Two new studies show that insomnia, far from being a symptom or side effect of depression, may instead precede it, making some patients more likely to become and remain mentally ill.
One paper was presented today at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies (APSS) in Denver, and the other will be published shortly in the Journal of Behavioral Sleep Medicine.
In recent years, researchers established that insomnia and depression are linked, but struggled to determine which came first. Many experts believed that...
Each year millions of people suffer from some form of depression. Researchers estimate as many as one out of every three people will develop depression at some point in their lives. Although the average depression lasts around six months, those with severe major depression or constant dysphoric depression may have symptoms that last for years. Some depressed individuals resort to suicide as a way of alleviating their anguish. Given the frequency with which depression occurs in our society, the length of time it can last...
Anyone who gets the jitters just thinking about speaking In class knows that Imagining fellow students In their skivvies doesn't really help. According to a speech expert, some people are born with a fear of public speaking. But he's working on ways to help them overcome it.
Ralph Behnke, Ph.D., a speech communication professor at Texas Christian University, has found that the highest point of anxiety and cardiovascular activity for public speakers comes in the moment they're expected to start talking. But another nerve-shattering high comes when...
GENEVA - Governments should pass legislation to protect people with mental illnesses from abuses, the U.N. health agency said Monday.
In many countries, the people who suffer from mental, neurological or behavioral problems are among the most vulnerable groups of society, the World Health Organization said in a 181-page report.
More than 450 million people around the world suffer from such problems, the agency said.
"We have a moral and legal obligation to modernize mental health legislation," said WHO chief Lee Jong-wook. "WHO is ready to help...
To provide context for the government's mental health survey, the Times told a similarly inspiring story of science replacing superstition. In the old days, it explained, "gamblers and drinkers, the excessively impulsive or rebellious, [and] the sexually promiscuous...were considered sinners, deviants or possessed," while "those who denied themselves food or comfort, or who prayed or performed ritual cleansing repeatedly, often struck others as especially pious."
But "as science gradually displaced religion," the Times continued, "such behavior was increasingly seen in secular, diagnostic terms." Hence "excessive fasting became anorexia," and "ritualized behavior was understood...
In an age of e-mails, databases and online catalogues, two heads may no longer be better than one, according to new ESRC-sponsored research into the effects of information overload.
Problems are exacerbated when information is shared between people with different viewpoints, says a team led by Professor Tom Ormerod of Lancaster University, which revealed big variations in recall among married couples.
In a project aimed at finding better ways for us to organise and retrieve information for shared use, researchers investigated how couples catalogue and retrieve their digital photos now that the age of the shoebox full of prints and negatives is gone.
The team developed a novel digital photograph browser (TW3 - 'The Way We Were'), which restricted cataloguing and retrieval to 'Who', 'What', 'Where' and 'When', while allowing choice within these categories.
When couples had jointly catalogued photographs, it was found that...
Anxiety disorders appear to be insidious and chronic conditions, with low rates of recovery and high probabilities of recurrence, study findings suggest, with the likelihood of recovery significantly reduced in the presence of particular comorbid psychiatric conditions.
The researchers therefore suggest that patients with comorbid conditions should not be excluded from clinical trials of anxiety disorders.
The inclusion of such individuals could "provide clinicians and policymakers with rich and much needed information about the effects of psychiatric comorbidity on the long-term outcome of anxiety disorders," Steven Bruce (Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island, USA) and colleagues say.
The team analyzed data from...
At the New York Academy of Medicine's 71st annual Thomas William Salmon Lecture, Nora D. Volkow, M.D., director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) told attendees that she has been obsessed with trying to understand what neurobiological changes explain aberrant behavior in addictive people. "We don't know to what extent changes in people who are addicted are effects of chronic drug exposure, effects of genes that predispose them to become addicted or effects of the environment that facilitate the translation of addiction," she explained. "I'm going to start to try to dissect those elements."
Delivered last December, Volkow's talk...
Up to 26 percent of all U.S. adults struggled with mental illness in the past year, with half of them having initially suffered symptoms as children, according to new research Monday from Harvard University scientists.
They found most people did not seek treatment for the common conditions such as depression and anxiety that were tracked. But when people did get help, they usually waited about...
After commanding a transportation unit in Iraq, a National Guardsman returned home to California (Guthrie, 2005). He thought he was fine until the nightmares and night sweats started. He felt numb and detached from his family. When he drove to work, a bump in the asphalt triggered memories of improvised devices that exploded on Iraqi roadways. With the encouragement of his family, the Guardsman finally sought counseling.
Meanwhile, a 24-year-old gunner still in Iraq became...
During a National Mental Health Association telephone media briefing this week, a teen with depression, her mother and two mental health experts discussed what families can do if they think their child needs mental health treatment. The briefing went beyond current controversies -- such as rumors and myths concerning specific treatments and mental health screenings in schools -- to address What Parents Need to Know: Treating Depression in Children and Teens.
"Recent controversies about depression in children and teens have left many parents with unanswered questions about what to do if their child has a mental health problem" said Michael Faenza, MSSW, NMHA president and CEO. "From the safety of antidepressants to the political debate about school-based mental health screenings, parents face...