The need for an innovative treatment like Well-Being Therapy hits you hard when you learn a bit about relapse. It happens – a lot. In fact, the majority of people who recover from depression will relapse in the months or perhaps years following the end of symptoms. Medications don’t prevent it, neither does cognitive behavioral […]
Depression Treatments
What Doctors Do When Depression is a Pain
I’ve had my share of problems with pain as well as with depression, but it never occurred to me to link the two until recently. Apparently, that’s true for most people with major depression, especially if physical pain is the first sign of the illness. They know they’re in pain, and depression is the last […]
A Brief History of My Meds
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 […]
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 […]
