Depression Symptoms Quotes

The trouble is, depression doesn't come with handy symptoms like spots and a temperature, so you don't realize it at first. You keep saying 'I'm fine' to people when you're not fine. You think you should be fine. You keep saying to yourself: 'Why aren't I fine?

Me: “I refuse to attend Support Group.” Mom: “One of the symptoms of depression is disinterest in activities.” Me: “Please just let me watch America’s Next Top Model. It’s an activity.” Mom: “Television is a passivity.” Me: “Ugh, Mom, please.” Mom: “Hazel, you’re a teenager. You’re not a little kid anymore. You need to make friends, get out of the house, and live your life.” Me: “If you want me to be a teenager, don’t send me to Support Group. Buy me a fake ID so I can go to clubs, drink vodka, and take pot.” Mom: “You don’t take pot, for starters.” Me: “See, that’s the kind of thing I’d know if you got me a fake ID.” Mom: “You’re going to Support Group.” Me: “UGGGGGGGGGGGGG.” Mom: “Hazel, you deserve a life.

In those pamphlets that they give at mental health centers where they list the ten or so symptoms that would indicate a clinical depression, 'suicide threats' or even simple 'talk of suicide' is considered cause for concern. I guess the point is that what's just talk one day may become a real activity the next. So perhaps after years of walking around with these germinal feelings, these raw thoughts, these scattered moments of saying I wish I were dead, eventually I too, sooner or later, would succumb to the death urge. In the meantime, I could withdraw to my room, could hide and sleep as if I were dead.

You know how most illnesses have symptoms you can recognize? Like fever, upset stomach, chills, whatever. Well, with manic depression, it's sexual promiscuity, excessive spending, and substance abuse - and that just sounds like a fantastic weekend in Vegas to me!

Wanting to die (or 'suicidal ideation'as the experts would have it) goes hand in hand with the illness. It is a symptom of severe depression, not a character failing or moral flaw. Nor is it, truly, a desire to die so much as a fervent wish not to go on living. All depressives understand that distinction.

Who would not want an illness that has among its symptoms elevated and expansive mood, inflated self-esteem, abundance of energy, less need for sleep, intensified sexuality, and- most germane to our argument here-"sharpened and unusually creative thinking" and "increased productivity"?

When our grief cannot be spoken, it falls into the shadow and re-arises in us as symptoms. So many of us are depressed, anxious, and lonely. We struggle with addictions and find ourselves moving at a breathless pace, trying to keep up with the machinery of culture.

The return of the voices would end in a migraine that made my whole body throb. I could do nothing except lie in a blacked-out room waiting for the voices to get infected by the pains in my head and clear off. Knowing I was different with my OCD, anorexia and the voices that no one else seemed to hear made me feel isolated, disconnected. I took everything too seriously. I analysed things to death. I turned every word, and the intonation of every word over in my mind trying to decide exactly what it meant, whether there was a subtext or an implied criticism. I tried to recall the expressions on people’s faces, how those expressions changed, what they meant, whether what they said and the look on their faces matched and were therefore genuine or whether it was a sham, the kind word touched by irony or sarcasm, the smile that means pity. When people looked at me closely could they see the little girl in my head, being abused in those pornographic clips projected behind my eyes? That is what I would often be thinking and such thoughts ate away at the façade of self-confidence I was constantly raising and repairing. (describing dissociative identity disorder/mpd symptoms)

Ultimately, forgiveness is usually about one thing—“This is for me, not for you.” Hatred is exhausting; forgiveness, or even just indifference, is freeing. To quote Booker T. Washington, “I shall allow no man to belittle my soul by making me hate him.” Belittle and distort and consume. Forgiveness seems to be at least somewhat good for your health—victims who show spontaneous forgiveness, or who have gone through forgiveness therapy (as opposed to “anger validation therapy”) show improvements in general health, cardiovascular function, and symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Chapter 14 explored how compassion readily, perhaps inevitably, contains elements of self-interest. The compassionate granting of forgiveness epitomizes this.41

Magnesium deficiency can produce symptoms of anxiety or depression, including muscle weakness, fatigue, eye twitches, insomnia, anorexia, apathy, apprehension, poor memory, confusion, anger, nervousness, and rapid pulse.

Rape and war, she explained are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behaviors as survivors of combat: flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, depression, isolation, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.

Chronic trauma (according to the meaning I propose) that occurs early in life has profound effects on personality development and can lead to the development of dissociative identity disorder (DID), other dissociative disorders, personality disorders, psychotic thinking, and a host of symptoms such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, and substance abuse. In my view, DID is simply an extreme version of the dissociative structure of the psyche that characterizes us all.

And all this talk, over and over, of bravery: it would be nice one day if a public figure could talk about having depression without the media using words like 'incredible courage' and 'coming out'. Sure, it is well intentioned. But you shouldn't need to confess to having, say, anxiety. You should just be able to tell people. It's an illness. Like asthma or measles or meningitis. It's not a guilty secret. The shame people feel exacerbates symptoms. Yes, absolutely, people are often brave. But the bravery is in living with it, it shouldn't be in talking about it.

Married women are far more depressed than married men -- in unhappy marriages, three times more; and -- interestingly -- in happy marriages, five times more. In truth, it is men who are thriving in marriage, now as always, and who show symptoms of psychological and physical distress outside it. Not only their emotional well-being but their very lives, some studies say, depend on being married!

No one needs to hit rock bottom to change. And yet so many people do, only because most of us are unskilled in communicating with ourselves. Stress, depression, anxiety, insomnia, headaches, illness ... these are all symptoms of a bigger problem. You're trying to tell yourself something. Loudly. Listen now or listen later. There is no ignoring the call.

It doesn’t occur to me that alcohol might be unhinging me, that drinking at the rate I am can induce depression, impulsive behaviour, and symptoms of bipolar and borderline personality disorder.

Anxiety and depression, and the physical symptoms they cause, are merely distractions and smokescreens to “protect” you from dangers, which are usually, imaginary.

Lincoln's story confounds those who see depression as a collection of symptoms to be eliminated. But it resonates with those who see suffering as a potential catalyst of emotional growth. "What man actually needs," the psychiatrist Victor Frankl argued,"is not a tension-less state but rather the striving and struggling of a worthwhile goal." Many believe that psychological health comes with the relief of distress. But Frankl proposed that all people-- and particularly those under some emotional weight-- need a purpose that will both draw on their talents and transcend their lives. For Lincoln, this sense of purpose was indeed the key that unlocked the gates of a mental prison. This doesn't mean his suffering went away. In fact, as his life became richer and more satisfying, his melancholy exerted a stronger pull. He now responded to that pull by tying it to his newly defined sense of purpose. From a place of trouble, he looked for meaning. He looked at imperfection and sought redemption.

The dirty little secret of biological psychiatry is that every single drug in the psychopharmacopoeia is palliative. That is, all of them are symptom suppressors, and when you stop taking them you’re back at square one.

Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

They sent the shrink round yesterday. He's put me on Prozac. Prozac! He thinks I'm depressed.' 'Aren't you depressed?' 'I wasn't depressed.' 'You did try to kill yourself,' I pointed out. 'Yes. That's what he said too. Apparently that's a classic symptom. It's not thought a sane plan of action for someone in my situation.

The symptoms are a messenger of a deeper problem. Let’s get to the deeper problem.

Cutting, and suicide, two very different symptoms of the same problem, are gaining on us. I personally don’t know a single person who doesn’t know at least two of these victims personally.

As it stands, the diagnostic criteria for depression are so loose that two people with absolutely no symptoms in common can both end up with the same unitary diagnosis of depression. For this reason especially, the concept of depression as a mental disorder has been charged with being little more than a socially constructed dustbin for all manner of human suffering.

It isn't depression, or anxiety, though it can sometimes appear as a symptom of these better—known conditions. Often, it emerges with cruel ferocity as a chronic disorder completely unto itself. Its destructive impact on an individual’s sense of self is implied in its very name—depersonalization.

There is no cell culture for depression. You can't see it on a bone scan or an x-ray. Not everyone with depression will show the same behavioral symptoms.

Yes: we have arrived at our common thread, the underpinning factor that lets us answer our tangled questions about causes and treatments, symptoms and overlaps. Mental disorders—all of them—are metabolic disorders of the brain.

In the last twenty-five years, the borderline patient, who confronts the psychiatrist not with well-defined symptoms but with diffuse dissatisfactions, has become increasingly common. He does not suffer from debilitating fixations or phobias or from the conversion of repressed sexual energy into nervous ailments; instead he complains "of vague, diffuse dissatisfactions with life" and feels his "amorphous existence to be futile and purposeless." He describes "subtly experienced yet pervasive feelings of emptiness and depression," "violent oscillations of self-esteem," and "a general inability to get along." He gains "a sense of heightened self-esteem only by attaching himself to strong, admired figures whose acceptance he craves and by whom he needs to feel supported." Although he carries out his daily responsibilities and even achieves distinction, happiness eludes him, and life frequently strikes him as not worth living.

The elders were very patient with my curiosity, and gently amused at my Western medical-model formulations of “disease” when I asked how they handled depression, sleep problems, drug abuse, and trauma. They kept trying to help me understand that these problems were all basically the “same thing.” The problems were all interconnected. In Western psychiatry we like to separate them, but that misses the true essence of the problem. We are chasing symptoms, not healing people.

I can't see the logic in medicating a grieving person like there was something wrong with her, and yet it happens all the time... you go to the doctor with symptoms of profound grief and they push an antidepressant at you. We need to walk through our grief, not medicate it and shove it under the carpet like it wasn't there.

[Hot flashes] are the prime cause of sleep disruption in women over age fifty, Suzanne Woodward of Wayne State University School of Medicine reports. Her studies show that hot flashes in sleep occur about once an hour. Most prompt an arousal of three minutes or longer. Independently of their hot flashes, women who have them still awaken briefly every eight minutes on average. The sleep process dramatically blunts memory for awakenings, Woodward said, and in the morning women seldom realize how poorly they slept. Instead, they often focus on the daytime consequences of poor sleep, which include fatigue, lethargy, mood swings, depression, and irritability. Many women and their doctors, Woodward said, dismiss such symptoms as "just menopause." This is a mistake, she suggested, because treatment can reduce or eliminate hot flashes, aid sleep, relieve other symptoms, and improve a woman's quality of life. Treatment also helps keep frequent awakenings from becoming a bad habit that continues after hot flashes subside.

The study demonstrated that people suffering from symptoms of depression used the Internet more. Why is that? One hypothesis is that those with depression experience negative emotions more frequently than the general population and seek relief by turning to technology to lift their mood.

Physical symptoms such as muscle tension, back problems, stomach distress, constipation, diarrhea, headaches, obesity or maybe even hypertension can be caused by suppressing your emotions. Suppressed anger may also cause you to overreact to people and situations or to act inappropriately. Unexpressed anger can cause you to become irritable, irrational, and prone to emotional outbursts and episodes of depression.

Food allergy is one of the least diagnosed and most prevalent causes of symptoms, especially depression.

One of the first symptoms of depression, even before your mood drops to new lows, is sleep disturbance. Either you can’t get up or you can’t get to sleep or both.

Although relatively speaking the right hemisphere takes a more pessimistic view of the self, it is also more realistic about it.457 There is evidence that (a) those who are somewhat depressed are more realistic, including in self-evaluation; and, see above, that (b) depression is (often) a condition of relative hemisphere asymmetry, favouring the right hemisphere.458 Even schizophrenics have more insight into their condition in proportion to the degree that they have depressive symptoms.459 The evidence is that this is not because insight makes you depressed, but because being depressed gives you insight.

If we try to ignore the inner world, as most of us do, the unconscious will find its way into our lives through pathology: our psychosomatic symptoms, compulsions, depressions, and neuroses.

Misinformation about the Bible's answers to these issues has led to much wrong teaching about boundaries. Not only that, but many clinical psychological symptoms, such as depression, anxiety disorders, guilt problems, shame issues, panic disorders, and marital and relational struggles, find their root in conflicts with boundaries.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job, it's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression is the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation that is keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.

Dissociation is numbness and nothingness; it is a feeling of being lost; it is floating on a cloud that threatens to suffocate; it is automatic speech and action without awareness or control; it is looking at the world and blinking to try to remove the blurry fog; it is hearing and seeing the immediate world and simultaneously feeling very far away; it is raw fear; it is unfamiliarity in familiar places; it is possession; it is being haunted everyday by unknown monsters that can be felt but not seen (at least not by others); it is looking in the mirror and not knowing who is looking back; it is fantasy and imagination; and, above all else, it is survival. Dissociation is all of these things and none of them at once.

Most emotional and physical symptoms of stress and depression are not typically caused by the circumstances themselves, but instead by how our minds perceive what is going on and how our hearts hold up under the pressure.

When a manic-depressive personality begins to slide deeply into a depressive period, he had written, one symptom he or she may exhibit is acts of self-punishment: slapping, punching, pinching, burning one’s self w/ cigarette butts,

One in two recently evicted mothers reports multiple symptoms of clinical depression, double the rate of similar mothers who were not forced from their homes. Even after years pass, evicted mothers are less happy, energetic, and optimistic than their peers. When several patients committed suicide in the days leading up to their eviction, a group of psychiatrists published a letter in Psychiatric Services, identifying eviction as a “significant precursor of suicide.” The letter emphasized that none of the patients were facing homelessness, leading the psychiatrists to attribute the suicides to eviction itself. “Eviction must be considered a traumatic rejection,” they wrote, “a denial of one’s most basic human needs, and an exquisitely shameful experience.” Suicides attributed to evictions and foreclosures doubled between 2005 and 2010, years when housing costs soared.

