Category Archives: Depression

Mummy’s boys versus macho boys and mental health

August 31, 2010

According to research carried out by Carols Santos, a professor at Arizona State University’s School of Social and Family Dynamics and recently presented at the annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, boys who are close to their mothers have better mental health.

The study followed 426 boys at middle school and assessed how much they embraced so called masculine stereotypical qualities such as being tough, autonomous and emotionally stoic and whether this had an effect on their mental health.

Santos measured the mental health of the boys using the Children’s Depression Inventory.

What the research revealed was that adolescent boys tended to favour hyper-masculine stereotypes the further they advanced into adolescence.

However, they were less emotionally stable than those who were close to their mothers and did not show the same traits such as acting tough and keeping their emotions in check. Interestingly, the level of closeness to the father didn’t have the same effect.

“If you look at the effect size of my findings, mother support and closeness was the most predictive of boys’ ability to resist [hypermasculine] stereotypes and therefore predictive of better mental health” Santos is reported as saying in Time.com.

The research didn’t reveal why boys who were closer to their mothers had better mental health. “It could be, men see close relationships with their sons as an opportunity to reinforce traditional gender roles” said Santos.

The BBC quoted Santos as saying “Helping boys resist these behaviours early on seems to be a critical step toward improving their health and the quality of their social relationships.”

The BBC recently reported on a different study, this time by Professor Sharon Lamb from the University of Massachusetts which says that today’s superhero is not a good role model for young boys.

The study was also presented at the American Psychological Association meeting and involved surveying 674 boys aged between 4 and 18 to ascertain what they watched on TV and what they read.

“Today’s superhero is too much like an action hero who participates in non-stop violence; he’s aggressive, sarcastic and rarely speaks to the virtue of doing good for humanity” said Professor Lamb.

Perhaps it’s best summed up by Niobe Way, a professor of psychology at New York University. Time.com quotes Way as saying:

“We have come to view fundamentally human attributes such as empathy, emotional skills and the desire for intimate relationships as being girlish or gay. They are not girlish or gay skills — they are human skills, or at least they should be.”

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Anxiety – depression linked to increased brain activity in childhood

August 31, 2010

A new study from the US has pinpointed areas of the brain that could possibly predict whether or not a child is likely to develop anxiety and depression during adolescence.

“Children with anxious temperaments suffer from extreme shyness, persistent worry and increased bodily responses to stress” says Ned H. Kalin, chair of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, who led the research.

“It has long been known that these children are at increased risk of developing anxiety, depression, and associated substance abuse disorders.”

The researchers looked at the brains of 238 young rhesus monkeys using Positron emission tomography (PET) scans and found that increased activity in the Amygdala part of the brain and in the hippocampus could predict anxiety later on.

It has already been found in previous research that young monkeys behave very similar to young children when they are anxious.

“We believe that young children who have higher activity in these brain regions are more likely to develop anxiety and depression as adolescents and adults and are also more likely to develop drug and alcohol problems in an attempt to treat their distress” says Kalin.

The researchers also looked at the genetic profiles of the monkeys and found that increased activity in the hippocampus area was inherited whereas increased activity in the Amygdala was not.

“We expected that all of the brain regions involved in anxious temperament would be similarly affected by genes and environment, but found that activity in the anterior hippocampus was more heritable than in the amygdala,” said the researchers.

“Even though these structures are closely linked, the results suggest differential influences of genes and environment on how these brain regions mediate AT and the ongoing risk of developing anxiety and depression.”

The findings, which have been published in the Aug. 12 edition of the journal Nature, could lead to new ways of identifying and treating children who are at risk.

“My feeling is that the earlier we intervene with children, the more likely they will be able to lead a happy life in which they aren’t as controlled by anxiety and depression. We think we can train vulnerable kids to settle their brains down,” Kalin said.

The researchers are now measuring brain activity in young children who are already showing signs of anxiety and depression to confirm their findings.

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Teens smoke to relieve stress report more signs of depression

August 31, 2010

Teenagers who are lighting up a cigarette in order to feel better are not only risking their physical health but are harming their mental health too. Canadian researchers are claiming that many teenagers who smoke in order to “self medicate” have elevated symptoms of depression.

The research, which is part of a long term study into nicotine dependence in teens (NDIT), was led by Michael Chaiton from the Ontario Tobacco Research Unit of the University of Toronto along with his co-author Jennifer O’Loughlin of the University of Montreal Hospital Research Centre.

“This observational study is one of the few to examine the perceived emotional benefits of smoking among adolescents. Although cigarettes may appear to have self-medicating effects or to improve mood, in the long term we found teens who started to smoke reported higher depressive symptoms” said lead author Chaiton.
The study involved 662 teenagers from grades 7 to 11 who came from a mixture of French and English, rural and urban secondary schools and from different socio-economic backgrounds.

