Thursday, January 31, 2008

Lazy Productivity -- Make that DEPRESSED Productivity: 10 Simple Ways to Do Only Three Things Today

Editor's note: This post was written by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits. For anyone who has ever struggled with the inertia of depression, this is invaluable.

I have to admit, I'm as lazy as the next guy. I have my moments of productivity, where I'm cranking out the tasks and checking things off my to-do list like my life depended on it.

But for the most part, I just want to do a few things each day, and then take a nap.

And as it turns out, that's all that's needed. Doing just a few things each day has worked wonders for my productivity -- I do less, but those few things I do have a higher impact. With this method, I've created a couple of successful blogs, and achieved a few other things along the way. Not trying to brag, but only showing that laziness can actually work if you put it to work for you.

How can laziness work? Well, if you only want to do three things, just do three things. But here's the key: make those three things count.

Here are my suggestions for making laziness work for you:

1. Choose only three things to do today. If you set a limit, you will be forced to choose just the important things. If you don't set a limit, you'll try to do everything ... which means you'll be busy, but you'll be doing a lot of unimportant things as well. Just choose three, but choose carefully.

2. Choose for impact, not urgency. There are always things that seem urgent today, and those things tend to push the important stuff back. But here's the thing: the urgent stuff is only urgent in our minds. In a week, they won't matter. But if you choose something that has long-term impact on your work and your life, it will matter in a week. It's those high-impact tasks that really make a difference. If you choose high-impact tasks -- things that will really make a difference over time, that will get you recognition and success and create new opportunities -- you can let the urgent stuff melt away.

3. Choose them the night before. Plan your three tasks the night before, so you're prepped for the day when you wake up. Then there's no "urgent" stuff on the list, because you chose them when you were calm. It helps give you a jump-start on your day.

4. Start on them immediately. First thing you do when you start working: start on the first of your three important tasks. Don't do little things. Just start.

5. Don't check email until the first one's done. There's always the urge to dive into email (or whatever your normal productive distraction is at work), but resist. Let it be your reward for completing the first task on your list. Let your urge to be lazy motivate you to finish that task!

6. Choose a fourth, more important task to procrastinate on. Here's where procrastination can really help you. Trick yourself by putting a big task you've been dreading at the top of your list. So you actually have four tasks. You will try to procrastinate on that big task by working on the three tasks below it. In that way, you'll still get three very important tasks done while procrastinating on the fourth. How will you get that fourth one done? When something bigger comes along that you dread even more, put that at the top of your list.

7. Take breaks in between. When you finish one of your three tasks, give yourself a short break. 10 minutes works well for me, but you may need 15 or 20. That's OK. We're not in a sweatshop here. You're only doing three things today. Take a walk. Get a glass of water. Shoot the breeze with someone. Check whatever you like to check online. Then get back to work on the next task.

8. When you're done, celebrate with a nap. After you do your three important tasks, take a nap. You've earned it. You've done three important things today, which is more than most people, to be honest. They might do 7 smaller things, but you've been more productive by doing less.

9. Batch process smaller tasks. It's inevitable that you'll have smaller things you'll need to take care of. Put those off until the afternoon or end of your day, and do them all at once in batches. So do all your phone calls, then all your emails, then all your little paperwork or whatever. Just don't allow these smaller, routine tasks to push back your big ones.

10. What if you need to do more? You probably won't actually complete them all anyway. Just choose three and put the rest off until tomorrow. I promise, the world won't end and life will go on. And you'll be much less stressed.

Introducing The Candy Heart Generator



The signs are unmistakable.

The dismal specter of yet another agonizing Valentine’s Day lumbers fatefully closer like some pink, sappy-faced behemoth. It reeks of refrigerated flowers and dirty cash, its roar a cacophony of disposable jingles for cheap diamonds, decapitated roses, and sickening confections barely fit for human consumption. It descends ravenous upon us all, feeding on hearts- whether bitter, black, or broken- passing over only the rare few it finds in a state of true romantic love.

To them, rather the vulgar monstrosity it is, the beast appears instead as a dear friend long awaited. They are swept as lovers into the creature’s intoxicating embrace, not to be devoured, but rather only pickpocketed, then left dizzied and drunk, as the beast returns to hibernation. In a year, it will return- more diabolical than before. And as certain as its coming, it will feed first and most viciously on the very ones it passed the year before. For what romance lasts longer than a season, anyway?

Shifting abruptly into my marketing message because I lack the grace and time for a more nimble segue…

Hey- want to make your own candy hearts? We’ve got a nifty new Do-It-Yourself tool! Check it out at iheart.despair.com!

An Interview With Author Tom Wootton On Depression As An Adv

It is not the hardships we face that matter, it is what we become as a result of facing them. Some of the greatest people in history have said that depression is what made them great. The Depression Advantage is about facing our condition while accepting the possibility that we might gain from it instead of trying to hide from the experience.

read more | digg story

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

At the York Public library


The excitement of holiday time is behind us. Looking ahead, there are still several months of cold and dark before we see strong signs of spring's return. There is hope, however. Haven't you noticed? The daylight is beginning to stay with us a bit longer each day. But even with this added light, it can be a difficult time of year for keeping up one

read more digg story

Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Depression risk 'highest in 40s'




Life may begin at 40, but research suggests that 44 is the age at which we are most vulnerable to depression.


Data analysis on two million people from 80 countries found a remarkably consistent pattern around the world.


The risk of depression was lowest in younger and older people, with the middle-aged years associated with the highest risk for both men and women.


The study, by the University of Warwick and Dartmouth College in the US, will feature in Social Science & Medicine.


The only country which recorded a significant gender difference was the US, where unhappiness reached a peak around the age of 40 for women, and 50 for men.


Previous research has suggested that the risk of unhappiness and depression stays relatively constant throughout life.


However, the latest finding - of a peak risk in middle age - was consistent around the globe, and in all types of people.


Researcher Professor Andrew Oswald, an economist at the University of Warwick, said: "It happens to men and women, to single and married people, to rich and poor, and to those with and without children."


He said the reason why middle age was a universally vulnerable time was unclear.


Count your blessings
However, he said: "One possibility is that individuals learn to adapt to their strengths and weaknesses, and in mid-life quell their infeasible aspirations.


"Another possibility is that a kind of comparison process is at work in which people have seen similar-aged peers die and value more their own remaining years. Perhaps people somehow learn to count their blessings."


Professor Oswald said for the average person, the dip in mental health and happiness comes on slowly, not suddenly in a single year.


Only in their 50s do most people emerge from the low period.


"But encouragingly, by the time you are 70, if you are still physically fit then on average you are as happy and mentally healthy as a 20-year-old.


"Perhaps realizing that such feelings are completely normal in midlife might even help individuals survive this phase better."


Marjorie Wallace, chief executive of the mental health charity Sane, said: "This study raises intriguing questions about the processes that lead to depression in mid-life, as well as indicating what a common experience it is worldwide.


"Depression is a complex and challenging condition that remains poorly understood, with as many as one in ten people with severe depression taking their own life.


"We welcome any scientific contribution to our understanding of this illness, particularly if the research can aid the development of better treatments, both therapeutic and pharmaceutical."


Andy Bell, of the Sainsbury Centre for Mental Health, said mental health problems were extremely common - but he stressed they could occur at any time in life.