While I was able to rise and function almost normally during the earlier part of the day, I began to sense the onset of the symptoms at midafternoon or a little later- -gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, stifling anxiety.

It was in this state that I first heard the term bipolar disorder. I was sitting in psychology 101 when the professor read the symptoms aloud from the overhead screen: depression, mania, paranoia, euphoria, euphoria, delusions of grandeur and persecution. I listened with a desperate interest. THIS IS MY FATHER, I wrote in my notes. HE'S DESCRIBING DAD.

the symptoms of depression cause depression. Loneliness is depressing, but depression also causes loneliness.

What I am describing here is entirely realistic. It is possible to find out one’s own truth in the partial, non-neutral company of such a (therapeutic) companion. In that process one can shed one’s symptoms, free oneself of depression, regain joy in life, break out of the state of constant exhaustion, and experience a resurgence of energy, once that energy is no longer required for the repression of one’s own truth. The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions, play down the memories stored in the body, and refuse them the attention they clamor for. Why

I admit I am an unnatural thing for not loving my child. But I hardly know my child. How can anyone love a thing that reveals nothing of itself. . . except for its unending screams?

Although it is important to be able to recognise and disclose symptom of physical illnesses or injury, you need to be more careful about revealing psychiatric symptoms. Unless you know that your doctor understands trauma symptoms, including dissociation, you are wise not to reveal too much. Too many medical professionals, including psychiatrists, believe that hearing voices is a sign of schizophrenia, that mood swings mean bipolar disorder which has to be medicated, and that depression requires electro-convulsive therapy if medication does not relieve it sufficiently. The “medical model” simply does not work for dissociation, and many treatments can do more harm than good... You do not have to tell someone everything just because he is she is a doctor. However, if you have a therapist, even a psychiatrist, who does understand, you need to encourage your parts to be honest with that person. Then you can get appropriate help.

Depression’s defining symptom is anhedonia, the inability to feel, anticipate, or pursue pleasure. Chronic stress depletes the mesolimbic system of dopamine, generating anhedonia. The link between childhood adversity and adult depression involves both organizational effects on the developing mesolimbic system and elevated adult glucocorticoid levels, which can deplete dopamine.

To be sure, depression, anxiety, and prolonged stress can cause specific physical symptoms, but these symptoms are not limitless, nor are they actually unexplained. When doctors invoke these labels for symptoms as diverse as vomiting, paralysis, and sever, unending pain, it is the concept of the somatoform disorders--hysteria dressed up in modern garb-- that allows them to do so.

Girls in virtual networks are subjected to hundreds of times more social comparison than girls had experienced for all of human evolution. They are exposed to more cruelty and bullying because social media platforms incentivize and facilitate relational aggression. Their openness and willingness to share emotions with other girls espouses them to depression and other disorders. The twisted incentive structures of social media reward the most extreme presentations of symptoms.

Apparently, as long as I continue to feed my children, there’s nothing wrong with me. A functional mom is one who can change a diaper and remember bedtimes. I’m not falling apart, so I’m fine.

The German psychologist Jutta Heckhausen, now in California, studied a group of childless middle-aged women who were still hoping to have a baby. As they approached menopause, their emotional distress became more and more intense. But after menopause those who gave up their hope for pregnancy lost their depression symptoms.81 The irony is deep: hope is often at the root of depression.

Water deficit is the primary cause of many other disease symptoms too. Chronic pain, digestive distress, migraines, depression—all may be attributed at least partly to a lack of cellular hydration.

When we encounter a friend who's depressed or afraid, we automatically try to take that distress away and to cheer the person up. While we may be operating with the best of intentions, this Band-Aid approach only reinforces the condition. Unless people experience their pain completely and begin to undrstand it, they will not only fail to overcome it, they'll also lose the opportunity of using it to advance their own growth. Pain can get you somewhere, and that somewhere can be a life-enhancing experience. We all tend to forget that pain can signal change. Alleviating the symptoms of pain in someone, without helping them to get at its underlying source, robs them of an important to for self-exploration. It's also a way of placating that reinforces the person'S need to cave in and succumb to another. This attitude undermines healthy character development and contributes to psychospiritual, moral, and ultimately social decay.

Of the many dreadful manifestations of the disease, both physical and psychological, a sense of self-hatred—or, put less categorically, a failure of self-esteem—is one of the most universally experienced symptoms, and I had suffered more and more from a general feeling of worthlessness as the malady had progressed.

I can't stand THE DEPRESSED. It's like a job. It's the only thing they work hard at. Oh good my depression is very well today. Oh good today I have another mysterious symptom and I will have another one tomorrow. The DEPRESSED are full of hate and bile and when they are not having panic attacks they are writing poems. What do they want their poems to DO? Their depression in the most VITAL thing about them. Their poems are threats. ALWAYS threats. There is no sensation keener or more active than their pain. They give nothing back except their depression. It's just another utility. Like electricity and water and gas and democracy. They could not survive without it.

There was another silence. I felt, above all, tired. Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us. Mornings we awoke into a malign weariness that seemed only to have refreshed itself overnight.

Given that narcissists can often be quite vulnerable, again, because their self-esteem is so fragile and reliant on the judgments of other people, depression is not a surprising part of this picture. At times when they are depressed, especially for men, it is quite possible that their mood will be even more irritable than usual, or they will become more withdrawn, and seemingly more focused on themselves. The big-ticket symptoms we would like to see changed—the lack of empathy, the chronic entitlement, the grandiosity—tend to be most resistant to change, since they are linked so strongly to the core deficits of the disorder, such as an inability to regulate self-esteem.

If everyone has the capacity for some measure of depression under some circumstances, everyone also has the capacity to fight depression to some degree under some circumstances. Often, the fight takes the form of seeking out the treatments that will be most effective in the battle. It involves finding help while you are still strong enough to do so. It involves making the most of the life you have between your most severe episodes. Some horrendously symptom-ridden people are able to achieve real success in life; and some people are utterly destroyed by the mildest forms of the illness.

My name is CRPS, or so they say But I actually go by; a few different names. I was once called causalgia, nearly 150 years ago And then I had a new name It was RSD, apparently so. I went by that name because the burn lived inside of me. Now I am called CRPS, because I have so much to say I struggle to be free. I don't have one symptom and this is where I change, I attack the home of where I live; with shooting/burning pains. Depression fills the mind of the body I belong, it starts to speak harsh to self, negativity growing strong. Then I start to annoy them; with the issues with sensitivity, You'd think the pain enough; but no, it wants to make you aware of its trembling disability. I silently make my move; but the screams are loud and clear, Because I enter your physical reality and you can't disappear. I confuse your thoughts; I contain apart of your memory, I cover your perspective, the fog makes it sometimes unbearable to see. I play with your temperature levels, I make you nervous all the time - I take away your independance and take away your pride. I stay with you by the day & I remind you by the night, I am an awful journey and you will struggle with this fight. Then there's a side to me; not many understand, I have the ability to heal and you can be my friend. Help yourself find the strength to fight me with all you have, because eventually I'll get tired of making you grow mad. It will take some time; remember I mainly live inside your brain, Curing me is hard work but I promise you, You can beat me if you feed love to my pain. Find the strength to carry on and feed the fears with light; hold on to the seat because, like I said, it's going to be a fight. But I hope to meet you, when your healthy and healed, & you will silenty say to me - I did this, I am cured is this real? That day could possibly come; closer than I want- After all I am a disease and im fighting for my spot. I won't deny from my medical angle, I am close to losing the " incurable " battle.

When clients relinquish symptoms, succeed in achieving a personal goal, or make healthier choices for themselves, subsequently many will feel anxious, guilty, or depressed. That is, when clients make progress in treatment and get better, new therapists understandably are excited. But sometimes they will also be dismayed as they watch the client sabotage her success by gaining back unwanted weight or missing the next session after an important breakthrough and deep sharing with the therapist. Thus, loyalty and allegiance to symptoms—maladaptive behaviors originally developed to manage the “bad” or painfully frustrating aspects of parents—are not maladaptive to insecurely attached children. Such loyalty preserves “object ties,” or the connection to the “good” or loving aspects of the parent. Attachment fears of being left alone, helpless, or unwanted can be activated if clients disengage from the symptoms that represent these internalized “bad” objects (for example, if the client resolves an eating disorder or terminates a problematic relationship with a controlling/jealous partner). The goal of the interpersonal process approach is to help clients modify these early maladaptive schemas or internal working models by providing them with experiential or in vivo re-learning (that is, a “corrective emotional experience”). Through this real-life experience with the therapist, clients learn that, at least sometimes, some relationships can be different and do not have to follow the same familiar but problematic lines they have come to expect.

Hot baths before bed improve sleep for insomnia sufferers and can reduce depression symptoms. One study found that people who took baths more frequently were less likely to be depressed three years later, an effect that was especially strong for bathing in winter.

The good news is that we have effective treatments for the symptoms of depression; the bad news is that medication will not make you happy. Happiness is not simply the absence of despair. It is an affirmative state in which our lives have both meaning and pleasure.

Rape and war, she explained, are among the most common causes of post-traumatic stress disorder, and survivors of sexual assault frequently exhibit many of the same symptoms and behaviors as survivors of combat: flashbacks, insomnia, nightmares, hypervigilance, depression, isolation, suicidal thoughts, outbursts of anger, unrelenting anxiety, and an inability to shake the feeling that the world is spinning out of control.

Classifying depression as an illness serves the psychiatric community and pharmaceutical corporations well; it also soothes the frightened, guilty, indifferent, busy, sadistic, and unschooled. To understand depression as a call for life-changes is not profitable. Stagnation is not a medical term. The 17.5 million Americans diagnosed as suffering a major depression in 1997 were mostly damned. (Psychobiological examinations confuse cause and symptom.) Deficient serotonergic functioning, ventral prefrontal cerebral cortex, dis-inhibition of impulsive-aggressive behavior, blah blah blah: the medical lexicon boils emotion from human being. Go take a drug, the doctor says. Pain is a biochemical phenomenon. Erase all memory.

Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was. For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.

When we are offended in our relationship our feelings generally move through 4 stages: hurt anger revenge destructive action psychosomic symptoms depression. One of the best ways to neutralize the cycle is to force ourselves back to the source of hurt and deal with the problem at that level.

A friend will soothe, like a cough drop smooth, Making the symptoms of our condition not so bad. You will soothe me, like a cough drop thick, Making the pain go away while I'm still sick. There's nothing we can do to close our interval, But celebrate your flavor that makes a sore life bearable.

Failure per se is not a disease but it can trigger anxiety, depression and even suicide. If failure can strike anyone, how can we handle it? Medical science has a well-defined mechanism in place for dealing with diseases – it identifies the symptoms and then prescribes a methodology for their management. Psychologists and Psychiatrists have management practices for dealing with anxiety and depression. But do we have a method for dealing with failure?

Further studies on humans have shown that certain probiotic treatments can reduce symptoms of depression, anxiety, and the occurrence of negative thoughts (Mohajeri et al. [2018] and Valles-Colomer et al. [2019]). However, a multibillion-dollar probiotics industry hovers around the field of neuromicrobiology, and a number of researchers have pointed out the tendency to overhype findings. Gut communities are complex, and manipulating them is a challenge.

The Serzone is a gift from God that frees her from the immobilising depression that would otherwise surround her and seep into her body like a poisonous fog. The drug distances the depression from her, although it is never out of sight. ... The depression she battles is not the newly acquired symptom of a young woman now living in Los Angeles on her own. It was first set in the bow in Vermont, where she grew up, and fired as a companion arrow that has travelled with her ever since.

I now believe that virtually all my problems could be attributed to my brain’s being configured differently from those of the majority of humans. All the psychiatric symptoms were a result of this difference, not of any underlying disease. Of course I was depressed: I lacked friends, sex, and a social life, because I was incompatible with other people. My intensity and focus were misinterpreted as mania. And my concern with organization was labeled as obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength ... Whenever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something 'ugly.' His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride - all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful ... The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgement of 'ugly.' Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition - even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol - all evoke the same reaction, the value judgement 'ugly.' A hatred is aroused ... the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species ... it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.

Our “increasing mental sickness” may find expression in neurotic symptoms. These symptoms are conspicuous and extremely distressing. But “let us beware,” says Dr. Fromm, “of defining mental hygiene as the prevention of symptoms. Symptoms as such are not our enemy, but our friend; where there are symptoms there is conflict, and conflict always indicates that the forces of life which strive for integration and happiness are still fighting.” The really hopeless victims of mental illness are to be found among those who appear to be most normal. “Many of them are normal because they are so well adjusted to our mode of existence, because their human voice has been silenced so early in their lives, that they do not even struggle or suffer or develop symptoms as the neurotic does.” They are normal not in what may be called the absolute sense of the word; they are normal only in relation to a profoundly abnormal society. Their perfect adjustment to that abnormal society is a measure of their mental sickness. These millions of abnormally normal people, living without fuss in a society to which, if they were fully human beings, they ought not to be adjusted, still cherish “the illusion of individuality,” but in fact they have been to a great extent deindividualized. Their conformity is developing into something like uniformity. But “uniformity and freedom are incompatible. Uniformity and mental health are incompatible too. . . . Man is not made to be an automaton, and if he becomes one, the basis for mental health is destroyed.

