, but does so in the body copy of an article.) All four cheerfully ignore the Samaritan’s guidelines on media reporting of suicide, which cite evidence that “vulnerable individuals may be influenced to engage in imitative behaviours by reports of suicide, particularly if the coverage is extensive, prominent, sensationalist and/or explicitly describes the method of suicide”.
The UK press seems to have taken its cue from the US coroner, who released a great deal of detailed information about Williams’s death – far more than we are likely to have had from a British coroner. Photography as a Balm for Mental Illness. Slide Show From Darkness to Light To the casual observer, Danielle Hark was living an enviable life, with a devoted husband, a new baby and work she enjoyed as a freelance photo editor.
But she was so immobilized by depression that she could barely get out of bed. Her emotional state could not be explained in postpartum terms — she had suffered from debilitating depression for most of her life, and ultimately received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder when her daughter was a year old. “I thought about killing myself for the first time in seventh grade,” said Ms. Hark, now 33. “I went from therapist to therapist and medication to medication, not comfortable with anyone or any drugs.” Two years ago, on one of her worst days, something different happened. Photo That experience led her to create the Broken Light Collective, an online gallery intended to provide a supportive environment for photographers affected by mental illness.
“For me, it’s the act of shooting that helps,” Ms. Ms. Phone App Might Predict Manic Episodes In Bipolar Disorder. Hide captionManic, sad, up, down. Your voice may reveal mood shifts. iStockphoto There are smartphone apps for monitoring your diet, your drugs, even your heart. And now a Michigan psychiatrist is developing an app he hopes doctors will someday use to predict when a manic episode is imminent in patients with bipolar disorder.
People with the disorder alternate between crushing depression and wild manic episodes that come with the dangerous mix of uncontrollable energy and impaired judgment. There are drugs that can prevent these episodes and allow people with bipolar disorder to live normal lives, according to Dr. "We want to be able to detect that well in advance," McInnis says. Early detection would give doctors a chance to adjust a patient's medications and stave off full-blown manic episodes. McInnis says researchers have known for some time that when people are experiencing a manic or depressive episode, their speech patterns change. Mindfulness and Stress Reactions: Getting Off the Elevator of Distress.
A good friend of mine describes her depression as an elevator that takes her down to an unfurnished basement with toxic mold, the stench of cat urine and no windows. When she is there, she has difficulty believing that there are any floors above her. What she sees and smells, she surmises, is the sum total of her existence and she will rot there until her last breath. We live so much of our day on automatic pilot — with little thought to what we are doing at the present moment — that we can get in that elevator with almost no effort on our part. Certain conversations or events trigger thoughts that push the “LL” (lower level) button. Then we walk out into a dark room and wonder how we got there. Last week I attended a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) class in which we explored some of the trigger points for the elevator ride down to the basement, our stress reactions that usually happen automatically and unconsciously.
First and foremost is the breath. Kabat-Zinn writes: What on earth is mindfulness? In the last few years, you might have noticed a new word make its way into the media: “mindfulness”. There’s mindfulness for stress, mindfulness for depression, mindful running, mindful shopping – and the government is even considering introducing mindfulness classes in schools. For mental health clinicians like me, the word is now part of our everyday language. We advise depressed clients to “become more mindful” and advise a human resources department that their stressed-out workforce “do some mindfulness”.
But as the concept spreads, it’s being met with little questioning and insufficient scepticism. The Mental Health Foundation’s definition of mindfulness is “meditation, breathing and yoga” where one pays “attention to the present moment”. This helps people to “become more aware of [their] thoughts and feelings so that instead of being overwhelmed by them, [they’re] better able to manage them.” What’s more, mindfulness relies on the participants’ ability to assess themselves. Stress. Stress can be defined as the way you feel when you’re under abnormal pressure.
All sorts of situations can cause stress. The most common involve work, money matters and relationships with partners, children or other family members. Stress may be caused either by major upheavals and life events such as divorce, unemployment, moving house and bereavement, or by a series of minor irritations such as feeling undervalued at work or dealing with difficult children. Sometimes there are no obvious causes.
Stressful events that are outside the range of normal human experience, for example being abused or tortured, may lead to post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Some stress can be positive. But stress is only healthy if it is short-lived. What are the symptoms of stress? Physical changesWhen you are stressed, your body produces more of the so-called ‘fight or flight’ chemicals which prepare your body for an emergency. For example, you may start to experience headaches, nausea and indigestion. Esoterica » Blog Archive » Seven Days With Depression. I’d been meaning to try out a new illness ever since the crazy times I had on the Norovirus, so when I was offered a week’s trial of depression I jumped at the opportunity.
I’d never tried a mental illness before and was curious to see how it compared to the physical kind. As only 1 in 4 people have suffered with a mental health problem I was looking forward to being part of an elite group, and had many questions about the experience. Would my illness be apparent to those around me? Would it garner sympathy like a broken leg, or make people tactfully avoid me like when I have something contagious? How would I know when it was ready? Would there be a period of feeling a little under the weather before the onslaught, or was it lurking around a corner waiting to hit me full-force? First Impressions I felt it arrive sometime on a Sunday evening. Monday I began the day with a shower. The hangover, which I assumed would have dissipated after a good night’s sleep, was still there. Notes: Tuesday. March 28, 1941: Virginia Woolf’s Suicide Letter and Its Cruel Misinterpretation in the Media.
By Maria Popova A humbling reminder that self-righteousness is the enemy of compassion and judging another human being’s private struggle is a disgrace to our own humanity. On March 28, 1941, shortly after the devastating dawn of WWII, Virginia Woolf filled her overcoat pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse behind her house never to emerge alive. A relapse of the all-consuming depression she had narrowly escaped in her youth had finally claimed her life.
She left behind a remarkable body of work — from her poignant diaries to her magnificent essays to her little-known children’s books to “the longest and most charming love letter in literature” — and a cohort of heartbroken friends, but the most stirring thing she left behind was her suicide letter to her husband Leonard: Dearest,I feel certain I am going mad again. Sir, — I read in your issue of Sunday last that the coroner at the inquest on Mrs. Mrs. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Dealing with Depression | Sue Fitzmaurice. I begin by saying I am an expert only in my own self. I have suffered depression on and off for years; I now consider myself largely ‘cured’, although ‘cure’ is such a medical term and I can’t say I found much help from that quarter, let alone any cure. Modern medicine does not offer any cure for depression, although it does offer an array of pharmaceutical appeasements which are, it must be said, a great aid to daily living.
My depression emerged post-natally following the birth of my second child 16 years ago. I had suffered severe morning sickness in the first trimester, and an opportunistic virus (cytomegalo-virus, which is a lot like glandular fever) cropped up in the third trimester leaving me beyond exhausted for a month until it disappeared as quickly as it arrived.
My best friend was a midwife and she gently told me I had just a wee bit of a postnatal depression. Ultimately of course it did not, and it was three years later when I sought medical treatment. Sue. LilacLounge : Depression: a most informative...