Story from BBC NEWS:


Published: 2008/01/29 00:57:01 GMT© BBC MMVIII

Don't be happy, worry

Awash in antidepressants, America is manipulated by Big Pharma and numbed out to basic, and inevitable, human pain -- or so argue critics of our serotonin nation.




Jan. 29, 2008 We are witnessing the rise of the anti-antidepressants.


The '90s, of course, were the age of Prozac, a decade when a class of antidepressants called SSRIs (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors) came to dominate psychological treatment and public discusssion about why life in America had become such a downer -- even before 9/11. After Prozac's FDA approval in 1987, some 80 million new prescriptions for antidepressants were written in the next 10 years. It was as if America had suddenly caught a bad case of the Superpower Blues: Office visits to doctors for treatment of depression tripled.


With the pills came books. Along with volumes about the new psychopharmacology like Peter Kramer's bestseller, "Listening to Prozac" (1993), there were Martin Seligman's "Learned Optimism" (1992) and "Authentic Happiness" (2002), which helped launch "positive psychology," a broader attempt to understand not illness but happiness.


But soon enough the good feelings gave way to a backlash: Where there was once "Listening to Prozac," now there is David Healy's "Let Them Eat Prozac." "Authentic Happiness" has been countered by the newly published "Artificial Happiness: The Dark Side of the New Happy Class" by Ronald W. Dworkin. In 2005, it was Kramer's "Against Depression"; now it's Eric G. Wilson's "Against Happiness."


Yet the recent volley of books represents more than an attack on our current overreliance on drug therapy to treat depression. They rip into the massive sales of the drug companies, dispute the medical thinking behind doping the populace and question whether the antidepressant advocates understand depression, happiness or the human mind.


What happened in the '90s wasn't an epidemic of the blues or just a new biomedical discovery taking hold. In Charles Barber's compelling new book, "Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation," the author contends that we underwent a major shift in attitudes toward mental illness and medications. Depression was redefined and popularized; the use of psychotropic drugs was greatly expanded to include what might be termed "personality repair."


And psychiatry became Big Science. Because of the speed and effectiveness of the new drugs in treating conditions that traditional therapies struggled with for years, psychotherapists lost their leadership in mental healthcare. Amazing advances in brain imagery and neurosurgery only heightened therapists' poky obsolescence. The bioengineers took over.


They weren't the only ones. The advent of managed care gave primary caregivers the power to greenlight treatments. This means that therapists are often dependent on the family doctor for patient referrals -- at least when the family doc isn't the one dispensing the pills. Of those 80 million new antidepressant prescriptions in the '90s, non-psychiatrists wrote 60 million. And if studies of primary caregivers are any indication, most of those diagnoses of depression were made in less than three minutes.


Once we add the multibillion-dollar weight of the pharmaceutical corporations behind some of these changes, we have what Barber calls "the Serotonin Empire": "a formidable testament to the ease and rapidity with which massive sociological change can occasionally be realized."


A counterrevolution by therapists, sociologists and humanists was probably inevitable. This was so not just because of their losses in prestige, income or turf. The mechanistic model of the brain that biological psychiatry is founded on -- block a neurotransmitter here, snip a tumor there -- is seductive but reductive. Almost by definition, it is mindless; it bypasses human consciousness entirely. It offers the illusion of mastery over thought.


Yet no direct link between serotonin and depression has been established. As "Comfortably Numb" notes, all of the new brain pills affect only four neurotransmitters. We're not sure how even those work, and there are more than a hundred others we haven't a clue about. We might as well be trying to map out a chess match when we're not clear how even the pawns move.


Accordingly, many current therapy books -- including "Comfortably Numb" and Dworkin's "Artificial Happiness" -- preach a degree of humility before the resistant complexity of the human mind (and of depression itself). Among other suggestions, they call for a greater acceptance of ordinary unhappiness as a temporary but unavoidable fact of life.


To that end, Eric Wilson's "Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy" is a loopy, feeble blow against the empire. The new book is a heartfelt defense of being bummed out. The chairman of the Wake Forest University English department, Wilson is Hamlet-mad for sadness. He extols depression the way 19th century aesthetes swooned over tuberculosis because it made them fashionably pale and broody.


Life means pain and death, Wilson repeatedly reminds us, and we must embrace these to find our "sorrowful joy." But most people are too harried and hollow to grasp this, too distracted by happy pills and shopping malls. We've probably never taken the time to walk through "autumn's multihued lustrousness ... with hearts irreparably ripped." Nor have we "stared for an hour at the sparrow lying stiff on the soiled snow."


No, never have. But they're at the top of my to-do list: ripped heart, dead sparrow.
In attacking our American way of happiness, Wilson is not suggesting we wallow in misery. There are severely depressed people out there; they need medical help. It is the enforced cheerfulness of contemporary consumerism that bugs Wilson, the great mass of "paper-thin minds" that can't appreciate the "luminous gloom."


Wilson actually makes sense on the irritations of our jollied-up culture or the need for normal grief. Lesley Hazleton made the same arguments, pre-Prozac, in 1984's "The Right to Feel Bad." Barber and Dworkin, among others, also cite our self-absorption, isolation and materialism as contributing factors. Americans gulp down chemical boosters whenever things aren't perfect. If that sounds harsh, consider that we report suffering from mental disorders at three times the rate of other developed countries.


With Wilson, the luminous gloom is mostly swamp gas. He admits he doesn't "do" happiness; melancholy is his true nature. So it's not really his moral or aesthetic choice, is it? Despite his protestations to the contrary, Wilson sounds like a goth kid sneering at the popular students: My moodiness makes me profound. I appreciate Herman Melville and you don't.


It's precisely this mystique of depression, its long association with soulful introspection and creative genius, that Peter Kramer took apart in "Against Depression." Kramer wanted to scrape away the "heroic melancholy" of depression to look at it face-on as a real disease. Depression acts like a multisystem illness; it damages the brain, it ages people.


Yet by the time he wrote "Against Depression" in 2005, Kramer's impassioned call for treating mood disorders as diseases -- treating them with antidepressants and therapy -- had more than swept the field. Or at least the antidepressant part had. Zoloft's American sales that year, $3.1 billion, exceeded those of Tide detergent.


Americans, it seems, no longer need convincing that depression is biochemically caused or treatable. We like quick fixes. We like drugs.


So we were more than receptive when depression was redefined during the '80s and '90s. Mercifully, as one of Tony Soprano's henchmen explained, depression has lost some of its "stigmata" -- it's just a chemical imbalance now. But this also made depression more accessible. The pivotal point came in 1980 with the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the DSM-III. Dr. Robert Spitzer of Columbia University led the expanded revision of the reference work, and in order to sidestep the escalating turf war between psychiatrists and physicians for control of mental healthcare, he chose a "theory-neutral" term.


What had previously been labeled "diseases" or "reactions" were now called "disorders."
A neurosis by any other name should feel as bad. But, Barber says, consider "social anxiety disorder" (i.e., shyness -- one of the many common conditions for which SSRIs are now prescribed): If it were called social anxiety disease -- with the herpeslike implication of infection -- how many of us would chat about it at parties?