Many survivors of relational and other forms of early life trauma are deeply troubled and often struggle with feelings of anger, grief, alienation, distrust, confusion, low self-esteem, loneliness, shame, and self-loathing. They seem to be prisoners of their emotions, alternating between being flooded by intense emotional and physiological distress related to the trauma or its consequences and being detached and unable to express or feel any emotion at all - alternations that are the signature posttraumatic pattern. These occur alongside or in conjunction with other common reactions and symptoms (e.g., depression, anxiety, and low self-esteem) and their secondary manifestations. Those with complex trauma histories often have diffuse identity issues and feel like outsiders, different from other people, whom they somehow can't seem to get along with, fit in with, or get close to, even when they try. Moreover, they often feel a sense of personal contamination and that no one understands or can help them. Quite frequently and unfortunately, both they and other people (including the professionals they turn to for help) do misunderstand them, devalue their strengths, or view their survival adaptations through a lens of pathology (e.g., seeing them as "demanding", "overdependent and needy", "aggressive", or as having borderline personality). Yet, despite all, many individuals with these histories display a remarkable capacity for resilience, a sense of morality and empathy for others, spirituality, and perseverance that are highly admirable under the circumstances and that create a strong capacity for survival. Three broad categories of survivorship, with much overlap between them, can be discerned: 1. Those who have successfully overcome their past and whose lives are healthy and satisfying. Often, individuals in this group have had reparative experiences within relationships that helped them to cope successfully. 2. Those whose lives are interrupted by recurring posttraumatic reactions (often in response to life events and experiences) that periodically hijack them and their functioning for various periods of time. 3. Those whose lives are impaired on an ongoing basis and who live in a condition of posttraumatic decline, even to the point of death, due to compromised medical and mental health status or as victims of suicide of community violence, including homicide.

Instead, when you have a symptom—when you feel cloudy, sad, sore, gassy, weepy, tired, or unnecessarily anxious—bring some wonder to it. Ask why and try to make the connections. Your body’s symptoms are telling you something about equilibrium. Your body is trying to tell you that it has lost balance. Stand back and appreciate the infinite complexity of your organism. Know that fear will only drive you to treat your body like a robotic machine that needs oil and gear changes. We are so much more than buttons and levers.

This shows up as symptoms of alexithymia (the inability to describe or elaborate feelings due to a deficiency in emotional awareness), depression and somatization.

Depression is an illness, not a failing. It’s what psychologists call a syndrome—that is, a group of signs and symptoms that form a pattern.

Online chatting, on the other hand, has been linked to symptoms of loneliness, confusion, anxiety, depression, fatigue, and addiction.

Depression was a symptom of another illness. Being human. Being me.

She can’t concentrate because trying not to cry is taking all of her focus. She looked up the symptoms of depression and ticked off all the boxes.

the symptoms of depression, despair or melancholy, and lethargy were considered by the Church the sin of accidia or sloth.

One of the symptoms of the approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important & that to take a holiday would bring all kinds of disaster. Bertrand Russell

Many children, however, are in some or many important respects unable to fulfill the expectations of their parents, and carry round with them, so to speak, raw, painful areas of disconfirmation which leave them exposed to sudden attacks of self-doubt and uncertainty, sudden ebbings of self-confidence which may well be experienced as 'symptoms' of anxiety or depression.

Often, women's symptoms are brushed off as the result of depression, anxiety, or the all-purpose favorite: stress. Sometimes, they are attributed to women's normal physiological states and cycles: to menstrual cramps, menopause, or even being a new mom. Sometimes, other aspects of their identity seem to take center stage: fat women report that any ailment is blamed on their weight; trans women find that all their symptoms are attributed to hormone therapy; black women are stereotyped as addicts looking for prescription drugs, their reports of pain doubted entirely. Whatever the particular attribution, there is often the same current of distrust: the sense that women are not very accurate judges of when something is really, truly wrong in their bodies.

Most people recognize, however, that relief of symptoms is not the depressed person’s ultimate objective. If you are depressed, your goal is not just not to be depressed; your goal is to be happy.

Cook referred to the symptoms collectively as polar anemia. Researchers today use the term winter over-syndrome. But it's essentially the same thing. A prevailing theory suggests it's a form of hypothyroidism , which is associated with depression and atrial fibrillation and could thus account for the cerebral symptoms and the cardiac symptoms that most concerned Cook before scurvy took hold.

Because of media portrayals, clinicians may believe that dissociative identity disorder presents with dramatic, florid alternate identities with obvious state transitions (switching). These florid presentations occur in only about 5% of patients with dissociative identity disorder.(20) How ever, the vast majority of these patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as post-traumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.(2,10)

Psychological symptoms are God’s way of letting us know that something is wrong. Depression, anxiety, eating disorders, substance abuse, and compulsive behaviors are all symptoms of a deeper problem.

The effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the user's experience and behavior depends in part on his or her personality and genetic predisposition, which can vary to a great extent from person to person. As symptoms of psychiatric disorders can sometimes be elicited after one-off use, people with a genetic tendency to depression or psychosis should be discouraged from using psychoactive mushrooms.

One of the first things mental health practitioners tell you after you try to die is that your recent attempt is not selfish, not a misery you’ve inflicted on those you love most, but a fatal final symptom of a disease that’s destroying you. Which, sure. Fine. But seeing my younger brother’s face in that psych ward after he’d flown in from his first weeks of law school convinced me I deserved to die in the most torturous way imaginable. Loving people so much it hurts doesn’t necessarily negate the need to die; it just makes you hate yourself more for all the pain you cause, makes you feel your death would be a gift.

Bad habits can be ingrained in our neurons as easily as good ones. Pascual-Leone observes that “plastic changes may not necessarily represent a behavioral gain for a given subject.” In addition to being “the mechanism for development and learning,” plasticity can be “a cause of pathology.”35 It comes as no surprise that neuroplasticity has been linked to mental afflictions ranging from depression to obsessive-compulsive disorder to tinnitus. The more a sufferer concentrates on his symptoms, the deeper those symptoms are etched into his neural circuits. In the worst cases, the mind essentially trains itself to be sick.

In 1970, when Dr. Edgar Berman said women’s hormones during menstruation and menopause could have a detrimental influence on women’s decision making, feminists were outraged. He was soon served up as the quintessential example of medical male chauvinism.12 But by the 1980s, some feminists were saying that PMS was the reason a woman who deliberately killed a man should go free. In England, the PMS defense freed Christine English after she confessed to killing her boyfriend by deliberately ramming him into a utility pole with her car; and, after killing a coworker, Sandie Smith was put on probation—with one condition: she must report monthly for injections of progesterone to control symptoms of PMS.13 By the 1990s, the PMS defense paved the way for other hormonal defenses. Sheryl Lynn Massip could place her 6-month-old son under a car, run over him repeatedly, and then, uncertain he was dead, do it again, then claim postpartum depression and be given outpatient medical help.14 No feminist protested. In the 1970s, then, feminists

The first thing you need to know if you are a survivor is that parts of you have probably been trained to create a variety of symptoms and behaviours. Abusers actually train child parts to cut the body, to make other parts cut, to attempt suicide, to create flashbacks by releasing pieces of visual or auditory memories, to create body memories of pain or electroshock, and to create depression, terror, anxiety, and despair by releasing the emotional components of memories to the rest of the personality system. The front person and most of the rest of the system do not know that this is the source of these feelings and behaviours. p126

One of the first actions we take at Passages is to ruthlessly scrutinize, always under a doctor's supervision and care, the specific necessity of any mind- altering or mood-altering medications that our clients are taking. As soon as any non essential drugs are out of their systems, the feelings they were trying to suppress usually emerge. When that happens, we can see what symptoms the client was masking with drugs or alcohol.

DSM definitions do not include personal and contextual factors such as whether the depressive symptoms are an understandable response to loss, a terrible life situation, psychological conflict or personality factors.

To the contrary, they frequently desire only relief from the symptoms of their depression “so that things can be as they used to be.” They do not know that things can no longer be “the way they used to be.” But the unconscious knows. It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that “the way things used to be” is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced. As likely as not the patient will report, “I have no idea why I’m depressed” or will ascribe the depression to irrelevant factors. Since patients are not yet consciously willing or ready to recognize that the “old self” and “the way things used to be” are outdated, they are not aware that their depression is signaling that major change is required for successful and evolutionary adaptation. The

One of the obvious implications is that a person will have to face the fact that she cannot meet other people’s expectations. This signals the end of what might be called the “camel” phase of human development. I believe it was Nietschze who suggested that for the first part of life, we are camels, trudging through the desert, accepting on our backs everybody’s “shoulds” and “don’ts.” Camels only know how to spit; they don’t think for themselves or talk back. As the camel dies, a lion is born in its place. Lions discover both their roar and the art of preening. The lion may be a little shaky at first, so support and encouragement are vital. But once the camel begins to die (e.g., signaled by depression), there is no turning back. Symptoms occupy the space between the death of the camel and the birth of the lion. A therapist can be a good midwife during this liminal phase.

For example, if surgery is employed to relieve back pain due to TMS, it will prove to be only a placebo “cure,” and similarly, if Prozac is used to treat depression, it will prove to be only a chemical “cure.” In both cases, the patient will soon develop new symptoms. The TMS and the depression are not disorders in themselves; they are symptoms of unconscious conflicts and must be treated with psychotherapy to avoid the inevitable return of new

Instead of showing visibly distinct alternate identities, the typical DID patient presents a polysymptomatic mixture of dissociative and posttraumatic stressdisorder (PTSD) symptoms that are embedded in a matrix of ostensibly non-trauma-related symptoms (e.g., depression, panic attacks, substance abuse,somatoform symptoms, eating-disordered symptoms). The prominence of these latter, highly familiar symptoms often leads clinicians to diagnose only these comorbid conditions. When this happens, the undiagnosed DID patient may undergo a long and frequently unsuccessful treatment for these other conditions. - Guidelines for Treating Dissociative Identity Disorder in Adults, Third Revision, p5

Suicide is a symptom of depression. That struck me as odd. I think of a sore throat as a symptom, or a headache, but death? Death as a symptom is too final. You're obviously not going to recover - the symptom is bigger than the disease.

Kendler himself is the researcher who reported that when Walter Cassidy, the psychiatrist who first proposed diagnostic criteria for depression, was asked why he set the threshold at six out of ten symptoms, he responded, “It sounded about right

he was afraid that if the idea that he was depressed gained currency, he would forfeit his right to his opinions. He would forfeit his moral certainties; every word he spoke would become a symptom of disease; he would never again win an argument.

Many research studies, as well as my own clinical experience, have confirmed that severely depressed patients who appear very "biologically" depressed with lots of physical symptoms often respond rapidly to cognitive therapy alone without any drugs.5

Contrary to previous assumptions, maternal depression can also manifest in a myriad of ways, many far different from what some might consider traditional depressive symptoms, including psychosis, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and other anxiety disorders.

The trouble is, depression doesn't come with handy symptoms like spots and a temperature, so you don't realize at first. You keep saying "I'm fine" to people when you're not fine. You think you should be fine. You keep saying to yourself: "Why aren't I fine?

shocking conclusion. It suggested that there appears to be one common pathway to all mental illnesses. Caspi and Moffitt called it the p-factor, in which the p stands for general psychopathology. They argued that this factor appears to predict a person’s liability to develop a mental disorder, to have more than one disorder, to have a chronic disorder, and it can even predict the severity of symptoms. This p-factor is common to hundreds of different psychiatric symptoms and every psychiatric diagnosis. Subsequent research using different sets of people and different methods confirmed the existence of this p-factor.25 However, this research was not designed to tell us what the p-factor is. It only suggests that it exists—that there is an unidentified variable that plays a role in all mental disorders.

Then there were all the diseases one is vulnerable to in the woods — giardiasis, eastern equine encephalitis, Rocky Mountain spotted fever, Lyme disease, ehrlichiosis, schistosomiasis, brucellosis, and shigellosis, to offer but a sampling. Eastern equine encephalitis, caused by the prick of a mosquito, attacks the brain and central nervous system. If you’re lucky you can hope to spend the rest of your life propped in a chair with a bib around your neck, but generally it will kill you. There is no known cure. No less arresting is Lyme disease, which comes from the bite of a tiny deer tick. If undetected, it can lie dormant in the human body for years before erupting in a positive fiesta of maladies. This is a disease for the person who wants to experience it all. The symptoms include, but are not limited to, headaches, fatigue, fever, chills, shortness of breath, dizziness, shooting pains in the extremities, cardiac irregularities, facial paralysis, muscle spasms, severe mental impairment, loss of control of body functions, and — hardly surprising, really — chronic depression.

Getting better is even more important. It consists of clients’ (1) feeling better; (2) continuing to feel better; (3) experiencing fewer disturbing symptoms (e.g., depressing and needlessly inhibiting themselves); (4) making their distressing seldom recur; (5) knowing how to reduce it when they partly cause it; (6) using this knowledge effectively; (7) being less likely to disturb themselves when new adversities occur in their lives; (8) accepting the challenge of making themselves minimally undisturbing, even when unusually aversive events occur.

