Medication Sad Quotes

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication, we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime.

So tonight I reach for my journal again. This is the first time I’ve done this since I came to Italy. What I write in my journal is that I am weak and full of fear. I explain that Depression and Loneliness have shown up, and I’m scared they will never leave. I say that I don’t want to take the drugs anymore, but I’m frightened I will have to. I am terrified that I will never really pull my life together. In response, somewhere from within me, rises a now-familiar presence, offering me all the certainties I have always wished another person would say to me when I was troubled. This is what I find myself writing on the page: I’m here. I love you. I don’t care if you need to stay up crying all night long. I will stay with you. If you need the medication again, go ahead and take it—I will love you through that, as well. If you don’t need the medication, I will love you, too. There’s nothing you can ever do to lose my love. I will protect you until you die, and after your death I will still protect you. I am stronger than Depression and Braver than Loneliness and nothing will ever exhaust me. Tonight, this strange interior gesture of friendship—the lending of a hand from me to myself when nobody else is around to offer solace—reminds me of something that happened to me once in New York City. I walked into an office building one afternoon in a hurry, dashed into the waiting elevator. As I rushed in, I caught an unexpected glance of myself in a security mirror’s reflection. In that moment, my brain did an odd thing—it fired off this split-second message: “Hey! You know her! That’s a friend of yours!” And I actually ran forward toward my own reflection with a smile, ready to welcome that girl whose name I had lost but whose face was so familiar. In a flash instant of course, I realized my mistake and laughed in embarrassment at my almost doglike confusion over how a mirror works. But for some reason that incident comes to mind again tonight during my sadness in Rome, and I find myself writing this comforting reminder at the bottom of the page. Never forget that once upon a time, in an unguarded moment, you recognized yourself as a FRIEND… I fell asleep holding my notebook pressed against my chest, open to this most recent assurance. In the morning when I wake up, I can still smell a faint trace of depression’s lingering smoke, but he himself is nowhere to be seen. Somewhere during the night, he got up and left. And his buddy loneliness beat it, too.

We listen to the small voice in the back of our head that says, “This medication is taking money away from your family. This medication messes with your sex drive or your weight. This medication is for people with real problems. Not just people who feel sad. No one ever died from being sad.” Except that they do.

I've never had a sustained period of medication for mental illness when I've not been on other drugs as well. It's just not something that I particularly feel I need. I know that I have dramatically changing moods, and I know sometimes I feel really depressed, but I think that's just life. I don't think of it as, "Ah, this is mental illness," more as, "Today, life makes me feel very sad." I know I also get unnaturally high levels of energy and quickness of thought, but I'm able to utilize that.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this—through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication—we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.

But I'll have to ask you to wait a long time, Anne," said Gilbert sadly. "It will be three years before I'll finish my medical course. And even then there will be no diamond sunbursts and marble halls." Anne laughed. "I don't want sunbursts and marble halls. I just want YOU. You see I'm quite as shameless as Phil about it. Sunbursts and marble halls may be all very well, but there is more `scope for imagination' without them. And as for the waiting, that doesn't matter. We'll just be happy, waiting and working for each other -- and dreaming. Oh, dreams will be very sweet now." Gilbert drew her close to him and kissed her. Then they walked home together in the dusk, crowned king and queen in the bridal realm of love, along winding paths fringed with the sweetest flowers that ever bloomed, and over haunted meadows where winds of hope and memory blew.

Pain could be killed. Sadness could not, but the drugs did shut its mouth for a time.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life. People don't like to talk about death because it makes them sad. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, all the people they love will briefly grieve but continue to breathe. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, Their children will still grow Get married Get old.. They don't want to imagine how life will continue to go on without them Their material things will be sold Their medical files stamped "closed" Their name becoming a memory to everyone they know. They don't want to imagine how life will go on without them, so instead of accepting it head on, they avoid the subject all together, hoping and praying it will somehow... pass them by. Forget about them, moving on to the next one in line. no, they didn't want to imagine how life would continue to go on.... without them. But death didn't forget. Instead they were met head-on by death, disguised as an 18-wheeler behind a cloud of fog. No. Death didn't forget about them. If only they had been prepared, accepted the inevitable, laid out their plans, understood that it wasn't just their lives at hand. I may have legally been considered an adult at the age of nineteen, but still i felt very much all of just nineteen. Unprepared and overwhelmed to suddenly have the entire life of a seven-year-old in my realm. Death. The only thing inevitable in life. -Will

My sadness is beautiful. It infuses everything I do. It is at the core of my identity and always has been, just as happiness is in some people. I refuse to be told that it's a flaw. I will not mute it with medications for the sake of society. I will hold it close to me and celebrate it rightfully while the rest of the world fails to see it for what it is and it will be their loss.

The say addiction might be linked to bipolar disorder. It's the chemicals in our brains, they say. I got the wrong chemicals, Ma. Or rather, I don't get enough of one or the other. They have a pill for it. They have an industry. They make millions. Did you know people get rich off of sadness? I want to meet the millionaire of American sadness. I want to look him in the eye, shake his hand, and say, 'it's been an honor to serve my country.

A sad fact, of course, about adult life is that you see the very things you'll never adapt to coming toward you on the horizon. You see them as the problems they are, you worry like hell about them, you make provisions, take precautions, fashion adjustments; you tell yourself you'll have to change your way of doing things. Only you don't. You can't. Somehow it's already too late. And maybe it's even worse than that: maybe the thing you see coming from far away is not the real thing, the thing that scares you, but its aftermath. And what you've feared will happen has already taken place. This is similar in spirit to the realization that all the great new advances of medical science will have no benefit for us at all, thought we cheer them on, hope a vaccine might be ready in time, think things could still get better. Only it's too late there too. And in that very way our life gets over before we know it. We miss it. And like the poet said: The ways we miss our lives are life.

It's an unfortunate word, 'depression', because the illness has nothing to do with feeling sad, sadness is on the human palette. Depression is a whole other beast. It's when your old personality has left town and been replaced by a block of cement with black tar oozing through your veins and mind. This is when you can't decide whether to get a manicure or jump off a cliff. It's all the same. When I was institutionalised I sat on a chair unable to move for three months, frozen in fear. To take a shower was inconceivable. What made it tolerable was while I was inside, I found my tribe - my people. They understood and unlike those who don't suffer, never get bored of you asking if it will ever go away? They can talk medication all hours, day and night; heaven to my ears.

I finally gave in today. Admitting that I haven't been able to do it alone, that's defeat right? But do a couple pills change why I'm here? Will my spirit be altered? Do my passions change? Will I lose hope either way? My madness is what makes me. It’s my most unique beauty.

I know the difference between sadness and depression. Clinical depression has no source from which it springs-it just is. Intractable sadness has nothing to do with synapses, or brain chemistry, or essential salts, it's born of something. It's the product of injustice and helplessness. It can be anesthetized, I suppose, but it's there, unaltered, when the medication wears off, like an intruder who has broken into your house and is still there every morning when you wake up. Given the choice, I would rather be depressed. I've come back from depression.

I thought I’d let go of the shame about this part of my life, the way I was basically medicating myself twenty-four hours a day. It’s no different from what millions of people do, good people who are in pain or unsure of where to turn; good people who need a break from everything in this world that’s hard and sad and unforgiving.

Drug companies are spending billions of dollars to turn normal human experiences like fear or sadness into medical diseases. They aren’t developing cures; they’re creating customers.

You wanted to become a doctor to help people and feel better at the end of your job, I think, watching them, as the nurse takes my hand. But I don't think you do feel better at the end of the day. You look like humans have constantly disappointed you.

I feel anger and frustration when I think that one in ten Americans beyond the age of high school is on some kind of antidepressant, such as Prozac. Indeed, when you go through mood swings, you now have to justify why you are not on some medication. There may be a few good reasons to be on medication, in severely pathological cases, but my mood, my sadness, my bouts of anxiety, are a second source of intelligence--perhaps even the first source. I get mellow and lose physical energy when it rains, become more meditative, and tend to write more and more slowly then, with the raindrops hitting the window, what Verlaine called autumnal "sobs" (sanglots). Some days I enter poetic melancholic states, what the Portuguese call saudade or the Turks huzun (from the Arabic word for sadness). Other days I am more aggressive, have more energy--and will write less, walk more, do other things, argue with researchers, answer emails, draw graphs on blackboards. Should I be turned into a vegetable or a happy imbecile?

Mainstream ideas of “healing” deeply believe in ableist ideas that you’re either sick or well, fixed or broken, and that nobody would want to be in a disabled or sick or mad bodymind. Unsurprisingly and unfortunately, these ableist ideas often carry over into healing spaces that call themselves “alternative” or “liberatory.” The healing may be acupuncture and herbs, not pills and surgery, but assumptions in both places abound that disabled and sick folks are sad people longing to be “normal,” that cure is always the goal, and that disabled people are objects who have no knowledge of our bodies. And deep in both the medical-industrial complex and “alternative” forms of healing that have not confronted their ableism is the idea that disabled people can’t be healers.

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.

So Janie began to think of Death. Death, that strange being with the huge square toes who lived way in the West. The great one who lived in the straight house like a platform without sides to it, and without a roof. What need has Death for a cover, and what winds can blow against him? He stands in his high house that overlooks the world. Stands watchful and motionless all day with his sword drawn back, waiting for the messenger to bid him come. Been standing there before there was a where or a when or a then. She was liable to find a feather from his wings lying in her yard any day now. She was sad and afraid too. Poor Jody! He ought not to have to wrassle in there by himself. She sent Sam in to suggest a visit, but Jody said No. These medical doctors wuz all right with the Godly sick, but they didn't know a thing about a case like his. He'd be all right just as soon as the two-headed man found what had been buried against him. He wasn't going to die at all. That was what he thought. But Sam told her different, so she knew. And then if he hadn't the next morning she was bound to know, for people began to gather in the big yard under the palm and china-berry trees. People who would not have dared to foot the place before crept in and did not come to the house. Just squatted under the trees and waited. Rumor, that wingless bird, had shadowed over the town.

The emptiness of the narcissist often means that they are only focused on whatever is useful or interesting to them at the moment. If at that moment it is interesting for them to tell you they love you, they do. It’s not really a long game to them, and when the next interesting issue comes up, they attend to that. The objectification of others—viewing other people as objects useful to his needs—can also play a role. When you are the only thing in the room, or the most interesting thing in the room, then the narcissist’s charisma and charm can leave you convinced that you are his everything. The problem is that this is typically superficial regard, and that superficiality results in inconsistency, and emotions for the narcissistic person range from intense to detached on a regular basis. This vacillation between intensity and detachment can be observed in the narcissist’s relationships with people (acquaintances, friends, family, and partners), work, and experiences. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe harbor in your life. Life throws us enough curve balls in the shape of money problems, work issues, medical issues, household issues, and even the weather. Sadly, a relationship with a narcissist can be one more source of chaos in your life, rather than a place of comfort and consistency.

To live a hard life was to make solid and impregnable every way in, until no openings remained and the soul hid in darkness, and no one else could hear its screams, its railing at injustice, its long, agonizing stretches of sadness. Hardness without created hardness within. Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation. Scillara knew better. She had faced her own sadness often enough. Even when she discovered her first means of escaping it, in durhang, she’d known that such an escape was simply a flight from feelings that existed legitimately. She’d just been unable to permit herself any sympathy for such feelings, because to do so was to surrender to their truth. Sadness belonged. As rightful as joy, love, grief and fear. All conditions of being. Too often people mistook the sadness in others for self-pity, and in so doing revealed their own hardness of spirit, and more than a little malice.