One unintended consequence of defining depression downward has been an inability to distinguish -- with any accuracy -- severe depression from garden-variety glumness. Drug companies and doctors started a cascade, a blurring of categories between depression and anxiety, anger, laziness or low self-esteem. Treating them represented a huge market expansion into "lifestyle issues." As a result, millions of people have been prescribed pills -- that is, treated as if they were ill -- when they were just feeling, well, sad.


In "Artificial Happiness," Ronald Dworkin (not to be confused with the legal scholar) takes a wide-ranging, thoughtful view of this history. An anesthesiologist, a political philosopher and a traditionalist, Dworkin sees these changes as "ideological," representing a turning away from organized religion as a spiritual comfort. The pharmaceutical companies are just an easy target, he contends; they didn't prompt our pursuit of convenient happiness.


Maybe so, but in "Comfortably Numb" and "Let Them Eat Prozac," Big Pharma still has a lot to answer for. For starters, the drugs aren't even that effective: In treating mild depression, they're no better than placebos. Their list of possible side effects now begins with sexual dysfunction and extends to anxiety, agitation, nightmares and suicidal feelings -- the very problems they're supposed to resolve.


Yet almost every major company is being investigated criminally or civilly for allegedly trying to promote their drugs beyond their approved uses. Drugmakers like GlaxoSmithKline (makers of Paxil) cynically turned 9/11 into a sweet marketing opportunity -- their ads blossomed after the attacks. Even with all their profits, the companies are not bothering to research new wonder drugs; they're just milking the cash cows they have. Consequently, the market has turned especially competitive and nasty: The companies have helped turn the FDA into a toothless tiger, and they pay doctors to belittle rival products in medical journals.


So much for federal oversight or scientific rigor. Not surprisingly, Big Pharma has joined Big Oil as one of the most reviled industries on the planet. But as several of these books also make clear, there's plenty of blame to dole out. In my experience, the Serotonin Empire continues to expand for a simple reason: Try getting your company's health insurance to cover the expense of counseling. Odds are, it won't. But it'll pay for pills.


In "Comfortably Numb," Barber brings a street-smart perspective to all this: He worked for years with homeless psychotics in New York -- like the schizophrenic Irishwoman who thinks there is a tracking device implanted in her vagina. Accordingly, "Comfortably Numb" has a degree of sardonic anger powering its torrent of data and case studies: The psychotics he used to handle aren't benefiting much from the wonder drugs. It's the neurotics, Barber notes, who pay cash.


In the second half of "Comfortably Numb," Barber offers something several of the other books don't: practical, therapeutic alternatives to antidepressants, notably cognitive behavioral therapy. CBT has repeatedly been shown to be as effective as drugs in managing mild to moderate depression. It seems there is something to be said after all for psychotherapy's strengths, for narrative and context and conscious reform.


The drawback of CBT is that it requires time and work from a patient. And for the healthcare industry, there is little to sell beyond the current volumes that explain CBT techniques. Where's the profit?


None of the therapy authors mentioned here is opposed to antidepressants per se. They recognize that SSRIs can work. And at this date, turning back the wave of antidepressants may not be possible. In "The Loss of Sadness," Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield hope that the DSM-V, set for release in 2012, will start a tidal shift by redefining depression more rigorously. It's a slender hope.


But better informing patients about what they're getting into certainly is possible, as well as combining antidepressants with counseling, one of the most effective options. Barber recognizes that changing our drug therapy culture will require more than just another behavioral repair kit like CBT. At the least, it will involve refiguring healthcare coverage and government policies.
In the '30s, bandleader Ted Lewis used to sing out, "Is everybody happy?" Actually, we never were. We probably never will be. But with care and effort and counseling -- and when needed, with properly managed drug therapy -- many of us can learn to live with that.


-- By Jerome Weeks

The road back from depression



In the final extract from her book, author Sally Brampton explains how, after her devastating illness, she pieced her life together again

Tom drove me to the mental hospital. I don’t mean that he drove me via love to madness, although part of that is true, but that he put me in his car and took me there for my second stay. I asked him to sit with me at home while I waited for a vacant room – not as easy to find as it sounds. Even private psychiatric units are woefully oversubscribed, which says much about the mental health of this nation.

A word about Tom here. We were still seeing each other, although our relationship was erratic and more highly charged than was comfortable, or even tolerable. He had separated from his partner, who had, some months before, discovered our affair and was justifiably furious, even though, as she herself admitted, their relationship had been dead for years.


We loved and fought, were kind to and hurt each other, came together and fell apart. We could not be together, and we could not stay away from each other. I don’t mean that in any great romantic sense. It was not romantic. It was ugly and bruising, and underneath it all was the recognition that we loved each other and recognised some unswerving connection, but could not find a way to manage it. There was little bliss. It was, in its own particular way, hell.


As we waited for a hospital room, we lay on my bed and Tom read to me from On Liberty, by John Stuart Mill – a passion of his at the time. As a teenager, inflamed by social inequities and the rights of women, I, too, had loved Mill, so it seemed right and familiar that Tom should be reading his words to me. I remember the irony of listening to Tom read about liberty as I waited for a call from the loony bin.


This time, rather than being treated in a psychiatric unit in a general hospital, I was admitted to a dedicated mental hospital. The first evening, Molly came to visit me wearing her school uniform. That innocent grey pinafore and red and white gingham shirt looked so out of place under the harsh fluorescent strip lights of the sad, green hospital corridors that, had I had the energy and strength, I would have bundled her up and scooped her right out of the door.


Instead, I diverted both of us by taking her down to the canteen to have supper, which was served at six o’clock.


I was hoping for pizza or burger and chips, but there was not much she wanted to eat, except white bread rolls and butter. The catering staff seemed particularly taken with Quorn, that chalky substitute for meat. There was curried Quorn, Quorn sausages and Quorn casserole, and I remember wondering if there was some weird connection between meat substitutes and mental illness.


Across the room, which was decorated in bright chintz, with white-painted bamboo furniture, like some cheap gastropub, a table of people discussed me in that obtrusive way people have when they are trying to be discreet. As I buttered Molly’s rolls, I was tempted to stop and write my diagnosis, severe clinical depression, in large black letters on a paper napkin and attach it to my forehead, together with a list of my medication.


Later, after Molly had gone, a doctor gave me a routine physical checkup. He asked me why I was in hospital.


“I have severe depression.” “And why do you think that is?” I enjoy it? “I have no idea.”
I was slightly taken aback. It is not usual for medical doctors to embark on psychiatric questions, even in a mental hospital. “You must have some.” I mumbled about a marriage breakdown. His face was close and he was checking my heartbeat with a stethoscope at the time. He said: “Do you hate men?”


At first, I thought I had misheard him, so I asked him to repeat himself. He came out with the same trite phrase. I was so angry, I was tempted to hit him, but I knew the consequences for my mental-health record. “Don’t be a f***ing idiot,” I said, and burst into tears. Wearing a smug expression, he tucked his stethoscope back into his pocket.


My mother was there at the time, the only time she was ever present when I was in hospital. “Don’t upset yourself,” she pleaded.


“I am not upsetting myself,” I said, sobbing. “I am being upset by somebody else.”


My mother left soon after. Later, I wondered if the doctor was actually a patient who had nicked a stethoscope.


