Posts Tagged ‘depression counseling boston’

Study finds that treatment of depression can increase work productivity. Get help for depression.

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Check out this study showing that depression negatively impacts productivity at work and that treatment of depression can improve performance and productivity at work. Another important point is that for many people, feeling like you are doing a good job at work can be a source of satisfaction that can help maintain a more positive mood.

If you are feeling down or depressed, effective treatment for depression including counseling and psychopharmacological treatment is available.

Excerpts from Study:

A new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health CAMH (in Canada) has found that employees with depression who receive treatment while still working are significantly more likely to be highly productive than those who do not. This is the first study of its kind to look into a possible correlation between treatment and productivity.

People who experienced a depressive episode were significantly less likely to be highly productive, the study showed. “We expected this, as past research has found that depression has adverse effects on comprehension, social participation, and day-to-day-functioning,” said Dr. Carolyn Dewa, Head of CAMH’s Centre for Research on Employment and Workplace Health and lead author.

“What’s exciting is we found that treatment for depression improves work productivity. People who had experienced a moderate depressive episode and received treatment were 2.5 times more likely to be highly productive compared with those who had no treatment,” she says.  “Likewise, people who experienced severe depression were seven times more likely to be high-performing than those who had no treatment.”

via CAMH: Study finds that treatment of depression can increase work productivity.

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Tiny Electrode in Brain May Be Effective Treatment for Depression.

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

Deep brain stimulation (DSB) involves placement of a tiny electrode in a region of interest in the brain. DBS has been used for more than a decade to treat Parkinson’s disease and other movement disorders. More recently, it also has shown promise for treating symptoms of depression and possibly bipolar disorder when other treatments have not been effective.

For most people, psychotherapy and psychopharmacology will be the best option for depression treatment but for those with intractable depression, the future may include DBS as a treatment option.

Excerpt from report:

A new study provides additional data on the safety and long-term efficacy of subcallosal cingulate SCC deep brain simulation DBS in patients with treatment-resistant depression, including those with bipolar disorder.

Results show that after 2 years of long-term stimulation, there was a 92% response rate and 58% remission rate in 12 patients in the study. No patient who achieved remission had a spontaneous depressive relapse.

Published online January 2, Archives of General Psychiatry via More Good News on Deep Brain Stimulation in Depression.

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New Year’s Resolutions: Take Steps Not Leaps.

Saturday, December 31st, 2011

Change is hard. And, big changes can be especially hard to make and to maintain. So, if you are going to make a resolution for the New Year, think of something small that you would like to change and set a realistic goal.

By setting unrealistic goals, we set ourselves up for failure and can even make ourselves feel worse than we did before we set the goals. So, before you create a list of New Year’s resolutions to ring in 2012, try to think of just one small change that you would like to make AND that you think you can maintain for the long haul.

For example, rather than putting yourself through another all-out diet that will likely be difficult to maintain, choose a small change in your diet that can lead to better health. Giving up sugary beverages like soda might be a good option that could be maintained over time (and that likely would result in a marked reduction in caloric and sugar intake).

And, of course, if you want to make greater changes in your life for 2012, working with a psychologist and behavioral specialist can be a great option. Change is hard, but you don’t have to do it alone.

Good luck!

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Laughter Produces Endorphins, Feel-good Brain Chemistry.

Tuesday, September 27th, 2011

Laughing with others makes us all feel better – we experience a momentary elevation in our mood and our sense of feeling relaxed. But, scientists have long wondered why that is so. A recent series of psychological studies has illuminated some of the reasons laughter is good for us. And, our brains are behind it all.

Check out this excerpt from the NY Times. Link to full article is below.

Laughter is regularly promoted as a source of health and well being, but it has been hard to pin down exactly why laughing until it hurts feels so good.

The answer, reports Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist at Oxford, is not the intellectual pleasure of cerebral humor, but the physical act of laughing. The simple muscular exertions involved in producing the familiar ha, ha, ha, he said, trigger an increase in endorphins, the brain chemicals known for their feel-good effect.

His results build on a long history of scientific attempts to understand a deceptively simple and universal behavior. “Laughter is very weird stuff, actually,” Dr. Dunbar said. “That’s why we got interested in it.” And the findings fit well with a growing sense that laughter contributes to group bonding and may have been important in the evolution of highly social humans.

Social laughter, Dr. Dunbar suggests, relaxed and contagious, is “grooming at a distance,” an activity that fosters closeness in a group the way one-on-one grooming, patting and delousing promote and maintain bonds between individual primates of all sorts.

In five sets of studies in the laboratory and one field study at comedy performances, Dr. Dunbar and colleagues tested resistance to pain both before and after bouts of social laughter. The pain came from a freezing wine sleeve slipped over a forearm, an ever tightening blood pressure cuff or an excruciating ski exercise.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, eliminated the possibility that the pain resistance measured was the result of a general sense of well being rather than actual laughter. And, Dr. Dunbar said, they also provided a partial answer to the ageless conundrum of whether we laugh because we feel giddy or feel giddy because we laugh.

“The causal sequence is laughter triggers endorphin activation,” he said. What triggers laughter is a question that leads into a different labyrinth.

Robert R. Provine, a neuroscientist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and the author of “Laughter: A Scientific Investigation,” said he thought the study was “a significant contribution” to a field of study that dates back 2,000 years or so.

via Laughter Produces Endorphins, Study Finds – NYTimes.com.

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Suicide Risk Assessment Often Inaccurate. Better Training Needed.

Monday, March 28th, 2011

Suicide Risk Assessment Often Inaccurate in

Ambiguous Cases

Findings Suggest a Need for Better Risk Assessment Training

Jill Stein

March 16, 2011 (Vienna, Austria) — Faced with ambiguous cases, mental health professionals (MHPs) often inaccurately classify patients’ suicide risk, new research shows.