The teens completed up to 20 questionnaires which asked questions relating to their energy levels, sleeping patterns and emotional states.

The youngsters were divided into three separate groups which consisted of those who had never smoked, those who did not use smoking to self medicate or improve mood, and those who did use smoking to self medicate.
The research revealed that the majority of youngsters smoke to relieve stress and loneliness, however, at the same time they often felt too tired to carry out tasks, had sleeping problems, and felt sad and depressed. Some also felt nervous and tense.

The researchers noted that those who self medicated using cigarettes are likely to have higher depression symptoms in the long term than those who had never smoked. They also found that those who claimed to get an emotional benefit out of smoking reported more signs of depression.

“Although cigarettes may appear to have self-medicating effects or to improve mood, in the long term we found teens who started to smoke reported higher depressive symptoms” said Chaiton.

“Smokers who used cigarettes as mood enhancers had higher risks of elevated depressive symptoms than teens who had never smoked,” says O’Loughlin, Chaiton’s co-author.

Dr. Chaiton said “It’s important to emphasize that depressive symptom scores were higher among teenagers who reported emotional benefits from smoking after they began to smoke”.

These finding have been published in the journal Addictive Behaviours.

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Doctors are less likely to seek help for depression and anxiety

August 31, 2010

Now you’d think that doctors would be the first to recognise the signs that they themselves are suffering from depression and anxiety and seek help but the truth is they’re not.

Even though doctors may know they have symptoms of depression a new review by mental health group “Beyond Blue” in Australia, says they don’t seek help and that’s despite being aware of the possible consequences of untreated mental illness.

The review involved analysing 68 studies from around the world. Apparently mental health problems are common in the medical profession. There is also a higher rate of suicide amongst doctors when compared with the general population and female doctors are particularly at risk.

“What’s also of great concern is that doctors in Australia have a higher suicide rate compared with the general population, and this is particularly true of female doctors in whom the rate is more than twice as high as females in the general population” says Professor David Clarke, a Beyond Blue research adviser.

The review also revealed that although alcohol use was lower amongst doctors than the rest of the population, self prescribing and use of prescription drugs like sedatives and benzodiazepines was common.

So why won’t they seek help?

The main barriers to doctors seeking help include the stigma surrounding mental health, career progress, the impact it would have on their colleagues and patients, confidentiality, and even embarrassment.

“International research indicates medical students and doctors are less likely to seek help for depression from colleagues and health services because they fear it will stifle their careers and that colleagues will question their professional integrity,” says Prof Clarke.

“They are also less likely than the general community to seek help from family members and friends, or they won’t seek help at all because they are embarrassed or worried about stigma in the profession.”

In order to address this problem Beyond Blue in consultation with other professionals including medical schools and colleges and doctor’s health advisory services amongst others, developed the Doctor’s Mental Health Program.

Chairman of the Advisory Committee for the program, Dr Mukesh Haikerwal, says the program will help increase awareness and intervention programs for doctors in Australia.

“It’s important that doctors are on the lookout for depression in the people they treat and that they realise they are at risk too – they can’t look after other people if they don’t look after themselves first” said Dr Haikerwal.

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Therapy no longer stigmatised and considered acceptable for mental health problems

August 3, 2010

A recent survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) has found that the stigma that was once attached to psychotherapy is almost gone and that attitudes are now significantly different towards mental health problems than what they were six years ago.

The results showed that 94 percent of the 1,400 adults surveyed, consider it acceptable to have some form of psychotherapy for mental health problems like anxiety and depression and that it is now more acceptable to talk about emotional problems than it was in the past. Back in a similar survey in 2004, the figure was just 67 percent.

The survey also found that almost 90 percent of those taking part in the survey believed that counselling and psychotherapy should be made available to everyone on the NHS.

“This survey represents a significant shift in people’s attitudes towards therapy – practically a revolution – at a time when mental health conditions such as anxiety and depression are far more common than was realised” said the association’s president, Cary Cooper, professor of organisational psychology and health at Lancaster University.

“Mental health conditions currently affect one in six of the population at an annual cost to England alone of pounds 77bn. It’s no accident that the growth of the problem has encouraged mass support for more effective treatments” said Cooper.

According to National Statistics, 1.3 million people a year receive some form of treatment for mental health problems so the chances are you will be affected yourself at some point or will at least know someone close to you who is.

At the moment the most common treatment for depression is some form of anti-depressant drug. Currently, around 40 million antidepressant prescriptions are issued each year in the UK alone. However, drugs won’t treat the cause of the depression, only the symptoms. Counselling and therapy on the other hand can change the way we perceive ourselves and the world around us.

The BACP survey revealed that a whopping 83 percent believe that it’s better to have therapy and talk about your problems than to rely on medication.