THE POINT OF RETURN
In the months immediately following my suicide attempt, I felt that it was over. I had given up. Nobody and nothing could help me. No drug, no shrink, no hospital, no therapist, no lover, no friend. Not even death could help me. I was on my own and the only way through that I could see was to take one halting step at a time. And so it began, the long, slow and painful road to recovery.


It took three years. Curiously, I see suicide as the turning point, although it didn’t feel like it at the time. By giving up on any expectation that anyone could help me, I took responsibility for my illness and began to look for ways to help myself. Here are some of the things that I did. I offer them up in the hope that they might help somebody else.


I took up yoga, which helped me to understand that comparing myself to others is pointless. They can do what I cannot, and I can do what they cannot, because we are all different and unique. I cannot, for example, squat or sit back on my heels – at least, not yet – but I can sit crosslegged or in the lotus position with relative ease.


I walked for at least half an hour a day. I tried not to isolate myself and began to see my friends, but only for a cup of tea or a quiet meal. I particularly saw my friends who are depressives, both because it was soothing to be among other people who understood and also because I learnt that in helping other people, I began to help myself.


I avoided any social situation that put me under pressure to perform, dress up or pretend that I was fully functional.


I watched old movies and comedies and avoided news and current-affairs programmes, highly charged, emotional drama, or anything that might trigger distress.


I understood that I had an illness, not a weakness.


I stopped feeling ashamed. It was not easy. But in among the bad times, there were also moments when I felt, if not hope, then at least the glimmerings of possibility. I began to believe that, one day, I might be well again and would reinhabit the person I call myself. But, first, I had to understand myself. I had to learn how to live again, just as somebody with a physical illness might have to learn how to walk again.


I embarked on a search for a garden, having finally put my flat on the market and sold it. I knew a garden was essential to my recovery, and, eventually, I found it: a tangle of weed and bramble on which I could impose some order, while still respecting the structure and the life that existed deep within it.


It is not a huge garden, although it is big by London standards, but it does have a curiously peaceful charm and atmosphere. I sometimes think that is because it was designed, then planted, with such hope. Perhaps that is fanciful, but I did once say to a neurologist, as she stood in my garden, that it had played a huge part in my recovery from depression. “Yes,” she said. “I can see that.”


Every story deserves a happy ending. Here is mine. Tom and I met again, three years after we parted. We had not seen each other at all during those years, but he was never far from my mind – or from my heart. We met in a pub. He bought me a drink – lime and soda. Then he bought me a cup of tea.


“You’re a cheap date these days,” he laughed, but I noticed his hands were shaking. So were mine.


He said: “How’s your love life?” I felt as if I was about 13. Was he asking me as an old friend, or because he wanted to know if I was available? I searched for a right answer; then, because I could find no right answer except the truth, I said: “Nonexistent. We were too much of a hard act to follow. How’s yours?”


He was silent for a while, and then he smiled at me. “The same.”


Two years later, we were married. It is, in its own particular way, bliss.



Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression by Sally Brampton (Bloomsbury £15.99) is published on February 4;


Read previous extracts from Sally's book by clicking on the background links below


Background



Amy Grant: it's the little things ...


Beliefnet's Dena Ross talks with Christian recording artist Amy Grant about, among other things, struggling with depression. Read the entire interview here:



In the book, you talk about battling depression off and on. What do you do to help yourself come out of a slump?


It's so funny what age is doing. I never thought getting older would be so great. But when it comes to depression, I have experienced less the older I've gotten. And I think part of it is, there are things that I know to look for in myself. I know winter time hits me like a ton of bricks.


My great-uncle told us when were kids, "If you're born into this family, you need to go take a brisk walk every day." He didn't know what endorphins were, but he knew that we battled that downward spiral. If I will make myself get some exercise, that always helps. And then, invest in somebody else. That's not hard when you're part of a family. Even if I'm feeling like a piece of wood, I'll wake up in the morning and I just think, "Somebody's got to put the bacon on. I will feel better about this moment if I do eggs on toast with a little melted cheese for the kids." It takes about four minutes to make breakfast for your children in the morning. You start doing little acts of getting beyond yourself. Sometimes it takes days or weeks. But you just learn there is a process to getting out of a slump.


Tiny little things that you have to do, responsibility that you can't slough off, is good when you battle depression—making lunch for your kids, or having to do laundry because nobody has clean underwear. Rather than grind your teeth over it, go, "Thank God I have got to do this little task that makes me move." And the more that [I'm] used to the rhythms of [my] own life, the more I realize, as bleak as this feels right this minute, it'll pass.

Japanese firm offers "heartache leave" for staff

Reuters reports:

TOKYO (Reuters) - Lovelorn staff at a Japanese marketing company can take paid time off after a bad break-up with a partner, with more "heartache leave" on offer as they get older.

Tokyo-based Hime & Company, which also gives staff paid time off to hit the shops during sales season, says heartache leave allows staff to cry themselves out and return to work refreshed.

"Not everyone needs to take maternity leave but with heartbreak, everyone needs time off, just like when you get sick," CEO Miki Hiradate, whose company of six women markets cosmetics and other goods targeted for women, told Reuters by telephone.

Staff aged 24 years or younger can take one day off per year, while those between 25 and 29 can take two days off and those older can take three days off, the company said.

"Women in their 20s can find their next love quickly, but it's tougher for women in their 30s, and their break-ups tend to be more serious," Hiradate said.

Hime & Company staff can also take two mornings off twice a year as "sales shopping leave", so they can race to stores to hunt for bargains.
"Before, women could take half-days off to go to sales, but you'd have to hide your shopping bags in lockers by the train station," Hiradate said.

"But with paid leave, we don't have to feel guilty about bringing our shopping bags to work, and we can enjoy the best part about sales shopping -- talking about our purchases afterwards."

(Reporting by Chisa Fujioka)

Writing Project Helps Veterans Heal Wounds


Weekend Edition Sunday, January 27, 2008 ·

A writers' workshop for veterans provides a place for healing. The brainchild of award-winning writer Maxine Hong Kingston, the Veterans' Writing Group was founded in 1993. Roughly 30 vets meet every few months to read and discuss their material.

listen here ...

Pollyanna: Spirit of Optimism Born Out of War

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 27, 2008 ·

She was cute, she was cheerful, and she was famous for the creation of "the glad game." But today Pollyanna her name is synonymous with optimism — to a fault.

Politicians and scholars alike attribute "the Pollyanna principle" to people who look on the bright side and hope for the best, no matter what.

Liane Hansen explores the roots of Pollyanna's story — as written by Eleanor Porter in 1913, as brought to life by Hayley Mills in the 1960s Disney movie, and as analyzed by psychologists and economists — to see whether this sweetheart's spirit has any place in real life.

listen here ...

Thursday, January 24, 2008

Unanswered questions surrounding the death of Heath Ledger ...

Therese Borchard quotes William Styron in a recent Beyond Blue posting:

The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it. To the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer.

Read Therese's complete blog entry here ...