Sadly, interpretation of medical science is frequently influenced by the dark forces of industry, out to make a killing. And

You can't fight mental health bias if you label people based on a lists of symptoms and you have no medical degree to diagnose people. We all have crazy running through our blood and so many things trigger that. We all struggle with our anxiety and twisted issues. Defamation of character is not kind, nor Christlike. Because when you label people with self righteous vindication you open the door to the very idea that self righteousness is itself a disorder that we should all be afraid of. This doorway when left open too long gets people to pull away from Christ, not run to him.

It’s a sad fact that the path to one’s own happiness is often paved with the heartbreak of others – or maybe that’s just what every selfish person tells themselves.

(It’s sad—but not surprising—that teeth have become a status symbol in a country where more than one in three citizens lack dental coverage, which isn’t included with standard medical insurance.)

I believe in the kind of love where you give the other person the last bite of cheesecake without thinking twice. Where you laugh when they’re happy, and you ache when they’re sad. Where you’re not two halves making a whole, but two wholes making something bigger, that only the two of you can make.

Illness affects everybody and alters relationships. When we receive grim medical news regarding a loved one, whom do we cry for first, for the injured party or for our own loss? The closer an ill person is to us, the more difficult it is to view their plight primarily in terms of their own misfortune. When a person we love suffers, we suffer as a collective group; we each bear part of the emotional pain.

me to see a therapist and take Y ——. The medication took away my sadness and replaced it with something else—not happiness, but more like a low dull hum, a weak radio frequency of feeling that couldn’t be turned up or down.

My mom was a sayyed from the bloodline of the Prophet (which you know about now). In Iran, if you convert from Islam to Christianity or Judaism, it’s a capital crime. That means if they find you guilty in religious court, they kill you. But if you convert to something else, like Buddhism or something, then it’s not so bad. Probably because Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are sister religions, and you always have the worst fights with your sister. And probably nothing happens if you’re just a six-year-old. Except if you say, “I’m a Christian now,” in your school, chances are the Committee will hear about it and raid your house, because if you’re a Christian now, then so are your parents probably. And the Committee does stuff way worse than killing you. When my sister walked out of her room and said she’d met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed. When I tell the story in Oklahoma, this is the part where the grown-ups always interrupt me. They say, “Okay, but why did she convert?” Cause up to that point, I’ve told them about the house with the birds in the walls, all the villages my grandfather owned, all the gold, my mom’s own medical practice—all the amazing things she had that we don’t have anymore because she became a Christian. All the money she gave up, so we’re poor now. But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane. There’s no middle. You can’t say it’s a quirky thing she thinks sometimes, cause she went all the way with it. If it’s not true, she made a giant mistake. But she doesn’t think so. She had all that wealth, the love of all those people she helped in her clinic. They treated her like a queen. She was a sayyed. And she’s poor now. People spit on her on buses. She’s a refugee in places people hate refugees, with a husband who hits harder than a second-degree black belt because he’s a third-degree black belt. And she’ll tell you—it’s worth it. Jesus is better. It’s true. We can keep talking about it, keep grinding our teeth on why Sima converted, since it turned the fate of everybody in the story. It’s why we’re here hiding in Oklahoma. We can wonder and question and disagree. You can be certain she’s dead wrong. But you can’t make Sima agree with you. It’s true. Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. This whole story hinges on it. Sima—who was such a fierce Muslim that she marched for the Revolution, who studied the Quran the way very few people do read the Bible and knew in her heart that it was true.

Sadness was, she well knew, not something that could be cured. It was not, in fact, a failing, not a flaw, not an illness of spirit. Sadness was never without reason, and to assert that it marked some kind of dysfunction did little more than prove ignorance or, worse, cowardly evasiveness in the one making the assertion. As if happiness was the only legitimate way of being. As if those failing at it needed to be locked away, made soporific with medications; as if the causes of sadness were merely traps and pitfalls in the proper climb to blissful contentment, things to be edged round or bridged, or leapt across on wings of false elation.

Depression can be due to a low endocrine function, nutritional deficiencies, blood sugar problems, food allergies, or systemic yeast infection. Depression can also result from medical illnesses such as stroke, heart attack, cancer, Parkinson's disease, and hormonal disorder. It can also be caused by a serious loss, a difficult relationship, a financial problem, or any stressful, unwelcome life change.

You're right. I haven't suggested medication. Because antidepressants are designed to smooth out the highs and lows of your mood, and if used properly they can stop you feeling so sad, but often they stop you feeling as happy. She held one hand up, her palm horizontal. You just end up... on a level. And you would expect that patients who take antidepressants mostly miss the highs, wouldn't you? But that isn't actually the case. The majority of people who want to stop medication say they want to be able to cry again. They watch a sad film with someone they love, and they want to be able to... feel the same thing.

Hammond shook his head sadly. “Yet, you’ll remember,” he said, “the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years—if you’re lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease—as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren’t going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication—they won’t be grateful, they’ll be outraged. Blue Cross isn’t going to pay it. They’ll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason—and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.

It’s the very things we run from, avoid at all costs, dread, medicate, and deny that hold the secret to our liberation. These unhappy times of great emotional pain, in a beautifully redemptive turn, have the potential—if we open to God in them—to transform us into grounded, deeply joyful people. Suffering is sadness leaving the body.

The more time I spent focused on my issues, the less time I had to focus on Steven’s. And the less I was focusing on Steven’s, the further apart we grew. It’s been sad to recognize how much fixing has been the backbone of our relationship. Whether it was Steven trying to fix my bulimia or me trying to fix his marijuana addiction or pushing him to find the right cocktail of medication, it’s been the glue of our relationship. Without that aspect of fixing the other, we don’t have much to talk about.

can’t be life. sadly, so many people are setting the bar really low in terms of their personal lives working a job they hate content with struggling settling for relationships that aren’t actual relationships life for so many is not living at all and that’s the problem you get what you allow watching others live life instead of living your best life and they wonder why everyone is self-medicating suppressing their pain pretending to be happy instead of trying to cultivate a lifestyle that brings them peace

You just end up… on a level. And you would expect that patients who take antidepressants mostly miss the highs, wouldn’t you? But that isn’t actually the case. The majority of people who want to stop medication say they want to be able to cry again. They watch a sad film with someone they love, and they want to be able to… feel the same thing.

It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm.

Isn't it sad that we have to gain control of the artificial numbers placed upon us by others to regain some control of our lives?

It’s a sad fact that the path to one’s own happiness is often paved with the heartbreak of others

Perhaps periods of anxiety, sadness, panic, and sheer craziness are just part of the mental continuum that nature has provided to help us stay alive, make babies, and pass on genes.

Why Research Issues Still Matter Why do centuries of mutual distrust over medical research matter today? What does the sad history of exploitative experimentation augur for black health?

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.

The doc began waving a medical Pentracorder over Hadrian. “Oh dear! Fractured ego, sprained confidence, dislocated immodesty, and broken bravado! Can this even be cured? Extensive long-term damage is the sad prognosis, alas.

I'm no expert, but in my limited experience, women aren't born women. They start out as girls. And every girl, from the moment they can dream, imagines the rescue. The knight. The castle. Life in a fairy tale. If you don't believe me, watch boys and girls on a playground. No one teaches us to do this. The kid in us actually believes in things that are too good to be true. Before life convinces us we can't and they're not. Then life kicks in. Boys become men. Girls become women. For any number of reasons we are wounded and, sadly, wounded people wound people. So many of us grow into doubting, hopeless, callous adults protecting hardened hearts. Medicating the pain. Life isn't what we imagined. Nor are we. And we didn't start out trying to get there. Far from it. But it's who we've become. One day we turn around, and what we once dreamed or hoped is a distant echo. We've forgotten what it sounded like. Once pure and unadulterated, the voice of hope is now muted by all the stuff we've crammed on top of it. And we're okay with that. For some illogical reason, we stand atop the mine shaft of ourselves, shoving stuff into the pipe that is us, telling our very soul, 'Shut up. Not another word.' Why? Because the cry of our heart hurts when unanswered. And the longer it remains unanswered, the deeper the hurt. In self-protection we inhale resignation and exhale indifference. [Murphy Shepherd]

Superficiality results in vacillating inconsistency, and emotions for the narcissistic person range from intense to detached on a regular basis. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe harbor in your life. Life throws us enough curve balls in the shape of money problems, work issues, medical issues, household issues, and even the weather. Sadly, a relationship with a narcissist can be one more source of chaos in your life, rather than a place of comfort and consistency.

When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone.

I was recently inside a hospital that had gone wireless and it was a forest of microwave antennas! It is sad that the medical profession is in the process of becoming expert on microwave radiation sickness due to willfully inducing it into their own staff!

First, a sad paradox. Medical research has become more laboratory oriented in the last fifty years. To be sure, this shift has produced some impressive results. But at the same time, human biology is not exclusively mechanical, and there are limits to what the laboratory can accurately study. The laboratory study of infectious diseases has been magnificent—it is very straightforward. But its very success has deflected attention from the influence of emotions. As a result, medical research has failed abysmally in many areas.

I’m not my best, and I had four glasses of wine. If I want to be a sad failure, I can. I got dumped by my fiancé because I’m not perfect and never will be. Love isn’t enough, and time doesn’t heal— " Caroline explaining why she watched Under the Tuscan Sun three times today.

All of us struggle to realize something Patrice spent years telling me, as I took on one position or another: "It's not about you, dear." She often needed to remind me that, whatever people were feeling-happy, sad, frightened, or confused-it was unlikely it had anything to do with me. They had received a gift, or lost a friend, or gotten a medical test result, or couldn't understand why their love wasn't calling them back. It was all about their lives, their troubles, their hopes and dreams. Not mine. The nature of human existence makes it hard for us-or at least for me-to come to that understanding naturally. After all, I can only experience the world through me. That tempts all of us to believe everything we think, everything we hear, everything we see, is all about us. I think we all do this. But a leader constantly has to train him- or herself to think otherwise. This is an important insight for a leader, in two respects. First, it allows you to relax a bit, secure in the knowledge that you aren't that important. Second, knowing people aren't focused on you should drive you to try to imagine what they are focused on. I see this as the heart of emotional intelligence, the ability to imagine the feelings and perspective of another "me". Some seem to be born with a larger initial deposit of emotional intelligence, but all of us can develop it with practice.

But I don’t have an answer for them. How can you explain why you believe anything? So I just say what my mom says when people ask her. She looks them in the eye with the begging hope that they’ll hear her and she says, “Because it’s true.” Why else would she believe it? It’s true and it’s more valuable than seven million dollars in gold coins, and thousands of acres of Persian countryside, and ten years of education to get a medical degree, and all your family, and a home, and the best cream puffs of Jolfa, and even maybe your life. My mom wouldn’t have made the trade otherwise. If you believe it’s true, that there is a God and He wants you to believe in Him and He sent His Son to die for you—then it has to take over your life. It has to be worth more than everything else, because heaven’s waiting on the other side. That or Sima is insane.

Curtis grew up to become King Cuz. A gangster well respected for his brain and his derring-do. His set, the Rollin’ Paper Chasers, was the first gang to have trained medics at their rumbles. A shoot-out would pop off at the swap meet and the stretcher-bearers would cart off the wounded to be treated in some field hospital set up behind the frontlines. You didn’t know whether to be sad or impressed. It wasn’t long after that innovation that he applied for membership to NATO. Everybody else is in NATO. Why not the Crips? You going to tell me we wouldn’t kick the shit out of Estonia?

