Health News. Lots of resources and information

Margaret, who was 70, had also struggled with BDD for many decades. Her concerns, too, had begun when she was a teenager and persisted ever since. She’d been treated in her teens for scoliosis (curvature of the spine), which was severe and required surgery and a brace. But after several surgeries, the scoliosis was much improved and hardly noticeable. Margaret, however, was still preoccupied with it. “It’s been a concern ever since then,” she said. “I think my back still looks very ugly. I think about it for hours a day. I can’t wear certain clothes because of how it looks. I wear clothes that hide it, and I change them a lot, trying to find an outfit that makes it look better.”Margaret spent approximately 8 hours a day doing BDD-related behaviors: selecting her clothes each morning and changing them during the day, scrutinizing how other people’s backs looked, checking mirrors, and asking her husband whether she looked okay. “I still think about how awful my back looks after all these years. I keep to myself because I don’t want to draw attention to it. It’s one of the things that’s made me depressed.”A woman in her sixties, who looked far younger than her age, was obsessed with getting eye surgery to eradicate facial “lines” that resembled those of a 35 year old. She’d seen most of the plastic surgeons in town, and she spent hours a day frantically examining the lines in mirrors and applying creams and makeup. Because of the lines, she restricted her activities and rarely left the house without wearing sunglasses.Given that untreated BDD may be a fairly chronic disorder, it isn’t surprising that it exists in the elderly. However, it isn’t known how common BDD is in this age group. The average age of the people I’ve seen is the thirties; I’ve seen far fewer elderly people with BDD. Does BDD “burn out” as people age, becoming less severe or remitting altogether? Conversely, can it become more severe over time, and can the elderly be particularly distressed and impaired because of the cumulative effect of suffering over so many years? Might they be particularly embarrassed about seeking help? Further research is needed to answer these important questions.*164\204\8*

Posted in Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid | Comments Off

When stress breakdown symptoms have been experienced over a period of time in relation to one specific stress, the person may become conditioned to associate the symptoms of breakdown with memories of the stressful situation. Just as a person can be conditioned to associate unpleasant or pleasant memories with odours or sounds, the person who has undergone severe stress may re-experience some of the feelings experienced at the time of the stressful event when these are triggered by stimuli which rekindle memories of the event.Thus, a person who experienced anxiety with the sound of helicopters in a war zone may re-experience some of that anxiety at the sound of a helicopter passing overhead years later. If a person held prisoner in an airplane hijacking experienced stage three symptoms, mention of the event or associations with it might recall the memories of what the breakdown symptoms felt like.Moreover, if the person still has a lot of unresolved feelings and repressed conflicts about this stressful period of his life, then the rekindled feelings might re-introduce those emotional conflicts. This vicious cycle of after-effects can be called the post-traumatic stress syndrome.It is not the aim of this book to deal with the post-traumatic stress syndrome, a complex problem requiring those skills necessary to examine conflicts which have been repressed into the unconscious mind. The correct treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder is by skilled psychotherapy.
*38/129/5*

Posted in Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid | Comments Off

Excessive use of stimulants
Another common cause of feelings of agitation is the consumption of excessive amounts of tea,   coffee and cola drinks containing caffeine. The caffeine and other drugs in these stimulant drinks cause stimulation by release of noradrenalin in the body. Excessive amounts of stimulants can produce a state indistinguishable from severe anxiety.
A similar comment applies as with sedative withdrawal. Excessive use of stimulants is not in itself a primary cause of stress breakdown. However, a person taking on too many worries and problems, feeling tired and worn, might well begin drinking extra cups of tea and coffee. The agitation produced by the excess caffeine might be indistinguishable from anxiety due to nervous system overload. A person seeking to use the anxiety equation to self-diagnose anxiety needs to be aware of this fact.

Physical illness, fever
When a person is coming down with a physical illness, the brain’s processing abilities may be impaired and stress breakdown may occur at lower levels of stress than would be otherwise tolerated. The illness need not be a condition primarily affecting brain function, such as meningitis or encephalitis. Many different disorders may cause relative failure of the brain’s processing capacity.
Fever due to any cause can so embarrass brain function as to produce delirium at times. When the onset of such an illness is gradual, the first sign of being ill may well be the sudden onset of anxiety symptoms in response to a normal workload.
It is not uncommon to find multiple factors involved in abnormal physiological states lowering the brain’s ability to handle incoming information adequately. Many of us are too fat and too unfit; we smoke, we drink alcohol and abuse stimulant drugs such as caffeine, we eat the wrong foods at the wrong times, we have irregular sleeping hours and often don’t relax. We often start the working day having already so disadvantaged our nervous systems that we have little hope of avoiding some level of stress breakdown.

*13/129/5*

Posted in Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid | No Comments »

People often confuse clinical depression with sadness. That’s a mistake. You can be sad without being clinically depressed, and vice versa. Let’s say, for example, that you have been rejected by a person you love, have been made redundant or have suffered some major setback in some project in which you have invested a lot of time and energy. It would be strange not to experience some feelings of sadness in the days or even weeks following such a reversal of fortune. But if such normal sadness is short-lived and not accompanied by some of the tell-tale signs of depression listed below, no doctor would diagnose you as being clinically depressed. You would expect to see the feelings of sadness diminish over days or weeks and be replaced by other feelings – elements of relief, hopefulness or even happiness and, together with those feelings, optimistic thoughts. Maybe it wasn’t such a great relationship and you’re better off out of it. And the job wasn’t necessarily that terrific, now that you think of it; some other job may suit you better. And as for the reversal of fortune, it hurt, no question about it, but it wasn’t critical. You take your knocks, learn your lessons and move on.

As you will see in the pages of this book, a capacity to get on with things is not a hallmark of depression. When you are depressed, you feel trapped and stuck. Solutions do not present themselves to you. It can seem as though there is no way out. So sadness by itself does not mean you are depressed, even though sadness is certainly one of the cardinal symptoms of depression. Often this is not an ordinary sadness, focused on a single situation or event. Rather it is a pervasive sadness that seems to settle on everything. The sadness can take over all other feelings, leaving little room for happiness, contentment, good humour or even anger. But even though sadness is one of the most common symptoms of depression, it is also one of the easiest to connect with the condition. In our everyday language, a person might say T feel sad’ or T feel depressed’ interchangeably. In contrast, there are other symptoms that may be less obviously associated with depression, but are nevertheless cardinal symptoms and signs of the condition. I have called them the seven tell-tale signs of depression. It is easy to attribute these signs, incorrectly, to conditions other than depression. But when they are present, depression is one condition that should always be considered.

The Seven Tell-Tale Signs of Depression

Running on empty

Nothing seems like fun anymore; life seems dreary

Putting yourself down

Failure – at work and in relationships

Biological disturbances: sleeping, eating, weight and sex drive

The future looks bleak

Life seems not worth living

*51\75\2*

Tags: Anti Depressants
Posted in Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid | No Comments »