Wednesday, January 23, 2008

"The Future" by Wesley McNair

From The Writer's Almanac:

The Future

On the afternoon talk shows of America
the guests have suffered life's sorrows
long enough. All they require now is the opportunity for closure,
to put the whole thing behind them
and get on with their lives. That their lives,
in fact, are getting on with them even
as they announce their requirement
is written on the faces of the younger ones
wrinkling their brows, and the skin
of their elders collecting just under their
set chins. It's not easy to escape the past,
but who wouldn't want to live in a future
where the worst has already happened
and Americans can finally relax after daring
to demand a different way? For the rest of us,
the future, barring variations, turns out
to be not so different from the present
where we have always lived—the same
struggle of wishes and losses, and hope,
that old lieutenant, picking us up
every so often to dust us off and adjust
our helmets. Adjustment, for that matter,
may be the one lesson hope has to give,
serving us best when we begin to find
what we didn't know we wanted in what
the future brings. Nobody would have asked
for the ice storm that takes down trees
and knocks the power out, leaving nothing
but two buckets of snow melting
on the wood stove and candlelight so weak,
the old man sitting at the kitchen table
can hardly see to play cards. Yet how else
but by the old woman's laughter
when he mistakes a jack for a queen
would he look at her face in the half-light as if
for the first time while the kitchen around them
and the very cards he holds in his hands
disappear? In the deep moment of his looking
and her looking back, there is no future,
only right now, all, anyway, each one of us
has ever had, and all the two of them,
sitting together in the dark among the cracked
notes of the snow thawing beside them
on the stove, right now will ever need.

"The Future" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark.

Monday, January 21, 2008

Tonight ...on PBS 8 ...


This is NOT cheerful viewing ..... but it's sure putting the occasional frustrations with my psychiatrist's office staff in perspective ....

From The Storied Mind: Acting, Depression and Work

I am so tickled that I've gotten to know John a little via email ... he's the ginchiest. I wrote a 4,000 page comment to this post of his ... but you'll have to search that out; I won't take up the space here ...

I was reading Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Blonde, about the life of Marilyn Monroe, and was stopped by a line spoken by the character known as the “The Survivor.” Norma, he said, was a natural actor because she didn’t know who she was and so was driven to try to become the character completely. That was acting, the reaching into the fictional being, to become that person totally – to fill an emptiness where most people had a strong sense of self. I’m adding my words here – but getting that thought suddenly helped me understand my own experience with acting as a depressed twenty-something. And that got me thinking about other work I’ve done because every job requires that I play a role. read more here ...

Sunday, January 20, 2008

From the Archives: Hurricane Katrina Victims' Mental Health Worsens

Morning Edition, November 1, 2007 · A new report on the mental health of Hurricane Katrina victims shows patterns in the Gulf Coast that are contrary to post traumatic stress disorder usually seen after major disasters. The mental health of Hurricane Katrina victims is worsening with the drawn out recovery time.

Listen to the story here ...

The Bryant Park Project, November 19, 2007 · A new study finds that Hurricane Katrina victims are suffering increased emotional problems like depression, PTSD and suicidal thoughts.


From the Archives: Post-Katrina Mental Health: What Can Be Done?

All Things Considered, August 8, 2007 · What is the source of the dysfunction in the FEMA trailer parks, and what can possibly be done to help? In the second part of the Scenic Trails story, reporter Alix Spiegel talks to government officials, mental health counselors, church volunteers and others.

Listen to the story here ...

From the Archives: Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park

All Things Considered, August 8, 2007 · The first morning of my visit to Scenic Trails, I was walking the path between some trailers when I bumped into a man named Tim Szepek. He was young, tall, and solidly good-looking. I asked if I could speak to him for a moment and he agreed. We found a spot of shade beneath a tree, and I started with what I considered a casual warm-up.

"What's it like to live around here?" I asked.


"Well," he replied, "I'll be honest."


"Ain't a day goes by when I don't think about killing myself."


And so began my time in Scenic Trails, a FEMA trailer park deep in the Mississippi woods where 100 families have lived in near isolation for close to two years.


Though Szepek was the first resident to tell me he wanted to commit suicide, he certainly wasn't the last. The day I spoke with him, three other residents confided the same.


The second person was Stephanie Sigur, a 28-year-old mother of two. She was sitting in front of her trailer at a picnic table, her daughter on her lap, when she explained that if it weren't a sin, she would have blown her brains out months ago.


"I know it's a bad thing to say because I'm a parent," she told me as her toddler played with her hair, "but I can't live like this no more."


Stephanie Sigur and Tim Szepek aren't alone. According to a recent study of 92 different Katrina FEMA parks published in the Annals of Emergency Medicine, suicide attempts in Louisiana and Mississippi's parks are 79 times higher than the national average. Major depression is seven times the national rate.


When I first read those numbers, I found them hard to believe. But after three days at Scenic Trails, they made a lot more sense.


The residents there, in essence, are trapped. It is no longer possible for them to live outside the trailer parks. Prior to Katrina, most of the people who now live in the parks were renters.


Along the Mississippi coast, a family of four could rent a two- or three-bedroom apartment or small home for around $500 a month. But when the storm wiped the Mississippi coast clean, it took out all the housing infrastructure that supported these people. Most of them are minimum-wage workers who live paycheck to paycheck. Today, a two- or three-bedroom apartment in Hancock County, where Scenic Trails is located, costs $800, $900, even $1,000 a month. This is an impossible amount of money for the people who live in the parks, and there is no immediate end in sight. FEMA says it would like to close the parks, but state and federal government plans to rebuild low-income housing for Mississippi coast residents have yet to break ground. Housing experts says it will probably take years to produce enough low-cost housing to move people out of the parks.


And so they are stuck. And the place they are stuck is not the kind of place you would want to spend an extended amount of time. For two years, many have lived in travel trailers intended for weekend use. Families of four housed in a space the size of most people's living rooms.


Worse, as time wears on, the communities around them seem to be falling into a kind of madness. At Scenic Trails, almost everyone at the camp has been burglarized at least once. Meth and cocaine addiction is rampant, and residents seem to be turning against one another.


Recently, the park has seen a rash of animal mutilations. One resident told me that her cat had come home bleeding — a long, thin razor cut along its leg. Another resident said his dog's throat had been cut, and several people reported that someone in the camp had been feeding anti-freeze to dogs.


No one seemed to have a particular suspect in mind. There was no specific theory of why. That was just the way things went at the camp nowadays. With no way to leave, people were angry and frustrated, and so they act out.


On the animals. On each other. On themselves.

From the Archives: Katrina Overwhelms Mental Health System

Katrina Overwhelms Mental Health System
by Alix Spiegel

Listen Now [7 min 46 sec]

Morning Edition, January 24, 2006 · The mental health system in Louisiana was never in great shape. But after Hurricane Katrina, demands for mental health services throughout the state have increased sharply and people in crisis are not getting care.


Stuck and Suicidal in a Post-Katrina Trailer Park

NPR reported back in August ...

This I Believe: Learning to Find the Silver Lining

Weekend Edition Sunday, January 20, 2008 ·

I'm 57. Divorced after 28 years of marriage, I no longer have a house. I own very little, make a marginal living and I lost my youngest child to suicide when he was 21. At my core I am grateful for it all — even my son's death. It gave me the lens through which to see everything.

I believe in a silver lining.

I will forever carry my son with me. How can a mother not? This is the only choice I had: I could either carry him as a bag of rocks or I could live a life celebrating him. Now let me be honest here: I wailed for months before I figured out how to trade the rocks for the joy, and found the silver lining thing. I'm a people person, but Arrick was really a people person. He told me once, "I talk to everyone I want to talk to."