...the vast majority of these [dissociative identity disorder] patients have subtle presentations characterized by a mixture of dissociative and PTSD symptoms embedded with other symptoms, such as posttraumatic depression, substance abuse, somatoform symptoms, eating disorders, and self-destructive and impulsive behaviors.2,10 A history of multiple treatment providers, hospitalizations, and good medication trials, many of which result in only partial or no benefit, is often an indicator of dissociative identity disorder or another form of complex PTSD.

the British humorist Sir A. P. Herbert nicely described the conflicting set of symptoms: “Thank heaven, I have given up smoking again!” he announced. “God! I feel fit. Homicidal, but fit. A different man. Irritable, moody, depressed, rude, nervy, perhaps; but the lungs are fine.

Symptoms of Candida vary according to what part of the body is affected.  (Even babies can get Candida, which usually shows up as diaper rash.)  And the problem is that because the infection can turn up in any part of the body, there’s no one definitive symptom.  Moreover, if you’re middle-aged, the effects of Candida can mimic the signs of so-called normal aging (impaired mental function, less energy, vague aches and pains, depression) and you might ignore the problem figuring there’s nothing you can do about it.  But there IS something you can do about it.

There is a real medical condition for which Japanese tourists are sometimes treated after visiting Paris. It is called Paris Syndrome, and symptoms include depression and nausea due to realising that the city isn’t as beautiful and romantic as they had previously been led to believe.

1922 was a bad year for Elizabeth. She was disappointed by some of the reviews of The Enchanted April although it was to prove the most popular — excepting the first — of all her novels. She suffered from depressions that she couldn’t throw off. Her doctor diagnosed menopausal symptoms.

When conventional medicine fails, when we must confront pain and death, of course we are open to other prospects for hope. And, after all, some illnesses are psychogenic. Many can be at least ameliorated by a positive cast of mind. Placebos are dummy drugs, often sugar pills. Drug companies routinely compare the effectiveness of their drugs against placebos given to patients with the same disease who had no way to tell the difference between the drug and the placebo. Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins -the small brain proteins with morphine-like effects - can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry.

For millennia, we’ve recognized the difference between “normal” sadness and crippling despair. But we’ve never been good at delineating between the two. So the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) defines depression by a list of symptoms rather than how it’s caused.

What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

In psychiatry, patients don't produce information as easily as they do in other medical settings. Most patients with physical disorders are frightened by their pain and eager to give information about it. Psychiatric patients have a very different relationship to their symptoms and don't always want to answer questions. Gertrude's patient probably found his rituals deeply embarrassing. He probably wanted the help, but he also probably wanted to tell this stranger as little as possible to get it. The paranoid patient, who has an unrealistic fixed belief that people are out to get him, may not feel, at the time, that it is of any relevance to the doctor that there is a conspiracy of aliens against him. The manic-depressive patient, whose judgment is usually quite poor during periods of illness, may take a dislike to the doctor and say that she has been behaving perfectly normally. Interviewing a psychiatric patient can be like trying to catch fish with your hands.

In recent years, there has been an explosion of research into meditation, which has been shown to: • Reduce blood pressure • Boost recovery after the release of the stress hormone cortisol • Improve immune system functioning and response • Slow age-related atrophy of the brain • Mitigate the symptoms of depression and anxiety

We may try to push thoughts out of our minds, but the body gets the message anyway. And just as trying to suppress sad and self-critical thoughts makes depression worse, studies show that thought suppression increases the symptoms of serious anxiety disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

For most people, disruptions in routine are simply annoying, but for someone with BPII, these types of disruptions may actually lead to depressive or hypomanic symptoms. In addition, research has found that individuals with bipolar disorder have more difficulty than the average person in maintaining a regular schedule (Shen et al. 2008).

The A.W.E. Method A.W.E stands for Attention, Wait, Exhale and Expand. Attention means Focusing your full and undivided attention on something you value, appreciate or find amazing. Wait means slowing down or pausing. Exhale and Expand amplifies whatever sensations you are experiencing. A.W.E. is a quick and easy intervention that can cultivate awe in the ordinary, at any time and in any place. Cultivating awe for less than a minute a day reduces symptoms of depression and anxiety, improves social connection, decreases loneliness, reduces burnout, lowers stress, increases wellbeing and reduces chronic pain. The capacity to help heal the mind and body is only one of awe's superpowers.

In 1944-1945, Dr Ancel Keys, a specialist in nutrition and the inventor of the K-ration, led a carefully controlled yearlong study of starvation at the University of Minnesota Laboratory of Physiological Hygiene. It was hoped that the results would help relief workers in rehabilitating war refugees and concentration camp victims. The study participants were thirty-two conscientious objectors eager to contribute humanely to the war effort. By the experiment's end, much of their enthusiasm had vanished. Over a six-month semi-starvation period, they were required to lose an average of twenty-five percent of their body weight." [...] p193 p193-194 "...the men exhibited physical symptoms...their movements slowed, they felt weak and cold, their skin was dry, their hair fell out, they had edema. And the psychological changes were dramatic. "[...] p194 "The men became apathetic and depressed, and frustrated with their inability to concentrate or perform tasks in their usual manner. Six of the thirty-two were eventually diagnosed with severe "character neurosis," two of them bordering on psychosis. Socially, they ceased to care much about others; they grew intensely selfish and self-absorbed. Personal grooming and hygiene deteriorated, and the men were moody and irritable with one another. The lively and cooperative group spirit that had developed in the three-month control phase of the experiment evaporated. Most participants lost interest in group activities or decisions, saying it was too much trouble to deal with the others; some men became scapegoats or targets of aggression for the rest of the group. Food - one's own food - became the only thing that mattered. When the men did talk to one another, it was almost always about eating, hunger, weight loss, foods they dreamt of eating. They grew more obsessed with the subject of food, collecting recipes, studying cookbooks, drawing up menus. As time went on, they stretched their meals out longer and longer, sometimes taking two hours to eat small dinners. Keys's research has often been cited often in recent years for this reason: The behavioral changes in the men mirror the actions of present-day dieters, especially of anorexics.

That question became even more salient to me as I began my clinical work with troubled children. I soon found that the vast majority of my patients had lives filled with chaos, neglect and/or violence. Clearly, these children weren’t “bouncing back”—otherwise they wouldn’t have been taken to a child psychiatry clinic! They’d suffered trauma—such as being raped or witnessing murder—that would have had most psychiatrists considering the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), had they been adults with psychiatric problems. And yet these children were being treated as though their histories of trauma were irrelevant, and they’d “coincidentally” developed symptoms, such as depression or attention problems, that often required medication.

However, there is no fixed rule that dictates when and if a symptom will appear. This group includes: •   Excessive shyness •   Diminished emotional responses •   Inability to make commitments •   Chronic fatigue or very low physical energy •   Immune system problems and certain endocrine problems such as thyroid malfunction and environmental sensitivities •   Psychosomatic illnesses, particularly headaches, migraines, neck and back problems •   Chronic pain •   Fibromyalgia •   Asthma •   Skin disorders •   Digestive problems (spastic colon) •   Severe premenstrual syndrome •   Depression and feelings of impending doom •   Feelings of detachment, alienation, and isolation (“living dead” feelings) •   Reduced ability to formulate plans

One of the key symptoms of depression is to see no hope. No future. Far from the tunnel having light at the end of it, it seems like it is blocked at both ends, and you are inside it. So if I could have only known the future, that there woudl be one far brighter than anything I'd experienced, then one end of that tunnel would have been blown to peices, and I could have faced the light.

It is possible to be indifferent to flowers—possible but not very likely. Psychiatrists regard a patient’s indifference to flowers as a symptom of clinical depression. It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person’s mind, that mind’s connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

Antidepression medication is temperamental. Somewhere around fifty-nine or sixty I noticed the drug I’d been taking seemed to have stopped working. This is not unusual. The drugs interact with your body chemistry in different ways over time and often need to be tweaked. After the death of Dr. Myers, my therapist of twenty-five years, I’d been seeing a new doctor whom I’d been having great success with. Together we decided to stop the medication I’d been on for five years and see what would happen... DEATH TO MY HOMETOWN!! I nose-dived like the diving horse at the old Atlantic City steel pier into a sloshing tub of grief and tears the likes of which I’d never experienced before. Even when this happens to me, not wanting to look too needy, I can be pretty good at hiding the severity of my feelings from most of the folks around me, even my doctor. I was succeeding well with this for a while except for one strange thing: TEARS! Buckets of ’em, oceans of ’em, cold, black tears pouring down my face like tidewater rushing over Niagara during any and all hours of the day. What was this about? It was like somebody opened the floodgates and ran off with the key. There was NO stopping it. 'Bambi' tears... 'Old Yeller' tears... 'Fried Green Tomatoes' tears... rain... tears... sun... tears... I can’t find my keys... tears. Every mundane daily event, any bump in the sentimental road, became a cause to let it all hang out. It would’ve been funny except it wasn’t. Every meaningless thing became the subject of a world-shattering existential crisis filling me with an awful profound foreboding and sadness. All was lost. All... everything... the future was grim... and the only thing that would lift the burden was one-hundred-plus on two wheels or other distressing things. I would be reckless with myself. Extreme physical exertion was the order of the day and one of the few things that helped. I hit the weights harder than ever and paddleboarded the equivalent of the Atlantic, all for a few moments of respite. I would do anything to get Churchill’s black dog’s teeth out of my ass. Through much of this I wasn’t touring. I’d taken off the last year and a half of my youngest son’s high school years to stay close to family and home. It worked and we became closer than ever. But that meant my trustiest form of self-medication, touring, was not at hand. I remember one September day paddleboarding from Sea Bright to Long Branch and back in choppy Atlantic seas. I called Jon and said, “Mr. Landau, book me anywhere, please.” I then of course broke down in tears. Whaaaaaaaaaa. I’m surprised they didn’t hear me in lower Manhattan. A kindly elderly woman walking her dog along the beach on this beautiful fall day saw my distress and came up to see if there was anything she could do. Whaaaaaaaaaa. How kind. I offered her tickets to the show. I’d seen this symptom before in my father after he had a stroke. He’d often mist up. The old man was usually as cool as Robert Mitchum his whole life, so his crying was something I loved and welcomed. He’d cry when I’d arrive. He’d cry when I left. He’d cry when I mentioned our old dog. I thought, “Now it’s me.” I told my doc I could not live like this. I earned my living doing shows, giving interviews and being closely observed. And as soon as someone said “Clarence,” it was going to be all over. So, wisely, off to the psychopharmacologist he sent me. Patti and I walked in and met a vibrant, white-haired, welcoming but professional gentleman in his sixties or so. I sat down and of course, I broke into tears. I motioned to him with my hand; this is it. This is why I’m here. I can’t stop crying! He looked at me and said, “We can fix this.” Three days and a pill later the waterworks stopped, on a dime. Unbelievable. I returned to myself. I no longer needed to paddle, pump, play or challenge fate. I didn’t need to tour. I felt normal.

Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins—the small brain proteins with morphinelike effects—can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. As

To understand why getting to the root cause is so critical in healing depression, it is necessary to go far beyond the catchall meaning of the word - to understand that the insomnia, fatigue, and other frequently debilitating troubles that we normally associate with depression are indeed just the symptoms of the condition. In reality, depression is not about sadness - it is in most cases about anger.

we are beginning to understand that the immune system could also be able to remember childhood episodes of assault or famine or any other severe threat to the self’s early survival. Child abuse survivors may enter adult life with their immune system set on a hair-trigger, poised to react to minor infections and social setbacks with a disproportionate inflammatory response that causes depressive symptoms.

If left untreated, depression can become serious. It can rob people from many hours of effective functioning—and sometimes rob them of life itself. At any given time, it is estimated that up to 20 percent of the population have disturbed daily functioning due to clinical depression. If you find yourself in this category and have experienced any of these symptoms for longer than two weeks, seek professional help.

PERIODIC MOOD-CHANGES We have already spoken of the affective concomitants of common migraines—elated and irritable prodromal states, states of dread and depression associated with the main phase of the attack, and states of euphoric rebound. Any or all of these may be abstracted as isolated periodic symptoms of relatively short duration—some hours, or at most two or three days, and as such may present themselves as primary emotional disorders. The most acute of these mood-changes, generally no more than an hour in duration, usually represents concomitants or equivalents of migraine aura. We may confine our attention at this stage to attacks of depression, or truncated manic-depressive cycles, occurring at intervals in patients who have previously suffered from attacks of undoubted (classical, common, abdominal, etc.) migraine.

In the 1980s, the American researcher Roger Ulrich discovered that simply having a room with a view of a natural environment rather than a brick wall helped patients at a Philadelphia hospital recover more quickly from gallbladder surgery. They also reported being less depressed and having less pain. Other studies have shown that being immersed in nature can lower blood pressure, reduce stress, and lessen ADHD symptoms.

How are psychiatric and neurological disorders different? At the moment, the most obvious difference is the symptoms that patients experience. Neurological disorders tend to produce unusual behavior, or fragmentation of behavior into component parts, such as unusual movements of a person’s head or arms, or loss of motor control. By contrast, the major psychiatric disorders are often characterized by exaggerations of everyday behavior. We all feel despondent occasionally, but this feeling is dramatically amplified in depression. We all experience euphoria when things go well, but that feeling goes into overdrive in the manic phase of bipolar disorder. Normal fear and pleasure seeking can spiral into severe anxiety states and addiction. Even certain hallucinations and delusions from schizophrenia bear some resemblance to events that occur in our dreams.

As long as high schools strive to list the number of Ivy League schools their graduates attend and teachers pile on work without being trained to identify stress-related symptoms, I fear for our children’s health. I am not mollified by the alums of my daughter’s school who return to tell everyone that the rigor of high school prepared them for college, making their first year easier than they’d anticipated. If they make it that far.

