Over at Health Central, I’ve put up a post called My 20 Meds. It’s about the trial and error process I went through to find a medication for depression that gave me more help than harm. The interesting thing is that none of the newer antidepressants worked for very long. The most effective have belonged […]
Depression Treatments
Why Therapy Can Work: Ideas from Brain Research
Brain research is one of those many scientific fields that I’ll never know much about, but I find it important to get even a limited understanding of the direction of recent findings. It helps me to know, for example, that emotions are generated unconsciously through multiple brain systems before anything gets to awareness. As I […]
Health Central Posts on Recovery
Some Rights Reserved by bala at Flickr Last week I published two posts at Health Central (here and here), describing the beliefs and attitudes I needed before I could begin to recover. That meant finding a mindset for recovery, but it wasn’t just a change in thinking. It went a lot deeper to the basic […]
Prozac for Crowd Control?
Some Rights Reserved by Image Zen at Flickr I’ve heard of a number of off-label uses for antidepressants, but turning them into non-lethal weapons for crowd control is a new one for me. The Soft-Kill Solution in the March Harper’s describes research on the use of “calmatives” or central nervous system depressants for just this […]
Talking Honestly about Depression
I’ve always had trouble talking honestly about depression, in therapy or out. Even though much of its influence is gone, this remnant of depression is still holding on. I was always able to report the latest news to a therapist – I’m down at level 2 instead of up at level 8 (or whatever […]
DSM-V: Medicalizing the Human Condition?
Some Rights Reserved by pedrosimoes7 at Flickr The ongoing revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders has provoked prominent psychiatrists to declare that the next version (DSM-V) is in danger of medicalizing normality. Since “normality” covers quite a few people who don’t think of themselves as mentally disordered, I thought it would […]
Feeling Fine on Prozac
Medication is a hot subject on the internet, so I need to say up front that I’m not opposed to the use of medications to treat long-term depression. I have a live-and-let-live attitude about treatment. Finding anything that works for each person is the key, with or without drugs or any of the many other […]
Days of Anxiety – 2
George Eliot wrote these lines in Middlemarch about 135 years ago: If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. In the midst […]
