Depression

The question this study asked was: In adults with depression who eat a poor diet, does teaching them about nutrition have an impact on their mental health? At the end of the 12-week intervention, the answer was: Yes.

In 1959, my mother suffered what people referred to as a nervous breakdown after my sister’s birth. I puzzled over why Mom never recovered, until I found Dad’s collection of medical records in my sister’s attic. How could anyone give a nursing mother with three small children so many drugs in such a short period of time?

A fist of its kind neuroscience study, published this month in Cerebral Cortex, found changes in the brain electrical activity of infants exposed to SSRI antidepressants during pregnancy.

Does maternal SSRI exposure increase the chances that a child will develop characteristics associated with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD)?

A new study investigated whether participants guessing if they have an antidepressant or placebo affects response rates.

A new meta-analysis finds that the large antidepressant effects of exercise may have been underestimated in previous reviews. This latest report, published this month...

Researchers interviewed people who were given medical advice to discontinue antidepressants.

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.

A new study suggests that smoking cessation is related to depressive symptom improvement, but that depression may also make it harder to quit.

The first ever population-level study of the brain-gut connection in humans finds evidence for a link between gut bacteria and mental health.

When women receive less pay than men for the same work, they were about two and a half times more likely to "have major depressive disorder," and about four times more likely to "have generalized anxiety disorder" than their male counterparts.  But when women were earning more than men, the odds were 1.2 and 1.5 respectively. The use of psychiatric terminology ("major depressive disorder" and "generalized anxiety disorder") constitutes something of a barrier to communication here, but the general message is clear: people (in this case women) who are routinely treated unfairly and discriminately are more likely to be depressed and anxious, than those not so treated.

  A. The Natural Course of Depression Prior to the widespread use of antidepressants, the National Institute of Mental Health told the public that people regularly...

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.”

A new study finds that more than a third of Americans are taking prescription drugs that can cause depressive symptoms as a side-effect.

Ultimately, the FDA Advisory Committee recommended approval of brexanolone by a 17-1 member vote. I was the only NO vote. I voted NO because as the sole Consumer Representative on the committee I didn’t believe the company had demonstrated that the potential benefits outweighed the potential for harm.

In-depth interviews find that those who screened positive for depression did not explain their experience in terms of diagnostic symptoms.

On Wednesday, JAMA Psychiatry released a meta-analysis comparing the results of cognitive-behavioral therapy and antidepressant medication in severely depressed populations. Currently, many practice guidelines suggest that antidepressants be used over psychotherapy for major depressive disorder. The analysis, however, found that “patients with more severe depression were no more likely to require medications to improve than patients with less severe depression.”

Meta-analysis of antidepressant tapering finds CBT and MBCT can aid in tapering, but limited studies met inclusion criteria.

A new study finds that elderly individuals using antidepressants are at significantly higher risk for dementia compared to depressed individuals who did not take the drugs.

The authors of a paper that endorses a computerized test for depression have acknowledged failure to disclose joint ownership of a company formed to bring the test to...

Researchers compared the efficacy of antidepressants using different rating scales and found them to be no different—just slightly better than placebo, and not meeting the criteria for clinical significance.

New study finds that antidepressants may negatively impact recovery after psychiatric hospitalization.

Despite concerns about the risk to benefit ratio, the FDA approved flibanserin (Addyi) to treat low female sexual desire in August. In a new...

A study demonstrates a 7% reduction in suicide attempts for teens in states that had legalized same-sex marriage.

The researchers found that, of those who were initially prescribed both antidepressants and benzodiazepines, approximately 12% went on to engage in long-term benzodiazepine use.