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadnesses of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this - through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication - we build these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, but yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward brackishness.

There is a moral imperative to seeing mental health through the same lens we use for other pathologies or illnesses. Being sad or overwhelmed is normal, much as being short of breath after a run is normal. Both become abnormal when they happen with no apparent cause and are hard to stop. Those situations need medical attention.

William Maxell, who became Mary’s editor at the New Yorker. William recalled a poignant sense of loss when his own mother and new-born sibling died from the disease: ‘From that time on there was a sadness which had not existed before, a deep down sadness that never went away. We aren’t safe. Nobody’s safe. Terrible things can happen to anyone at any time.’36

Can we become wiser and better people because of major medical problems? Absolutely. But that’s *our* choice. It’s not automatically included in the package – a package that is filled with pain and sadness and disappointment. Anyone who chooses to find a ray of light in that darkness, to use the pain to benefit themselves and other people, has my utmost awe and respect. But that doesn’t erase the horror of the packaging. If we forget that, empathy is lost. Sickness is not a gift – far more often, it feels like a curse. The people who take that curse and nevertheless continue to try, to fight, to hope – they are the gifts. Love those people well. And love them even more on days when trying, fighting, and hoping are simply out of reach.

A “snap” is certainly not a medical term. Experts use fancier language to describe the instant when a troubled person steps over the edge. Nonetheless, a snap is a real moment. It can happen in a split second, the result of a terribly traumatic event. Or it can be the final straw, the sad culmination of pressure that builds and builds until the mind and body must find a release.

Looking at her sitting opposite me, in a medicated haze, drool collecting around her mouth, fingers fluttering like dirty moths, I experienced a sudden and unexpected wrench of sadness. I felt desperately sorry for her, and those like her—for all of us, all the wounded and the lost. Of course, I said none of this to her. Instead I did what Ruth would have done. And we simply sat in silence.

We confuse depression, sadness, and grief. However, the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality — the ability to experience a full range of emotions, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief.2 Depression is not an emotion itself; it’s the loss of feelings, a big heavy blanket that insulates you from the world yet hurts at the same time. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness.

Morphine addicts, also called morphinomaniacs, were oftentimes wealthy women being treated for all sorts of ailments. When heroin came on the market at the end of the century, it was thought not to be addictive. The original manufacturer was Bayer (as in the Bayer that makes aspirin today). These snippets of medical history were both fascinating and sadly still timely, given our opioid addiction crisis today.

Albert Ellis, who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, a precursor to cognitive behavior therapy, taught me the extent to which we teach ourselves negative feelings about ourselves—and the negative and self-defeating behaviors that follow from these feelings. He showed that underlying our least effective and most harmful behaviors is a philosophical or ideological core that is irrational but is so central to our views of our self and the world that often we aren’t aware that it is only a belief, nor are we aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.

Without direction, the respiratory technician goes to the head of the bed. She takes the tubing, attaches it to the oxygen, and turns it on as high as it will go. She provides a seal with her hand cupped over the plastic mask, over the nose and mouth of the toddler, and methodically provides oxygenated air. Doyle’s tiny chest rises and falls while I listen with my stethoscope. I am reaching for another breathing tube. “Fib!” Dr. Pedras feels for a pulse while another places gelled pads on her chest.

We all build internal sea walls to keep at bay the sadness of life and the often overwhelming forces within our minds. In whatever way we do this--through love, work, family, faith, friends, denial, alcohol, drugs, or medication--we guild these walls, stone by stone, over a lifetime. One of the most difficult problems is to construct these barriers of such a height and strength that one has a true harbor, a sanctuary away from crippling turmoil and pain, and yet low enough, and permeable enough, to let in fresh seawater that will fend off the inevitable inclination toward blackishness. For someone with my cast of mind and mood, medication is an integral element of this wall: without it, I would be constantly beholden to the crushing movements of the mental sea; I would, unquestionably, be dead or insane. But love is, to me, the ultimately more extraordinary part of the breakwater wall: it helps to shut out the terror and awfulness, while, at the same time, allowing in life and beauty and vitality.

blur in my memory.” She wagged her head and clucked her tongue sadly, which I found very annoying. “Well, at least you’re better now. That’s what counts, right?” She shuffled through my file. “I see your doctor has filed a medical certificate for gym.” “Yeah.” “Okay, no problem. I’ll see that the nurse and Coach Procter get copies. And you have a prescription request, which has been approved. The nurse has to dispense medicine to you, but you probably already know that.” “Uh, yeah,” I said dryly. She seemed

As I work with people who are new to being present with the dying, I ask them to remember two things. (1)Stepping back from the physical and medical concerns of the patient, we must now focus on the spiritual. Dying is more than the physical body shutting down, although that is certainly the primary view in our society. The body will take charge on its own. The spiritual reality will not. Sacred dying means bringing the spiritual experience to the forefront. Deal with spiritual things, whatever they may be, first and foremost. (2) The sacred dying experience is for the person dying - all rituals and observances are for him or her. This does not mean that the loved ones and their profound feelings of loss and sadness do not count or should not be a part of the rituals. It means, rather, that the grievers will have time later to mourn and honor their feelings of loss. Loved ones must try to respect the experience of dying, and even if they need to sacrifice their own feelings for the time being, they must try to focus 100 percent on the person who is dying.

Self-improvement appealed to me, too. I could stand to exercise more often, and be more mindful of salt. I wanted to be more open and thoughtful, more attentive and available to family and friends, Ian. I wanted to stop hiding discomfort, sadness, and anger behind humor. I wanted a therapist to laugh at my jokes and tell me I was well-adjusted. I wanted to better understand my own desires, what I wanted; to find a purpose. BUt non medical monitoring of hear rate variability, sleep latency, glucose levels, ketones--none of this was self-knowledge. It was just metadata.

With drugs and alcohol, people self-medicate to live in a state of euphoria, abusing the chemicals that force endorphins and serotonin to the brain. However, we aren't suppose to be in this mental state all the time. And when the high is over, we come down and crash. This is why withdrawal plays a huge part in addicts never getting clean- they are running from the problems in their lives that make them sad or depressed. They are finding solace in substances. But the truth is, if they just dealt with their issues in the first place, then they wouldn't need to self-medicate.

How the sadness is handled by the physician has a powerful impact on the medical care received by the patients. If the grief is relentlessly suppressed--as in Eva's experience during residency--the result can be a numb physician who is unable to invest in a new patient. This lack of investment can lead to rote medical care--impersonal at best, shoddy at worst. At the other end of the spectrum is the doctor who is inundated with grief and can't function because of the overwhelming sorrow. Burnout is significant in both these cases, and that erodes the quality of medical care.

Harm reduction is often perceived as being inimical to the ultimate purpose of “curing” addiction—that is, of helping addicts transcend their habits and to heal. People regard it as “coddling” addicts, as enabling them to continue their destructive ways. It’s also considered to be the opposite of abstinence, which many regard as the only legitimate goal of addiction treatment. Such a distinction is artificial. The issue in medical practice is always how best to help a patient. If a cure is possible and probable without doing greater harm, then cure is the objective. When it isn’t — and in most chronic medical conditions cure is not the expected outcome — the physician’s role is to help the patient with the symptoms and to reduce the harm done by the disease process. In rheumatoid arthritis, for example, one aims to prevent joint inflammation and bone destruction and, in all events, to reduce pain. In incurable cancers we aim to prolong life, if that can be achieved without a loss of life quality, and also to control symptoms. In other words, harm reduction means making the lives of afflicted human beings more bearable, more worth living. That is also the goal of harm reduction in the context of addiction. Although hardcore drug addiction is much more than a disease, the harm reduction model is essential to its treatment. Given our lack of a systematic, evidencebased approach to addiction, in many cases it’s futile to dream of a cure. So long as society ostracizes the addict and the legal system does everything it can to heighten the drug problem, the welfare and medical systems can aim only to mitigate some of its effects. Sad to say, in our context harm reduction means reducing not only the harm caused by the disease of addiction, but also the harm caused by the social assault on drug addicts.

Truth or Care by Stewart Stafford It's not every day you find out you're going to die, A sweaty doctor hit me right between the eyes, With my body's Judas kiss and then I was prey, Life had left me without any cards to play. Reading the shocked expression on my face, The doctor played his "it's treatable" ace, Treatable is good but curable is better, Survival hinges on the placement of letters. Turns out I never had a chance, sadly, The doctor lied to me and lied badly, Flop sweat had put truth to the sword, And I'm writing all this through a ouija board. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

different subject. The story of the serotonin hypothesis for depression, and its enthusiastic promotion by drug companies, is part of a wider process that has been called ‘disease-mongering’ or ‘medicalisation’, where diagnostic categories are widened, whole new diagnoses are invented, and normal variants of human experience are pathologised, so they can be treated with pills. One simple illustration of this is the recent spread of ‘checklists’ enabling the public to diagnose, or help diagnose, various medical conditions. In 2010, for example, the popular website WebMD launched a new test: ‘Rate your risk for depression: could you be depressed?’ It was funded by Eli Lilly, manufacturers of the antidepressant duloxetine, and this was duly declared on the page, though that doesn’t reduce the absurdity of what followed. The test consisted of ten questions, such as: ‘I feel sad or down most of the time’; ‘I feel tired almost every day’; ‘I have trouble concentrating’; ‘I feel worthless or hopeless’; ‘I find myself thinking a lot about dying’; and so on. If you answered ‘no’ to every single one of these questions – every single one – and then pressed ‘Submit’, the response was clear: ‘You may be at risk for major depression’.

Xuan pulled out his phone and searched Google. He had to ask for the correct spelling of the drug. He wanted more real information about how much of a financial burden he would be to his parents. Money was a big concern. Possibly a deal breaker. “Several sites—it’s around five hundred dollars a day! That’s fifteen thousand a month! How could I let my parents pay that much for me?” Fifteen thousand dollars. I gasped, appalled. I staggered to the chair and collapsed into it. He’ll never agree to that. Xuan opened his mouth and closed it again, in shock. The atmosphere in the room plunged from friendly and informative to frigid with mathematical figures and calculations. I sat with my elbows on my knees, my face buried in my hands. Saints, I knew cancer treatment was expensive, but I never imagined it was that expensive. That was too much. Ironically, I didn’t know if I could live with myself, knowing my parents were working day and night to keep me alive. That would be a huge financial responsibility. I just couldn’t imagine allowing it, month after month. Sadly, I wondered how many people died every year because of the cost of medication in the United States. In a way, it seemed like pharmaceutical companies were getting away with murder.

These terms themselves are somewhat horrifying. “Obese” is an unpleasant word from the Latin obesus, meaning “having eaten until fat,” which is, in a literal sense, fair enough. But when people use the word “obese,” they aren’t merely being literal. They are offering forth an accusation. It is strange, and perhaps sad, that medical doctors came up with this terminology when they are charged with first doing no harm. The modifier “morbidly” makes the fat body a death sentence when such is not the case. The term “morbid obesity” frames fat people like we are the walking dead, and the medical establishment treats us accordingly.

If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That’s a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology.” Hammond shook his head sadly. “Yet, you’ll remember,” he said, “the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years—if you’re lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease—as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren’t going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication—they won’t be grateful, they’ll be outraged. Blue Cross isn’t going to pay it. They’ll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason—and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind.

