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Here’s an excerpt from this fascinating article from SciAm:
A research team studying brain signals in mice accidentally stumbled upon what could be an important discovery that could lead to understanding and successfully treating obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
The finding identifies a new potential target for treating the psychological syndrome, which affects some 2.2 million Americans and is characterized by symptoms including anxiety and excessive behavior such as repeated hand washing and pulling out one’s own hair.
Researchers at Duke University Medical Center made the discovery after deleting a gene in mice while studying neuronal communication in the striatum, a structure in the midbrain that plays a role in information processing, decision making and movement. They had set up 24-hour video surveillance of the critters in their cages after the animals developed skin lesions on their heads and necks four to six months after their birth.
“These mice stay by themselves and are grooming themselves all the time,” says Guoping Feng, an assistant professor of neurobiology at Duke and co-author of a report on the findings published in Nature. He says the mice also show telltale signs of anxiety, hewing to the sides of their cages and staying out of both bright and open spaces.
“We were not specifically looking for OCD … the phenotype itself is by accident,” notes Feng. But, the serendipitous discovery shows “how synaptic dysfunction can lead to abnormal function.”
Obsessive thinking is characteristic of most anxiety disorders. If you ever find yourself stuck on a specific fear, then you’ve experienced obsessive thinking. Unfortunately, OCD is typically characterized in the media as purely obsessive behaviors while ignoring the obsessive thinking that causes these behaviors. This is why any research on OCD is beneficial to anyone experiencing chronic fear.
The Washington Post has a fascinating article on morality, empathy, compassion and their relation to happiness. More importantly, however, recent studies have shown that this morality is actually hardwired into the human brain, likely the result of an evolutionary adaptation that made our species more successful than those without a sense of morality.
While the whole topic certainly provides a lot of food for thought, I’m sharing this with you because I believe that being a moral person is beneficial for everyone, including ourselves. In a sense, having compassion and acting morally can also be selfish as such action brings us joy, happiness, and a sense of self-worth. This model of belief is an ancient tenet of Buddhism and many other religion and spiritual traditions and I find it amusing that only now are scientists investigating this. As much as I love science and rationality, I often find that the uber-skeptics are the same people who completely disregard tradition wisdom in the belief that it’s all nonsense. The research noted in this article verifies the hypothesis that morality has a positive effect on the brain:
The results were showing that when the volunteers placed the interests of others before their own, the generosity activated a primitive part of the brain that usually lights up in response to food or sex. Altruism, the experiment suggested, was not a superior moral faculty that suppresses basic selfish urges but rather was basic to the brain, hard-wired and pleasurable.
So again, I urge you to consider the possibility that one of the best methods for treating anxiety and depression is to stop focusing on yourself and begin to turn your thoughts outward. I’ve personally found this to be a wonderful antidote to anxiety, but I don’t believe I’m alone in this. Helping others is not just something we should do, it’s something we must do.
Read the rest of the article. There’s a lot of interesting speculation about the role this plays in our bodies, minds, human cultures, and even our system of laws.
Take a look at this:
Kingston, ON) – Surprisingly, people with mild depression are actually more tuned into the feelings of others than those who aren’t depressed, a team of Queen’s psychologists has discovered.
“This was quite unexpected because we tend to think that the opposite is true,” says lead researcher Kate Harkness. “For example, people with depression are more likely to have problems in a number of social areas.”
Personally, I’ve always believed that people who are prone to depression — myself included — tend to be more socially receptive. That isn’t to say that we’re more social, but rather that we are particularly sensitive to the feelings of others.
What do you think?
A year ago you didn’t find people talking so freely about their mental illness. I was extremely excited to find this article in our local newspaper. I hope it continues, it’s the only way we really make progress.
