Tag: treating depression

Comedian Gary Gulman: Opening Up About Depression Has Been "A Reward"

“The easiest way and the most comfortable way for me to address anything real is to make jokes about it.”

Back in October comedian Gary Gulman released a vulnerable and inspiring HBO special called The Great Depresh where he discussed his lifelong struggles with depression. Critics and fans alike applauded Gulman for being so open and honest about what depression looks like and how it has changed his life.

Gulman recently sat down with People magazine to discuss how the special has affected his life and how he treats his chronic depression.

“The easiest way and the most comfortable way for me to address anything real is to make jokes about it,” the comedian explained.

“Depresh” is a cutesy nickname that Gulman gave depression to make it easier to digest for those who have never battled the mental health disorder. For Gulman, it’s all about starting a conversation about mental illness in an effort to end the stigma surrounding it.

“I had called it that to sort of lighten the impact of the illness,” Gulman said. “I mean, I either consciously or subconsciously figured out that people would feel more comfortable if you were immediately making fun of it.”

Normalize It

Gulman feels as though using his voice to normalize the disorder that affects more than 300 million people globally.

“I got such a reward for opening up about this,” the 49-year-old told People. “I thought that this was a great way to sort of redeem the experience and exact some revenge on the time lost and that it was actually a way to, I guess, make the two-and-a-half years that I had suffered not be just useless.”

Though Gulman has lived with depression since his childhood, the disorder hit him hardest in 2015 when he was placed in a psychiatric hospital for treatment.

“By the time I did go in, there was no question that that’s where I belonged. I wasn’t functioning on any level.”

Sleep changes are one of the most common symptoms of depression. During his lowpoint with the disorder, he was sleeping 18 or 19 hours a day and when he wasn’t sleeping, he was experieincing anxiety and suicidal ideation.

His Darkest Moments

“I was spending every moment I was awake — which was sometimes only like five or six hours a day — … in pain from anxiety and also just contemplating painless suicides and ruminating on mistakes and regrets,” he detailed.

Electroconvulsive therapy, meds, talk therapy and support from loved ones, Gulman was able to make it through his darkest days to tell his tale.

If you or someone you know is considering suicide, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255), text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 or go to suicidepreventionlifeline.org.

View the original article at thefix.com

14 November 2019
Patients, Psychiatrists Share Their Experience With Treating Depression

From medication to exercise, patients and psychiatrists get candid about their methods of treating depression.

Kelli María Korducki wanted options. While she appreciated the arsenal of medications being offered to treat her depression, she also wanted to explore the emotional, personal side of the disease, not just the chemical imbalance.

“A more realistic, nuanced approach to the way we conceive of mental illness would go a long way toward validating the myriad potential causes for human suffering and clearing paths for many more in need,” Korducki wrote in a July 27 editorial for The New York Times.

Medication Management

Korducki argued that psychiatry has become “medication management.”

“To be sure, many people need medication, and greatly benefit from it,” she wrote. “The right drugs have made my life better too. But I fantasize about a future in which mental illness is understood less in terms of static diagnoses and psychopharmaceutical stopgaps than each individual’s symptoms and the circumstances that might inform them.”

In response to Korducki’s editorial, many people—doctors and patients—shared their experience with treating depression.

Insurance Changes the Game

John M. Oldham, chief of staff at the Menninger Clinic and former president of the American Psychiatric Association, said that insurance requirements have transformed psychiatry into short, 20-minute med-check visits that do not have the length or intimacy to address a patient’s underlying concerns.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Oldham writes. “Psychiatric medications are valuable components of treatment. But mental illnesses are complicated. Medications can do part of the job, but the rest must be done by a careful partnership between psychiatrist and patient, a thoughtfully crafted treatment plan that includes psychotherapy and/or high-quality psychosocial interventions.”

Christopher Lukas, author of Shrink Rap: A Guide to Psychotherapy From a Frequent Flier, shared that his doctor told him that antidepressants weren’t serving him—instead, talk therapy was what really made a difference for Lukas.

“My psychotherapist believes in listening,” Lukas writes.

