Will Antidepressants for your good Emotions?

Antidepressants are designed to lessen overwhelming sadness and depression but that doesn't mean you should be numb to elation, love, and satisfaction. Here's what to do if your medication is depleting you of all your emotions. If you’re depressed, antidepressants can arrogate you minimize those feelings of sadness and hopelessness but will the drugs also debilitate your ability to feel joy? Emotional blunting an overall unfeeling or numbness is a general complaint of depression patients prescribed to certain antidepressants. This diminished capacity to bear feel-good emotions during positive moments can be a significant side effect for some people engaging selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs.
 And when scrutinize supporting the idea was first discussed at a national conference in 2002, mental health professionals nodded in agreement over the existence of this unwanted side outcome, recalls psychiatrist Heidi Combs, MD, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Washington in Seattle. Putting, emotional blunting is largely based on what doctors hear from their patients, as opposed to results from clinical enquiry. So what can be done about it?
Who Experiences Emotional Blunting?  
 SSRIs are a order of antidepressants that affect the way the brain uses the neurotransmitter serotonin. Their at bottom is intended to relieve the symptoms of depression and they’re often successful in doing so. Unfortunately, explains Dr. Combs, the drugs also act on the prize pathways in the brain the pathways that bring us pleasure. For some people, this means that they suffer emotional blunting, or the sensation that all their emotional responses are dulled. “If something forceful is going on, these patients might not have the full response,” Combs says. Granting there are many case studies, the lack of large clinical studies makes it scabrous to predict which people will experience this side effect and which ones won’t.
Cause of the problem is the very nature of depression. People struggling with depression frequently complain that they have lost some of their ability to moved emotionally to events and people around them. So for a long time, emotional blunting caused by antidepressants was written off a as trait of hard-to-treat depression. However, says Combs, it’s fairly lenient now for physicians to tease apart the symptoms of depression itself and this antidepressant side significance. If the depression symptoms have improved, but emotional blunting persists, it’s likely due to the buy Valium online no prescription. If, on the other dispense, the emotional blunting continues alongside unrelieved sadness, weepiness, and other the dumps symptoms, then it’s more apt to be part of the original disorder, she explains. 


Get Your Glee Back: What to Do About Emotional Blunting
 
To regain your pleasure response, Combs recommends these solutions:

• Switch antidepressants. It may be a good idea to move to another class of antidepressants entirely because someone who responds to one SSRI drug with emotional blunting may respond the same way to another one.
• Add a second medication. If switching to another class of drugs just leaves you with more troublesome symptoms (which can happen if you’re dealing with anxiety), ask your doctor about adding just a small amount of another antidepressant to free the reward pathways.
• Talk it out. If you’re feeling an overall loss of emotional response, working through the problems that are causing stress and depression in the first place (including solving practical problems like those related to housing or income) may help.

If you find that your depression medication is edging out all your emotions, buy diazepam generic valium. This is a real effect, emphasizes Combs, but the good news is that it has real solutions.

Depression Is Significant Cause Of Early Retirement

Men in late middle age with depressive symptoms are more likely to leave the labor force than men without such symptoms are, according to a new study from the University of Pennsylvania.
Retirement-age women, though they have a greater tendency to work part time or transition to part-time status, are more likely to opt out completely if they suffer even mild, or sub-threshold, symptoms of depression.
Almost one in 10 adults in the labor force suffers a bout of major depression in a 12-month period.
“In light of our findings, it is of concern that major depression and depressive symptoms are often unrecognized and under-treated, said lead researcher Jalpa Doshi, Ph.D.
The study will appear in the journal Health Services Research and will be available online in mid-September.
Doshi, a research assistant professor of medicine, and her colleagues looked at data from the Health and Retirement Study, a long-term study covering 48 states. The study followed nearly 3,000 adults between the ages of 53 and 58 every two years between 1994 and 2002 for mental health and labor-force status changes.
The researchers did not examine whether retirement was voluntary or involuntary.
An earlier study of Finnish workers, in a country with a more stable post-retirement safety net system, also showed depression to be a predictor of early retirement. Doshi said it is surprising that this holds true in the United States, where there is increasingly less guarantee of post-retirement income and health care to early retirees. “The burden presented by depression, she said, “may be higher than we thought.
“I believe any infirmity might make you think of retiring, said Eric Kingson, Ph.D., professor of social work and public administration at Syracuse University. The American attitude toward retirement is schizophrenic, Kingson said. “Sometimes, we encourage people to leave work early. To some extent, the pension system does that. When there need to be layoffs, the older people are laid off, but in areas with labor shortages, companies try to retain the workforce.
“Health plans need better mental health options, Kingson said. However, many insurance plans are cutting, not adding, benefits.
“If people retire early as a result of depression, in addition to the financial hardship resulting from loss of income, it potentially may have a far-reaching detrimental effect on the health of older workers unable to obtain health insurance, Doshi said. There could be a downward health trajectory.

