Depression

From Business Insider: Depression may be an adaptation that serves a valuable purpose, not a disease or disorder. "The basic concept is that what we think...

Eighteen years ago, in the fall of 1996, I plunged into a major depression that almost killed me. Over the next eighteen years I took what I had learned in my healing and put together a mental health recovery program which I taught through my books, support groups and long distance telephone coaching. In the process, I counseled many people who were in the same desperate straights that I had been in. I shared with them what I had learned through my ordeal---that if you set the intention to heal, reach out for support, and use a combination of mutually supportive therapies to treat your symptoms, you will make it through this. And in the cases where people used these strategies and hung there, they eventually were able, like myself, to emerge from the hell of depression.

Study finds that traditional healers in South Africa, whose services are widely used by the country’s population, perform important suicide prevention work.

A new study has found that antidepressants are ineffective for reducing suicide attempts. Researchers report that the risk of suicide is particularly high in the first month after starting an antidepressant.

The APA DSM-5 Development website announced today that "Psychosis Risk" and "Mixed Anxiety Depression" will not be included in the DSM-5 (apart from recommendations...

With the increasing medicalization of depression, and as more and more physicians see the treatment of depression as falling under their purview, it is imperative to distinguish between actual clinical depression and "healthy depression" — the adaptive and expectable responses to distressing life events that signal a need for rethinking one's life and recalibrating one's self-perceptions and emotions.

Higher levels of physical activity serve as a protective factor for the future development of depression.

A new study suggests that most people diagnosed with depressive, anxiety, and substance abuse disorders recover without treatment within a year of diagnosis. “This...

How people are treated after being hospitalized can either help them to overcome the traumatic effects of coercion or make them worse.

Researchers from China and the Harvard Medical School studied the effects of anxious and avoidant attachment on the development of depression and anxiety in...

New study finds that smartphone use may precede experiences of loneliness and depressive symptoms among older teens according to longitudinal analysis.

Researchers, publishing in Toxicology Research, review the evidence that antidepressant exposure in the womb is linked to autism spectrum disorders (ASD) in humans.

A Nigerian study finds that more than three-quarters of patients improved, even when only 13% were prescribed medication.

From Thoughtful Living: The biomedical model of psychiatry, along with the DSM, is deeply flawed and can often be misleading. To improve, mental health services...

Researchers in Spain followed 8.964 subjects who had never been diagnosed with depression followed for over six years, finding that consumers of fast food...

Depressed elderly people are more likely to suffer heart disease not because of their depression, but apparently due to antidepressant drugs.

Audit of ECT usage, demographics, and adherence to guidelines and legislation raises concern over its continued use.

Mothers’ loss of group membership impacts their social identity and linked to postpartum depression.

“The Food and Drug Administration’s approval of pharmaceutical treatment for low sexual desire in women has launched a heated debate over the dangers and benefits of medicalizing sex,” Maya Dusenbery writes in the Pacific Standard. Is “female Viagra” a feminist victory or a product of clever faux-feminist marketing by Big Pharma?

The largest ever study of the thoughts and reactions of antidepressant users reveals that many people have vastly different understandings and experiences of the...

We are wired for community. If we disconnect, our bodies will call us back to the sense of human connection that we are wired for, using the unexpected language of inflammation.

Tanya Luhrmann writes in the NY Times that, although diagnosis and pathologization of human experience has increased, "there is reason to believe that mental...

The first time I tried to kill myself, I was 14. I won’t go into the indignity of being involuntarily locked up, time after time, until I satisfactorily convinced the staff that I wouldn’t harm myself or attempt suicide again. (I was lying.) The system taught me to lie, to hide my suicidal feelings in order to escape yet another round of dehumanizing lock-ups and “treatments.”

The researchers found that while antipsychotic drugs may be slightly more effective than alternative antidepressants, they come with a much higher side effect burden.

Reuters reports that a new drug for major depression failed to improve symptoms in two late-stage clinical trials sending the manufacture’s stock into a...