Charleston, SC - Most of us take our mental health for granted since it’s a basic part of who we are. But mental health is a major aspect of everyone’s life that needs to be protected. “I told everybody I do not have a mental illness, I have a brain tumor. For the first 2 years I was diagnosed, I convinced everybody I did not have bipolar.” Donna Lynch believed the negative stigma that exists about mental illness…that she would be seen as crazy. “Most of the time when we hear about mental illness something horrific has happened. A person with mental illness goes crazy Virginia Tech.” But Donna notes that there are dozens of mental illnesses, the majority of which do not cause a person to become violent. “Eating disorders, autism, alzhemiers, dementia anything that’s a chemical imbalance and that’s what mental illness is a chemical imbalance.” Mental illness is a disease that is highly treatable with medications and therapy. Donna was told she would never be able to work. Now she’s a peer support specialist at the Berkeley Community Mental Health Center helping patients with recovery skills. The Berkeley Community Mental Health Center serves up to 1800 patients with a variety of mental illness. Donna says they are helping these patients live successful lives in spite of their disease. Donna says she’s living proof. “I literally am a success story from the center and I’m not the only one I know people I’ve seen come there that I’ve literally seen their lives turn around.” And changing lives is the goal of Mental health awareness month which is this month to promote mental wellness.
As if you weren’t already feeling bad about yourself because of your poor diet, now you have another reason to get more omega-3 fatty acids in your diet. Take a look at this from Reuters:
The imbalance of fatty acids in the typical American diet could be associated with the sharp increase in heart disease and depression seen over the past century, a new study suggests.
Specifically, the more omega-6 fatty acids people had in their blood compared with omega-3 fatty acid levels, the more likely they were to suffer from symptoms of depression and have higher blood levels of inflammation-promoting compounds…
[...]
Hunter-gatherers consumed two or three times as much omega-6 as omega-3, Kiecolt-Glaser’s team notes in their study, published in Psychosomatic Medicine, but today Westerners consume 15- to 17-times more omega-6 than omega-3.
The researchers investigated the relationship among fatty acid consumption, depression and inflammation in 43 older men and women. The 6 individuals diagnosed with major depression had nearly 18 times as much omega-6 as omega-3 in their blood, compared with about 13 times as much for subjects who didn’t meet the criteria for major depression.
Just in case that doesn’t make much sense to you, here’s the gist: eat more foods with omega-3 fatty acids, and less foods with omega-6 fatty acids. This doesn’t mean you should avoid omega-6, but that we should try to balance our omega-3s with our omega-6s.
Phew. Could our dietary requirements get any more complicated? Personally, I believe that if you’re interested in the optimal diet and don’t want to bother with juggling all of the different components, just eat as the Okinawans do.
Take a look at this article from SciAm:
The big news in this study is that at least some cortical inputs to the amygdala — those from the prelimbic cortex — are involved in the expression of conditioned fear. This involvement gives learned fear a previously unrecognized anatomical component. And it establishes that there is at least one difference between the networks underlying the expression of innate and learned fears.
These observations have far-reaching implications. First, they suggest that the expression of learned fear is flexible and subject to modulation by the prelimbic cortex, depending on the circumstances; our expression of learned fears is less rigid and less automatic than the expression of innate fears, which are beyond the reach of the cortex.
These observations also raise the possibility that hyperactivity in the prelimbic region might contribute to human anxiety disorders that are caused by over-expression of learned fear, such as post-traumatic stress disorder. If that proves true, reducing the activity of the prelimbic cortex might constitute a useful strategy for the treatment of these debilitating disorders, while leaving innate fear responses intact. If learned fear is necessary, so is our ability to control it. This study reveals some dynamics that might be crucial in exercising that control.
This is good news for us. Although it’s a bit technical, what’s really being said here is that learned fear is within the reach of our thinking brain. That means we’re able to change learned fear and, subsequently, completely recover from anxiety disorders. This is probably not news to most of us (myself included) who have subscribed to this belief for quite some time now, but many people still insist that anxiety disorders are innate fears that we are born with. This research shows (yet again) that this is patently false.
Take a look at this article from today’s Washington Post.
Up to 25 percent of people in whom psychiatrists would currently diagnose depression may only be reacting normally to stressful events such as a divorce or losing a job, according to a new analysis that reexamined how the standard diagnostic criteria are used.
[...]
The new study, however, found that extended periods of depression-like symptoms are common in people who have been through other life stresses such as a divorce or a natural disaster and that they do not necessarily constitute illness.
The study also suggested that drug treatment may often be inappropriate for people who are experiencing painful — but normal — responses to life’s stresses. Supportive therapy, on the other hand, may be useful — and may keep someone who has been through a divorce or has lost a job from going on to develop full-blown depression.