Presented here at EPA 2011: 19th European Congress of Psychiatry, UK investigators found obviously high- or low-risk scenarios produced a predictable consensus of opinion among MHPs with respect to suicide risk. However, an ambiguous or incomplete scenario produced more variation in risk classification.

“The results mean that a group of MHPs may be misclassifying some of their patients, who are at high risk of suicide, as being at low or medium risk,” Julian Beezhold, FRCPsych, consultant in emergency psychiatry at Hellesdon Hospital in Norwich, United Kingdom, told Medscape Medical News.

The data also identify the need for better risk assessment training, with a special focus on MHPs who assume the risk is low when presented with incomplete or ambiguous information, Dr. Beezhold added.

Lack of Guidance

According to investigators, suicide risk assessment accounts for a significant part of the MHPs’ workload, and a large body of research has examined the efficacy of various methods of suicide risk assessment. Further, a significant amount of effort has been devoted to developing suicide risk assessment training to improve clinical outcomes.

To date, the various assessment methods available include the actuarial approach, which is based on algorithms and objective procedures; the clinical approach, which is more subjective, intuitive, and based on clinical experience; and a structured approach, which combines the actuarial and clinical approach, which is widely viewed as the preferred approach.

None of these methods, however, provide clinicians with guidance on how to respond to an ambiguous scenario.

Dr. Kate Manley (left) and Dr. Julian Beezhold (right)

The study examined suicide risk for various clinical scenarios with a particular focus on ambiguous cases.

A total of 720 MHPs from a broad range of disciplines were asked to assess suicide risk for 10 clinical scenarios developed to provide a mixture of high-, medium-, and low-risk cases. In some of the scenarios, the available information was incomplete or ambiguous.

The following is an example of an incomplete and ambiguous scenario that was included in the study:

“A 55-year-old man has been sent in by a community practitioner without a letter. He does not respond to your questions and avoids eye contact. You notice that he is short of breath.”

About 20% of MHPs suggested that they didn’t know how to classify a patient with ambiguous or incomplete information. About 40% of MHPs were more cautious and opted for a high-risk classification. The remaining 40% were less cautious and assumed that the patient was at low risk for suicide.

Best Response

“The best response in an uncertain scenario is to acknowledge that the lack of information and ambiguity may mask a higher-risk patient, and therefore clinicians should proceed more cautiously,” Dr. Beezhold said.

“For example, they should take more time in order to complete a more thorough risk assessment. A lack of information in a given clinical scenario may prevent individuals from using a combined actuarial/clinical judgment-based method, such as a suicide rating scale, in their assessment of suicide risk. Without objective information, clinicians may have to rely on judgment alone,” he said.

The MHPs in the study included junior and senior psychiatrists, mental health nursing staff, clinical psychologists, nursing assistances, and therapists working at the Norfolk & Waveney Mental Health Care NHS Foundation Trust, which provides a complete range of mental health care to roughly 1 million people.

Dr. Beezhold pointed out the study clearly identifies a need to target training more precisely according to individual response to ambiguity.

Finally, he noted that more studies are needed to better explain the discrepancy in responses to suicide risk scenarios among MHPs.

“The more information we have, the better we can predict suicidality,” he said.

If you or a loved one are suffering from depression or have suicidal thoughts, please seek professional help.

DE

Dr. Beezhold has disclosed no relevant financial relationships.

EPA 2011: 19th European Congress of Psychiatry: Abstract P03-458. Presented March 15, 2011.

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Mental Health Counseling Needs Seen Growing at Colleges. Boston Psychotherapy & Counseling for Students Available.

Monday, December 20th, 2010

Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.

It was deep into the fall semester, a time of mounting stress with finals looming and the holiday break not far off, an anxiety all its own.  On a Thursday afternoon, a freshman who had been scraping bottom academically posted thoughts about suicide on Facebook. If I were gone, he wrote, would anybody notice? An alarmed student told staff members in the dorm, who called Dr. Hwang after hours, who contacted the campus police. Officers escorted the student to the county psychiatric hospital.

There were two more runs over that weekend, including one late Saturday night when a student grew concerned that a friend with a prescription for Xanax, the anti-anxiety drug, had swallowed a fistful.

On Sunday, a supervisor of residence halls, Gina Vanacore, sent a BlackBerry update to Dr. Hwang, who has championed programs to train students and staff members to intervene to prevent suicide.“If you weren’t so good at getting this bystander stuff out there,” Ms. Vanacore wrote in mock exasperation, “we could sleep on the weekends.”

Stony Brook is typical of American colleges and universities these days, where national surveys show that nearly half of the students who visit counseling centers are coping with serious mental illness, more than double the rate a decade ago. More students take psychiatric medication, and there are more emergencies requiring immediate action.

To read the article visit: Serious Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges – NYTimes.com.

Commonwealth Psychology Associates offers counseling and psychotherapy services for students from many area colleges. A large percentage of our work is comprised of college students. If you are a student suffering from depression, anxiety/panic attacks or other emotional issues, our psychologists may be able to help. Give us a call or complete our quick and easy online appointment request form.

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20 million people suffer from symptoms of depression but only half seek help. Depression treatment available in Boston & Newton.

Tuesday, October 19th, 2010

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, approximately 20 million people in the U.S. suffer from symptoms of depression. However, they estimate that as few as half seek treatment despite the availability of many effective treatments that include psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and medication management. There are many reasons that people with depression don’t seek help including lack of knowledge about the symptoms of depression or of the available treatments for depression.

If you think you may be one of the 20 million people with depression, seek help soon. To learn more about depression symptoms and treatments, please visit our Depression Treatment page.

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