Posts for 'Other' Category

The word "depression" comes from the Latin word, "deprimere", meaning to press down or depress. Anyone who has ever suffered from depression recognizes the connection between the physical feeling of being pressed down and the emotional and spiritual sensation of feeling depleted of energy for living.
Carroll College students who have experienced depression describe it in vivid terms such as "being in a deep, dark pit", "feeling hopeless about life", "total apathy for living", and "absolutely no enjoyment in life anymore". The bad news about depression is that it impacts every aspect of an individual's life: social, physical, spiritual, emotional, and cognitive changes occur as it becomes more and more difficult to cope. The good news about depression is that it is very, very treatable.The 1990's earned the sobriquet "Decade of the Brain" due to the vast amount of research focusing on the impact of amino acids on our emotional health. Seratonin, endorphins, and dopamine have become familiar terms as medical scientists link our mental health to the biochemistry of our brains. As a result, antidepressant medications have become more and more effective in treating depression.

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Researchers from Michigan University discovered that Russians, who often plunge into a reverie and focus on gloomy thoughts and memories, are nevertheless less prone to depression than Americans.
      
 Scientists inquired several tens of American and Russian students about their feelings and emotions. The study revealed that Russians oftener focused on negative things.

But they distanced themselves from these emotions. Americans seem to sink in their negative experience, thus promoting depression. During tests students were asked to remember and analyze.

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The annual Swannanoa Gathering is an ideal locale for interviewing the Twilite Broadcasters. Here, on the campus of Warren Wilson College, Adam Tanner and Mark Jackson are surrounded by fellow musicians obsessed with the myriad forms of archaic Americana. A killer multi-instrumentalist and mainstay on the Western North Carolina folk scene, Tanner is scheduled to play several times during the week-long, workshop-intensive exploration of traditional song and fiddle.Swannanoa Valley is gorgeous tonight.

For now, the suffocating heat has relented. After meeting-up outside Morris Pavilion we grab beers from Highland Brewing’s makeshift tent and carve out turf near the fiddle circle, from which a serene drone permeates the atmosphere.

The Weaverville duo is beside itself. “Did you just see Charlie Louvin perform?” they both ask, minds clearly blown. A member of the music staff at this year’s Gathering, Louvin is one of their idols. The Louvin Brothers, Charlie and Ira, helped pioneer the close-harmony/brother-duets tradition the Twilite Broadcasters now mine. Sandwiched between the “hillbilly” craze of.

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Having depression may nearly double the risk of developing dementia later in life,” reported BBC news. It said that a 17-year study of nearly 1,000 elderly people, found that 22% of those who were depressed at the start went on to develop dementia, compared with 17% of those who were not depressed.

This is a well-designed study and was accurately reported by the BBC. It has several strengths and adds to the evidence of a link between the two conditions. However, as the researchers say, this does not necessarily mean that depression causes dementia and the reason for the association between the two conditions is still unclear.

It is unknown if depression is a risk factor for dementia, whether it is an early sign of cognitive decline or if certain changes in the brain are associated with both conditions. Also, certain lifestyle factors not measured by this study, such as poor diet, lack of physical activity and social interaction, may increase the risk of both depression and dementia.

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Giving teenagers half an hour of extra sleep before school each day dramatically improves their behaviour, a study has found. Youngsters who had 30 minutes more shut-eye were more alert and in a better mood in class, were less likely to be late for lessons and even ate healthier breakfasts.

'The results were stunning. There's no other word to use,' said Patricia Moss, the head of the Rhode Island boarding school where the research took place. 'We didn't think we'd get that much bang for the buck.'Researchers say even 30 minutes can make a big difference because teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn - when they typically need to get up for school.

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 We all have our Anxiety Closets, filled with fears: global nuclear warfare, raging inflation, clowns. Lately, another fear has arisen: depression. We're not talking about the psychologically crippling condition, but the economically crippling one. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman has been the most recent economist to sound a warning about the possibility of a depression.

Could we have a depression? Well, sure. What should you do about it? It depends on how worried you are Depressions are, technically, extremely severe business contractions. Before the Great Depression, all business downturns were called depressions. Economists started using the term "recession" after the Great Depression, because they didn't want to terrify the public, already scarred from the Big One.

The hallmarks of a depression are abnormally high unemployment, numerous bank failures and massive bankruptcies. The term "depression" also carries the connotation of deflation — that is, a sharp decline in prices. Certainly, housing and stock prices have been marked down sharply in the past two years.

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According to one of the largest combined studies of its kind in Australia, conducted in collaboration with the University of New England and Bond University and released yesterday, found all patients had some level of mood alteration following a cancer diagnosis, but for one in five patients it progressed to serious depression. The research tracked more than 1000 patients who had undergone radiation therapy over the past decade and compared their emotional experiences with the support provided by their GPs.

Michelle Baker, 49, is in remission for secondary breast cancer in her lungs, ribs and spine, but is still battling depression developed after her diagnosis in 2006. The mother of two, whose sister and father died as a result of cancer, first encountered the disease with a primary breast cancer diagnosis in 1991.

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A new study has revealed that the strain of genetically defective mice is a useful animal model for laboratory studies that could be useful for understanding human depression.A unique strain of laboratory mice could have behavioural, hormonal, and neurochemical characteristics that are similar to those of human patients with drug-resistant forms of depression.

"A mouse can't tell us if it is feeling depressed, so we used a number of different kinds of tests-including some new ones that we developed-to gauge behavioral and hormonal changes, or phenotypes, of a type of depression that, in humans, does not respond well to some antidepressant drugs," said Bernhard Luscher, professor of biology at Penn State.

"These indicators include reduced exploration of novel or otherwise aversive environments, failure to escape from a highly stressful situation, and reduced pleasure-seeking behavior such as a reduced preference for sweet over plain water," he added.

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Radiation oncologist David Christie collaborated with the University of New England and Bond University to research the link between cancer and mental illness in 1,000 patients across south-east Queensland. Dr Christie says every patient feels a change in their mood following a cancer diagnosis but for a fifth of patients, he says these feelings will progress to serious depression.

"A relatively high proportion of patients reached the normal criteria for considering that a patient has either depression or anxiety," he said. "[It is] something more than the natural feeling of bad news that one would get when you receive a diagnosis of cancer or have to undergo cancer treatment, but to actually have that to lead to an illness or a disorder where it might affect you in other ways."

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Nearly three quarters of new mums feel down shortly after birth, complaining of sadness, mood swings, anxiety and loss of appetite. In around one in ten new mothers this continues and is classed as post-natal depression. A sharp drop in oestrogen levels after birth has now been found to coincide with the release of an enzyme in the brain which blocks 'feel-good' chemicals.

Previous research has shown that in the first three to four days after giving birth, oestrogen levels drop by up to 1000 fold. And the new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry shows that in proportion to this oestrogen loss, levels of an enzyme called monoamine oxidase A increase dramatically in the brain.

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