Another change identified by the survey was that people are starting to seek help for mental health problems earlier than they used to and 95 percent recognise that getting help will help prevent their symptoms from getting worse.

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Teenagers who spend a lot of time online, more likely to develop depression

August 3, 2010

A recent study carried out by researchers in Australia and China has found that teenagers who spend several hours a day on the internet are more likely to develop depression than other teenagers who use their leisure time for other pursuits.

The study involved over 1,040 teenagers aged between 13 and 18, the average age of which was 15 years old. All the teenagers came from the Southern Guangzhou City in China and none of them had depression at the start of the study. However, just over 6 percent were identified as using the internet excessively.

Just nine months later 84 of the teenagers were identified as suffering from depression and the data showed that those who used the internet “excessively” were one and a half times more likely to have depression than those who didn’t.

Of course you may say that teenagers are at a difficult time of life and some may become depressed anyway, but in this case, the data was obtained after other factors that could contribute to depression had been ruled out.

The study was authored by Dr Lawrence Lam, a psychologist at Sydney’s University of Notre Dame’s School of Medicine and Zi-Wen Peng of the Ministry of Education and SunYat-Sen University in Guangzhou.

Warning signs that your teen is using the internet excessively is when they become anxious and agitated when not sat in front of their computer screens and who show little or no interest in socializing with their peers.

“They can’t get their minds off the Internet; they feel agitated if they don’t get back on after a short period of being away” the telegraph reports Dr Lam as saying in a telephone interview.

“They don’t want to see friends, don’t want to join family gatherings, don’t want to spend time with parents or siblings”.

The research has been published in the Archives of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and the authors wrote:

“This result suggests that young people who are initially free of mental health problems but use the internet pathologically could develop depression as a consequence”.

The researchers are therefore calling for screening of at risk individuals in schools as a way of identifying those who are at risk in order to enable early counselling and treatment.

What isn’t clear by the study is whether teenagers who are prone to depression use the internet more frequently or if excessive internet use triggers the depression.

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Having a sister helps protect against teenage depression

August 3, 2010

An interesting study from Brigham Young University led by professor Laura Padilla-Walker, has found that having a sister helped to protect a teenage sibling from developing depression and intriguingly, it didn’t matter what the age difference was, nor did it matter if she was younger or older.

The study involved gathering detailed information on almost 400 families from Seattle who had at least one teenager between the ages of 10 and 14 and who had more than one child in the family, then one year later the researchers followed up on those families.

The researchers noted that having a sister could prevent teenagers from “feeling lonely, unloved, guilty, self-conscious and fearful”.

“For parents of younger kids, the message is to encourage sibling affection,” said Padilla-Walker” because “Once they get to adolescence, it’s going to be a big protective factor.”

However, brothers weren’t completely left out of the picture. The researchers also said that affectionate siblings of any gender or age had a positive influence on the emotional wellbeing of each other.

However, the results of the follow up showed that having a sister appeared to be more influential than having a brother, perhaps because girls in general are more likely to talk about their problems and adopt a caring role said Dr Padilla Walker.

Another interesting finding was that siblings mattered more than parents as far as promoting kindness and generosity was concerned.

Ok so what happens if the siblings don’t get on very well?

It’s normal for children to squabble but apparently those who fight and are often openly hostile to each other are more likely to display this type of behaviour in other relationships. This behaviour was associated with a higher level of delinquency.

However, it’s not the fighting that seems to be the problem; it’s when it’s combined with lack of affection for each other that the damage is done.

“An absence of affection seems to be a bigger problem than high levels of conflict,” said Padilla-Walker.

Sibling influence was even more pronounced in families with two parents as opposed to single parent families and this may be because in single parent families one of the siblings could possibly become a “parent figure” to a younger child and this would change the family dynamics.

The study is to be published in the August edition of the Journal of Family Psychology.

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Too much not too little serotonin may trigger depression

July 26, 2010

Most of us are probably aware that serotonin levels have a role to play in depression and that someone with low levels of serotonin are more likely to become depressed. Now there is evidence to suggest that brain chemistry isn’t quite as simple as that.

Recent research indicates that the reverse may actually be true and that people with too much serotonin in certain parts of the brain may develop depression. If this proves to be the case then it means that drugs such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors known as SSRIs may not be effective in treating some people with depression.

Recent evidence published in the Archives of General Psychiatry has shown that in some people with depression, serotonin activity is increased. Not only that, but there may be different types of serotonin neurons each of which are independently regulated.

The New Scientist reports Christopher Lowry of the University of Boulder in Colorado as saying “Because antidepressants increase serotonin in some parts of the brain, people assumed that depression must be the result of low serotonin”.

In the light of the recent evidence, this could mean a change of thinking about how serotonin influences depression and obviously a change in the treatment of depression.

