Posts Tagged ‘depression treatment 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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Some depressed people do worse on drugs. Other options for depression treatment.

Sunday, December 18th, 2011

A new study investigating the effectiveness of anti-depressant medications found that while most people showed improvement in symptoms of depression, some actually showed increasing symptoms.

The researchers suspected that for those who did not benefit from medication, the unpleasant side effects of the medications, such as sleep disturbance, might explain why some participants felt worse after using the medication.

The research highlights the need for an individualized approach to treatment of depression and other behavioral health issues. One size does not fit all. For many, psychotherapy and counseling will be the best option.

If  you or a loved one suffer from symptoms of depression or another emotional issue, help is available. To learn more about treatment options, call us at 617-259-1895.

Excerpt:

Up to a fifth of patients being treated for depression with some medications may do worse than those given a placebo, according to a U.S. study.The findings, published in Archives of General Psychiatry, highlight the importance of quickly identifying how patients respond to certain drugs, said lead author Ralitza Gueorguieva, at the Yale University School of Health.

“Identifying variables that are associated with response is a very important question that we havent quite tackled,” she said.

via Some depressed people do worse on drugs: study | Reuters.

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Light Boxes May Help Melt Those Winter Blues. Help For Depression.

Saturday, November 19th, 2011

With winter approaching, the days are getting much shorter. That means we are being exposed to less sunlight than we are during the summer months. Reduced exposure to sunlight is thought to result in changes in mood and can lead to Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) – a form of depression resulting from the low-sunlight seasons.

For some, simply using light boxes that mimic exposure to sunlight can help minimize or combat SAD. However, for many people the light boxes will not provide sufficient relief from SAD. And, for many people, the cause of their depression might not be SAD. For those people, depression treatments such as psychotherapy and counseling and/or psychopharmacology may be needed.

If you struggle with depression or sadness, help is available. Call us or complete our online intake form to learn more.

 

Excerpt from New York Times article:

For the millions of Americans who suffer from mild to severe winter blues — a condition called seasonal affective disorder, or S.A.D. — bright-light therapy is the treatment of choice, with response rates comparable with those of antidepressants. “Your natural clock is usually longer than 24 hours, and you need light in the morning to set it and keep it on track,” said Dr. Alfred Lewy, a professor of psychiatry at Oregon Health and Science University and an expert on seasonal depression and light therapy.

Yet many experts think light therapy is underused, given its affordability and relative lack of side effects, in large part because there is little profit to be made from it and no commercial incentive to promote the treatment.

Patients generally sit in front of the light box, which can be as small as 9 by 11 inches and 5 inches deep, with the bright light emanating from the square surface, in the morning. “With the natural dawn being later in winter, the body rhythms drift late,” Dr. Lewy said. “If you can fix the drift, you can fix the depression.”

via Light Boxes May Help Melt Those Winter Blues – NYTimes.com.

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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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Brain at higher risk from “real-world” ecstasy use.

Wednesday, March 30th, 2011

By Kerry Grens

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – For a glimpse into real-world drug use, Australian researchers went to parties where people were using a drug known as ecstasy – and discovered that users’ brains were at far more risk from the drug than anyone had suspected.

The researchers also found that ecstasy pills often contain a variety of other drugs.

“What’s concerning is that most studies looking at toxicity in people or animals look at a single drug,” said Dr. Thomas Newton, a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, who was not involved in this study.

“We have no idea what happens when you start mixing like this.”

For this study, 56 people who had taken ecstasy at least five times in the past agreed to invite the researchers to house parties where they took ecstasy once again.

The researchers collected a sample of the pills and measured users’ blood levels of MDMA – the chemical that’s in ecstasy – every hour for 5 hours after people took the drug. At the end of the study, each user received AUS$200 (about US$205, or 128 GBP) for participating.

In some people, the amount of MDMA reached levels that cause injury or death in primates.

The researchers found that only half of the pills consisted entirely of MDMA. The other half also contained methamphetamine or chemicals related to MDMA: MDEA or MDA.

Some pills had no MDMA at all. The ones that did had amounts that ranged widely, from as low as 25 mg to ten times that amount.

“This highlights a significant public health concern, particularly regarding the existence of pills containing more than 200 mg of MDMA,” the authors write in their report of the study, which is published in the journal Addiction.

Because the research was intended to capture a realistic snapshot of ecstasy use, the number of pills people took over the course of an evening varied as well. Most users ingested more than one pill; some people took as many as five.

“Taking multiple pills is likely to lead to very high blood concentration, which may be harmful,” Dr. Rod Irvine, the lead author of the study, wrote in an email to Reuters Health.

That’s because concentrations of MDMA in users’ blood did not stop climbing during the 5 hours of sampling.

“We were surprised that the…concentrations continued to rise throughout the study,” Irvine, a professor at the University of Adelaide, said. “The higher levels are approaching those that have been shown to be damaging to brain cells in animal models.”

Three users had blood concentrations greater than 700 mg/L, which was poisonous to primates in laboratory studies. Another three users had concentrations very close to that level.

“Those are big numbers,” Newton said of the blood concentrations.

Irvine said that most users continued to take more ecstasy throughout the night, even though their blood concentrations from the initial pill had not peaked.

The authors speculate that users might develop a tolerance to the drug while they’re using it, making them feel less intoxicated even while their blood levels of the drug are increasing.

None of the users in the study suffered any immediate health problems from taking ecstasy.

According to the US National Institute on Drug Abuse, ecstasy can interfere with heart rate and temperature regulation and can cause brain damage.

Seven of every 100 twelfth-graders say they have tried ecstasy.

Irvine said that collecting data at parties is a valuable way to get a sense of what people are actually exposing themselves to.

For instance, in 14 people the amount of MDMA in the blood reached levels that had never been studied in humans in the lab.

In laboratory studies, ethical considerations prevent researchers from testing such high doses in people, so the amounts they experiment with “do not reflect the range used naturally,” Irvine wrote.

Regarding the information Irvine’s team collected, Newton said, “It’s very unique to pull that off.”

The research was funded by the National Health and Medical Research Council of Australia.

SOURCE: bit.ly/gStlbA, Addiction, online February 14, 2011.

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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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