Depression/Anxiety

He takes the drug Klonopin for his condition. “He was on medication for his anxiety but was off his meds for two days because he couldn’t get to the pharmacy before it closed,” his father, Donald Bardwell, told The Mercury News. His condition got so bad that he collapsed during a basketball practice on his first day of summer basketball class after suffering a panic attack. So, was rushed to El Maino Hospital in Los Gatos,…

I often wish I could be a “normal” wife. I wish I could keep a clean house, cook dinners, bake, and have people over. I wish I could keep up on laundry and be organized. But no, the house is always a mess, I hardly ever cook, I rarely bake, and I’m always behind on laundry. Organization? I spend 20 minutes trying to find my textbook for school and several more trying to find a…

After years of debate, researchers finally determined that persistent depression causes brain damage, and not the other way around. Neurologists previously had hypothesized that brain damage was a predisposing factor for chronic depression, but a new study published in Molecular Psychiatry sheds a different light. The study, which consisted of 9,000 individual samples, collected from the ENIGMA group, succeeded in definitively proving a causal relationship between persistent depression and brain damage. Magentic resonance images (MRIs)…

She’s been battling her anxiety for quite some time and she continues to do so with bravery. She’s not a victim of her mental struggle, because she knows in her heart that she’s so much more than the demons that live in her mind. She’s learned to hold her head up high when the chaos in her mind consumes her, so the word weakness is practically not in her vocabulary. She’s a strong girl because…

“Mom, my stomach hurts.” My daughter tells me this almost every night at the same time. She feels fine all day but when it’s bedtime and I’m turning down the lights, her stomach hurts. Nighttime is when many kids anxiety intensifies. It’s dark, they’re alone, there are no distractions… We have worked together to conquer her anxiety and she knows I will remind her that her stomach is actually just fine and it’s just her…

Stay at home mom (SAHM) depression …the elephant in the room nobody talks about. I mean, how dare you complain after being gifted this opportunity to stay at home and raise your own kids? But it’s not that simple: of course we SAHM’s are grateful to stay home and raise our young but that it’s literally all we become. No one talks about the isolation. No one talks about the loss of identity. No one…

A new meta-analysis of 17 academic papers finds evidence that having a pet benefits people with mental health problems. The research also reviews the pet owners’ testimonials, laying out the various ways that pets offer them much-needed solace. Pets provide invaluable support for people with mental health problems. An increasing amount of research is pointing to the benefits of pets for people with mental health issues. For instance, a large study interviewed people living with…

New research uses over half a million Facebook status updates to predict depression diagnoses in people at risk. Depression is one of the most widespread mental health problems in the United States, with over 16 million adults having experienced at least one major depressive episode in their lifetimes. Worldwide, the World Health Organization (WHO) estimate that unipolar depressive disorders will be “the leading cause of the global burden of disease” by 2030. Currently, however, the…