Jenny Orme, who has struggled with major depression, said that she refused to believe she was a “victim of her genes” even though her mother died from complications of depression at 45. Orme took her health into her own hands, with what she describes as a “rigorous program of yoga, tai chi, swimming and meditation.” That, combined with Eastern medicine and the support of friends and family, help Orme stay stable.

“The epidemic of mental illness and suicide calls for a multifaceted, enlightened approach to the treatment of this serious personal and public health problem,” Orme writes.

Like Orme, Kordicki says she now views her depression as more than a biological process, and now treats it as so.

“Rather than view my psychological experience as a biologically fated roller coaster, I’ve come to think of my mental health as a reflection of the complex ebbs and flows of life; accordingly, I’ve developed tools to better mitigate that which I can’t control, an agency I once wouldn’t have imagined possible,” she wrote. “I feel, for the first time, like a person who belongs to the world.”

View the original article at thefix.com

2 August 2019
Can Deep Brain Stimulation Help Treat Psychiatric Disorders?

Scientists have been experimenting with whether deep brain stimulation could help those with depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Certain neurological and psychiatric disorders may be rooted in dysfunctional circuits in the brain — and some studying the area think deep brain stimulation (DBS) may be one way of treating such disorders.

The idea, according to NPR, is that it may be possible to pinpoint such circuits and manipulate them to be functional by sending electric pulses to exact regions in the brain. These regions are reached by placing an electrode in the brain, which is then controlled with an implanted device, usually in the collarbone region. Once placed, the frequency of the electric pulses can be controlled by doctors.

“Modify the circuit, and you can modify the behavior,” James Giordano, neuroethicist and chief of the Neuroethics Studies Program at Georgetown University Medical Center, tells NPR. “The goal is to use DBS to modify the circuits in such a way as to improve symptoms in a very specific and precise way.”

While this method has potential to treat a number of conditions, the Food and Drug Administration has only approved it for a select few, including movement disorders (like effects of Parkinson’s disease) and a type of epilepsy that does not respond to other treatment methods.

According to NPR, scientists worldwide have been experimenting with whether deep brain stimulation could help those with diagnoses such as depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Scientists have also tried to use DBS to treat drug cravings.

However, clinical study results haven’t been clearcut, as some patients claim DBS has helped, while others have seen no improvement or felt worse.

According to Giordano, DBS differs from antidepressants because it can be more fine-tuned and tailored to each individual.

“A drug like Prozac or antidepressant drugs is basically like throwing water on your face to get a drink of water,” he told NPR. “Using something like deep brain stimulation is like putting a drop of water on your tongue. We can increase the specificity and precision … and, in many ways, the precision and specificity of deep brain stimulation makes it a more effective tool.”

When it comes to the procedure of placing a device in the brain, Giordano says there are of course the normal risks of neurosurgery, such as infection. Though rare, he adds, there are also some risks specific to the procedure.

“By stimulating Area X, it’s possible that we could get a spillover effect that modulates other things ancillary to that, like personality, temperament, character, personal preferences,” he explained. “There have been case reports and anecdotal reports of things like that happening, but they’re rare.”

As with any new procedure and technology, Giordano acknowledges that learning the ins and outs of deep brain stimulation won’t always be smooth sailing. However, he says, the capabilities of deep brain stimulation are worth continuing to explore.

“Mistakes will get made” he said. “Hopefully, we’ll be bright enough to correct them and recognize them when they occur not only in terms of the technological and scientific mistakes but ethical, moral, legal mistakes. In many ways, this represents something of a brave new world of capability. And I think that we have to be very, very sentinel to what the potential of this could yield.”

View the original article at thefix.com

2 April 2019
New Type of Antidepressant Could Be Game Changer

The new medication will reportedly deliver fast-acting relief for patients, who often need to wait four to six weeks to feel the effects of current anti-depressants.

A fast-acting and innovative depression medication that works differently from drugs currently on the market received a positive result in clinical trials this week, clearing the way for the drug to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration as soon as March.

Sage Therapeutics announced in a news release that its drug, SAGE-217, led to statistically-significant improvements for women with postpartum depression in just two weeks, while being well tolerated by the women overall.