The collective denial of our underlying emotional life has contributed to an array of troubles and symptoms. What is often diagnosed as depression is actually low-grade chronic grief locked into the psyche, complete with the ancillary ingredients of shame and despair. Martín Prechtel calls this the gray-sky culture,72 one in which we do not choose to live an exuberant life, filled with the wonder of the world and the beauty of day-to-day existence, one in which we do not welcome the sorrow that comes with the inevitable losses that accompany us on our walk here. This refusal to enter the depths has shrunk the visible horizon for many of us, dimmed our participation in the joys and sorrows of the world. We suffer from what I call premature death—we turn away from life and are ambivalent toward the world, neither in it nor out of it, lacking a commitment to fully say yes to life.

What Happened to Male Birth Control? A 2016 trial of injectable male contraceptive was suspended after determining that the risks to men’s health outweighed the benefits. What brought researchers to that conclusion? Out of 320 men, 20 said they couldn’t tolerate the side effects, which included pain at the injection site, acne, and depression. Yes, based on 20 men saying they were uncomfortable with these symptoms, researchers discontinued the

If your boundaries have been injured, you may find that when you are in conflict with someone, you shut down without even being aware of it. This isolates us from love, and keeps us from taking in safe people. Kate had been quite controlled by her overprotective mother. She’d always been warned that she was sickly, would get hit by cars, and didn’t know how to care for herself well. So she fulfilled all those prophecies. Having no sense of strong boundaries, Kate had great difficulty taking risks and connecting with people. The only safe people were at her home. Finally, however, with a supportive church group, Kate set limits on her time with her mom, made friends in her singles’ group, and stayed connected to her new spiritual family. People who have trouble with boundaries may exhibit the following symptoms: blaming others, codependency, depression, difficulties with being alone, disorganization and lack of direction, extreme dependency, feelings of being let down, feelings of obligation, generalized anxiety, identity confusion, impulsiveness, inability to say no, isolation, masochism, overresponsibility and guilt, panic, passive-aggressive behavior, procrastination and inability to follow through, resentment, substance abuse and eating disorders, thought problems and obsessive-compulsive problems, underresponsibility, and victim mentality.

reality is this: All of us, to some degree, are mentally ill. We get paranoid, anxious, depressed, and insomniac. We alternate between delusions of grandeur and crippling self-doubt, we suffer from paralyzing fears and embarrassing neuroses. We all have compulsions to do things we know we shouldn’t, and there are millions of us with addictions, whether to gambling, drinking, dieting, or playing Second Life. Every one of us has psychiatric symptoms, many of them

Relieve Stress It has been proven that meditation can lower the levels of cortisol, one of the major stress hormones. As little as 5 to 10 minutes of meditation per day, it can alleviate symptoms like tension, anxiety, and even depression. Meditation can also counter excess adrenalin and norepinephrine, hormones known to produce our “fight or flight response”, and which are also associated with stress. This, again, was proven scientifically by Herbert Benson, MD.

For nearly a hundred years, psychiatry has been striving to apply medical model thinking to psychiatric disorders. In this model, the symptoms besieging patients are sorted into specific disease entities and the causes then identified and removed. For doctors of internal medicine, this works. In the case of diabetes mellitus, for example, the symptoms of urinary frequency, fatigue, and confusion often lead to suspicion of the underlying cause, which is confirmed by blood sugar monitoring and then treated by insulin replacement. But psychiatric symptoms are much harder to sort into diagnoses. People with depression sometimes become paranoid. People with schizophrenia sometimes become depressed. Some people who hear voices have no other symptoms whatsoever, and others who hear voices also fall victim to terrible mood swings. Thus far, the hope that psychiatry would be able to identify homogeneous disease states, uncover the biological underpinnings, and remedy them has been largely a barren one. Kappler's symptoms, however, evolved when the hope for psychiatry's becoming a true medical specialty was bright to the point of being blinding. Over the years he would collect over a dozen diagnoses and cavalierly take a myriad of medicines, but no one would be able to bring him close to confronting the past he had disowned, to stand a chance of making peace with it and, ultimately, overcoming it. (46)

No doubt you will be delighted to hear from an adept who has undertaken the operation of his H.G.A. in accord with our traditions. The operation began auspiciously with a chromatic display of psychosomatic symptoms, and progressed rapidly to acute psychosis. The operator has alternated satisfactorily between manic hysteria and depressing melancholy stupor on approximately 40 cycles, and satisfactory progress has been maintained in social ostracism, economic collapses and mental disassociation. These statements are mentioned not in any vainglorious spirit of conceit, but rather that they may serve as comfort and inspiration to other aspirants on the Path. Now I'm off to the wilds of Mexico for a period, also in pursuit of the elusive H.G.A. before winding up in the guard finally via the booby hotels, the graveyard, or—? If the final, you can tell all the little Practicuses that I wouldn't have missed it for anything. —No one. Once called 210

I have seen mood stabilization, reduced or eliminated depression, reduced or eliminated anxiety, improved cognitive functioning, greatly enhanced and evened-out energy levels, cessation of seizures, improved overall neurological stability, cessation of migraines, improved sleep, improvement in autistic symptoms, improvements with PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), improved gastrointestinal functioning, healthy weight loss, cancer remissions and tumor shrinkage, much better management of underlying previous health issues, improved symptoms and quality of life in those struggling with various forms of autoimmunity (including many with type 1 and 1.5 diabetes), fewer colds and flus, total reversal of chronic fatigue, improved memory, sharpened cognitive functioning, and significantly stabilized temperament. And there is quality evidence to support the beneficial impact of a fat-based ketogenic approach in all these types of issues. – Nora Gedgaudas

A book is open in front of me and this is what it has to say about the symptoms of morphine withdrawal: '... morbid anxiety, a nervous depressed condition, irritability, weakening of the memory, occasional hallucinations and a mild impairment of consciousness ...' I have not experienced any hallucinations, but I can only say that the rest of this description is dull, pedestrian and totally inadequate. 'Depressed condition' indeed! Having suffered from this appalling malady, I hereby enjoin all doctors to be more compassionate toward their patients. What overtakes the addict deprived of morphine for a mere hour or two is not a 'depressed condition': it is slow death. Air is insubstantial, gulping it down is useless ... there is not a cell in one's body that does not crave ... but crave what? This is something which defies analysis and explanation. In short, the individual ceases to exist: he is eliminated. The body which moves, agonises and suffers is a corpse. It wants nothing, can think of nothing but morphine. To die of thirst is a heavenly, blissful death compared with the craving for morphine. The feeling must be something like that of a man buried alive, clawing at the skin on his chest in the effort to catch the last tiny bubbles of air in his coffin, or of a heretic at the stake, groaning and writhing as the first tongues of flame lick at his feet. Death. A dry, slow death. That is what lurks behind that clinical, academic phrase 'a depressed condition'.

Along with unemployment neurosis, which is triggered by an individual's socioeconomic situation, there are other types of depression which are traceable back to psychodynamic or biochemical conditions, whichever the case may be. Accordingly, psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy are indicated respectively. Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se, it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome - depression, aggression, addiction - are due to what is called in logotherapy "the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness.

Worse, Roger erupted into outbursts of uncontrollable rage, without apparent cause. In time I learned that this was one symptom of what therapists formerly described as a manic-depressive personality. Now they call the condition bipolar disorder. Roger sometimes telephoned and began the conversation, “You better listen to me, Dad, or you are one dead man.” Then, half an hour later, “Dad, can we go to the Yankee game tonight?” Bipolar disorder is terrifying, perhaps most of all for the person suffering from it.

Their most radical conclusion is that inequality breeds stress among poor and rich alike; the more unequal a society, the less benefit is obtained from an individual’s wealth. The stress of inequality does not just breed envy, it is not just about coveting your neighbor’s ox/Cadillac Escalade. Inequality breeds depression, addiction, resignation, and physical symptoms including premature aging, that affect the entire population. In other words, the well-being of individuals, rich or poor, is mutually dependent.

Circadian rhythms are implicated in some of the symptoms of depression, such as early awakening and diurnal variation in mood. The possible importance of the circadian system in its pathogenesis is suggested by the capacity of experimental alterations in the timing of sleep and wakefulness to alter clinical state." Biological rhythms range in frequency from milliseconds to months or years. Most rhythmic disturbances identified in the symptoms of manic-depressive illness occur over the course of a day-that is, they are circadian rhythms-and are most apparent in the daily rest-activity cycle. The episodic recurrences of the illness, on the other hand, are usually infradian, oscillating over periods of months or years. Episodic mania and depression may also reflect disturbances in ultradian rhythms, those that oscillate more than once a day, which are common at the cellular level and in hormone secretion, as well as in such autonomic functions as circulation, blood pressure, respiration, heart rate, and in the cycles of sleep.

hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

Transgenerational trauma, the idea that trauma can be transferred through generations, has been documented in an array of people – the descendants of those enslaved, survivors of war, victims of abuse, and refugees. The event in and of itself can’t be passed down, of course. Rather it is the lingering symptoms that descendants inherit. The mother’s anxiety or drug abuse, the father’s violent outbursts or depression. Behaviours that children witness and adopt or are disturbed by, creating a vicious circle of distress. The

Many people are shocked when I say that the incest victims I’ve worked with are usually the healthiest members of their families. After all, the victim usually has the symptoms—self-blame, depression, destructive behaviors, sexual problems, suicide attempts, substance abuse—while the rest of the family often seems outwardly healthy. But despite this, it is usually the victim who ultimately has the clearest vision of the truth. She was forced to sacrifice herself to cover up the craziness and the stress in the family system. All her life she was the bearer of the family secret. She lived with tremendous emotional pain in order to protect the myth of the good family. But because of all this pain and conflict, the victim is usually the first to seek help. Her parents, on the other hand, will almost always refuse to let go of their denials and defenses. They refuse to deal with reality. With treatment, most victims are able to reclaim their dignity and their power. Recognizing a problem and seeking help is a sign not only of health but of courage.

Overall, depression is considered “clinical” when symptoms are severe and include difficulty getting through a daily routine, sleeping too much or too little, disturbance of concentration, excessive negative or pessimistic thoughts, severe guilt, and an inability to connect with or be around others. Secondary symptoms include diverse aches and pains, headaches, or other uncomfortable physical symptoms. Depression can make you feel overwhelmed, anxious, worthless, and hopeless, and you might even have thoughts about ending your life.

Medications have helped many people deal with very real symptoms of depression and anxiety—but for others, those same medications can conveniently mask the discomfort that could have pushed them to get help. Even cell phones can mask the pain behind obsessions: people don’t have to stay home and become uncomfortable waiting for him or her to call—they can bring their phone and their obsessions with them and act them out anywhere, anytime. We’ve learned to become therapeutically correct and cover our insecurity with all the right lingo.

Everyone has had the experience of suddenly feeling intense physiological and psychological shifts internally at trading glances with another person; such shifts can be exquisitely pleasurable or unpleasant. How one person gazes at another can alter the other’s electrical brain patterns, as registered by EEGS, and may also cause physiological changes in the body. The newborn is highly susceptible to such influences, with a direct effect on the maturation of brain structures. The effects of maternal moods on the electrical circuitry of the infant’s brain were demonstrated by a study at the University of Washington, Seattle. Positive emotions are associated with increased electrical activity in the left hemisphere. It is known that depression in adults is associated with decreased electrical activity in the circuitry of the left hemisphere. With this in mind, the Seattle study compared the EEGS of two groups of infants: one group whose mothers had symptoms of postpartum depression, the other whose mothers did not. “During playful interactions with the mothers designed to elicit positive emotion,” the researchers reported, “infants of non-depressed mothers showed greater left than right frontal brain activation.” The infants of depressed mothers “failed to show differential hemispheric activation,” meaning that the left-side brain activity one would anticipate from positive, joyful infant-mother exchanges did not occur — despite the mothers’ best efforts. Significantly, these effects were noted only in the frontal areas of the brain, where the centers for the self-regulation of emotion are located. In addition to EEG changes, infants of depressed mothers exhibit decreased activity levels, gaze aversion, less positive emotion and greater irritability. Maternal depression is associated with diminished infant attention spans. Summarizing a number of British studies, Dale F. Hay, a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suggests “that the experience of the mother’s depression in the first months of life may disrupt naturally occurring social processes that entrain and regulate the infant’s developing capacities for attention.

It’s very hard for us to believe that people who loved us would intentionally hurt us, so we feel the need to excuse their behavior. But repressing that pain just makes us more likely to hit our own children. If you were willing to reach deep inside and really feel again the hurt you felt when you were physically punished as a child, you would never consider inflicting that pain on your own child. And the pain does not end in childhood, even if we repress and deny it. The scientific consensus of hundreds of studies shows that corporal punishment during childhood is associated with negative behaviors in adults, even when the adult says that the spanking did not affect them badly. Even a few instances of being hit as a child are associated with more depressive symptoms as an adult. While most of us who were spanked “turned out okay,” it is clear that not being spanked would have helped us turn out to be healthier. I suspect that one contributing factor to the epidemic of anxiety and depression among adults in our culture is that so many of us grew up with parents who hurt us.