Josh’s father felt Josh should bond with his fellow injured patients in the ward. This was something I really dissuaded Josh from doing. I didn’t want him to hear the hardships, battles, and frustrations that others were going through. I also didn’t want Josh to take on their fears and frustrations. We were always pleasant and polite to everyone else in the ward, but my only concern was Josh, and it was enough for us to focus just on his issues. I found the whole Acute Spinal Ward experience extremely negative and distressingly sad with no great healing or recovery objective. The message from the medical team was always, without fail, acceptance of the prognosis. This was totally the opposite message of what we presented and instilled into Josh. We slowly gained evidence that our non-traditional approach was working.

Was it real? Well, of course not, not in any meaningful sense of the word "real." But did it stay with me? Absolutely. Long after my psychosis cleared, and the medications took hold, it became part of what one remembers forever, surrounded by an almost Proustian melancholy. Long since that voyage of my mind and soul, Saturn and its icy rings took on an elegiac beauty, and I don't see Saturn's image now without feeling an acute sadness at its being so far away from me. So unobtainable in so many ways. the intensity, glory, and absolute assuredness of my mind's flight made it very difficult for me to believe, once I was better, that the illness was one I should willingly give up. Even though I was a clinician and a scientist, and even though I could read the research literature and see the inevitable, bleak consequences of not taking lithium, I for many years after my initial diagnosis was reluctant to take my medications as prescribed." An Unquiet Mind by Kay Redfield Jamison Pages 90 - 91, 2nd paragraph.

If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from another planet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But it isn’t our skin that is full of wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer. All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that this world is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world for thousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and the psychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but I can tell you it is not normal. When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world. Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painful that for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say “I love you” can be frightening. But even if it’s painful and fearful to have an emotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we get married, and we have children. In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. In that denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lie to ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don’t notice we are lying, and sometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lie to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

If you were going to start a bioengineering company, Henry, what would you do? Would you make products to help mankind, to fight illness and disease? Dear me, no. That’s a terrible idea. A very poor use of new technology.” Hammond shook his head sadly. “Yet, you’ll remember,” he said, “the original genetic engineering companies, like Genentech and Cetus, were all started to make pharmaceuticals. New drugs for mankind. Noble, noble purpose. Unfortunately, drugs face all kinds of barriers. FDA testing alone takes five to eight years—if you’re lucky. Even worse, there are forces at work in the marketplace. Suppose you make a miracle drug for cancer or heart disease—as Genentech did. Suppose you now want to charge a thousand dollars or two thousand dollars a dose. You might imagine that is your privilege. After all, you invented the drug, you paid to develop and test it; you should be able to charge whatever you wish. But do you really think that the government will let you do that? No, Henry, they will not. Sick people aren’t going to pay a thousand dollars a dose for needed medication—they won’t be grateful, they’ll be outraged. Blue Cross isn’t going to pay it. They’ll scream highway robbery. So something will happen. Your patent application will be denied. Your permits will be delayed. Something will force you to see reason—and to sell your drug at a lower cost. From a business standpoint, that makes helping mankind a very risky business. Personally, I would never help mankind

Jon,” she was saying to the boy across the table from her. “I am in so much pain from stubbing my toe! I need aspirin.” “What’s aspirin?” asked the boy, sounding panicked. He was obviously Nephilim, through and through and through. Magnus could tell without seeing his runes. In fact, he was prepared to bet the boy was a Cartwright. Magnus had known several Cartwrights through the centuries. The Cartwrights all had such distressingly thick necks. “You buy it in a pharmacy,” said the girl. “No, don’t tell me, you don’t know what a pharmacy is either. Have you ever left Idris in your whole life?” “Yes!” said Jon, possibly Cartwright. “On many demon-hunting missions. And once Mama and Papa took me to the beach in France!” “Amazing,” said the girl. “I mean that. I’m going to explain all of modern medicine to you.” “Please don’t do that, Marisol,” said Jon. “I did not feel good after you explained appendectomies. I couldn’t eat.” Marisol made a face at her plate. “So what you’re saying is, I did you a huge favor.” “I like to eat,” said Jon sadly. “Right,” said Marisol. “So, I don’t explain modern medicine to you, and then a medical emergency occurs to me. It could be solved with the application of a little first aid, but you don’t know that, and so I die. I die at your feet. Is that what you want, Jon?” “No,” said Jon. “What’s first aid? Is there a . . . second aid?” “I can’t believe you’re going to let me die when my death could so easily be avoided, if you had just listened,” Marisol went on mercilessly. “Okay, okay! I’ll listen.” “Great. Get me some juice, because I’ll be talking for a while. I’m still very hurt that you even considered letting me die,” Marisol added as Jon scrambled up and made for the side of the room where the unappetizing food and potentially poisonous drinks were laid out. “I thought Shadowhunters had a mandate to protect mundanes!” Marisol shouted after him. “Not orange juice. I want apple juice!

He sighed. Morrie had counseled so many unhappy lovers in his years as a professor. “It’s sad, because a loved one is so important. You realize that, especially when you’re in a time like I am, when you’re not doing so well. Friends are great, but friends are not going to be here on a night when you’re coughing and can’t sleep and someone has to sit up all night with you, comfort you, try to be helpful.” Charlotte and Morrie, who met as students, had been married forty-four years. I watched them together now, when she would remind him of his medication, or come in and stroke his neck, or talk about one of their sons. They worked as a team, often needing no more than a silent glance to understand what the other was thinking. Charlotte was a private person, different from Morrie, but I knew how much he respected her, because sometimes when we spoke, he would say, “Charlotte might be uncomfortable with me revealing that,” and he would end the conversation. It was the only time Morrie held anything back.“I’ve learned this much about marriage,” he said now. “You get tested. You find out who you are, who the other person is, and how you accommodate or don’t.” Is there some kind of rule to know if a marriage is going to work? Morrie smiled. “Things are not that simple, Mitch.” I know. “Still,” he said, “there are a few rules I know to be true about love and marriage: If you don’t respect the other person, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you don’t know how to compromise, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. If you can’t talk openly about what goes on between you, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. And if you don’t have a common set of values in life, you’re gonna have a lot of trouble. Your values must be alike. “And the biggest one of those values, Mitch?” Yes? “Your belief in the importance of your marriage.” He sniffed, then closed his eyes for a moment. “Personally,” he sighed, his eyes still closed, “I think marriage is a very important thing to do, and you’re missing a hell of a lot if you don’t try it.” He ended the subject by quoting the poem he believed in like a prayer: “Love each other or perish.

It was the combination of many factors," Dr. Hornicker said in his last report, written for no medical reason but just because he couldn't get the girls out of his head. "With most people," he said, "suicide is like Russian roulette. Only one chamber has a bullet. With the Lisbon girls, the gun was loaded. A bullet for family abuse. A bullet for genetic predisposition. A bullet for historical malaise. A bullet for inevitable momentum. The other two bullets are impossible to name, but that doesn't mean the chambers were empty." But this is all a chasing after the wind. The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out of hearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.

Like many children, Shiloh Pepin loved swimming, playing at the playground, and dancing. But unlike most children, Shiloh resembled a mermaid. She suffered from a very rare medical condition called sirenomelia, also known as Mermaid Syndrome, in which humans are born with their legs fused (attached) together like a mermaid’s tail. Some people believe that sirenomelia might account for some mermaid sightings. But, sadly, most children suffering from this condition live no more than a few hours after birth. Shiloh, however, defied the odds. She lived for 10 years, until 2009. Milagros Cerron, pictured below, was born with a rare condition called sirenomelia, in which her legs are joined together, like a mermaid’s.

Sadly, however, I have met people who are better evangelists for Prozac than they are for the living God. Rather than viewing medication as simply one component of a full-orbed God-centered body-soul treatment approach, they view it almost as if it was their salvation. By definition, this is idolatry: attributing ultimate power and help to something other than our triune God. If a counselee believes that what ultimately matters is fine-tuning the dose of his Paxil, and finds discussion of spiritual things superfluous or irrelevant, that’s a problem. How a person responds when the medication works—or doesn’t work—reveals her basic posture before God. Thanksgiving and a more fervent seeking after God in the wake of medication success say one thing; a lack of gratitude and a comfort-driven forgetfulness of God say another. A commitment to trust God’s faithfulness and goodness in the wake of medication failure says one thing; a bitter, complaining distrust of his ways says another. So, receive the gift but look principally to the Giver. Whether a medication “works” or not, he is always working on your behalf.

A ranting psychotic is far enough away from mean to be recognized as mentally sick by your aunt Tilly, but how do you decide when everyday anxiety or sadness is severe enough to be considered mental disorder? One thing does seem perfectly clear. On the statistical face of it, it is ridiculous to stretch disorder so elastically that the near average person can qualify. Shouldn’t most people be normal?

Why the us government Should Maintain students Healthcare Claims education and learning is probably the finest ventures in ensuring the people stay a greater existence from the contemporary setting. Over time, education and learning methods have transformed to guarantee individuals gain access to it in the very best ways. Besides, the adjustment can be a purposeful relocate making sure that learning meets pupils distinct needs nowadays. Consequently, any country that is focused on establishing in the current technical period must be ready to devote in schooling no matter what. We appreciate that lots of claims have was able to meet the most affordable threshold in offering secondary and basic education. It is actually commendable for schooling is focused and attends on the needs in the present environment. In addition to, we certainly have observed reduced rates of dropouts due to correct education and learning systems into position. Nevertheless, it is not enough because there are many other factors that, in turn, lower the superiority of education. We appreciate the reality that educational costs is mainly purchased and virtually totally given through the express or low-successful businesses. Sadly, small is defined in range to be sure the unique treatment of learners. It has led to the indiscriminate govt accountability. Apart from putting everything in place, the government must also provide the proper healthcare of a learner because it' s the foundation of excellent learning. The arranged provision of health care to students is defined around the periphery, plus it is amongst the essential things that degrade the grade of training. Standard attendance is actually a necessity for pupils to acquire much more and carry out greater. For that reason, government entities need to ensure an original set up of arranged healthcare to pupils to ensure they are certainly not stored away from university because of health care problems. Re-Analyzing the goal of Government in mastering It can be only by re-dealing with government entitiesAnd#039; s role in supplying primary and secondary education and learning that people can completely set up the skewed the outdoors of learner’s health care and the desire to influence the state to reconsider it. The cause of why the government must pay for the student’s healthcare is that its responsibility is unbalanced. It provides maintained to purchase basic training effectively but has did not shield the health-related requirements of any learner. Aside from, it is suitably interested in increasing the size of young menAnd#039; s and ladiesAnd#039; s chances in obtaining technical and professional education. But it has not searched for has and aims unacceptable method of achieving the medical care requirements of any learner. As a result, education require is not met because its services are skewed. The possible lack of equilibrium in government activities replicates the malfunction to discrete primarily sharply amid the steps right for authorities financing and activities to become implemented. Financing healthcare for students, which is equally essential, is neglected, though Financing education is largely accepted. For that reason, this is a deliberate demand government entities to perform the circle by paying for student' s health care. When there is stability in federal government commitments in education and learning, its requirements will probably be fulfilled. So, the state should pay for pupil' s medical care. If they are healthful, they find out better. In addition to, a large stress will probably be lifted, and will also unquestionably raise enrolment in professional coachingcenters and colleges, along with other studying companies.