"Everyone?" I asked incredulously.

"Well, yeah, I might miss someone I need to know."

And now, five years later, I've embraced my son's philosophy.

My daughter on the other hand, is more cautious — she shushes me when she sees I am about to say hello to a strange woman by the subway stop. "You can't do that, Mom," she says half laughing, knowing that I now see every single encounter as filled with possibilities that can make a difference in my life; that I am more eager than ever to connect with others.

Waiting for the train, I hear strains of an Ornette Coleman tune. I smile, and drop a precious $5 bill into the open case. My Arrick played the saxophone. I wish I had his saxophone's soft leather traveling bag with me, so I could give it to this man in case he someday finds himself on the way to a non-street gig. I tell him that. He smiles.

Arrick couldn't figure out how to make his way, how to live out the rest of his life. I believe he wanted to. When I call up that beautiful face and those elegant cocoa-brown fingers running along the sax's keys, I am always convinced of it. The youngest of three, Arrick was the smartest, the funniest, and we all say so.

He was also the darkest, but no one ever saw him as suicide dark. The why of these choices is often not clear — actually downright murky. I still don't know what brought him to suicide. What is clear, however, is that my son continues: He continues to be part of my story, the family's story and every day now, I'm still making connections on his behalf.

And so I smile at the checker in the grocery store, discuss architecture with the homeless guy who reads every bad-weather day in the library. I tell the woman my daughter thinks I shouldn't speak to that I love her fuchsia hat with the funky feathers, and I thank the saxophone player for the fine Coleman on a subway platform in wintry New York City.

Arrick's death made me sit up and pay attention. I lingered on the edges before, playing it safe, but I'm in the game now. Arrick showed me the silver lining and I'm showing it to everyone I meet.

Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and artist. Her poetry, essays and short fiction have appeared in publications including Utne Reader, Hip Mama, Bangor Metro, GQ Italy and Beloit Poetry Journal. A native of Boston, Jakimides lives in Bangor, Maine.

Independently produced for Weekend Edition Sunday by Jay Allison and Dan Gediman with John Gregory and Viki Merrick.

Friday, January 18, 2008

Not Depressed, Just British!


A new take on mental health
January / February 2005 Staff Living, Lightly

George Farthing, an expatriate British man living in America, was diagnosed as clinically depressed, tanked up on antidepressants, and scheduled for a controversial shock therapy when doctors realized he wasn't depressed at all, he was just British!


Farthing, a man whose characteristic pessimism and gloomy perspective were interpreted as serious clinical depression, was led on a nightmare journey through the American psychiatric system. Doctors described Farthing as suffering from pervasive negative anticipation: a belief that everything will turn out for the worst, whether it's trains arriving late, England's chances of winning any national sports events, or his own prospects of getting ahead in life. The doctors reported that the satisfaction he seemed to get from his pessimism was particularly pathological.
'They put me on everything -- lithium, Prozac, St. John's wort,' Farthing says. 'They even told me to sit in front of a big light for half an hour a day or I'd become suicidal. I kept telling them this was all pointless, and they said that was exactly the sort of attitude that got me here in the first place.'


Dr. Isaac Horney, a psychotherapist, explored Farthing's family history and couldn't believe his ears. Farthing spoke of growing up in a gray little town where it rained every day, of treeless streets lined with identical houses, and of passionately backing a football team that never won. Although Farthing had six months of therapy, he mainly wanted to talk about the weather. 'I felt he wasn't responding to therapy at all,' says Horney, who recommended electroconvulsive therapy.


Farthing takes up the story: 'Hopeless case? I was all strapped down on the table, and they were about to put the rubber bit in my mouth when the psychiatric nurse picked up on my accent and said, 'Oh my God, I think we're making a terrible mistake!'' Identifying Farthing as British changed the diagnosis of clinical depression to rather quaint and charming. He was immediately discharged from the hospital with a selection of brightly colored leaflets and an I Love New York T-shirt.


A satirical piece reprinted from Living Lightly (Summer 2004), a quarterly magazine that covers people and organizations creating a positive and sustainable future. Subscriptions: $17.50/yr. (4 issues) from Positive News Publishing Ltd., Bicton Enterprise Centre, Clun, Shropshire, SY78NF, UK; http://www.positivenews.org.uk/.

Thursday, January 17, 2008

Being Mindful of Mindfulness ...

No sooner had I chatted with Scott about mindfulness yesterday (we're working our way through our "text," ("The Mindful Way Through Depression" -- Chapter Two: The Healing Power of Awareness if you're following along...) ... when the ever-wonderful Therese posted this on Beyond Blue:

Today is the first time in over six months that I woke up with that horrible knot in my stomach--the kind that, I suspect, a priest or sister might feel after robbing a bank. It's like guilt in that I'm convinced it's the result of a recent action, something bad I did. Yet, after searching my conscience, I fail to arrive at any major crime or sin (though there are plenty of little ones).

Early in my recovery I would take a sedative (or ten) on mornings like these, because a tiny seed of agitation was enough to turn and twist my thoughts into layers and layers of distortions, totally disabling me. Before long I'd be shaking nervously, unable to drive my car or load the dishwasher without holding onto something for balance.

Now I try to catch the anxiety in its birth, before it persuades my mind, body, and spirit to collaborate with it. I remember what positive psychologists like Dan Baker and Martin Seligman and neuroscientists like Joseph LeDoux say about a human being's "fear system," generated by that delinquent cluster of brain tissue called the amygdala, which sends messages of panic from my left toenail to my right eyebrow.

I put both index fingers into my ears and shout, "Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire." And I wait for the more nuanced, intellectual part of my brain to help me sort out the issue.

So that's what I'm doing right now. Having a conversation with the Harvard-educated part of my brain, which is assisting me in analyzing what is triggering such angst, and which instruments in my recovery toolbox I need to pull out in order to whack the sucker over the top of the head so he doesn't start pulling me into that deep, dark abyss.

Which is mindfulness. And so here I am, being mindful. Mindful of when the universe sends me "reminders" of things. Mindful of how wonderful it is to connect with a good therapist, or other people with my struggles as they work it out and share their efforts over the internet. Mindful of how it seems almost impossible to take a photo of a panda that is NOT ricidulously cute. And mindful of how much easier it is to battle our demons when someone makes us smile at them.

You can read Therese's complete posting here:

Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Speaking of "Must Not Think Too Much" ....




One of the most horrifying medical treatments of the 20th century was carried out not clandestinely, but with the approval of the medical establishment, the media and the public. Known as the transorbital or "ice pick" lobotomy, the crude and destructive brain-scrambling operation performed on thousands of psychiatric patients between the 1930s and 1960s was touted as a cure for mental illness.


As the riveting hour-long "American Experience" documentary "The Lobotomist" (scheduled to air Jan. 21 at 9 p.m. on WETA and other PBS stations) makes clear, Walter J. Freeman's operation reflected the neurologist's peculiar combination of zealotry, talent, hubris and, as one of his trainees noted, craziness. Sometimes Freeman, who relished putting on a show, used a carpenter's mallet instead of a surgical hammer during demonstrations of his operation. At other times, he would operate left-handed rather than right-handed. .... read more ...