Contrary to popular belief, the psychiatric concept of clinical depression is different from ordinary sadness. Depression adds to sadness a constellation of physical symptoms that produce a general slowing and deadening of bodily functions. A depressive person sleeps less, and the nighttime becomes a dreaded chore that one can never achieve properly. Or one never gets out of bed; better sleep, if one can, since one can’t do anything else. Interest in life and activities declines. Thinking itself is difficult; concentration is shot; it’s hard enough to focus on three consecutive thoughts, much less read an entire book. Energy is low; constant fatigue, inexplicable and unyielding, wears one down. Food loses its taste. Or to feel better, one might eat more, perhaps to stave off boredom. The body moves slowly, falling to the declining rhythm of one’s thoughts. Or one paces anxiously, unable to relax. One feels that everything is one’s own fault; guilty, remorseful thoughts recur over and over. For some depressives, suicide can seem like the only way out of this morass; about 10 percent take their own lives.

Telling a depressed person things like “Pull yourself out of it” is cruel and may reinforce the feelings of worthlessness, guilt, and failure already present as symptoms of the illness. Telling a manic person, “Slow down and get hold of yourself” is simply wishful thinking; that person is like a tractor trailer careening down a mountain highway with no brakes. So the first challenge facing family and friends is to change the way they look at behaviors that might be symptoms of the illness—behaviors like not wanting to get out of bed, being irritable and short-tempered, being “hyper” and reckless or overly critical and pessimistic. Our first reaction to these sorts of behaviors and attitudes is to regard them as laziness, meanness, or immaturity and to be critical of them. In a person with bipolar disorder, criticism almost always makes things worse: it reinforces the depressed patient’s feelings of worthlessness and failure, and it alienates and angers the hypomanic or manic patient. This is a hard lesson to learn. Don’t always take behaviors and statements at face value. Learn to ask yourself, “Could this be a symptom?” before you react.

The answer, in short, is that the expectation that work will always be fulfilling can lead to suffering. Studies show that an “obsessive passion” for work leads to higher rates of burnout and work-related stress. Researchers have also found that lifestyles that revolve around work in countries like Japan are a key contributor to record-low fertility rates. And for young people in the United States, inflated expectations of professional success help explain record-high rates of depression and anxiety. Globally, more people die each year from symptoms related to overwork than from malaria.

People feel ashamed of being depressed, they feel they should snap out of it, they feel weak and inadequate. Of course, these feelings are symptoms of the disease. Depression is a grave and life-threatening illness, much more common than we recognize. As far as the depressive being weak or inadequate, let me drop some names of famous depressives: Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sigmund Freud. Terry Bradshaw, Drew Carey, Billy Joel, T. Boone Pickens, J. K. Rowling, Brooke Shields, Mike Wallace. Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, Mark Twain.

The phenomenon of the "creative ilness", described in detail by Henri Ellenberger, in his massive study of the history of the unconsious, is alive and well in our own culture. Ellenberger described its characteristic elements: A creative illness succeeds a period of intense preoccupation with an idea and search for a certain truth. It is a polymorphous condition that can take the shape of depression, neurosis, psychomatic ailments, or even psychosis. Whatever the symptoms, they are felt as painful, if not agonizing by the subject, with alternating periods of allevation and worsening. Throughout the illness the subject never loses the thread of his dominating preoccupation. It is often compatible with normal, professional activity and family life. But even if he keeps to his social activities, he is almost entirely absorbed with himself. He suffers from feelings of utter isolation, even when he has a mentor who guides him through the ordeal (like the shaman apprentice with his master). The termination is often rapid and marked by a phase of exhilaration. The subject emerges from his ordeal with a permanent transformation in his personality and the conviction that he has discovered a great truth or a new spiritual world.

Unfortunately, there wasn’t the same conversation about mental health back then that there is now. I hope any new mothers reading this who are having a hard time will get help early and will channel their feelings into something more healing than white marble floors. Because I now know that I was displaying just about every symptom of perinatal depression: sadness, anxiety, fatigue. Once the babies were born, I added on my confusion and obsession about the babies’ safety, which was ratcheting up the more media attention was on us. Being a new mom is challenging enough without trying to do everything under a microscope.

So people feel tired, wired, and stressed at the same time. In one group of patients with rapid cycling bipolar disorder, more than 50 percent had hypothyroidism. Experts conservatively estimate that one-third of all depressions are directly related to thyroid imbalance. More than 80 percent of people with low-grade hypothyroidism have impaired memory function. Low thyroid is associated with a host of symptoms and problems, such as: Feeling cold when others are hot Weight gain Constipation Fatigue High cholesterol High blood pressure Dry, thinning, or losing hair, especially the eyebrows, where the outer third are often missing

Bereavement is useful; full-blown depression is not. William Styron renders an eloquent description of “the many dreadful manifestations of the disease,” among them self-hatred, a sense of worthlessness, a “dank joylessness” with “gloom crowding in on me, a sense of dread and alienation and, above all, a stifling anxiety.”14 Then there are the intellectual marks: “confusion, failure of mental focus and lapse of memories,” and, at a later stage, his mind “dominated by anarchic distortions,” and “a sense that my thought processes were engulfed by a toxic and unnameable tide that obliterated any enjoyable response to the living world.” There are the physical effects: sleeplessness, feeling as listless as a zombie, “a kind of numbness, an enervation, but more particularly an odd fragility,” along with a “fidgety restlessness.” Then there is the loss of pleasure: “Food, like everything else within the scope of sensation, was utterly without savor.” Finally, there was the vanishing of hope as the “gray drizzle of horror” took on a despair so palpable it was like physical pain, a pain so unendurable that suicide seemed a solution. In such major depression, life is paralyzed; no new beginnings emerge. The very symptoms of depression bespeak a life on hold. For

So if depression isn’t a disease, then what is it? As I briefly mentioned in the introduction, depression is a symptom, a vague surface sign at best that doesn’t tell you anything about its root cause. Consider, for a moment, that your toe hurts. Any number of things can cause a toe to hurt, from physically injuring it to a bunion, blister, or tumor growing inside. The hurting is a sign that something is wrong with the toe, simple as that. Likewise, depression is the hurting; it’s an adaptive response, intelligently communicated by the body, to something not being right within, often because things are also off in our environment.

In a word, every man for his own ends. Our summum bonum is commodity, and the goddess we adore Dea Moneta, Queen Money, to whom we daily offer sacrifice, which steers our hearts, hands, affections, all: that most powerful goddess, by whom we are reared, depressed, elevated, esteemed the sole commandress of our actions, for which we pray, run, ride, go, come, labour, and contend as fishes do for a crumb that falleth into the water. It is not worth, virtue (that's bonum theatrale [a theatrical good]), wisdom, valour, learning, honesty, religion, or any sufficiency for which we are respected, but money, greatness, office, honour, authority; honesty is accounted folly; knavery, policy; men admired out of opinion, not as they are, but as they seem to be: such shifting, lying, cogging, plotting, counterplotting, temporizing, flattering, cozening, dissembling, "that of necessity one must highly offend God if he be conformable to the world," Cretizare cum Crete [to do at Crete as the Cretans do], "or else live in contempt, disgrace, and misery." One takes upon him temperance, holiness, another austerity, a third an affected kind of simplicity, whenas indeed he, and he, and he, and the rest are hypocrites, ambidexters, outsides, so many turning pictures, a lion on the one side, a lamb on the other.

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on. They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats. And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?" In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always requires the right environment. Now, if you're a gardener you know that. If you are growing plants in your backyard and you want them to grow into healthy, functioning beings, botanical beings, you want to provide them with the right nurturing, the right nutrition, minerals, water, sunlight and so on. So the real question is how do we provide the conditions for further development for people whose development was impaired in the first place? Now we know how to do that. We are just not doing it.

ME/CFS is not synonymous with depression or other psychiatric illnesses. The belief by some that they are the same has caused much con- fusion in the past, and inappropriate treatment. Nonpsychotic depression (major depression and dysthymia), anxiety disorders and somatization disorders are not diagnostically exclusionary, but may cause significant symptom overlap. Careful attention to the timing and correlation of symptoms, and a search for those characteristics of the symptoms that help to differentiate between diagnoses may be informative, e.g., exercise will tend to ameliorate depression whereas excessive exercise tends to have an adverse effect on ME/CFS patients.

No one knew about my pain. That’s one of the most perverse realities of depression, or of any mental illness for that matter. With a physical illness, the symptoms are much more evident, so family and friends are aware of the patient’s suffering and often do their part to help. But depression? No one can see that. When you’re cutting yourself alone, no one can see that. No one can read your thoughts and see how unhappy you are – or in the worst cases, how much you hate your life and want to die. That’s why suicide usually comes as such a shock – because no one knows what’s going on inside the victim’s head. Their mind is a closed book, with a cover that blends in with all the others.

Coopersmith’s study with adolescent boys indicates that children develop self-trust, adventuresomeness and the ability to deal with adversity if they are treated with respect and are provided with well-defined standards of values, demands for competence and guidance toward solutions of problems. The development of individual self-reliance is fostered by a well-structured, demanding environment, rather than by largely unlimited permissiveness and freedom to explore in an unfocused way. The research of both Stanley Coopersmith and Morris Rosenberg has led them to believe that pupils with high self-esteem perceive themselves as successful. They are relatively free of anxiety and psychosomatic symptoms, and can realistically assess their abilities. They are confident that their efforts will meet with success, while being fully aware of their limitations. Persons with high self-esteem are outgoing and socially successful and expect to be well received. They accept others and others tend to accept them. On the other hand, according to Coopersmith and Rosenberg, pupils with low self-esteem are easily discouraged and sometimes depressed. They feel isolated, unloved and unlovable. They seem incapable of expressing themselves or defending their inadequacies. They are so preoccupied with their self-consciousness and anxiety that their capacity for self-fulfillment can be easily destroyed.4

displacement is perhaps the most traumatic experience that humans can undergo, with invisible consequences that can last for generations, from physical and mental problems to difficulty maintaining the social fabric of a community. Fullilove identifies the symptoms of displacement as “root shock,” which, she explains, “undermines trust, increases anxiety about letting loved ones out of one’s sight, destabilizes relationships, destroys social, emotional, and financial resources, and increases the risk of every kind of stress-related disease, from depression to heart attack. Root shock leaves people chronically cranky, barking a distinctive croaky complaint that their world was abruptly taken away.”49

If for example you are diagnosed with depression, then your clinician might prescribe therapy to reduce your depression and or recommend anti-depressant medication. As we have discussed previously though, reducing the symptoms of mental illness does not seem to reduce the probability that someone will make a suicide attempt. Two treatments in particular, dialectical behavior therapy DBT and cognitive behavioral therapy for suicide prevention, CBT-SP, have demonstrated the ability to reduce the probability of suicidal behaviors in multiple studies conducted by multiple research teams. Other treatments that share many of the same characteristics and components as these treatments via attempted suicide.

When you are depressed, you may have a tendency to confuse feeling with facts. Your feelings of hopelessness and total despair are just symptoms of depressive illness, not facts. If you think you are hopeless, you will naturally feel this way. Your feelings only trace the illogical pattern of your thinking. Only an expert, who has treated hundreds of depressed individuals, would be in a position to give a meaningful prognosis for recovery. Your suicidal urge merely indicates the need for treatment. Thus, your conviction that you are "hopeless" nearly always proves you are not. Therapy, not suicide, is indicated. Although generalizations can be misleading, I let the following rule of thumb guide me: Patients who feel hopeless never actually are hopeless. The conviction of hopelessness is one of the most curious aspects of depressive illness. In fact, the degree of hopelessness experienced by seriously depressed patients who have an excellent prognosis is usually greater than in terminal malignancy patients with a poor prognosis. It is of great importance to expose the illogic that lurks behind your hopelessness as soon as possible in order to prevent an actual suicide attempt. You may feel convinced that you have an insoluble problem in your life. You may feel that you are caught in a trap from which there is no exit. This may lead to extreme frustration and even to the urge to kill yourself as the only escape.

depression in its major stages possesses no quickly available remedy: failure of alleviation is one of the most distressing factors of the disorder as it reveals itself to the victim, and one that helps situate it squarely in the category of grave diseases. Except in those maladies strictly designated as malignant or degenerative, we expect some kind of treatment and eventual amelioration, by pills or physical therapy or diet or surgery, with a logical progression from the initial relief of symptoms to final cure. Frighteningly, the layman-sufferer from major depression, taking a peek into some of the many books currently on the market, will find much in the way of theory and symptomatology and very little that legitimately suggests the possibility of quick rescue. Those that do claim an easy way out are glib and most likely fraudulent. There are decent popular works which intelligently point the way toward treatment and cure, demonstrating how certain therapies—psychotherapy or pharmacology, or a combination of these—can indeed restore people to health in all but the most persistent and devastating cases; but the wisest books among them underscore the hard truth that serious depressions do not disappear overnight. All of this emphasizes an essential though difficult reality which I think needs stating at the outset of my own chronicle: the disease of depression remains a great mystery. It has yielded its secrets

How often are people told they’ve brought a condition like depression upon themselves? It’s all part of mercury’s blame-the-victim game. Those depressive symptoms are the mercury speaking for the patient without her or his consent. Sometimes mercury moves past the hostage phase and takes someone out, resulting in death by Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, dementia, or stroke. It’s that serious. Mercury has injured or killed well over a billion people. No one likes Alzheimer’s; it’s a frightening, terrible disease. Yet it’s rapidly becoming common—and it’s 100 percent mercury-caused. You heard that here first: Mercury is 100 percent responsible for Alzheimer’s disease. You will never in your lifetime hear the truth about that anywhere else.