Despite the ubiquity of government-organized trans pageants in the Philippines, trans people themselves are not politically recognized. We are culturally visible but legally erased. To this day, trans Filipinas have M gender markers on their documents and cannot change their names in court. We don't have robust antidiscrimination protections. No amount of pageant glory can make up for the fact that our government still doesn't see and treat trans people as full citizens able to participate in society as we truly are. In a country of over 100 million people, only a few dozen certified endocrinologists offer gender-affirming care. Growing up, I relied on other trans people to find hormones, figuring out the right dosages through hearsay, transitioning entirely without proper medical supervision. There was no other choice back then - and for many today, DIY is still the only option. My community is littered with stories of injections gone horribly wrong. Even worse, when someone dies from an overdose or an unsupervised medical treatment, it's shrugged off as a sad fact of life. 'That's what happens,' the emergency techs will say, our lives stripped of value by the very institutions that ought to care for us. I will never forget when one of my Garcia clan sisters succumbed to death from a botched medical procedure, a victim of all the intersecting forces trans Filipinas have to navigate to get treatment.

Cardiologists obviously care about their “scorecard.” However, the easiest way for a surgeon to improve his mortality rate is not by killing fewer people; presumably most doctors are already trying very hard to keep their patients alive. The easiest way for a doctor to improve his mortality rate is by refusing to operate on the sickest patients. According to a survey conducted by the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester, the scorecard, which ostensibly serves patients, can also work to their detriment: 83 percent of the cardiologists surveyed said that, because of the public mortality statistics, some patients who might benefit from angioplasty might not receive the procedure; 79 percent of the doctors said that some of their personal medical decisions had been influenced by the knowledge that mortality data are collected and made public. The sad paradox of this seemingly helpful descriptive statistic is that cardiologists responded rationally by withholding care from the patients who needed it most.

It is a well-known fact, and one that has given much ground for complaint, that after women have lost their genital function their character often undergoes a peculiar alteration, they become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy, that is to say that they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits which they did not possess earlier during their period of womanliness,” Sigmund Freud declared in 1913.8 Well, you can argue that he was a man of his time; the first couple of decades of the twentieth century weren’t exactly known for their respect for women’s finer qualities. But unfortunately, the nonsense didn’t stop there. “The unpalatable truth must be faced that all postmenopausal women are castrates,” pronounced American gynecologist Robert Wilson in a 1963 essay;9 he then elaborated fulsomely on this theme in his 1966 bestseller Feminine Forever.10 This frighteningly influential book, it later emerged, was backed by a pharmaceutical company eager to market hormone replacement therapy. “Once the ovaries stop, the very essence of being a woman stops,” psychiatrist David Reuben wrote in 1969 in another bestseller, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.11 The postmenopausal woman, he added, comes “as close as she can to being a man.” Or rather, “not really a man but no longer a functional woman.” Half a century on, has anything really changed? Sadly, I don’t think so. It might not be acceptable in most circles to write that kind of thing anymore, but menopausal women are too often the butt of men’s jokes for me really to believe that the attitudes themselves have shifted. They’ve just gone a little more underground. So if these are the stories men are telling about us, where are the stories we’re telling about ourselves? Unfortunately, they’re not always very much more helpful. A surprising number of self-help or quasi-medical books by female authors toe the male line, enjoining women to try to stay young and beautiful at all costs, and head off to their doctor to get hormone replacement therapy to hold off the “symptoms” of the dreaded aging “disease” for as long as possible. Their aim, it seems, is above all a suspension of the aging process, an exhortation to live in a state of suspended animation. And although more women are beginning to write about menopause as a natural and profoundly transformational life-passage, in the culture at large it is still primarily viewed as something to be managed, held off, even fought.

Walking alone up and down the tracks late that night, I wondered how long I must prove myself. I wanted to let go and become old, which meant, as my friend Ben said, becoming irrelevant. But that sounded sad. So I decided not to get old until my medical record was thicker than the Denver telephone book.

Soldiers were shot outside a poet’s door and a bomber plane was on its way. So he took his manuscript, folded it, and locked it into a tin chest. There was a place east of town where it could be safely buried and found by another someday. He ran out during battle, was shot multiple times in his legs, slithered his way in a swamp of gushing muscle, and alas, could not make it. So, in desperation, he opened up the holes in his stomach and inserted the tin chest where his poems lie safe and died there. One day, a medic will read about birds that chirped on emerald trees.

In September 1942, a month after Gandhi was jailed, Winston Churchill wrote to the secretary of state for India, Leo Amery: ‘Please let me have a note on Mr.Gandhi’s intrigues with Japan and the documents the Government of India published, or any other they possessed before on this topic.’ Three days later, Amery sent Churchill the note he asked for, which began: ‘The India Office has no evidence to show, or suggest, that Gandhi has intrigued with Japan.’ The ‘only evidence of Japanese contacts [with Gandhi] during the war’, the note continued, ‘relates to the presence in Wardha of two Japanese Buddhist priests who lived for part of 1940 in Gandhi’s Ashram’. Before the Quit India movement had even begun, Churchill had convinced himself that Gandhi was intriguing with the Japanese. In February 1943, when Gandhi went on a fast in jail, Churchill convinced himself that Gandhi was secretly using energy supplements. On 13 February, Churchill wired Linlithgow: ‘I have heard that Gandhi usually has glucose in his water when doing his various fasting antics. Would it be possible to verify this.’ Two days later, the viceroy wired back: ‘This may be the case but those who have been in attendance on him doubt it, and present Surgeon-General Bombay (a European) says that on a previous fast G. was particularly careful to guard against possibility of glucose being used. I am told that his present medical attendants tried to persuade him to take glucose yesterday and again today, and that he refused absolutely.’ On 25 February, as the fast entered its third week, Churchill wired the viceroy: ‘Cannot help feeling very suspicious of bona fides of Gandhi’s fast. We were told fourth day would be the crisis and then well staged climax was set for eleventh day onwards. Now at fifteenth day bulletins look as if he might get through. Would be most valuable [if] fraud could be exposed. Surely with all those Congress Hindu doctors round him it is quite easy to slip glucose or other nourishment into his food.’ By this time, the viceroy was himself increasingly exasperated with Gandhi. But there was no evidence that the fasting man had actually taken any glucose. So, he now replied to Churchill in a manner that stoked both men’s prejudices. ‘I have long known Gandhi as the world’s most successful humbug,’ fumed Linlithgow, ‘and have not the least doubt that his physical condition and the bulletins reporting it from day to day have been deliberately cooked so as to produce the maximum effect on public opinion.’ Then, going against his own previous statement, the viceroy claimed that ‘there would be no difficulty in his entourage administering glucose or any other food without the knowledge of the Government doctors’ (this when the same government doctors had told him exactly the reverse). ‘If I can discover any firm of evidence of fraud I will let you hear,’ said Linlithgow to Churchill, adding, somewhat sadly, ‘but I am not hopeful of this.’ This prompted an equally disappointed reply from Churchill: ‘It now seems certain that the old rascal will emerge all the better from his so-called fast'.

Mostly I’m sad about just plain reading. When I pass a bookshelf, I like to pick out a book from it and thumb through it. When I see a newspaper on the couch, I like to sit down with it. When the mail arrives, I like to rip it open. Reading is one of the main things I do. Reading is everything. Reading makes me feel I’ve accomplished something, learned something, become a better person. Reading makes me smarter. Reading gives me something to talk about later on. Reading is the unbelievably healthy way my attention deficit disorder medicates itself. Reading is escape, and the opposite of escape; it’s a way to make contact with reality after a day of making things up, and it’s a way of making contact with someone else’s imagination after a day that’s all too real. Reading is grist. Reading is bliss. But my ability to pick something up and read it—which has gone unchecked all my life up until now—is now entirely dependent on the whereabouts of my reading glasses.

I am sad to conclude that there is only one solution to our problem,” responded Klein. “For now, until these young people assimilate to the cultural expectations of our Viennese medical community, we must severely curtail their admission to study at the Allgemeine

My dad said some medical stuff like, "We gave him eight hundred milligrams of boppity-boop-boop in the car.

Forcing an entire population to accept an arbitrary and risky medical intervention is the most intrusive and demeaning action ever imposed by the United States Government, and perhaps any government. And it is based upon a lie. The Director of the CDC, Dr. Fauci, and the WHO have all had to reluctantly acknowledge that the vaccines cannot stop transmission. When Israel’s Director of Public Health addressed the FDA Advisory Panel, she left no doubt about the vaccines’ inability to stop transmission of the virus, or stop sickness, or stop death. Describing Israel’s situation as of September 17th, 2021, she said: Sixty percent of the people in severe and critical condition were, um, were immunized, doubly immunized, fully vaccinated. Forty-five percent of the people who died in this fourth wave were doubly vaccinated. Even so, three weeks later, on October 7th—just days before this book went to press—the President of the United States announced that he was ensuring healthcare workers are vaccinated, “because if you seek care at a healthcare facility, you should have the certainty that the people providing that care are protected from COVID and cannot spread it to you.” The President just told Americans that being vaccinated provides “certainty” that vaccinated people are “protected from COVID and cannot pass it to you.” Not one question was posed to the President about this stunning disconnect, about the obvious untruth—and that speech gives us a stark example of what’s going on. A televised image of an unchallenged leader mouthing untrue pronouncements to mislead and control the population—that is the world of George Orwell’s sadly prophetic novel, 1984. It

As we develop our understanding of what mental illness actually is, we must also recognize what it isn't. Sadness and stress and worry are part of the human condition. The medicalization of what should be considered normal and the categorizing of all suffering as a disorder helps no one.

You asked quite readily after it. I know my brother can have that effect on women, and I had hoped you had not fallen prey to it. If so, you will be sadly disappointed. He is not in the market for a wife.” “And I am not in the market for a husband,” I say. “Only a handsome man to spend the night with. Once he recovers, of course. Is he also not in the market for that?” I have no idea where those words come from. And how I manage them without a stammer or a blush. Indeed, they trip jauntily off my tongue, leaving Ben blinking and speechless. “Oh, bother,” I say with a dramatic sigh. “He does not wish that, either? Then I have quite wasted my time. It is so hard to find dashing young highwaymen to rescue. All that time practicing my medical craft. And for what?

While further exploring the first floor of the hospital, the friends discovered a dusty room filled with old photographs and crumbling letters; the room was labeled “Archives”. One picture caught their attention — a group of children in tattered school uniforms, their faces frozen in time. The letters spoke of longing and loneliness, and the pain of separation. “These kids do not look like they were at this school according to their own will. They look very sad, almost disturbed.” Emily said as she looked around, cautious of what may be in the basement of this place. Continuing on the main floor, a second room also had file cabinets in it but had no name on the door. Inside the room was an article from the Mountainside times of a time when the hospital had its own tale of tragedy and despair. During the war, the medical facility had been overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, and the staff struggled to provide adequate care. Rumors circulated of a nurse who, unable to cope with the constant death and suffering, succumbed to madness, killing 3 interns and one patient before being shot. It went on to say that since this incident, patients reported she still wandered the desolate corridors, her soft footsteps and distant sobs haunting those who dared to stay overnight. The war department cited an increase in transfer requests out of the hospital citing the interactions with “the inhabitants” that haunt the place. As the friends explored the hospital's abandoned wards and empty rooms, they could almost feel the weight of the past pressing down on them the whole time. Shadows danced along the peeling wallpaper, and the air was filled with an otherworldly chill and the dampness of a bog. Every creak and groan of the building seemed to whisper the stories of those who had lived and died within its walls. Its decrepit walls and shattered windows bathed in the ghostly light of the full moon.

But my mom came home right then, and when she found out I was inside, she didn’t wait for the firefighters. She ran in and pulled me out. We almost made it to the front door before a beam fell and trapped us again. I don’t remember much of what happened after that. I passed out from too much smoke inhalation. When I woke up, I was outside with the medics. I survived. She didn’t.