Here’s a snippet:
My first attack happened a week before my graduation from college. I was in bed, painting my nails bright red, when my heart began racing. I had the sensation that I was watching myself from above — not alive but not quite dead. (I’d later learn that a sense of dreamlike unreality — depersonalization — is a hallmark of panic.)
I wondered at first if I were being punished for drinking too much at a party the night before. Perhaps someone had spiked my drink. (Nobody had.) What if I were actually dying? (I wasn’t.) This is panic’s flailing logic. Other sufferers I know count coins to ground themselves; some clean out their closets. Back then, when the attacks were new to me, I used to match celebrities with their home towns. (I recall murmuring, “Rosie O’Donnell, Merrick, Long Island,” repeatedly.)
Study: Antioxidant Vitamins May Increase Health Risks.
According to the results of a new study, antioxidant vitamin supplements taken by people to promote their health may actually shorten their life. The findings were based on a review of dozens of studies on the health effects of vitamin supplements.
Funny isn’t it? It seems that nothing is healthy anymore.
It seems that anxiety disorders have really been making it into the news lately. At the forefront of the discussion is, of course, the Iraq War and PTSD, but that’s not all it’s limited to. On today’s Diane Rehm show (NPR/WAMU) the second half of the show featured Allen Shawn, author of Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life.
The interview was interesting, although I found myself disagreeing with Shawn on a few things. For example, he places a large amount of faith into Freud. If I understood him correctly, Shawn claims to have an Oedipus complex. Whatever. I can’t say that I’ve ever really found Freud to be enlightening, although some of his theories were unique and a different way of thinking about psychology. Much of Freud’s theories, however, have little conclusive evidence to back them up. In fact, take a gander at this recent Washington Post article: “Was Repressed Memory a 19th Century Creation?”
On the other hand, during the interview, Mr. Shawn spoke a lot about the biological origins of fear and phobias, and I think this discussion is important because many people often forget that fear serves a very important function: it keeps you alive. It only becomes a problem when the fear mechanism is triggered unnecessarily and for extended periods of time.
Anyway, the interview’s worth a listen if you’re interesting. Follow this link and then click on “Real Audio” or “Windows Media Player” to the right of the 11 o’clock segment.
I’ve always been fascinated by the placebo effect, especially after an experience I had when I was in the Army. As a joke, a few of us decided to buy some non-alcoholic beer and place it into real beer bottles. We then decided to spend the day playing volleyball. After about an hour or two, most people were complaining that the beer was weak (and a few immediately knew what it was and we had to let them in on the secret so they didn’t bust us), but there were a few who truly seemed drunk. No one ever got the point where they were physically sick or stumbling, but the effect was definitely obvious. It was good for a laugh, and once we announced the news, everyone was a little embarrassed, some were pissed off, and others just wanted to know where the real beer was.
Anyway, check this story out. The premise: Hotel maids who believe they are getting exercise are healthier than maids who don’t think of their toil as a workout. Even if there’s nothing practical here, this is certainly fascinating stuff.
Now if only I could convince myself that I love sitting in rush hour traffic.
Dr. Weil has the low-down on L-theanine and whether or not it may be helpful for those of us living with chronic anxiety.
I’ve been meaning to post this Time article for a while. It covers a wide variety of topics but is centered around the “recent discoveries” that the human brain is amazingly adaptive. For example, changing the way you think literally alters your brain chemistry. The article also explores a few of the methods that people have successfully used to rewire their brains (including meditation) and it makes mention of anxiety disorders and depression. As time passes and the research continues to pile up, the “anxiety is a disease” camp grows ever smaller. Research has consistently shown that most forms of anxiety and depression can be effectively treated with a shotgun approach that includes cognitive therapy, medications, and meditation or other forms of “brain rewiring.” In other words, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with you.
The whole “chemical imbalance” stuff is a misinterpretation of the data. It’s your anxiety that causes the imbalance, not the other way around. Your serotonin and noradrenaline problems are real and medication can treat them, but treating the imbalance by itself is only treating the symptons and not the causes of your anxiety and/or depression; therefore, such treatment is only part of the solution.