“What’s more likely is that there are subgroups of serotonin neurons that are overactive in depressed patients, rather than under active as we have all been assuming” says Lowry.

The New Scientist also reports that 3 years ago, researcher Murray Esler and colleagues from the Baker Heart Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, found that the levels of serotonin in people with panic disorder was actually 4 times higher than it was in people who were healthy. Also, in people who were depressed and who were not receiving any medication, the serotonin levels were twice as high as they were in healthy volunteers.

The researchers also showed that using SSRI drugs over a long period of time actually had the effect of reducing serotonin levels although the reason why isn’t known.

Using rats and mice, Lowry has now been able to demonstrate multiple types of serotonin neurons and he presented his results at the Forum of European Neuroscience in Amsterdam last week.

The implications of the research are that higher levels of serotonin in some parts of the brain can elevate mood whereas higher levels in other parts could have the opposite effect.

Obviously this research will have an impact on the future of anti-depressant medication as a better understanding of each of the groups of serotonin neurons could lead to targeted drugs and more effective treatments for anxiety and depression.

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Depression and anxiety higher in people with Celiac disease

July 26, 2010

Research shows that people with celiac disease and other inflammatory conditions have a higher rate of anxiety and depression than others.

A recent German study carried out by researchers W. Häuser et al of the Department of Internal Medicine of the Klinikum Saarbrücken in Germany is the first research showing that women in particular, who are suffering from celiac disease, are more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the rest of the general population.

The researchers used the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale to measure levels of anxiety and depression in 441 adults with celiac disease. They also measured anxiety and depression levels in 235 people with inflammatory bowel disease and 441 adults from the general population.

What they found was that the patients with celiac disease and those with inflammatory bowel disease had higher levels of depression and anxiety than those in the general population, but in particular, women with celiac disease.

The researchers concluded that women with celiac disease following a gluten free diet should be screened for anxiety.

The link between celiac disease and depression has already been well established by many previous studies but the underlying reasons why aren’t really that well understood. Although Celiac disease is classed as an auto immune condition, it is also a malabsorption condition because when the body ingests gluten, it cannot absorb certain nutrients. Some research has pointed to a lack of Vitamin B in the diet, particularly vitamin B6 as why people with celiac disease suffer from depression.

The question is, if you have celiac disease and follow a strict gluten free diet will it help ease depression in people with celiac disease. The answer is not quite so simple.

A Swedish study involving 13,000 people with celiac disease found a higher rate of depression in people who were gluten free but were not able to identify any particular reason for this.

One reason why celiacs following a gluten free diet may suffer from depression is that the dietary restrictions placed on people with celiac disease may cause anxiety and actually lead to depression.

Another explanation is that people who are sensitive to gluten and following a gluten free diet may be ingesting gluten without realising it so should be meticulous about checking labels and be aware of foods in which gluten may be hidden such as soy sauce, some stock cubes, curry powders, alcoholic drinks, and even play dough and some lipsticks.

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Americans more likely to suffer depression than Russians

July 26, 2010

We tend to think of America as the land of freedom and opportunity, it is the home of the American dream of course, and as such you might expect the population to be quite happy and carefree, particularly when compared to Russians.

However, interesting new research from the University of Michigan has discovered that although Russians are more likely to brood and dwell on the negative, Americans are more likely to be depressed.

“Among Westerners, focusing on one’s negative feelings tends to impair well-being, but among Russians, that is not the case,” study co-author Igor Grossmann, a doctoral candidate in psychology at the University of Michigan, said in a university news release.

“Russians focus more on their negative feelings than Americans do but they spontaneously distance themselves from their emotions to a greater extent than Americans, who tend to immerse themselves in their recalled experiences” said Grossman.

The research was based on two separate studies involving both American and Russian students looking at cultural influences on depressive tendencies. The studies were funded by the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health.

The first study involved 168 students, 85 of whom were Russian, and 83 who were American. Each participant completed a test designed to measure brooding and depression symptoms. The researchers found that the Russian students were more likely to brood but were less likely to have depression symptoms than the American students.

The second study involved 76 Russian students and 86 American students. This time the students were asked to recall their thoughts and feelings on an unpleasant memory involving an interaction between themselves and someone else. Afterwards the researchers assessed each student for levels of distress.

An analysis of the data showed that the Russians were less distressed after recalling the experience and placed less blame on the other individual involved in their experience. They were also better able to distance themselves from their experience whilst recalling the event and analysing how they felt.

The researchers noted that this distancing of oneself is linked to lower levels of distress and blame.

“These findings add to a growing body of research demonstrating that it’s possible for people to reflect on negative experiences either adaptively or maladaptively” Grossmann said.

Igor Grossmann and co-author assistant professor of psychology Ethan Kross published their findings in the August issue of Psychological Science.

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