Foster children are much more likely than other children with similar problems to be prescribed multiple medications that will have no impact on their symptoms. These medications, particularly the so-called atypical antipsychotics (medications like Risperdal, Abilify, and Seroquel) can shorten life and have severe side effects, like weight gain great enough to increase risk for diabetes. The over prescribing and inappropriate prescribing of such medications to children in foster care has been so dramatic that the Government Accountability Office has issued a special report condemning it. Both the federal government and several states have sued Big Pharma for targeting foster care children, resulting in multi-million-dollar settlements. In the last few years, attention to these issues by legal groups, such as the National Center for Youth Law in Oakland, the press (an excellent example can be seen in the online series from the Mercury News by Karen de Sa), and advocacy groups such as Foster Youth in Action, has increased awareness of this problem. These investigations and advocacy are leading to some positive changes. For example, California passed legislation to monitor prescribing to children in foster care. But sadly, rather than joining in or even leading efforts to improve the quality of care for foster and adopted youth, most medical and psychiatric groups have resisted or even openly opposed these efforts. Change is hard, and it is hardest for those with the most to lose. As Annette Jackson and I wrote in 2014, “the academic or interest group most threatened by the innovations which challenge their existing frame of reference or perspective, will be the most vocal and hostile to the new ideas.

Sadness is only a disease in a society that medicalizes life.

An excessively positive outlook can also complicate dying. Psychologist James Coyne has focused his career on end-of-life attitudes in patients with terminal cancer. He points out that dying in a culture obsessed with positive thinking can have devastating psychological consequences for the person facing death. Dying is difficult. Everyone copes and grieves in different ways. But one thing is for certain: If you think you can will your way out of a terminal illness, you will be faced with profound disappointment. Individuals swept up in the positive-thinking movement may delay meaningful, evidence-based treatment (or neglect it altogether), instead clinging to so-called “manifestation” practices in the hope of curing disease. Unfortunately, this approach will most often lead to tragedy. In perhaps one of the largest investigations on the topic to date, Dr. Coyne found that there is simply no relationship between emotional well-being and mortality in the terminally ill (see James Coyne, Howard Tennen, and Adelita Ranchor, 2010). Not only will positive thinking do nothing to delay the inevitable; it may make what little time is left more difficult. People die in different ways, and quality of life can be heavily affected by external societal pressures. If an individual feels angry or sad but continues to bear the burden of friends’, loved ones’, and even medical professionals’ expectations to “keep a brave face” or “stay positive,” such tension can significantly diminish quality of life in one’s final days. And it’s not just the sick and dying who are negatively impacted by positive-thinking pseudoscience. By its very design, it preys on the weak, the poor, the needy, the down-and-out. Preaching a gospel of abundance through mental power sets society as a whole up for failure. Instead of doing the required work or taking stock of the harsh realities we often face, individuals find themselves hoping, wishing, and praying for that love, money, or fame that will likely never come. This in turn has the potential to set off a feedback loop of despair and failure.

Scientists have a term for when a cancer cell decides to form. It is called expression. When cancer unfolds, scientists often refer to the cancer cell as expressing itself. And so the cells in Dana’s lungs may have done what she herself would not publicly do, for fear of appearing “not strong.” With all she went through, she needed to let her hair down and let out her feelings of loss and rage—openly expressing sadness—discharging her trauma from her system.

While Wollen wasn’t wrong that society expects girls to swallow their sadness, sadness is still tolerated in a woman far more than anger. An angry woman is dangerous, unpredictable, uncontrollable. She must immediately be punished, shamed, or medicated back into complacency. Anger aims outward, disrupting systems and inconveniencing those in power, whereas we tend to turn our sadness inward, on ourselves—not bothering anyone or making a mess.

Both David and Marcus, I came to realize, though they seemed happy enough, and looked forward to being doctors, had a certain sadness, a sense of loss and renunciation, about other interests they had given up.... Both became medical students, in part, to defer their call-up. But with this, I think, they deferred their other aspirations, a deferment that seemed permanent and irreversible by the time they returned to London.

The most effective interventions, Davis found, were those that had some interactive component—role-play, discussion groups, case solving, hands-on training, and the like. Such activities actually did improve both the doctors’ performance and their patients’ outcomes, although the overall improvement was small. By contrast, the least effective activities were “didactic” interventions—that is, those educational activities that essentially consisted of doctors listening to a lecture—which, sadly enough, are by far the most common types of activities in continuing medical education. Davis concluded that this sort of passive listening to lectures had no significant effect at all on either doctors’ performance or on how well their patients fared.

The role of endorphins in human feelings was illustrated by an imaging study of fourteen healthy women volunteers. Their brains were scanned while they were in a neutral emotional state and then again when they were asked to think of an unhappy event in their lives. Ten of them recalled the death of a loved one, three remembered breakups with boyfriends and one focused on a recent argument with a close friend. Using a special tracer chemical, the scan highlighted the activity of opioid receptors in the emotional centres of each participant’s brain. While the women were under the spell of sad memories, these receptors were much less active.6 On the other hand, positive expectations turn on the endorphin system. Scientists have observed, for example, that when people expect relief from pain, the activity of opioid receptors will increase. Even the administration of inert medications—substances that do not have direct physical activity—will light up opioid receptors, leading to decreased pain perception.7 This is the so-called “placebo effect,” which, far from being imaginary, is a genuine physiological event. The medication may be inert, but the brain is soothed by its own painkillers, the endorphins.

Dear Alexis, Last week at our debate, I talked about the essential unfairness that my friend and colleague Levon Helm had to continue to tour at the age of 70 with throat cancer in order to pay his medical bills. On Thursday, Levon died and I am filled with unbelievable sadness. I am sad not just for Levon’s wife and daughter, but sad that you could be so condescending to offer “to make right what the music industry did to the members of The Band.” It wasn’t the music industry that created Levon’s plight; it was people like you celebrating Pirate Bay and Kim Dotcom—bloodsuckers who made millions off the hard work of musicians and filmmakers. You were so proud during the debate to raise your hand as one of those who had downloaded “free music and free movies.” But it’s just your selfish decision that those tunes were free. It wasn’t Levon’s decision. In fact, for many years after The Band stopped recording, Levon made a good living off of the record royalties of The Band’s catalog. But no more. So what is your solution—charity. You want to give every great artist a virtual begging bowl with Kickstarter. But Levon never wanted the charity of the Reddit community or the Kickstarter community. He just wanted to earn an honest living off the great work of a lifetime. You are so clueless as to offer to get The Band back together for a charity concert, unaware that three of the five members are dead. Take your charity and shove it. Just let us get paid for our work and stop deciding that you can unilaterally make it free.

When Oscar announced he was leaving to pursue his medical studies at the University of Vienna, specializing in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery after his Sekham service, I was sad that our triplet relationship was coming to an end. After his departure, Andy consoled and comforted me, guiding me to regain an emotionally stable footing. My Valet loved me unconditionally and had hoped I would follow him to Christchurch, New Zealand when he left to pursue his engineering studies. I did not.

I heard of Bobby first early in the winter, from a Bible-reader at the Medical Mission in the Cowgate, who saw the little dog’s master buried. He sees many strange, sad things in his work, but nothing ever shocked him so as the lonely death of that pious old shepherd in such a picturesque den of vice and misery.” “Ay,

Medical Warning: Talk to your doctor before beginning a John Locke series, as studies have shown them to be habit-forming and highly addictive. Do not read Locke if you suffer from high blood pressure or other heart-related issues, as readers often experience mood swings, increased pulses, elevated heart rates, and have reported unexpected shifts in body position that take them to the edge of their seats. Do not drive or use machinery while reading Locke novels. Locke novels are not for everyone, and may cause serious reactions including insomnia, night terrors, and uncontrollable, maniacal laughter. Tell your doctor right away if you have these, or if you experience unusual changes in your behavior including increased sexual urges, palpitations, or prolonged erections. Common side effects include confusion, hysteria, and trouble swallowing a given premise. Do not drink alcohol while reading Locke novels, though those with a history of drug or alcohol abuse may be more prone to understanding the material. Adverse reactions to Locke novels include nausea and vomiting, loss of appetite, severe itching, rectal bleeding, purple spots under the skin, and Jimmy Legs. In extreme cases, readers have reported laughing so hard they not only shit their pants, but other’s pants, as well. Upon completing a Locke series be prepared to experience symptoms of withdrawal, including fear, anger, extreme sadness, and moderate to severe depression. Ask your doctor today if John Locke novels are right for you!

Our late modern world prides itself on recognising, for the first time in history, the basic equality of all humans, yet it might be poised to create the most unequal of all societies. Throughout history, the upper classes always claimed to be smarter, stronger and generally better than the underclass. They were usually deluding themselves. A baby born to a poor peasant family was likely to be as intelligent as the crown prince. With the help of new medical capabilities, the pretensions of the upper classes might soon become an objective reality. This is not science fiction. Most science-fiction plots describe a world in which Sapiens – identical to us – enjoy superior technology such as light-speed spaceships and laser guns. The ethical and political dilemmas central to these plots are taken from our own world, and they merely recreate our emotional and social tensions against a futuristic backdrop. Yet the real potential of future technologies is to change Homo sapiens itself, including our emotions and desires, and not merely our vehicles and weapons. What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine?

Happiness in a tablet. This is our world. Prozac. Paxil. Xanax. Billions are spent to advertise such drugs. And billions more are spent purchasing them. You don’t even need a specific trauma; just “general depression” or “anxiety,” as if sadness were as treatable as the common cold. I knew depression was real, and in many cases required medical attention. I also knew we overused the word. Much of what we called “depression” was really dissatisfaction, a result of setting a bar impossibly high or expecting treasures that we weren’t willing to work for. I knew people whose unbearable source of misery was their weight, their baldness, their lack of advancement in a workplace, or their inability to find the perfect mate, even if they themselves did not behave like one. To these people, unhappiness was a condition, an intolerable state of affairs. If pills could help, pills were taken. But pills were not going to change the fundamental problem in the construction. Wanting what you can’t have. Looking for self-worth in the mirror. Layering work on top of work and still wondering why you weren’t satisfied—before working some more. I knew. I had done all that. There was a stretch where I could not have worked more hours in the day without eliminating sleep altogether. I piled on accomplishments. I made money. I earned accolades. And the longer I went at it, the emptier I began to feel, like pumping air faster and faster into a torn tire.

my favorite was when the schoolgirl didn’t complete her homework on time!” Owen was saying enthusiastically. “It was a great piece of filmmaking, because the professor had this dungeon...” “Hey, buddy,” Liam said, leaning forward. “Looks like there’s a gas station at that exit up ahead. Didn’t you say you were running low? How about we stop and fill up, and maybe grab a bite to eat?” “But I’m in the middle of my story!” Owen protested. “Don’t you want to hear what happens to the schoolgirl? Helen does! Don’t you, Helen?” “Get. Gas. Now.” My voice has never been more deadly serious. “Sheesh,” Owen says sadly, signaling and pulling over to exit. “Fine, Helen; if you insist. I’m disappointed in you. Liam is a spoilsport, but I would have thought that since you’re a writer, you would appreciate a good story.” “A good story?” I repeat incredulously. “Owen, nothing you’ve said in the past three hours has been anywhere close to a good story. Listening to you is making my ears hurt. I think they’re melting—your words are like acid being poured into my ear canals.” “Hey! That’s not nice,” Owen says in a grumpy tone. It sounds like he might be pouting. “It’s medically impossible to lose your hearing from listening to someone talk about the glorious art of pornography.” I grumble to myself unhappily. “It’s possible if I buy a popsicle at the gas station, eat the popsicle, and then use the popsicle stick to gouge my own ears out so that I can tolerate the rest of this trip!” Sighing, I lean to press my head against the glass of the car window. It is cold, and I use it like an ice pack to soothe my aching ear and temple. I really do feel like if I need to listen to one more ridiculous tale of sexual depravity for no particular reason, I’m going to lose my mind. I really wouldn’t care if they were good stories. “Seriously. I think I’m going deaf. It hurts.” “Well, that’s a bad problem to have when you’re in the car with two eye doctors!” Owen says cheerfully. “Jesus, man,” Liam says to his friend in dismay. “It’s been hours. You need to stop talking.