At the risk of going off on a tangent about my own personal bias for such approaches, I’ll just let you read the article and decide for yourself. Here’s an excerpt:
FOR DECADES, THE PREVAILING DOGMA IN neuroscience was that the adult human brain is essentially immutable, hardwired, fixed in form and function, so that by the time we reach adulthood we are pretty much stuck with what we have. Yes, it can create (and lose) synapses, the connections between neurons that encode memories and learning. And it can suffer injury and degeneration. But this view held that if genes and development dictate that one cluster of neurons will process signals from the eye and another cluster will move the fingers of the right hand, then they’ll do that and nothing else until the day you die. There was good reason for lavishly illustrated brain books to show the function, size and location of the brain’s structures in permanent ink.
[...]
But research in the past few years has overthrown the dogma. In its place has come the realization that the adult brain retains impressive powers of “neuroplasticity”–the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience. These aren’t minor tweaks either. Something as basic as the function of the visual or auditory cortex can change as a result of a person’s experience of becoming deaf or blind at a young age. Even when the brain suffers a trauma late in life, it can rezone itself like a city in a frenzy of urban renewal. If a stroke knocks out, say, the neighborhood of motor cortex that moves the right arm, a new technique called constraint-induced movement therapy can coax next-door regions to take over the function of the damaged area. The brain can be rewired.
Don’t just sit there. Read this! This new way of thinking about the brain is already beginning to make waves among psychiatrists and psychotherapists. Your doctor is following this stuff and so should you.
I heard a few interesting stories this morning on NPR about magnetic pulse treatment, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, as a potential last-resort treatment for depression. The concept behind this treatment is to provide the brain with a magnetic pulse that stimulates neurons. It’s similar to another treatment which works in the same fashion but uses small electrical currents as opposed to magnetic fields. You can follow the links above to hear two short audio clips (from NPR) about this treatment.
I’m a skeptic, but hey, as long as it doesn’t hurt anything…
Scientific American has this article about TeenScreen, a new “national mental health and suicide risk screening program…” for teenagers.
Past studies have revealed that parents do not know of suicide attempts 90 percent of the time. In fact, roughly one third to two thirds of suicidal teens do not reveal past attempts to anyone.
Teens with mental disorders are at even greater risk—roughly 90 percent of teens who died by suicide had a psychiatric illness at the time of their deaths, according to research by child psychologist David Shaffer at Columbia University. Nearly two thirds of youth who die by suicide exhibit psychiatric symptoms for more than a year beforehand, which makes this time a significant window for potential intervention.
Flynn is now executive director of TeenScreen, a national mental health and suicide risk screening program based on Shaffer’s research. In 2005 the program screened more than 55,000 teens at 460 sites in 42 states and they hope to have exceeded 500 sites by the end of 2006. “The idea is to identify risks early to prevent tragedies,” Flynn says. “It’s amazing when kids who are really struggling and don’t know why then learn what’s going on and that there are things that can help.”
Keep in mind that this screening program is not mandatory. Given this, I’m a bit surprised at the controversy that TeenScreen has caused. The article mentions a number of critics — including Rep. Ron Paul (R-Tex.) — although none are directly quoted in any detail. It speaks volumes to note that some people are actually opposed to mental health screening. Yes, opposed to it. What good could possibly come from opposing something as potentially beneficial as a simple mental health screening? From my standpoint, the only thing one could possibly gain is denial. Although attitudes are changing, much of our society still ostracizes and stigmatizes people with mental/emotional problems. It’s a damn shame.
Of course there will always be a debate on the details of such screenings, and such debate is both necessary and critical to the program’s success; but forthright opposition to screening makes no sense to me. If a teen is feeling suicidal, then it is crucial that he or she receive treatment as soon as possible. Some people want to pretend that depression is something that happens only to weak people, the ones who take medications they don’t need and whine to psychiatrists. But this cultural construct is bullshit and it’s high time that our society recognizes mental illnesses as potentially affecting everyone, even those who routinely deny their own weaknesses.
Would you oppose a screening for diabetes? What about scoliosis screenings? Hearing and vision screenings? The only difference between these common screenings and mental health screening is the social stigma attached to mental illness. That’s it.
I fully understand the concerns about pharmaceutical companies pushing anti-depressants onto teens and pre-teen children. Anti-depressants are greatly abused in the United States and other Western countries, especially when it comes to children. But medication is not the only approach to healing emotional pain, and some treatment is better than no treatment, whether or not medication is a part of that treatment. Denying the problem will not make it go away.
