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,…

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…

In the 1970s, a truth was accidentally discovered about depression – one that was quickly swept aside, because its implications were too inconvenient, and too explosive. American psychiatrists had produced a book that would lay out, in detail, all the symptoms of different mental illnesses, so they could be identified and treated in the same way across the United States. It was called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. In the latest edition, they laid out…

Scientists may have caught a glimpse of what sadness looks like in the brain. A study of 21 people found that for most, feeling down was associated with greater communication between brain areas involved in emotion and memory, a team from the University of California, San Francisco reported Thursday in the journal Cell. “There was one network that over and over would tell us whether they were feeling happy or sad,” says Vikaas Sohal, an…

Dear Daughter, You’re sleeping peacefully next to me in your bed right now, snoring quietly. It’s so calm in here, with the fan blowing, the white noise machine whirring, the soft light of your projector shining into the darkness. But inside my mind is like the aftermath of an earthquake. Everything in disarray, jumbled, chaotic. That’s what anxiety feels like. And I want to tell you I’m sorry for letting you witness that earthquake so…