Nothing Is Lost

Deep in our sub-conscious, we are told
Lie all our memories, lie all the notes
Of all the music we have ever heard
And all the phrases those we loved have spoken,
Sorrows and losses time has since consoled
Family jokes, out-moded anecdotes
Each sentimental souvenir and token
Everything seen, experienced, each word
Addressed to us in infancy, before
Before we could even know or understand
The implications of our wonderland.
There they all are, the legendary lies
The birthday treats, the sights, the sounds, the tears
Forgotten debris of forgotten years
Waiting to be recalled, waiting to rise
Before our world dissolves before our eyes
Waiting for some small, intimate reminder,
A word, a tune, a known familiar scent
An echo from the past when, innocent
We looked upon the present with delight
And doubted not the future would be kinder
And never knew the loneliness of night.


Monday, January 14, 2008

Do Narcissists Get Abortions?

The Last Psychiatrist says: He gets a girl pregnant, and he slips $200 under her door, goes and plays softball, and never speaks to her again. And to this day, the regret wasn't that he was a self-centered asshole who slipped $200 under her door, went and played softball, and never spoke to her again, it's that she aborted the child. ... read more digg story

Friday, January 11, 2008

The Sad Decline of Britney Spears and Our Voyeuristic Complicity ...

Roy Peter Clark of the Poynter Institute writes:"And here, for journalists, is the crux of the problem: While we linger beyond imagination on the dissolution of one young celebrity, mental illness is an almost invisible story in the American news media." The Poynter Institute is a school for journalists, future journalists, and teachers of journalists.

read more | digg story

The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression


Author Darian Leader aims, in his new book The New Black, to disentangle the idea of natural mourning from melancholia or pathological grief, to help “shed light on how we deal - or fail to deal with the losses that are part of human life”.

read more

The Bible is not a guide to optimism. It is a guide to hope.


Patton Dodd is the author of “My Faith So Far: A Story of Conversion and Confusion.” Therese Borchard recently did an interview with him for her blog, Beyond Blue, which you can read here ...


Patton writes:


Optimism doesn't let you acknowledge what's wrong with your life; it encourages you to lie to yourself, and over the course of the years, to live in willful blindness to your real problems. Optimism tells you to be positive no matter the circumstances—which, if you can't keep it up, is a recipe for depression.


Hope lets you be honest about the circumstances, and still urges you to look toward something better. The testimony of the Apostle Paul, Augustine, John Calvin, Flannery O'Connor, Dorothy Day, and many other Christian saints attests to the power of hope. Hope is part of the longstanding tradition of the Christian faith because it allows you to admit the condition of your life, warts and all, and trust that God can recreate that condition. That's the story that we're invited to participate in: God is at work renewing all things. Some of his work is now, and some of it is eventual, but we're called to have hope and join in that work. That—as I learned in those years of spiritual searching—is what it means to believe. Faith is found not in getting your best life now, but in having hope.


Thursday, January 10, 2008

Bookshelf: Head Trips and Evil Genes


Why some people are ruthless monsters and other book reviews.

read more

Wednesday, January 9, 2008

I'd kick Britney off the bi-polar express

(The Mirror's Sue Carroll demonstrates once again that you don't need to know of what you write to get published ...)

The path to self-destruction is not due to an excess of mind-bending drugs, alcohol or general self-indulgence, but in Britney's case, the mental disorder, bipolar.So much sexier and hip than manic depression - as it was called until it became trendy. read more

Quirky Minds: Invasion of the Body Snatchers

In 1993, a man was rushed to the hospital for a stab wound he inflicted on himself. Though he was depressed at the time, the act wasn't intended to end his life; it was to prove to his family that he wouldn't bleed—because he was sure he was already dead.

read more

Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Sometimes We Can't Do What We're Expected to Do


Beyond Blue blogger Therese Borchard says "I was impressed by all the compassion for Britney and others that are caught in the perfect storm of addiction and mental illness on the combox of my post 'Britney: Is Addiction More Acceptable Than Mental Illness?'" read more digg story

For most, there is no crueler day of the calendar year than that of Valentine's Day. While a tiny fraction of the population can look forward to a holiday of wine and roses, poetry and song, the vast majority of us can anticipate a day of nausea and grimacing, trauma and grief. A day in which minutes seem like hours, and hours like days, as we reflect sorrowfully on yesteryear's romantic indignities, today's loneliness, and the unknowable but certain heartbreak that will be visited upon us repeatedly in the years to come.

When cruelty and holidays collide, the weak-willed find solace in self-pity and comfort foods. And now, Despair Inc. is pleased to announce that we've combined BOTH into a radical new offering. Introducing Bittersweets® - The Valentine's Candy for the Rest of Us.


Monday, January 7, 2008

Clinical depression linked to abnormal emotional brain circuits

Aug. 15, 2007
by Jill Sakai
In what may be the first study to use brain imaging to look at the neural circuits involved in emotional control in patients with depression, researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have found that brains of people with clinical depression react very differently than those of healthy people when trying to cope with negative situations.

The study appears in the August 15 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience.


According to the World Health Organization, clinical depression is one of the leading causes of disability and lost productivity in the world. Understanding the root cause of depression, however, has proved difficult.


"It's normal for people to have negative emotions in certain circumstances," says lead study author Tom Johnstone. "One of the features of major depression is not that people have negative reactions to negative situations, it's that they can't pull themselves out of those negative emotional moods. They seem to have a deficit in their ability to be able to regulate their emotions — to come back down to baseline after a negative experience."


To evaluate the role of emotional regulation in depression, psychology and psychiatry researchers from the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and Waisman Center monitored the brain responses of healthy or depressed individuals to a series of images designed to provoke strong negative emotional responses - images such as car accidents and threatening-looking animals.


Participants were asked to consciously work to decrease their emotional responses to some of the negative images, using techniques such as envisioning a more positive outcome than the one implied or by imagining the situation was acted out rather than real.


"We ask them to reframe the content of what they're seeing," rather than divert their attention or distract themselves with unrelated thoughts, Johnstone says. "We hope to engage cognitive areas in re-interpreting the emotional content of a stimulus — to either increase or decrease its impact."


In both healthy and depressed individuals, they found that such efforts increased brain activity in prefrontal cortical areas known to help regulate the emotional centers of the brain, as they expected.


The big difference was seen in the reactions of the emotional centers themselves, including a small almond-shaped structure called the amygdala located deep in the brain.


In nondepressed individuals, high levels of regulatory activity correlated with low activity in the emotional response centers - in effect, the healthy subjects' efforts successfully quelled their emotional responses. In depressed patients, however, high levels of activity in the amygdala and other emotional centers persisted despite intense activity in the regulatory regions.


This finding suggests that healthy people are able to effectively regulate their negative emotions through conscious effort, but that the necessary neural circuits are dysfunctional in many patients with depression, the researchers say.


The difference becomes even more pronounced the harder the patients try.


"Those [healthy] individuals putting more cognitive effort into it are getting a bigger payoff in terms of decreasing activation in these emotional centers," Johnstone explains. "In the depressed individuals, you find the exact opposite relationship - it seems the more effort they put in, the more activation there is in the amygdala."