You say doctors will make the best poets. They will search your emotions by the skin; cutting open to reveal and revel with surgical precison. They will play with heavy drugs and blades-- nothing shall hide beneath the armors of bone and muscle. They know the anatomy of the heart too well. They will find the things you have hidden in your chest. I say doctors will never be poets. They are too mechanical, too fast with their edges and ridges. They cannot see the pain as pain but merely as an anomaly. That sadness is black bile not melancholia. They cannot sing to you but only clammer in medical jargon. Poets will use their imperfect words, and perfect rhymes to find the secrets of your rib cage with ease. They will find every flaw of your broken body and make it the best story you've never heard. Doctors, they will put love to define as a momentary rush of adrenaline, an arrythmia for another human caused due to an imbalance of the heart rhythm. Poets will tell you that love is the first jolt of life for them. They will say love is a state of euphoria that takes those irregular rhythms to perfect symphonies. Doctors say that veins carry blood devout of oxygen. I say that they carry your broken emotions to their feelings factory to mend it within its beautiful catacombs. All those doctors will find and fix you with perfect solutions. And these poets will do their best to be your perfect solution. For Aarshia. I am to be a doctor with a poet's heart.

The sad truth is that most of the advice we are now bombarded with varies from neutral to damaging. In some cases it can be potentially very damaging indeed. Advising people with diabetes to eat a low fat, high carbohydrate diet, for example. As a piece of harmful idiocy, this really could hardly be bettered.

Author’s Note Writing about a suicidal character is one of the most challenging things I’ve ever done, but also one of the most important. Suicide is always tragic, but it has become an epidemic among American active-duty service members and veterans alike. The statistics are staggering and heart-wrenching. In the U.S. Army, which has the highest suicide rate among the branches (48.7 percent of all military suicides in 2012), the suicide rate in 2012 was thirty per hundred thousand, compared with fourteen per hundred thousand among civilians and eighteen per hundred thousand in 2008. In 2012, 841 active-duty service members attempted or committed suicide. Among veterans, as of November 2013, twenty-two committed suicide every day. Every. Day. A frightening 30 percent of veterans say they’ve considered suicide, and 45 percent say they know an Iraq or Afghanistan veteran who has attempted or committed suicide. In a study of veterans, combat-related guilt was the most significant predictor of suicide attempts and of preoccupation with suicide after discharge. Veterans’ suicidal thoughts are also related to feelings that one does not belong with other people or has become a burden. Couple these sad realities with the fact that veterans are less likely to seek care than active-duty military or civilians, and you begin to understand why statistics like these exist. Suicide is a process that begins with ideas and thoughts, followed by planning, and finally followed by a suicidal act. If you or someone you love is experiencing these thoughts, please seek immediate medical help or call the Suicide Prevention Hotline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK). This service works with civilians of all ages, active-duty military, and veterans. I hope Easy’s story raises awareness of the problems these brave men and women—and our country as a whole—face. But awareness is not enough. Therefore, I will be donating all of my proceeds from the first two weeks’ sales of this book (8/19/14 – 9/1/14) to a national non-profit that assists wounded veterans. Because I don’t want anyone else’s Edward “Easy” Cantrell to be one of the twenty-two, either.

I flew back to the States in December of 1992 with conflicting emotions. I was excited to see my family and friends. But I was sad to be away from Steve. Part of the problem was that the process didn’t seem to make any sense. First I had to show up in the States and prove I was actually present, or I would never be allowed to immigrate back to Australia. And, oh yeah, the person to whom I had to prove my presence was not, at the moment, present herself. Checks for processing fees went missing, as did passport photos, certain signed documents. I had to obtain another set of medical exams, blood work, tuberculosis tests, and police record checks--and in response, I got lots of “maybe’s” and “come back tomorrow’s.” It would have been funny, in a surreal sort of way, if I had not been missing Steve so much. This was when we should have still been in our honeymoon days, not torn apart. A month stretched into six weeks. Steve and I tried keeping our love alive through long-distance calls, but I realized that Steve informing me over the phone that “our largest reticulated python died” or “the lace monitors are laying eggs” was no substitute for being with him. It was frustrating. There was no point in sitting still and waiting, so I went back to work with the flagging business. When my visa finally came, it had been nearly two months, and it felt like Christmas morning. That night we had a good-bye party at the restaurant my sister owned, and my whole family came. Some brought homemade cookies, others brought presents, and we had a celebration. Although I knew I would miss everyone, I was ready to go home. Home didn’t mean Oregon to me anymore. It meant, simply, by Steve’s side. When I arrived back at the zoo, we fell in love all over again. Steve and I were inseparable. Our nights were filled with celebrating our reunion. The days were filled with running the zoo together, full speed ahead. Crowds were coming in bigger than ever before. We enjoyed yet another record-breaking day for attendance. Rehab animals poured in too: joey kangaroos, a lizard with two broken legs, an eagle knocked out by poison. My heart was full. It felt good to be back at work. I had missed my animal friends--the kangaroos, cassowaries, and crocodiles.

If you poll people in the church, you will find a spectrum of opinions on psychiatric medication. Some will say it is from the Devil, some will say it is the answer, and some don't care. A more moderate opinion is that, although it is not wrong to take these medications, they are rarely our first line of attack against personal suffering. Instead, we should first consider that God can bless us through our suffering, and we might also weigh the possibility that psychiatric medications could numb us to the refining benefits of suffering. There is a worthwhile point here. Although it may sound strange or evening unloving to those who don't share a biblical position, there can be real benefits from having our faith testing a strengthened through trials. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4) Suffering is not always something that must be escaped. In contrast to the growing American sentiment that we have a right to a pain-free existence, most everyone has personal examples of how suffering and difficulties have been essential to Christian maturity. Conversely, most everyone has witnessed the sad consequences of lives that have been artificially shielded from suffering by overprotective parents or illegal, mind-altering drugs. Given these common observations, suffering is not always the enemy that we think it is, and medication should not be considered the ultimate answer.

If you poll people in the church, you will find a spectrum of opinions on psychiatric medication. Some will say it is from the Devil, some will say it is the answer, and some don't care. A more moderate opinion is that, although it is not wrong to take these medications, they are rarely our first line of attack against personal suffering. Instead, we should first consider that God can bless us through our suffering, and we might also weigh the possibility that psychiatric medications could numb us to the refining benefits of suffering. There is a worthwhile point here. Although it may sound strange or even unloving to those who don't share a biblical position, there can be real benefits from having our faith testing a strengthened through trials. Consider it pure joy, my brothers, whenever you face trials of many kinds, because you know that the testing of your faith develops perseverance. Perseverance must finish its work so that you may be mature and complete, not lacking anything. (James 1:2-4) Suffering is not always something that must be escaped. In contrast to the growing American sentiment that we have a right to a pain-free existence, most everyone has personal examples of how suffering and difficulties have been essential to Christian maturity. Conversely, most everyone has witnessed the sad consequences of lives that have been artificially shielded from suffering by overprotective parents or illegal, mind-altering drugs. Given these common observations, suffering is not always the enemy that we think it is, and medication should not be considered the ultimate answer.

I also like to call this category "hypersuck," because women tend to get "sucked" into believing that our bodies are wild, scary, shameful places that need to be managed by an outside source, medicated, controlled, and sterilized. (We have the media and other social influences to thank for that.) We are rewarded for acting/speaking/looking like young girls versus confident women. We have too few powerful, healthy role models, but plenty of exhausted moms and emaciated models front and center on our cultural stage. We have a hard time appreciating our grown-up female bodies. We're made to feel that feminine intuition is fickle. We suspect that our energy is unstable. We're conditioned to think that our periods are shameful and disgusting. We look for ways to fix what's broken. We discipline the highs and lows of our female essence. We disconnect from our own bodies and, often, our deepest sense of knowing. Ultimately, our mind-body conversation tips the scales in a negative direction, and this too affects hormone balance. And since hypersuck (that old cultural conditioning) tricks us into thinking our bodies are supposed to be acting this way, we allow serious hormonal issues - and all the symptoms that tag along - to linger for years before seeking out any kind of sustainable action to help heal ourselves. Sadly, many women lose faith long before reaching the point of action.

What about Helena? It’s okay, because she’s in the medical profession. They have to do whatever is the best for health. That’s right, the Hippocratic oath. She’ll be sad, but she won’t interfere with us because of the oath. Will you move your things up to my apartment?

Complex PTSD is a result of prolonged or repeated trauma over a period of months or years. Here are some common symptoms of Complex PTSD: reliving trauma through flashbacks and nightmares dizziness or nausea when recalling memories avoiding situations or places that remind you of the trauma or abuser hyperarousal, which means being in a continual state of high alert the belief that the world is a dangerous place, a loss of faith and belief in the goodness of others a loss of trust in yourself or others difficulty sleeping being jumpy—sensitive to stimuli hypervigilance—constantly observing others’ behavior, searching for signs of bad behavior and clues that reveal bad intentions low self-esteem, a lack of self-confidence emotional regulation difficulties—you find yourself being more emotionally triggered than your usual way of being; you may experience intense anger or sadness or have thoughts of suicide preoccupation with an abuser—it is not uncommon to fixate on the abuser, the relationship with the abuser, or getting revenge for the abuse detachment from others—wanting to isolate yourself, withdraw from life challenges in relationships, including difficulty trusting others, possibly seeking out a rescuer, or even getting into another relationship with an abuser because it is familiar disassociation—feeling detached from yourself and your emotions depression—sadness and low energy, a lack of motivation toxic guilt and shame—a feeling that somehow you deserved to be abused, or that your failure to leave earlier is a sign of weakness destructive self-harming behavior—abusing drugs and alcohol is a common result of ongoing trauma; this can also include overeating to soothe and self-medicate. The flip side can be harming yourself through not eating. These behaviors develop during the period of trauma as a way to deal with or forget about the trauma and emotional pain.

To heal in grief is to integrate your grief into your self and to learn to continue your changed life with fullness and meaning. Experiencing a new and changed ’wholeness’ requires that you engage in the work of mourning. Healing doesn’t just happen. And, contrary to what we sometimes believe, time alone does not heal all wounds. Mourning, which requires a time of convalescence…a very slow, gradual return to health after an injury, heals all wounds. Healing is a holistic concept that embraces the physical, cognitive, emotional, social, and spiritual realms. Note that healing is not the same as curing, which is a medical term that means ’remedying’ or ’correcting.’ You cannot remedy your grief, but you can reconcile it. You cannot correct your grief, but you can heal it.

We’ve got a medical model in Western culture that says that death is failure. We’ve got a psychological model that says anything other than a stable baseline of “happy” is an aberration. Illness, sadness, pain, death, grief—they’re all seen as problems in need of solutions. How can you possibly be expected to handle grief with any skill when all of our models show the wrong approach? Grief is not a problem. It doesn’t need solutions.