Visit the TeenScreen website for more on the program.
Here’s a story from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel about a woman whose phobia of doctors and “medical settings” caused her to overlook the growth of a uterine fibroid, a “benign [tumor] composed of muscle and connective tissue that develop within or along the uterine wall.” Her tumor had grown so large that she appeared to be seven months pregnant.
Interestingly, her phobia doesn’t seem to have been directly connected with a fear of disease. Rather, it was doctors, hospitals and the like that caused her anxiety, which manifested in the form of a panic attack. Most of us deal with a fear of disease, which in turn often translates to a fear of death, and this usually have two outcomes: 1) We seek a doctor’s assistance more often in the hopes that it’ll allay our fears; or 2) We avoid doctors because the thought of discovering illness is enough to provoke anxiety.
If you fall into the first category, here’s a bit of advice: You should always see a doctor when you’re concerned about serious health problems, but once you’ve done so, you have to let it go. You can visit a doctor every week and your fears would still not be contained. Constantly seeking reassurance only encourages anxiety and allows it take root. You have to find the strength to resist the urge to run to the doctor every time you sneeze. Try to be rational about it by explaining your symptoms to an unbiased third-party.
If you’re a member of the second category, try to keep regular doctor’s appointments regardless of how you feel. This allows you to experience the doctor’s office without the fear of discovering a terrible illness. If you were to visit only when you’re experiencing high anxiety, then you’ll quickly associate the doctor with high anxiety.
I’m not sure what I think about this. This only makes sense if you’re one who believes that all anxiety and depression are congenital disorders. I do not believe this, although I do believe that there may be genetic factors or other congenital factors that may make the likelihood of developing anxiety or depression more likely.
I may be way off the mark on this one, but if I’m not mistaken, an infant’s cognitive abilities are incredibly limited and, for the most part, are dictated entirely by instinctual behaviors. It seems that it would be impossible to determine if an infant had depression or anxiety because it’s impossible to ask them.
In my years of navigating anxiety-related internet forums, I’ve often seen the question of pregnancy arise. I’ve always been wary about responding to such questions because I’m a male and don’t have the benefit of personal experience and because there’s very little reliable information to be found on the topic.
Most respondents attempt to assure the woman that anxiety during pregnancy is harmless to the fetus, but that never seemed very logical to me, considering that a developing fetus is very sensitive to everything. But this puts us in a bind: mothers who constantly worry about their anxiety are only going to make it worse, thereby compounding the potential effects on the unborn child. Additionally, if the woman chooses to take SSRIs during pregnancy, this introduces a whole new variable into the equation.
So, to help understand this complicated question, The Anxiety Disorders Association of America has a special feature this month on this very topic. If you’ve ever asked questions about anxiety and pregnancy, this article will definitely be of interest to you.
The Washington Post has a great article on our bad habits and why it’s so hard to change them. Although this doesn’t directly deal with anxiety, it isn’t uncommon for those of us who live with chronic anxiety to also deal with overeating, drinking, smoking, and other bad habits. In addition, we also deal with stress at a much greater level than most people, and stress is a major contributing factor to poor health.
Here’s a snippet from the article:
We’re fat. We smoke. Drink too much. Don’t exercise enough. And our stress levels are off the charts.
We’re killing ourselves, and we know it. And yet we carry on — overeating, lighting up, slumping in front of the television and throwing back another beer — inspiring some of the greatest thinkers in the worlds of genomics, neuroscience, biochemistry and evolutionary psychology to ponder the Big Mac of medical questions:
Why is it so hard for people to change?
Western medicine is still in its honeymoon period with the mind-body connection. Many cultures have understood this connection for hundreds — if not thousands — of years, but here in the West, we’ve been slow to come around.
People with generally positive outlooks show greater resistance to developing colds than do individuals who rarely revel in upbeat feelings, a new investigation finds.
Frequently basking in positive emotions defends against colds regardless of how often one experiences negative emotions, say psychologist Sheldon Cohen of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and his colleagues. They suspect that positive emotions stimulate symptom-fighting substances.