Nothing is beautiful, except man alone: all aesthetics rests upon this naïveté, which is its first truth. Let us immediately add the second: nothing is ugly except the degenerating man — and with this the realm of aesthetic judgment is circumscribed. Physiologically, everything ugly weakens and saddens man. It reminds him of decay, danger, impotence; it actually deprives him of strength. One can measure the effect of the ugly with a dynamometer. Wherever man is depressed at all, he senses the proximity of something "ugly." His feeling of power, his will to power, his courage, his pride — all fall with the ugly and rise with the beautiful. In both cases we draw an inference: the premises for it are piled up in the greatest abundance in instinct. The ugly is understood as a sign and symptom of degeneration: whatever reminds us in the least of degeneration causes in us the judgment of "ugly." Every suggestion of exhaustion, of heaviness, of age, of weariness; every kind of lack of freedom, such as cramps, such as paralysis; and above all, the smell, the color, the form of dissolution, of decomposition — even in the ultimate attenuation into a symbol — all evoke the same reaction, the value judgment, "ugly." A hatred is aroused — but whom does man hate then? There is no doubt: the decline of his type. Here he hates out of the deepest instinct of the species; in this hatred there is a shudder, caution, depth, farsightedness — it is the deepest hatred there is. It is because of this that art is deep.

Children in misogynistic households experience tremendous rage, tension, and frustration. When they see their mothers victimized either psychologically or physically, they become frightened and angry. Unfortunately, they have no more outlet for their anger than their mothers have for theirs. Typically, such children express their feelings in self-defeating ways: psychosomatic complaints, difficulties at school, and depressions. Bedwetting and nightmares are common reactions among younger children. The older child may express his feelings through fighting with his peers, indiscriminate sexual activity, substance abuse, or other forms of antisocial behavior. If a child is also a victim of physical and/or sexual abuse, the symptoms of distress will be much greater.

The grief triggered by the loss of loved ones does not appear to be an adaptation produced by natural selection as it does not appear to increase an individual's fitness in any way -at least not in non-social species. Depression caused by loss is more likely to be a by-product of the ability to form long-term attachment relationships. Grief is the price we have to pay when the attachment relationship is finally broken. This assumption is supported by the fact that a person may also experience symptoms of depression as a result of the death of their beloved dog, horse or other pet. The stronger the attachment, the longer the symptoms of depression last. On the other hand, the knowledge of the pain caused by the loss of an important person or pet makes us take more care of the people or pets that are important to us.

It was a sad fact that the commonest complaint in the outpatient department was “Rasehn . . . libehn . . . hodehn,” literally, “My head . . . my heart . . . and my stomach,” with the patient’s hand touching each part as she pronounced the words. Ghosh called it the RLH syndrome. The RLH sufferers were often young women or the elderly. If pressed to be more specific, the patients might offer that their heads were spinning (rasehn yazoregnal) or burning (yakatelegnal ), or their hearts were tired (lib dekam), or they had abdominal discomfort or cramps (hod kurteth), but these symptoms were reported as an aside and grudgingly, because rasehn-libehn-hodehn should have been enough for any doctor worth his salt. It had taken Matron her first year in Addis to understand that this was how stress, anxiety, marital strife, and depression were expressed in Ethiopia—somatization was what Ghosh said the experts called this phenomenon. Psychic distress was projected onto a body part, because culturally it was the way to express that kind of suffering. Patients might see no connection between the abusive husband, or meddlesome mother-in-law, or the recent death of their infant, and their dizziness or palpitations. And they all knew just the cure for what ailed them: an injection. They might settle for mistura carminativa or else a magnesium trisilicate and belladonna mixture, or some other mixture that came to the doctor’s mind, but nothing cured like the marfey—the needle. Ghosh was dead against injections of vitamin B for the RLH syndrome, but Matron had convinced him it was better for Missing to do it than have the dissatisfied patient get an unsterilized hypodermic from a quack in the Merkato. The orange B-complex injection was cheap, and its effect was instantaneous, with patients grinning and skipping down the hill. T

My mother was addicted to being rich, to servants and unlimited charge accounts, to giving lavish dinner parties, to taking frequent first-class trips to Europe. So one might say she was tormented by withdrawal symptoms all through the Great Depression. She was acculturated! Acculturated persons are those who find that they are no longer treated as the sort of people they thought they were, because the outside world has changed. An economic misfortune or a new technology, or being conquered by another country or political faction, can do that to people quicker than you can say “Jack Robinson.” As Trout wrote in his “An American Family Marooned on the Planet Pluto”: “Nothing wrecks any kind of love more effectively than the discovery that your previously acceptable behavior has become ridiculous.” He said in conversation at the 2001 clambake: “If I hadn’t learned how to live without a culture and a society, acculturation would have broken my heart a thousand times.” ***

The case of a patient with dissociative identity disorder follows: Cindy, a 24-year-old woman, was transferred to the psychiatry service to facilitate community placement. Over the years, she had received many different diagnoses, including schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder. Dissociative identity disorder was her current diagnosis. Cindy had been well until 3 years before admission, when she developed depression, "voices," multiple somatic complaints, periods of amnesia, and wrist cutting. Her family and friends considered her a pathological liar because she would do or say things that she would later deny. Chronic depression and recurrent suicidal behavior led to frequent hospitalizations. Cindy had trials of antipsychotics, antidepressants, mood stabilizers, and anxiolytics, all without benefit. Her condition continued to worsen. Cindy was a petite, neatly groomed woman who cooperated well with the treatment team. She reported having nine distinct alters that ranged in age from 2 to 48 years; two were masculine. Cindy’s main concern was her inability to control the switches among her alters, which made her feel out of control. She reported having been sexually abused by her father as a child and described visual hallucinations of him threatening her with a knife. We were unable to confirm the history of sexual abuse but thought it likely, based on what we knew of her chaotic early home life. Nursing staff observed several episodes in which Cindy switched to a troublesome alter. Her voice would change in inflection and tone, becoming childlike as ]oy, an 8-year-old alter, took control. Arrangements were made for individual psychotherapy and Cindy was discharged. At a follow-up 3 years later, Cindy still had many alters but was functioning better, had fewer switches, and lived independently. She continued to see a therapist weekly and hoped to one day integrate her many alters.

In that moment, I finally understood for the first time why -- throughout this journey -- I kept thinking about that day when I got terribly sick in rural Vietnam. When I yelled for drugs to stop my worst symptoms -- the extreme room-spinning nausea -- the doctor told me: "You need your nausea. It is a message, and we must listen to the message. It will tell us what is wrong with you." If i had ignored or silenced that symptom, my kidneys would have failed, and I would have died. You need your nausea. You need your pain. It is a message, and you must listen to the message. All these depressed and anxious people, all over the world -- they are giving us a message. They are telling us something has gone wrong with the way we live. We need to stop trying to muffle or silence or pathologize that pain. Instead, we need to listen to it, and honor it. It is only when we listen to our pain that we can follow it back to its source -- and only there, where we can see its true causes, can we begin to overcome it.

Care of the soul doesn’t mean wallowing in the symptom, but it does mean trying to learn from depression what qualities the soul needs. Even further, it attempts to weave those depressive qualities into the fabric of life so that the aesthetics of Saturn—coldness, isolation, darkness, emptiness—makes a contribution to the texture of everyday life. In learning from depression, a person might dress in Saturn’s black to mimic his mood. He might go on a trip alone as a response to a saturnine feeling. He might build a grotto in his yard as a place of saturnine retreat. Or, more internally, he might let his depressive thoughts and feelings just be. All of these actions would be a positive response to a visitation of Saturn’s depressive emotion. They would be concrete ways to care for the soul in its darker beauty. In so doing, we might find a way into the mystery of this emptiness of the heart. We might also discover that depression has its own angel, a guiding spirit whose job it is to carry the soul away to its remote places where it finds unique insight and enjoys a special vision.

James Pennebaker, a researcher at the University of Texas at Austin and author of Writing to Heal, has done some of the most important and fascinating research I’ve seen on the power of expressive writing in the healing process. In an interview posted on the University of Texas’s website, Pennebaker explains, “Emotional upheavals touch every part of our lives. You don’t just lose a job, you don’t just get divorced. These things affect all aspects of who we are—our financial situation, our relationships with others, our views of ourselves, our issues of life and death. Writing helps us focus and organize the experience.” Pennebaker believes that because our minds are designed to try to understand things that happen to us, translating messy, difficult experiences into language essentially makes them “graspable.” What’s important to note about Pennebaker’s research is the fact that he advocates limited writing, or short spurts. He’s found that writing about emotional upheavals for just fifteen to twenty minutes a day on four consecutive days can decrease anxiety, rumination, and depressive symptoms and boost our immune systems.

COULD IT BE B12 DEFICIENCY? The neurological symptoms of B12 deficiency that occur in young and middle-aged people are very similar to those in older people. They include the following: • Numbness, tingling, or burning sensations of the hands, feet, extremities, or truncal area, often misdiagnosed as diabetic neuropathy or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) • Tremor, often misdiagnosed as essential tremor or pre-Parkinson’s disease • Muscle weakness, paresthesias, and paralysis, sometimes attributed to Guillain-Barré syndrome • Pain, fatigue, and debility, often labeled as “chronic fatigue syndrome” • “Shaky leg” syndrome (leg trembling) • Confusion and mental fogginess, often misdiagnosed as early-onset dementia • Unsteadiness, dizziness, and paresthesias, often misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis • Weakness of extremities, clumsiness, muscle cramps, twitching, or foot drop, often misdiagnosed as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) • Psychiatric symptoms, such as depression or psychosis (covered in greater length in the next chapter) • Visual disturbances, vision loss, or blindness In contrast, a doctor ignorant about the effects of B12 deficiency can destroy a patient’s life. The

Insofar as the feeling of meaninglessness is concerned, however, we should not overlook and forget that, per se, it is not a matter of pathology; rather than being the sign and symptom of a neurosis, it is, I would say, the proof of one's humanness. But although it is not caused by anything pathological, it may well cause a pathological reaction; in other words, it is potentially pathogenic. Just consider the mass neurotic syndrome so pervasive in the young generation: there is ample empirical evidence that the three facets of this syndrome-depression, aggression, addiction-are due to what is called in logotherapy "the existential vacuum," a feeling of emptiness and meaninglessness. It goes without saying that not each and every case of depression is to be traced back to a feeling of meaninglessness, nor does suicide-in which depression sometimes eventuates-always result from an existential vacuum. But even if each and every case of suicide had not been undertaken out of a feeling of meaninglessness, it may well be that na individual's impulse to take his life would have been overcome had he been aware of some meaning and purpose worth living for. If, thus, a strong meaning orientation plays a decisive role in the prevention of suicide, what about intervention in cases in which there is a suicide risk?

We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com

The classic host personality, which usually (over 50% of the time) presents for treatment, nearly always bears the legal name and is depressed, anxious, somewhat neurasthenic, compulsively good, masochistic, conscience-stricken, constricted hedonically, and suffers both psychophysioiogical symptoms and time loss and/or time distortion. While no personality types are invariably present, many are encountered quite frequently: childlike personalities (fearful. recalling traumata, or love-seeking), protectors, helpers-advisors, inner self-helpers (serene, rational, and objective helpers and advisors first described by Allison in 1974), personalities with distinct affective states, guardians of memories and secrets (and of family boundaries), memory traces (holding continuity of memory), inner persecutors (often based on identification with the aggressor), anesthetic personalities (created to block out pain), expressers of forbidden impulses (pleasurable and otherwise, such as defiant, aggressive, or antisocial), avengers (which express anger over abuses endured and may wish to redress their grievances), defenders or apologists for the abusers, those based on lost love objects and other introjections and identifications, specialized encapsulators of traumatic experiences and powerful affects, very specialized personalities, and those (often youthful) that preserve the idealized potential for happiness, growth, and the healthy expression of feelings (distorted by traumata) in others (Kluft, 1984b).

Let’s see what “multifactorial” means in a practical sense. Consider someone with frequent depression who is visiting a friend today, pouring her heart out about her problems. How much could you have predicted the global depression and today’s behavior by knowing about her biology? Suppose “knowing about her biology” consisted only of knowing what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. How much predictive power does that give you? As we saw in chapter 8, not much—say, 10 percent. What if “knowing about her biology” consists of knowing the status of that gene plus knowing if one of her parents died when she was a child? More, maybe 25 percent. How knowing her serotonin transporter gene status + childhood adversity status + whether she is living alone in poverty? Maybe up to 40 percent. Add knowledge of the average level of glucocorticoids in her bloodstream today. Maybe a bit more. Toss in knowing if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture. Some more predictability.fn11 Know if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn rather than reaching out to someone). Some more predictability. Maybe even above the 50 percent mark by now. Add enough factors, many of which, possibly most of which, have not yet been discovered, and eventually your multifactorial biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

For many, an explosion of mental problems occurred during the first months of the pandemic and will continue to progress in the post-pandemic era. In March 2020 (at the onset of the pandemic), a group of researchers published a study in The Lancet that found that confinement measures produced a range of severe mental health outcomes, such as trauma, confusion and anger.[153] Although avoiding the most severe mental health issues, a large portion of the world population is bound to have suffered stress to various degrees. First and foremost, it is among those already prone to mental health issues that the challenges inherent in the response to the coronavirus (lockdowns, isolation, anguish) will be exacerbated. Some will weather the storm, but for certain individuals, a diagnostic of depression or anxiety could escalate into an acute clinical episode. There are also significant numbers of people who for the first time presented symptoms of serious mood disorder like mania, signs of depression and various psychotic experiences. These were all triggered by events directly or indirectly associated with the pandemic and the lockdowns, such as isolation and loneliness, fear of catching the disease, losing a job, bereavement and concerns about family members and friends. In May 2020, the National Health Service England’s clinical director for mental health told a Parliamentary committee that the “demand for mental healthcare would increase ‘significantly’ once the lockdown ended and would see people needing treatment for trauma for years to come”.[154] There is no reason to believe that the situation will be very different elsewhere.