MySpace Campaign To Help Teen New Yorkers Cope Depression

Teenage visitors are encouraged to seek help for depression, drugs and dating violence.
The New York Health Department last week announced a new online campaign to engage teenagers grappling with depression, drugs, and violence, and to encourage them to seek help. NYC Teen Mindspace, posted on MySpace, is the agency’s first effort to promote health through Web-based social networking – a medium with great potential because of its popularity with young people. To see the campaign, visit here.
Mental health issues are common among teens. Nearly one-third of New York City high school students say they experience sadness that keeps them from daily activities (30%), and 8% report attempting suicide during the past year. In addition, some 11% say they experienced dating violence during the past year – up from 7% in 1999. About 15% of teens report binge drinking, and 12% say they smoke marijuana. (Both rates have fallen slightly in recent years.)
Though many teens experience mental health issues, they are often reluctant to acknowledge them and seek help. When asked who they are most likely to talk with when they feel sad, more than 20% of teens said they talk to no one, one-third said they would talk to a friend only (31%), and just one-third said they would talk to an adult (32%). The Mindspace page responds to these issues with interactive features that raise awareness and combat stigma by helping teens identify with peers and prompting them to seek help.
* Video blogs for teen characters. Mindspace features fictional, composite personalities, such as “Kyle,” “Nicole,” and “Stephanie,” who chronicle their struggles through video posts. Their stories about using drugs or suffering from depression unfold through updates. Any teen who visits the site can “friend” the characters and follow their stories. Additional characters will be added in coming weeks.
* Opportunities to reach out for help. By sending a confidential message to a mental health counselor from LifeNet, a service offered by the Mental Health Association of New York City, teens can get help and referrals to treatment. Mindspace does not offer live assistance, but it encourages teens who need support to call 800-LifeNet – where counselors are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week – or they can call 911 in an emergency.
* Quizzes, polls, games, and fact sheets. “Have you ever felt the need to harm yourself or others?” Teens can use questions like these to test their knowledge and compare their feelings with those of their peers. Fact sheets, quizzes, and games that focus on stress and abuse offer guidance and perspective – and they can be forwarded to friends.
* Music downloads. A standard piece of any popular page, this feature invites teens to express themselves by playing music to fit their moods.
“Social networking sites present a unique opportunity to help teenagers with mental health problems,” said Dr. David Rosin, Deputy Commissioner for Mental Hygiene. “By reaching out to young people where they socialize, in a style they can relate to, we make it easier for them to talk and seek help.”
Social networking has become a fact of teen life. Research from the Pew Research Center shows that 93% of U.S. teens use the Internet and 85% of them visit social networking sites, with half of them visiting their personal profiles daily to interact with a larger online community. These sites provide an opportunity not only to share information, but to shift social norms. Young people who visit Mindspace will see that the featured characters address their issues by talking to a counselor or calling LifeNet, and some will be inspired to reach out themselves.
“Many teens are reluctant to seek help,” said Dr. Myla Harrison, Assistant Commissioner for Child and Adolescent Services. “Engaging with these characters may help teens express their feelings, connect with others and realize that help is available. They may also realize that they don’t have to take risks and endanger themselves. Instead, they will see the characters think about how to direct their own lives in a safer, healthier way.”
The Health Department drew on data from the city’s biannual survey of public high school students in developing the focus areas for the campaign. The Department convened a teen advisory panel to guide the look and feel of the page and shape the profiles and experiences of the teen characters.

Biochemical link found between adversity, depression, and death

Researchers have used a unique way to determine a link between adverse life events that trigger stress and depression and lead to disease and increased risk of death. Interactions that occur between genes and the environment, in response to stress vary among individuals.
People with a rare form of the gene IL6 seem to be immune to dying from adverse life events and depression that can lead to poor health.
Steven Cole, a member of the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and an associate professor of medicine in the division of hematology-oncology, and his colleagues used a computational model to discover that IL6, a gene that promotes inflammation, differs among individuals and changes the way adverse life events that trigger depression and misery affects individual health.
People who experience depression from adverse life events, whose IL6 gene activation pathway is blocked, seem to be immune from cardiovascular disease, neurodegeneration and some types of cancer that in other individuals produces depression that leads to disease and increased chances of death.
"The IL6 gene controls immune responses but can also serve as 'fertilizer' for cardiovascular disease and certain kinds of cancer," said Cole, who is also a member of UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center and UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "Our studies were able to trace a biochemical pathway through which adverse life circumstances — fight-or-flight stress responses — can activate the IL6 gene.
We also identified the specific genetic sequence in this gene that serves as a target of that signaling pathway, and we discovered that a well-known variation in that sequence can block that path and disconnect IL6 responses from the effects of stress."
The scientists found that individuals who possess the most common IL6 gene were at higher risk of death for approximately eleven years from depression brought about by adverse life events.
The authors write, “This opens a new era in which we can begin to understand the influence of adversity on physical health by modeling the basic biology that allows the world outside us to influence the molecular processes going on inside our cells." Stress that lead to misery is now found to be linked to death from inflammation that promotes heart disease, some types of cancer, and neurodegenerative disease.
The IL6 gene varies among individuals. The researchers discovered through epidemiological studies and by using a computer model, that people with the rarer variant of the IL6 gene, were immune from the ill effects of adverse life events that leads to depression, misery and death.