“We need to take more seriously the possibility that a positive emotional style is a major player in disease risk,” Cohen says.
The exact mechanism(s) of how this works have yet to be fully understood, but I can guarantee you one thing: as soon as it is understood, pharmaceutical companies will patent, bottle, and sell artificial “positive moods” as immuno-boosters.
The good news is that you already have direct access to your emotions even though you may believe that your mood is pre-ordained by genetics. Despite popular belief, this isn’t true. Thankfully, there’s a host of scientific studies that have shown this to be the case.
The truth is that your attitude is not determined by how healthy, how wealthy, or how attractive you are. Your mood is determined solely by your attitude. If you can adjust your attitude in spite of your hardships then you can adjust your mood. It’s easier said than done, but it can be done.
Or you can just wait for the happy pill.
Despite those who romanticize depression as the wellspring of artistic genius, studies find that people are most creative when they are in a good mood, and now researchers may have explained why: For better or worse, happy people have a harder time focusing.
[...]
As for the myth of the depressed but brilliant artist, Anderson speculates that creativity may be a form of self-medication, giving a gloomy artist the chance to adopt a cheerful disposition.
I’m often surprised at how these studies miss the point entirely. Sometimes I get the impression that people who study happiness have no idea what they’re looking for, so they waste their time answering redundant questions and then trying to make a case for causality.
I do not believe that the depression-creativity link is a “myth.” Here’s why: there are two major stages in any creative enterprise. The first is raw creativity, which we can describe as the ability to generate ideas and concepts that will, eventually, translate into some form of unique art or solution. The second stage in this process is actually following through.
So, given this study’s findings, I think it’s contradicted itself. If depressed people have “laserlike” attention, then it follows that they’re more likely to follow through with their creative enterprises, while happy people — who are full of ideas — will not spend much time on any one idea, thus producing nothing.
I’m not trying to make an argument for depression, just that some scientists seem to be unable to fully understand their own results, and this type of nonsense is what generates massive income for the snake-oil salesmen.
This from the AP via CBSNews.com:
Nearly half of all women in the United States suffer from increased stress during the holidays, a condition that contributes to rising levels of comfort eating, drinking and other coping mechanisms that can lead to weight gain, according to a survey conducted in October by the American Psychological Association.
A national stress survey the association conducted in January showed one in four people in the United States agrees that “when I am feeling down or facing a problem, I turn to food to help me feel better.” The October survey showed that the proportion increases to one in three people during the holidays.
[...]
The holiday season is the most emotional time of the year for many Americans, particularly for women who often feel pressured to make it special to those they care about, said Sharon Gordetsky, a psychologist who specializes in children, families and issues of female development.
Even in families where fathers play a bigger role in parenting, child caring and household work, “women tend to often still do more of the planning, do more of the nurturing, do more of the social and family organization” for the holidays, said Gordetsky, an assistant professor at the Tufts-New England Medical Center’s Comprehensive Family Evaluation Center.
This article really covers multiple topics. The first is the title topic: stress eating. A second is holiday stress. A third is women’s role during the holidays.
I’d like to address the first topic by saying that stress eating is not much different than any other coping mechanism for stress and anxiety. Therefore, I think the findings of this study are rather obvious.
But I find the second and third topics more interesting. When my grandmother was alive, she was the central hub around which our family planned all holiday activities. She was the point-of-contact, the organizer, the procurement specialist, and an endless source of joy for all of us. When she died in 1995 of cancer, our lives changed permanently: the family stopped gathering at Thanksgiving and Christmas for our annual dinners. The phone ceased to ring as often. Our Christmas tree was virtually void of gifts. Eventually, the family nearly stopped talking altogether. In short, when my grandmother died, much of our family died with her.
In addition, I find the pattern somewhat repeating in my immediate family. To me, the holidays are a time when I want to relax. I feel as though I deserve to relax. My wife, on the other hand, sees it as a limited time offer to get everybody together at various points in various places to eat various meals and to, hopefully, have a cheery time. For me — and for many men — cheeriness is most often accompanied by silence. Yet women seem to be more social in their holiday goals which, in my opinion, creates loads of unnecessary stress.
