depression

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I had a really depressed patient.  She had just had one leg amputated below the knee because of advanced diabetes. Of course, I prescribed some antidepressants, and made sure the medical stuff (medical causes of diabetes) had been eliminated. I asked her why she couldn’t dance. “I can’t walk and you want me to dance?”  she asked, as if holding back tears.

Read more on Never say “Never” — Especially to dancing!…

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I think I was in my teens when I heard the playwright Edward Albee interviewed.  It was one of those interviews that sears your soul and that you remember over 40 years later. He said something about people who get older, like when their children who are adults and start having families of their own.  They all ask themselves the same question, which is “Did I do it right?” — meaning “Life” definitely with a capital “L.”

Read more on Don’t Live A Life Of Regrets…

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Natural treatment of obsessionality. “Estelle, you’re such a little worrier.  Yes you are.” When I was little, I never understood why my Auntie Charlotte always addressed me this way.  I did know that my family had “adopted” her which seemed to give her the right to “adopt” me.  Her orthodox Jewish family had rejected her because she wanted to marry a guy who had been married before, even though he was very Jewish. I was not supposed to know or care about such things.  But I did know she was the first person in my life to tell me I worried too much about things that didn’t need worrying about.

Read more on Obsessions…

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No, I haven’t downloaded it to my android.
My professional life and my thoughts and writing are still too mired in direct human-to-human interaction.  I will admit to feeling a kinship, with some minimal sense of attraction, to “cute” characters, mostly because that seems to be my husband’s favorite adjective for me.

I suppose I should give a very official link to download it; it’s free, although it did allegedly make the developers 1.6 million dollars in the first day when they released it. Read more on Waiting For Love Or Death With Pokemon Go…

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He was just 18. He had been followed by child psychiatry with a diagnosis of depression. He had long refused to take any pills.  As far as this poor, agricultural county was concerned, I was just seeing him so I could bill MediCal and fatten up the county coffers. The previous psychiatrists had simply noted he was depressed, was not suicidal, and refused any participation in his own treatment.

He was a young man of few words, with a common Hispanic name.  He sat there and twirled one of his lush curls. It became pretty obvious he wasn’t going to give me a complete history.  He said he would never take pills, not ever. To his credit, he did say I could talk to his mother, if I wanted to, but he had to be in the room and hear what she said. Someone brought her to me, from the waiting room.  She spoke only Spanish; fine with me. I learned my Spanish mostly from my patients, who in that time and place could rarely communicate well in either Spanish or English. His mother was charming, really grateful that I wanted to talk to her. She kept complimenting my clothes and elegance. I told her it was all thrift shop.  I doubt she believed me. Read more on Diagnosis From The Guts…

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Maybe if it’s “all in your head,” it’s in your brain chemistry

We women have spent so long and worked so hard for equality in rights, in education, and at work, that it may actually be hard to talk about how we are different.

The World Health Organization has been working on this, and knows a lot about what is going on.  Illnesses of the mind, problems with thinking and feeling and living, are only identified by doctors less than half the time. Three out of five people who have this kind of problem wait less than a year before seeing a doctor. This is true of both sexes. Read more on Mental Health In Women…

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Only 16% of all murder victims are members of the defendant’s family?

That’s according to the PDF file that pops open (or opens in your browser) when you click this link – and you must have the free Adobe Acrobat reader to see it. (Fortunately, it is included with most computers nowadays).

Actually, I am surprised to see the number is so small.

I am a little bit heartened to learn that only 20% are strangers.

This leaves 64 % that are friends and acquaintances. Read more on Your Family Really Can Kill You…

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This story found me in the headlines: Colts’ Jim Irsay discusses addiction.” I had never heard of and would not have been able to cite the name of the owner of the Baltimore Colts. I certainly am no fan of professional football.  I have reviewed recent problems in other posts. It seems to me that football — seemingly more than other sports — breaks brains, heads, bones and lives and may foster drug addiction to boot. Read more on Baltimore Colts Owner Jim Irsay – Too Rich To Need Help?…

Filed under Diagnosis, Sports, Substance Abuse by on . Comment#

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It gets pretty evident pretty fast, to any psychiatrist who deals with the general public, that depression is daily bread.  I mean, with current estimates at 19 million patients per year coming down with a depression — even with less than one half of them seeking treatment — it is a pretty sure bet that depressed people are common.

This in no way diminishes the anguish I have seen in patients having that disease. The anguish is real and dramatic.

I remember one of my earlier newspaper columns written for the Wichita Eagle-Beacon — the largest daily newspaper in Kansas — asking this simple question:

Why — when someone broke their leg — a salt-of-the-earth next-door neighbor would never fail to bake a pie.  But when someone had a depression, nobody would bake anything.

The depressed person was basically treated like someone with a contagious disease. Read more on Why Some Get Depressed And Some Do Not…

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I have heard just a little too much about suicide among the religious — from patients, from others, now this; to the son of a published pastor who gave an invocation for the Obama folks.

I really do feel for the family, for death of the younger generation before the older one by any means including suicide by his own hand, is a horrible thing that is anti-nature and has a profound wrongness, a too-deep effect on all involved.

I was way back in residency when I attempted to gather some statistics on the association between religion and psychiatry in Kansas, sending a basic questionnaire on feelings about mental illness (and referral patterns to mental health professionals) to a big list of Wichita area “religious professionals.”
First, I had already made the assumption from the French part of my education that not too many people actually went to church, but none of them seemed to much care about mental health professionals.

In Kansas, with the world’s worst statistics (no major support on this from my

Read more on Religion — And Suicide…

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