Depression

The International Business Times covers a new study showing “trials for new antidepressant medications may not be applicable to the population at large.” “The finding, published in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, shows recent trials are less generalizable than the prior studies, as researchers excluded most depressed patients from drug company-sponsored treatment studies.”

Writing for Truth-Out, hurricane Katrina survivor G. Maris Jones writes: “To adapt to a changing climate, survivors of these catastrophes - especially those in marginalized, low-income communities - need long-term physical and mental health services.” She adds a concurrent call to “assume our responsibility to make positive change through action on climate change.”

In this week’s NY Times Modern Love blog Hannah Louise Poston tells the story of living with her severely depressed boyfriend, Joe, and how her decision to buy a kitten improved their relationship. “The next morning when we woke up, the first words out of Joe’s mouth were, ‘Where’s the kitten?’ And the kitten’s first act, when she heard his voice, was to ice-pick her way up the quilt and jump on his face. That same summer, Joe mustered the energy to make major changes in his life…”

-Business Insider explores some of the psychosocial factors that may be contributing to depression in the high tech industry.

A Molecular Psychiatry study found that people who had recurrent depression developed smaller hippocampi and antidepressants protected against that effect -- except insofar as the study evidence seemed to show the opposite of what the media reported on it.

Continuing to take antidepressants during pregnancy was associated with higher rates of depressive relapses and hospitalizations than discontinuing.

-NPR interviews some of the psychiatrists who feel that the fast-acting drug ketamine is a "revolution" in depression treatment.

-Correspondence in The Lancet Psychiatry suggests that a study linking depression to acts of violence should have examined antidepressant medications as possible causes.

One reason that depression is linked to later psychological problems in children could be because depressed mothers often have less healthy diets.

Depressed pregnant women need good care.  They should not be made to feel guilty for the choices they make concerning their depression or lectured to by those who don’t understand the area or lack compassion for them.  In that sense, Andrew Solomon does the public a service by turning his attention and writing talents to the topic of depression and pregnancy this week in the New York Times.  However, a crucial part of providing good care to depressed pregnant women is to give them accurate information on the topic.  In this sense, Andrew Solomon falls short.

-Buzzfeed looks at the history -- and present -- of how antipsychotic drugs became a common treatment for depression, despite their apparent lack of effectiveness.

Not an Onion Study: SSRI antidepressants did consistently outperform placebo in clinical trials, researchers discovered, so long as 16 of the 17 questions about patients' feelings are ignored.

"Depression can double risk of stroke," reported many news outlets, covering a study by Harvard School of Public Health researchers in the Journal of the American Heart Association

Women diagnosed with bipolar or depression did not perform as well on tests measuring the ability to "sustain attention and respond quickly."

-Pharmaceutical companies and psychiatric researchers still "aren't telling you the whole truth" about treating anxiety.

-Time magazine looks at the effects of a number of relaxation techniques on depression and anxiety in elderly people.

Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy worked as well -- and as poorly -- as antidepressants for preventing relapses in depressed people. Though the mindfulness participants may have been in acute withdrawal.

-Psychologist Laurence Palfreyman critically reviews a recent study that made global headlines, purporting to have found that depression made people three times as likely to commit violent crimes.

I thought I would make a small contribution to the discussion about how coverage of the recent airline tragedy focuses so much on the supposed ‘mental illness’ of the pilot and not so much on the possible role of antidepressants. Of course we will never know the answer to these questions but it is important, I think, to combat the simplistic nonsense wheeled out after most such tragedies, the nonsense that says the person had an illness that made them do awful things. So, just to confirm what many recipients of antidepressants, clinicians and researchers have been saying for a long time, here are some findings from our recent New Zealand survey of over 1,800 people taking anti-depressants, which we think is the largest survey to date.

-Peter Hitchens argues that the public discussion about the Germanwings crash has to start distinguishing between whether depressed people should be flying and whether people taking antidepressants should be.

Common scientific beliefs about serotonin levels in depression and how antidepressants act on the brain appear to be completely backwards.

When I was researching Anatomy of an Epidemic and sought to track the number of people receiving a disability payment between 1987 and 2007 due to “mental illness,” I was frustrated by the lack of diagnostic clarity in the data. The Social Security Administration would list, in its annual reports on the Supplemental Security Income and Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) programs, the number of people receiving payment for “mental disorders,” which in turn was broken down into just two subcategories: “retardation,” and “other mental disorders.” Unfortunately, the “other mental disorders,” which was the category for those with psychiatric disorders, was not broken down into its diagnostic parts.

We live in a culture bombarded by media and sped up by rapid-fire social interactions. It's definitely useful to grab hold of a simple, short, sound-bite term, to quickly describe what we are feeling or suffering. "Depression" is such a word - it evokes and encapsulates, conjures the images of that ugly pit of despair that can drive so many to madness and suicide. Yet at the same time the words we use, strangely, become like those pens deposited in medical offices and waiting rooms around the world: ready at hand, easily found, familiar -- and tied to associations, marketing and meanings we were only dimly aware were shaping how we think.

-Was life better in the past, or is there some other reason depression is increasing?

Depressed elderly people are more likely to suffer heart disease not because of their depression, but apparently due to antidepressant drugs.