When I met Dr. Phil Zimbardo, the former president of the American Psychological Association, for lunch, I knew him primarily as the mastermind behind the famous Stanford prison experiment.7 In the summer of 1971, Zimbardo took healthy Stanford students, assigned them roles as either “guards” or “inmates,” and locked them in a makeshift “prison” in the basement of Stanford University. In just days, the “prisoners” began to demonstrate symptoms of depression and extreme stress, while the “guards” began to act cruel and sadistic (the experiment was ended early, for obvious reasons). The point is that simply being treated like prisoners and guards had, over the course of just a few days, created a momentum that caused the subjects to act like prisoners and guards. The Stanford prison experiment is legendary, and much has been written about its many implications. But what I wondered was this: If simply being treated in a certain way conditioned these Stanford students to gradually adopt these negative behaviors, could the same kind of conditioning work for more positive behavior too? Indeed, today Zimbardo is attempting a grand social experiment along those lines called the “Heroic Imagination Project.”8 The logic is to increase the odds of people operating with courage by teaching them the principles of heroism. By encouraging and rewarding heroic acts, Zimbardo believes, we can consciously and deliberately create a system where heroic acts eventually become natural and effortless. We have a choice. We can use our energies to set up a system that makes execution of goodness easy, or we can resign ourselves to a system that actually makes it harder to do what is good. Ward’s Positive Tickets system did the former, and it worked. We can apply the same principle to the choices we face when designing systems in our own lives.

It is common to assume that multi-racialism is inevitable, and that racial identity will disappear as races mix. Americans prefer to think that the “tragic mulatto,” welcome in neither community, was either a myth or a reflection of outmoded racist thinking. Research suggests things may not be so simple. A 2003 study of 90,000 middle-school and high-school students found that black/white mixed-race children had more health and psychological problems than children who were either black or white. They were more likely to be depressed, sleep badly, skip school, smoke, drink, consider suicide, and have sex. White/Asian children showed similar symptoms. The principal author concluded that the cause was “the struggle with identity formation, leading to lack of self-esteem, social isolation and problems of family dynamics in biracial households.” The authors of a 2008 study reached the same conclusion: “When it comes to engaging in risky/anti-social adolescent behavior, however, mixed race adolescents are stark outliers compared to both blacks and whites. . . . Mixed race adolescents—not having a natural peer group—need to engage in more risky behaviors to be accepted.” A study of white/Asian children found that they were twice as likely as mono-racial children—34 percent vs. 17 percent—to suffer from psychological disorders such as anxiety, depression or drug abuse. Yoonsun Choi of the University of Chicago found that in Seattle middle schools, a clear racial identity seemed to protect against certain problems. Bi-racial children were the group most likely to smoke, take drugs, have been in fights, hurt someone badly, or carry a gun. Prof. Choi believes mixed-race children suffer because no racial group accepts them. “There is some indication that a strong ethnic identity helps protect kids from these [undesirable] behaviors,” she said.

Central to any understanding of stress, health and disease is the concept of adaptiveness. Adaptiveness is the capacity to respond to external stressors without rigidity, with flexibility and creativity, without excessive anxiety and without being overwhelmed by emotion. People who are not adaptive may seem to function well as long as nothing is disturbing them, but they will react with various levels of frustration and helplessness when confronted by loss or by difficulty. They will blame themselves or blame others. A person’s adaptiveness depends very much on the degree of differentiation and adaptiveness of previous generations in his family and also on what external stressors may have acted on the family. The Great Depression, for example, was a difficult time for millions of people. The multigenerational history of particular families enabled some to adapt and cope, while other families, facing the same economic scarcities, were psychologically devastated. “Highly adaptive people and families, on the average, have fewer physical illnesses, and those illnesses that do occur tend to be mild to moderate in severity,” writes Dr. Michael Kerr. Since one important variable in the development of physical illness is the degree of adaptiveness of an individual, and since the degree of adaptiveness is determined by the multigenerational emotional process, physical illness, like emotional illness, is a symptom of a relationship process that extends beyond the boundaries of the individual “patient.” Physical illness, in other words, is a disorder of the family emotional system [which includes] present and past generations. Children who become their parents’ caregivers are prepared for a lifetime of repression. And these roles children are assigned have to do with the parents’ own unmet childhood needs — and so on down the generations. “Children do not need to be beaten to be compromised,” researchers at McGill University have pointed out. Inappropriate symbiosis between parent and child is the source of much pathology.

One idea that has been repeatedly tested is that low mood can make people better at analyzing their environments. Classic experiments by psychologists Lyn Abramson and Lauren Alloy focused specifically on the accuracy of people’s perceptions of their control of events, using test situations that systematically varied in how much control the subject truly had. In different conditions, subjects’ responses (pressing or not pressing a button) controlled an environmental outcome (turning on a green light) to varying degrees. Interestingly, subjects who were dysphoric (in a negative mood and exhibiting other symptoms of depression) were superior at this task to subjects who were nondysphoric (in a normal mood). Subjects who were in a normal mood were more likely to overestimate or underestimate how much control they had over the light coming on.7 Dubbed depressive realism, Alloy and Abramson’s work has inspired other, often quite sophisticated, experimental demonstrations of ways that low mood can lead to better, clearer thinking.8 In 2007 studies by Australian psychologist Joseph Forgas found that a brief mood induction changed how well people were able to argue. Compared to subjects in a positive mood, subjects who were put in a negative mood (by watching a ten-minute film about death from cancer) produced more effective persuasive messages on a standardized topic such as raising student fees or aboriginal land rights. Follow-up analyses found that the key reason the sadder people were more persuasive was that their arguments were richer in concrete detail (see Figure 2.2).9 In other experiments, Forgas and his colleagues have demonstrated diverse benefits of a sad mood. It can improve memory performance, reduce errors in judgment, make people slightly better at detecting deception in others, and foster more effective interpersonal strategies, such as increasing the politeness of requests. What seems to tie together these disparate effects is that a sad mood, at least of the garden variety, makes people more deliberate, skeptical, and careful in how they process information from their environment.

A phobia is an excessive or unreasonable fear of an object, situation or place. Phobias are quite common and often take root in childhood for no apparent reason. Other times they spring from traumatic events or develop from an attempt to make sense of unexpected and intense feelings of anxiety or panic. Simple phobias are fears of specific things such as insects, infections, or even flying. Agoraphobia is a fear of being in places where one feels trapped or unable to get help, such as in crowds, on a bus or in a car, or standing in a line. It is basically an anxiety that ignites from being in places or situations from which escape might be difficult (or embarrassing). A social phobia is a marked fear of social or performance situations. When the phobic person actually encounters, or even anticipates, being in the presence of the feared object or situation, immediate anxiety can be triggered. The physical symptoms of anxiety may include shortness of breath, sweating, a racing heart, chest or abdominal discomfort, trembling, and similar reactions. The emotional component involves an intense fear and may include feelings of losing control, embarrassing oneself, or passing out. Most people who experience phobias try to escape or avoid the feared situation wherever possible. This may be fairly easy if the feared object is rarely encountered (such as snakes) and avoidance will not greatly restrict the person’s life. At other times, avoiding the feared situation (in the case of agoraphobia, social phobia) is not easily done. After all, we live in a world filled with people and places. Having a fear of such things can limit anyone’s life significantly, and trying to escape or avoid a feared object or situation because of feelings of fear about that object or situation can escalate and make the feelings of dread and terror even more pronounced. In some situations of phobias, the person may have specific thoughts that contribute some threat to the feared situation. This is particularly true for social phobia, in which there is often a fear of being negatively evaluated by others, and for agoraphobia, in which there may be a fear of passing out or dying with no one around to help, and of having a panic attack where one fears making a fool of oneself in the presence of other people. Upon recognizing their problem for what it is, men should take heart in knowing that eighty percent of people who seek help can experience improvement of symptoms or, in male-speak, the illness can be “fixed.

Another common form of mental illness is bipolar disorder, in which a person suffers from extreme bouts of wild, delusional optimism, followed by a crash and then periods of deep depression. Bipolar disorder also seems to run in families and, curiously, strikes frequently in artists; perhaps their great works of art were created during bursts of creativity and optimism. A list of creative people who were afflicted by bipolar disorder reads like a Who’s Who of Hollywood celebrities, musicians, artists, and writers. Although the drug lithium seems to control many of the symptoms of bipolar disorder, the causes are not entirely clear. One theory states that bipolar disorder may be caused by an imbalance between the left and right hemispheres. Dr. Michael Sweeney notes, “Brain scans have led researchers to generally assign negative emotions such as sadness to the right hemisphere and positive emotions such as joy to the left hemisphere. For at least a century, neuroscientists have noticed a link between damage to the brain’s left hemisphere and negative moods, including depression and uncontrollable crying. Damage to the right, however, has been associated with a broad array of positive emotions.” So the left hemisphere, which is analytical and controls language, tends to become manic if left to itself. The right hemisphere, on the contrary, is holistic and tends to check this mania. Dr. V. S. Ramachandran writes, “If left unchecked, the left hemisphere would likely render a person delusional or manic.… So it seems reasonable to postulate a ‘devil’s advocate’ in the right hemisphere that allows ‘you’ to adopt a detached, objective (allocentric) view of yourself.” If human consciousness involves simulating the future, it has to compute the outcomes of future events with certain probabilities. It needs, therefore, a delicate balance between optimism and pessimism to estimate the chances of success or failures for certain courses of action. But in some sense, depression is the price we pay for being able to simulate the future. Our consciousness has the ability to conjure up all sorts of horrific outcomes for the future, and is therefore aware of all the bad things that could happen, even if they are not realistic. It is hard to verify many of these theories, since brain scans of people who are clinically depressed indicate that many brain areas are affected. It is difficult to pinpoint the source of the problem, but among the clinically depressed, activity in the parietal and temporal lobes seems to be suppressed, perhaps indicating that the person is withdrawn from the outside world and living in their own internal world. In particular, the ventromedial cortex seems to play an important role. This area apparently creates the feeling that there is a sense of meaning and wholeness to the world, so that everything seems to have a purpose. Overactivity in this area can cause mania, in which people think they are omnipotent. Underactivity in this area is associated with depression and the feeling that life is pointless. So it is possible that a defect in this area may be responsible for some mood swings.

PATTERNS OF THE “SHY” What else is common among people who identify themselves as “shy?” Below are the results of a survey that was administered to 150 of my program’s participants. The results of this informal survey reveal certain facts and attitudes common among the socially anxious. Let me point out that these are the subjective answers of the clients themselves—not the professional opinions of the therapists. The average length of time in the program for all who responded was eight months. The average age was twenty-eight. (Some of the answers are based on a scale of 1 to 5, 1 being the lowest.) -Most clients considered shyness to be a serious problem at some point in their lives. Almost everyone rated the seriousness of their problem at level 5, which makes sense, considering that all who responded were seeking help for their problem. -60 percent of the respondents said that “shyness” first became enough of a problem that it held them back from things they wanted during adolescence; 35 percent reported the problem began in childhood; and 5 percent said not until adulthood. This answer reveals when clients were first aware of social anxiety as an inhibiting force. -The respondents perceived the average degree of “sociability” of their parents was a 2.7, which translates to “fair”; 60 percent of the respondents reported that no other member of the family had a problem with “shyness”; and 40 percent said there was at least one other family member who had a problem with “shyness.” -50 percent were aware of rejection by their peers during childhood. -66 percent had physical symptoms of discomfort during social interaction that they believed were related to social anxiety. -55 percent reported that they had experienced panic attacks. -85 percent do not use any medication for anxiety; 15 percent do. -90 percent said they avoid opportunities to meet new people; 75 percent acknowledged that they often stay home because of social fears, rather than going out. -80 percent identified feelings of depression that they connected to social fears. -70 percent said they had difficulty with social skills. -75 percent felt that before they started the program it was impossible to control their social fears; 80 percent said they now believed it was possible to control their fears. -50 percent said they believed they might have a learning disability. -70 percent felt that they were “too dependent on their parents”; 75 percent felt their parents were overprotective; 50 percent reported that they would not have sought professional help if not for their parents’ urging. -10 percent of respondents were the only child in their families; 40 percent had one sibling; 30 percent had two siblings; 10 percent had three; and 10 percent had four or more. Experts can play many games with statistics. Of importance here are the general attitudes and patterns of a population of socially anxious individuals who were in a therapy program designed to combat their problem. Of primary significance is the high percentage of people who first thought that “shyness” was uncontrollable, but then later changed their minds, once they realized that anxiety is a habit that can be broken—without medication. Also significant is that 50 percent of the participants recognized that their parents were the catalyst for their seeking help. Consider these statistics and think about where you fit into them. Do you identify with this profile? Look back on it in the coming months and examine the ways in which your sociability changes. Give yourself credit for successful breakthroughs, and keep in mind that you are not alone!