So here I’m presenting two different pictures of the same phenomenon. In the first, my grandmother was the matriach who virtually created Christmas from her cheeky smile; in the second, my wife seems to run herself thin trying to make Christmas perfect when, in my opinion, a perfect Christmas is the one where I don’t have to leave my home.
What do you think?
This article from SciAm is an interesting read.
The team discovered that those who took SSRIs reported an increased sensitivity to sweet and bitter tastes, detecting them at concentrations of 27 percent and 53 percent lower, respectively, than before ingestion of the drug.
[...]
The team, however, did find that a decreased sensitivity to salt correlated well with higher general anxiety levels among the 20 study participants–as did sensitivity to bitterness–although no one in the study suffered from either anxiety disorders or depression.
“What we’re working towards, hopefully, is to try and use taste tests and taste reactions in people as a sort of marker for the levels of those neurotransmitters in people with depression, so that we can tell if they’ve got a serotonin problem or a noradrenaline problem or both,” Donaldson says.
I heard this story yesterday on NPR. It chronicles the experiences of Iraq veterans who, upon their return from the war, suffer from depression and anxiety (in the form of PTSD). Rather than being treated for their emotional problems, they’re ridiculed and made into pariahs. As a former soldier myself (U.S. Army), I can attest to the general attitude within the Army that any form of emotional pain is a sign of a weakness and is shunned in the same way that High School kids shun the outcasts for fear of being associated with them. Luckily for me, my problems with anxiety didn’t start until years after I’d left the military, but not all soldiers are so fortunate.
Even within our society at large, those with anxiety and depression are usually ostracized to some degree, but this is nothing compared to what happens in the military. The military is, in a sense, a microcosm of society; but it’s also less tolerant, more judgmental and reactive, and flush with a sense of bravado that is more a facade than anything else.
To hear the story, follow the link and click on “Listen.” I do however want to warn you that the story is both shocking and graphic. If you’re easily triggered by listening to others’ stories of anxiety and depression, I would proceed with caution. Yet, confronting anxiety is about confronting our fears, so if you’re just slightly unnerved, listening to this story may actually be benefit for you. I found it both saddening and inspirational.
A recent study has found that anxiety, depression, and memory-problems are not a significant reason to treat subclinical thyroid dysfunction in the elderly (”subclinical” meaning exactly what it sounds like: mild). You can find the results of the study here.
I doubt this will apply to most individuals living with chronic anxiety considering that the vast majority of anxiety sufferers are under the age of 65 (the elderly threshold for this study), but if I’m not mistaken, studies like this usually have implications that extend beyond the reach of the study. We’ll see if anything more comes of it.
MSNBC has posted an interesting article about conquering your fear of dogs. Here’s a snippet:
“To me, big dogs looked like wolves, and little dogs are so jumpy. If I see a big dog, I’m terrified. Little dogs I avoid because they bark and I’m always afraid they’re going to nip,” she says.
Sometimes phobias develop after a bad experience with an animal or simply through lack of exposure to them, but often they originate as a type of panic disorder, for no apparent reason, says David Carbonell, author of “Panic Attacks Workbook.” “This kind of fear can be really powerful.”
I think the most interesting thing about this article is that those of us who deal with chronic anxiety on a regular basis can really relate to the symptoms and responses that are described in this article. Yet, for me, a fear of dogs seems completely irrational. I love dogs more than most humans. In fact, I honestly don’t know if I could’ve made it this far in life without my canine companions. My dogs have helped me through rough patches, and not by being soothing or caring, but by reminding me that they had no idea what was going on and they didn’t really care so long as I continued to feed them and hang out. I think the genuine simplicity of dogs is unparalleled and we could learn a lot from it.
But I’m getting off-topic.
As I was saying, one individual’s fear is another’s love. You may fear dogs but I want to approach even the most ferocious looking animals. So the core problem here isn’t the “trigger.” You’re actually not afraid of dogs per se, you’re actually afraid of your perception of dogs. Perhaps misperception is a more accurate word. When you see a dog, your mind generates thoughts, ideas, and images, and it’s this automatic response that tells the brain “beware!”
Anyway, my point is this: always keep in mind that your fear of dogs or cats or clowns or heart attacks is not actually caused by the trigger itself, but rather by your reaction to it. By changing your reaction, you can significantly alter your perception of the feared object/event.
Check out the article. It’s not too shabby.