“These are strong and consistent data demonstrating a rapid, stable, and clinically meaningful improvement in PPD depressive symptoms in the SAGE-217 treatment group compared to placebo,” Dr. Jeff Jonas, M.D., CEO of Sage, said in the release.

Despite the fact that depression is one of the most common health conditions in the world, there are currently limited means for treating the condition. Current medications that act on the brain’s serotonin system don’t work for as many as a third of patients. SAGE-217 offers an entirely different model for treatment, acting on the brain’s GABA receptors in order to alleviate depression symptoms.

Jonas said last year that the new approach will deliver fast-acting relief for patients, who often need to wait four to six weeks to feel the effects of current anti-depressants.

“In this development program, we are exploring the potential for patients with [major depression] to feel well within days, with just a 2-week course of treatment – similar to how antibiotics are used today – instead of enduring long-term chronic treatment,” Jonas wrote in a news release. “We believe a medicine with rapid onset and robust response could be truly paradigm shifting. SAGE-217, if successfully developed and approved, may rewrite the textbook on how the tens of millions of people suffering from [major depression] are treated, ultimately turning depression into a disorder, not an identity.”

In June, the FDA announced that it would allow an accelerated approval plan for Sage, allowing the drug to come to market faster by using shorter clinical trials to prove its effectiveness.

In addition to providing fast-acting relief, Jonas has said that SAGE-217 could be taken intermittently so that patients don’t need to take a monthly pill.

Despite the lofty promises, many medical professionals are cautiously optimistic about the new drug and how life-changing it may be for patients.

Psychiatrist Cristina Cusin, who specializes in depression at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard University told Business Insider that the company’s predictions might be a little rosy, saying it seems “a little excessive to say a chronic disease would disappear after two weeks, that’s something you can’t say about diabetes or any other chronic disease.”

View the original article at thefix.com

14 January 2019
Can Hot Baths Help Ease Depression Symptoms?

A recent study examined the effects that a regular hot bath had on people with depression.

Can a bath a day keep the blues away? Researchers seem to think so.

A new study published in New Scientist indicates that by taking regular afternoon baths, people with depression may experience a “moderate but persistent lift in mood.”

During the study, researchers from the University of Freiburg in Germany took 45 individuals with depression and had one group soak in hot water (104 degrees Fahrenheit) for up to 30 minutes, then wrap in a blanket and hot water bottles for an additional 20 minutes, while another group took 40 to 45 minutes of exercise twice per week.

Then, after eight weeks, the individuals taking the afternoon baths scored six points lower on a widely used depression scale, while those exercising scored about three points lower.

The theory is that warm baths strengthen and synchronize a person’s circadian rhythm by increasing the core body temperature. A circadian rhythm is “the daily fluctuations in behavior and biochemistry that affect every one of our organs, including the brain,” the Guardian notes.

For most people, core body temperature increases during the day and decreases at night, which helps the body to fall asleep. But in those with depression, the circadian rhythm is frequently “flatter, disrupted or delayed by several hours.” So, by affecting the core body temperature, baths may help those with depression to fall asleep more easily.

In addition to affecting the circadian rhythm, hot baths could lead to the firing of more neurons that distribute serotonin.

According to the Guardian, depression is likely related to low levels of serotonin in the brain, and research involving rats has found that neurons that release serotonin are connected to mood-regulating parts of the brain, which fire when body temperature increases.

When it comes to taking a good bath, the Guardian recommends picking a time without disruptions, possibly using an essential oil, making bathwater slightly warmer than body temperature, and taking into account the temperature of the room.

However, such hot baths could cause issues for some people. According to Bustle, some study participants struggled to get hot enough water at home, since 104 degrees is fairly high, and had to go to a spa instead.

People with health issues should be sure to check with their doctors before taking such hot baths, as they may be dangerous in some circumstances.

Of course, hot baths may not be the answer for everyone. But, as Bustle notes, they may be a good go-to while waiting the four-to-six weeks it can take for antidepressants to start working.

View the original article at thefix.com

31 October 2018