Road rage is a topic that has received much attention recently with reports of serious incidents appearing in the media on an almost daily basis. Road rage has no standard definition, although it has been defined as a situation where "a driver or passenger attempts to kill, injure or intimidate a pedestrian or another driver or passenger or to damage their car in a traffic incident" (Smart and Mann, 2002a). Newspaper reports on road rage have greatly increased in...
Family ties, friendships and involvement in social activities can offer a psychological buffer against stress, anxiety and depression. Social support can also help you cope better with health problems.
Cultivating social support can take some effort. Here's how to develop and maintain strong and healthy social ties.
Social support isn't the same as a support group. Social support is...
Philadelphia–Depressed seniors who believe their life is guided by a larger spiritual force have significantly fewer symptoms of depression than those who do not use religious coping strategies. Moreover, this relationship is independent of the amount of social support those individuals receive, according to results of a prospective study presented at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association.
"This is a pretty remarkable study–and when you see these kind of data coming out from both medical and psychiatric populations, it’s hard to continue ignoring...
Likening the human brain's regulation of emotions to a well-tuned orchestra, scientists from the U.S. government's National Institutes of Mental Health (NIMH) say they may have found a gene that sounds a discordant note, increasing some people's susceptibility to anxiety and depression.
In a report appearing in the May 8 online issue of Nature Neuroscience, NIMH scientists say the gene variant weakens a circuit in the brain for processing negative emotions like anxiety and depression. The research team first scanned 114 healthy subjects using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI).
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has approved a drug by GlaxoSmithKline for the treatment of restless leg syndrome (RLS).
The drug, Requip, was first approved in 1997 for Parkinson's disease.
Restless legs syndrome (RLS) is a common neurological disorder characterized by unpleasant sensations of the legs and an urge to move them for relief. Individuals affected with the disorder describe...
Psychologist Drew Westen, Ph.D., director of the adolescent and adult personality program of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston University, and his colleague, Kate Morrison, Ph.D., have written an ambitious, multidimensional meta-analysis of 34 studies on empirically validated psychotherapies published between 1990 and 1998 in top peer-reviewed journals. The study has raised controversy in its reassessment of previously published data and with its suggestion that these data are not always strong enough to warrant...
There are situations in life that come to us where we feel stuck and that there is no way out and we are doomed forever. We tell ourselves "this is it." I am sure if you have a mental health disorder you have faced those times.
At times they are self created and times where fate just seems to walk in on us.
I had my car stolen yesterday. The police were at my door telling me they saw my car driven over 100 mph by a 20 some year old male and a female in the car.
It is important to know that approximately 3 months ago my previous car just "quit on me" and to fix the car would cost more than it was worth. It took me 3 months of financial hardship to get another very cheap car - $450 was all I could afford and find someone to take payments.
I just paid for some work on it last month. It is important for you to know...
The mile hike along the rocky, fairly inclined Deep Gap Trail in the mid-day sun is moderately strenuous and yields a just reward. Perched on a massive boulder, the view of the Appalachian ranges in the Pisgah National Forest is wondrous: wave after wave of hazy blue ridges breaking onto the green forested valley. A cool caressing "sea" breeze provides the only disturbance to the waves of silence. (I try to momentarily ignore the reality that the haze has more to do with man-made pollution than natural mountain "smoke.")
However, driving home it's clear the back muscles are starting to tighten up. And by the time I return to the B&B, I'm out of it enough to improvise upon Henry Higgins: "The pain of strain drains body and the brain."
I've definitely got severe...
Relaxation techniques, such as meditation and prayer, can improve people's health, and psychologists are in a unique position to promote such self-care techniques as a major part of preventative health care, said Herbert Benson, MD, the founding president of the Harvard Medical School Mind/Body Medical Institute, during the 2005 State Leadership Conference's opening session.
Stress hormones, produced when the body's "fight or flight" response is triggered, play a role in a host of ailments including...