Just as I was thinking I understood the full range of depression’s impact on my life, I started finding out about links between the mood disorder and some nasty physical problems. I mentioned in this post the prevalence of pain among depressed people seeking treatment from their regular doctors. But depression can do a lot […]
Psychiatric Treatment
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 […]
Despondex: Sure Cure for the Annoyingly Cheerful
Courtesy of ONN, The Onion News Network
The Draft Revisions for DSM-5: Dimensional Assessment
Like many, I’ve been worried that the revision of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the source for all our diagnoses, could lead to what’s been called the medicalization of normality. But there are even more fundamental problems inherent in the classification system itself. It slots you into a fixed category based on a […]
What’s in a (DSM Diagnostic) Name?
When I started getting a diagnosis of “depression” years ago, I found myself assuming that this was the name for a permanent condition rather than one dimension in the changing nature of an unfolding life. Later, the term became more formalized as “major depressive disorder recurrent non-psychotic” under the DSM-IV classification system. In a way, […]