Though the researchers don't yet know exactly where the differences lie, Johnstone suggests multiple factors may be at work. One possibility is that depressed individuals have a broken link between the brain regions, such that regulatory centers fail to send any dampening signals to emotional centers.


Alternately, he says, depressed patients may fall prey to rumination on negative thoughts. Maybe, he says, "When they try to engage in this regulation they just think more about the emotional content of the images. Perhaps it's quite maladaptive for them -- instead of turning down their emotional responses possibly they turn up their emotional responses."


The results of this study may help identify appropriate treatment methods for people with depression, who represent a diverse patient population, says senior study author Richard Davidson.


Common psychological therapies use mental strategies similar to those used in this study, he says, and although psychotherapy might benefit patients who found conscious efforts effective in the scenarios provided in this study, it could be counterproductive for those patients whose mental efforts increased their emotional responses.


"Our results suggest that there is a subgroup of patients with depression for whom traditional cognitive therapy may be contraindicated," Davidson says. "Other therapeutic interventions may benefit this subgroup more than cognitive therapy, though this remains to be studied in future research."


Identifying the involvement of emotional brain circuits may also help focus the development of new treatment strategies for depression and other psychiatric disorders. "Emotional regulation underlies many psychiatric disorders, not only depression," Johnstone says.


Long term, he says, "If we understand where the brain circuits are that are important and how they are involved in regulating emotion, then we can target them with different types of therapies."


Other authors on the study include Carien van Reekum, Heather Urry, and Ned Kalin. The work was funded by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and Wyeth-Ayerst Pharmaceuticals.


© 2007 Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

Ferguson Speaks From The Heart

Craig Ferguson speaks on his past problems as an alcoholic and why he will not ridicule Britney Spears and her shaved head crisis. Must watch!

read more | digg story

15 Can’t-Miss Ways to Declutter Your Mind

You can declutter your mind with simple actions, things we’ve discussed here before, but things that are almost guaranteed to have a positive effect. Little things that can make a big difference, especially when used in combination. Choose a few to try out, and see if they work for you.

read more | digg story

Sunday, January 6, 2008

A new plague facing women

Three graphic new books about depression by women writers will cast new light on Britain's hidden epidemic. Stephanie Merritt, herself a sufferer, recalls her own experience and argues for greater openness about a subject that still remains largely taboo

read more | digg story

Saturday, January 5, 2008

Make that 34 ...

The things you find while surfing, much too late, on a Saturday night.

Found this amazing poem here: http://33namesofgrace.blogspot.com/2005/12/33-names-of-grace.html

This is WONDERFUL. New Year's Assignment for the Universe - everyone try to write their own, personal version of this.

33 Names of Grace

1.Two women in front of the mantle
weeping public promises in a crowded room.

2.The son in your arms
not born of your body.

3.The son in your arms
not expected from your body.

4.The second marriage.

5.The first warm breeze.

6.The cat on your chest at 5 AM,
even though she is just cold.

7.The words that wait until you are ready.

8. The God who waits until you are ready.

9.Colombian coffee with cream.

10.The notes of the song he wooed you with
Rising from the basement at midnight.

11.Ancient words, known rote
Suddenly shocking.

12.The green of northern lights.

13.The stars reflected in water.

14.Carrying a canoe on your shoulders
And tossing it into the next lake, alone.

15.A tent that doesn’t leak.

16.A car that always starts.

17.The one who exclaims your beauty at 6 AM.

18.The base of the mountain peak, looking up.

19.The noon breeze in the desert.

20.The thimble of cardamom coffee
in a Bedouin woman’s tent at sunset.

21.Hot tea with fresh mint and sugar.

22.The fountain pen that works on the first try.

23.The infant girl, each hair an exclamation point.

24.The old woman in a rocking chair,
white hair brushed back in soft waves.

25.A child reaching into the baptismal font
To soak his own head with water.

26.The blue moonlight on snow.

27.A new calendar.

28.Raspberries from the backyard.

29.The year after your dog
Has reached her breed’s lifespan.

30.A ring not binding.

31.A fresh mango.

32.The first time you taste cilantro,
or ginger.

33.The heavy heartbeat of wings lifting.

Waiting ...

"I hope you'll hear what I'm about to tell you. I hope you'll hear it
all the way down to your toes. When you're waiting, you're not doing
nothing. You're doing the most important something there is. You're
allowing your soul to grow up. If you can't be still and wait, you can't
become what God created you to be."

"When the Heart Waits" by Sue Monk Kidd


~*~ Topic of the Week - Learning to Wait~*~

I received an email this week from a woman who was anxiously waiting to hear about whether or not she was chosen for a job that felt like the perfect fit for her soul. Like so many job searches that seem to take forever, this poor woman had been waiting for two months. Although she had been warned that the process would take a while, it felt frustrating and scary. She asked for my help in learning to be patient.

Her email hit home for me since I've done a lot of waiting this year -- waiting for my husband Michael to get better, waiting for our new house to be completed, waiting to unpack boxes and spread my wings so I can feel a bit normal again. As I wrote many years ago in Life Makeovers, for months I've felt like a giant hold button has been pressed on my life and I've been left with no choice but to hang on :).

I've never been a big fan of waiting. Like many of us, I usually want everything yesterday. And yet, as I look back over my life (and over the last year, especially), the times I've spent waiting have been some of the most meaningful and insightful. Usually a waiting period has signaled a
turning point -- a period of soul growth that leads to something far better. It's during these times of transition that I've settled more deeply into myself, connecting to a strength of character that I hadn't known existed.

Although waiting can feel like agony, it may be exactly what you need to do to prepare for the next stage of your life. Think of it as a time to connect with your inner wisdom on a whole new level -- an opportunity to get to know yourself even better. Here are a few things you can do to
make the waiting period easier:

~*~ Spend more time journaling to deepen your connection to yourself.
~*~ Invest in your physical health by moving your body to release any pent-up anxiety.
~*~ Express your feelings. Pound pillows, yell and scream, or allow yourself a good, healing cry.
~*~ Listen to inspirational music or catch up on your favorite movies when you need a break.
~*~ Read a good self-help book or listen to personal development audio programs to inspire your growth.
~*~ Spend regular time with a friend who makes you laugh.

Do what you can to embrace the discomfort, knowing that if you use this time wisely, you will strengthen your personal power, the kind of power that no outside person or event can ever give you. And remember, although waiting is a personal journey, there's no need to wait in isolation. Share your fears, concerns, frustrations and hopes for the future with trusted loved ones who can support you in your waiting. By doing this, you'll experience another benefit of waiting -- a deeper connection to those you love.

Years ago, when I wrote about a period of waiting that felt hard, a reader named Roberta sent me a copy of Sue Monk Kidd's book "When the Heart Waits." It's one of those little gems that I keep with me for times like this. If you need a little spiritual sustenance while you wait, I encourage you to check it out. And also, remember this: While you wait, the world is conspiring in your favor . . .


~*~ Take Action Challenge ~*~

Embrace your time of waiting. If there's an area of your life that feels like it's on hold, consciously sit with the waiting this week. Don't try to change things, push the flow or control the circumstances. Instead, sit quietly and be open to the messages from within. Use this time to relax and rest. When your life starts to move forward, you'll be glad you did.

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