The word psychiatry derives from Greek roots meaning “soul doctoring”—a noble enterprise. Sadly, psychiatry today has lost touch with its roots. It is now dominated by the biomedical model, which attributes all disturbances of mental and emotional health to imbalances of brain biochemistry, correctable by medication. Big Pharma has taken great advantage of this by marketing an array of drugs to treat depression, anxiety, and major mental illnesses.

It’s been sad to recognize how much fixing has been the backbone of our relationship. Whether it was Steven trying to fix my bulimia or me trying to fix his marijuana addiction or pushing him to find the right cocktail of medication, it’s been the glue of our relationship. Without that aspect of fixing the other, we don’t have much to talk about. Like right now.

Aggressive direct-to-consumer marketing of these drugs certainly accounts for much of their popularity. Big Pharma has convinced many people that ordinary states of sadness represent imbalances in brain chemistry that antidepressant medications can correct. But a growing body of data suggests that for mild to moderate depression, the drugs are no more effective than placebos.

Death. The only thing inevitable in life. People don’t like to talk about death because it makes them sad. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, all the people they love will briefly grieve but continue to breathe. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, Their children will still grow Get married Get old… They don’t want to imagine how life will continue to go on without them, Their material things will be sold Their medical files stamped “closed” Their name becoming a memory to everyone they know. They don’t want to imagine how life will go on without them, so instead of accepting it head on, they avoid the subject altogether, hoping and praying it will somehow… pass them by. Forget about them, moving on to the next one in line. No, they didn’t want to imagine how life would continue to go on… without them. But death didn’t forget. Instead they were met head-on by death, disguised as an 18-wheeler behind a cloud of fog. No. Death didn’t forget about them. If only they had been prepared, accepted the inevitable, laid out their plans, understood that it wasn’t just their lives at hand. I may have legally been considered an adult at the age of nineteen, but I still felt very much all of just nineteen. Unprepared and overwhelmed to suddenly have the entire life of a seven-year-old In my realm. Death. The only thing inevitable in life.

I also received dozens, hundreds, of emails from epidemiologists, medical scientists, doctors, biostatisticians—agreeing with me, sending me their own research, and sadly telling me they personally were afraid to speak out, but that I should keep going, keep citing the facts. I received pleas from parents, from teachers, from school board members begging me not to give up, to stay visible, and keep telling the truth.

What? Why?! After everything you’ve done to be free—” “Because I’m dying, Lito,” she spits at me, “and I’m taking as much from Souji val Akira as I can on my way out.” (...) “That’s treatable, Ofiera! We just need to escape this trap together and find you medical aid.” I’m surprised to find I’m begging. “Or at least send you back to Sorrel before—” I can see from the way she smiles at me sadly that she’s already thought of this. “I’m not able to survive the trip to Sorrel. What do you expect me to do, walk into a hospital? They’ll arrest me, and I know where that road ends.” She shakes her head. “Souji val Akira could fix me, but Sorrel and I made a promise . . . We’d rather die than go back into cryo.” (...) Oh-feaaaaaaaaar-uhhhhh. (...) “There are innocents working at the docks and in the levels below this—” “When will you learn?” she shouts, so loud it echoes through the hold. “This is war, and there are no innocents.” (...) “Did Sorrel ask you to do this?” (...) “What did he tell you to do? You’ve already given everything. Do you need to give this too?” (...) “Don’t do something monstrous because of him, Ofiera. Don’t burn yourself into oblivion because of his blind need.” (...) “Did you think,” Ofiera snarls, “that I am some weak-willed woman to be manipulated by a man?” She shoves the blade deeper, all the way up to the hilt. “Did you think I didn’t choose of my own volition to give everything I have to stop Souji val Akira?” (...) “Everything I did,” she says, “was for me. For what val Akira did to me.” (...) I see nothing but naked fear in her eyes. Her hands on the hilt of the mercurial blade tremble. She’s terrified. We’d rather die than go back into cryo. (...) I press my thumbs against her trachea and go still, a silent offering. I see the moment she realizes what I’m doing. She too softens. Closes her eyes. (...) She does not fight, in the end. She could detonate the explosives, but she doesn’t. She’s so ill. So weak. She wants to die.

Insulin is the primary hormone that tells your body whether to store energy or burn it. When you eat—particularly when you eat the typical high-carb, heavily processed foods that most Americans eat at all hours of the day—your blood glucose levels become elevated to unhealthy ranges. Your body then increases your insulin in an effort to lower those glucose levels. Sadly this results in an enormously foolish medical strategy that many physicians use to treat tens of millions of diabetics—they frequently put type 2 diabetics on insulin in an effort to lower their blood sugar. What they fail to realize is that higher insulin levels, and secondary insulin resistance, are a far more serious issue than elevated glucose. The way to lower insulin and glucose and to treat insulin resistance is to lower your carbohydrate intake and become metabolically flexible, as co-author of The Complete Guide to Fasting and a nephrologist (kidney specialist) in Canada, so eloquently demonstrated in his 2018 case report published in the British Medical Journal. In this report, Dr. Fung was able to use intermittent fasting to reverse insulin resistance and resolve type 2 diabetes for three patients who had their diabetes for 10 to 25 years. All were taking insulin.1 One result of insulin resistance is that you gain weight because higher levels of insulin signal your body to store energy as fat. Another result is that the receptors for insulin in your cells begin to get desensitized, so you need to release more and more insulin in order to move the glucose out of your bloodstream and into your cells. As a result of the insulin resistance, your body is in constant fat-storing mode.

sadly, so many people are setting the bar really low in terms of their personal lives working a job they hate content with struggling settling for relationships that aren’t actual relationships life for so many is not living at all and that’s the problem you get what you allow watching others live life instead of living your best life and they wonder why everyone is self-medicating suppressing their pain pretending to be happy instead of trying to cultivate a lifestyle that brings them peace

In your world, it is as though people too poor to afford food or medical help or firewood in winter do not even exist. You simply close your eyes, and everything is well.” Sadness hung in his eyes, his jaw still tense with anger. “I cannot do that because when I close my eyes, all I see are starving children, their bodies battered and bruised from a life that never treated them well. Not once.

It’s also helpful to get into the granularity of your emotions. Is it just sadness? Or is it actually despair, grief, misery, agony, rejection, insecurity, sorrow, or defeat? Is it just anger? Or is it actually resentment, rage, irritation, jealousy, annoyance, or bitterness? Why should you get more specific? Psychology professor, and author of How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett found that higher emotional granularity was associated with lowered needs for medication, fewer hospitalization days for illnesses, and greater flexibility regulating emotions. Getting into the specifics of what you’re feeling helps you hear the message one part of your mind is trying to deliver to another part. It can guide you to determine the course of action in response to that emotion. It can help you to feel less ruled or controlled by your feelings because you’ll know more specifically what you’re feeling.

Adderall or Ritalin TYPE 3. Impulsive-Compulsive Addicts SYMPTOMS Combination of types 1 and 2 BRAIN FINDINGS/NEURO-TRANSMITTER ISSUE High ACG plus low PFC/low S and DA SUPPLEMENTS 5-HTP plus green tea and rhodiola MEDICATIONS SSRI plus stimulant TYPE 4. Sad or Emotional Addicts SYMPTOMS Sad or depressed mood, winter blues, carbohydrate cravings, loss of

The symptoms of hormonal imbalance are many, and can include depression, anxiety, severe headaches, joint pain—and bone loss. A disruption in the balance of hormones produced by one gland or set of glands can cause other glandular systems to malfunction as well. Hormonal imbalance can be caused by a number of factors, including poor nutrition, stress, aging, blockages in “nerve flow” (i.e., distortions in the “flow” of the activity of the nerves), and even environmental toxins. Sadly, many people with hormone imbalances are put on symptom-focused medications when their symptoms—depression, for example—could be resolved with a treatment that corrects the underlying imbalance, benefitting the body as a whole.

I am here to tell you that it is OK to grieve. It is OK to feel sad that your life may not look the way you thought it would. You can even grieve if you feel grateful and happy with your current life.

Just one example of this is the proliferation of the U.S. Black maternal health crisis. According to the CDC, Black women in the United States are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.21 When Black women are seen as stronger and less worthy than their white counterparts, it is no wonder that this translates into the medical field. As Harris-Perry writes in Sister Citizen, “Therapists are less likely to perceive a black woman as sad; instead they see her as angry or anxious.”22

Depression is a serious but treatable mental health condition affecting thousands of people in Orlando, Florida, from all walks of life. Whether it’s a persistent sense of sadness, loss of interest in things that once brought joy, or difficulty functioning in daily life, depression can make even the simplest tasks feel overwhelming. Fortunately, residents of Orlando have access to a wide range of professional, evidence-based treatment options that offer real hope and healing. From board-certified psychiatrists and licensed therapists to specialized clinics and telehealth services, Orlando’s mental health community is dedicated to supporting individuals struggling with depression through compassionate, personalized care. Treatment begins with a thorough evaluation to understand each person’s unique symptoms, medical history, lifestyle, and emotional challenges. Depression isn’t one-size-fits-all, and neither is the approach to recovery. Providers in Orlando work closely with patients to develop treatment plans that may include therapy, medication, lifestyle adjustments, and ongoing support tailored to their specific needs.

The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we must change our thoughts

Medication, meditation, sleeping pills, trying to spend time doing ‘things that bring me joy’ (which just backfires, because I end up feeling hopeless while I’m doing them).” Every day that the depression goes on, failures to change mood turn into nagging thoughts: “Why can’t I just get over this? “Why am I so weak?” These self-monitoring statements become further fodder for rumination, which becomes further fodder for depression, and we are reminded once again that our powers of language are a decidedly mixed blessing. As you can see, our interpretations of sad mood are powered by a meaning-making machine that is not easy to downshift. This explains why the most useless pieces of well-meaning advice to give someone in midst of a deep depression are “Snap out of it” or “Stop thinking about it.” This advice is nearly impossible to implement; about as futile as asking a burn victim to stop feeling pain.

In reality, colonialism was the spread of Western Christian civilisation, with its commitment to education, health, justice and economic advancement, into areas which were truly ‘darkest Africa’. The people in these areas of sub-Saharan Africa had never seen a white man, had no written language, no medical facilities, and no currency, so barter was their only means of trade… The development and advancement of the people of sub-Saharan Africa has been remarkable, and today they enjoy a standard of living which is much higher than that of a number of other Third World countries; the credit for this is due to colonialism. But it is sad to record that they have been going downhill over the past few decades, since the ending of colonialism. Not only are their economies in tatters, but their people are denied their basic rights: freedom and justice.

aware of how persistently we repeat this belief to ourselves in our daily lives. The belief determines our feelings (sadness, anger, anxiety, etc.), and our feelings in turn influence our behavior (acting out, shutting down, self-medicating to ease the discomfort). To change our behavior, Ellis taught, we must change our feelings, and to change our feelings, we change our thoughts.

Because antidepressants are designed to smooth out the highs and lows of your mood, and if used properly they can stop you feeling so sad, but often they stop you feeling as happy.” She held one hand up, her palm horizontal. “You just end up… on a level. And you would expect that patients who take antidepressants mostly miss the highs, wouldn’t you? But that isn’t actually the case. The majority of people who want to stop medication say they want to be able to cry again. They watch a sad film with someone they love, and they want to be able to… feel the same thing.

Copy This Link : - whitechemist.com