Information about depression self help and alternative treatments for depression. As with any other depression treatment, what works for one may not work for another, but any ideas are worth considering when trying to beat depression.

If you have HBO and anyone in your life with bipolar disorder (or you have it), you should watch “Boy Interrupted,” a documentary that played at the Sundance Festival.

I think this movie will be up there with Kite Runner as one that sticks with me. It is haunting and it is powerful.

The filmmaker is Evan Perry’s mother, and Evan Perry killed himself at age 15. His parents did everything right, got him into therapy, saw a psychiatrist regularly, loved him unconditionally.

If there’s anything you take out of this movie, it should be this: there’s no black and white with mental illness. The media portrays it as two ends of a spectrum: either the person with mental illness is a crazed killer (most killers are sociopaths and assholes, but not necessarily mentally ill, and most persons with mental illness are not violent) or psychiatry cures it all.

I’ve been afraid to watch the show “Mental” precisely for this reason. I have taped every episode, but haven’t had the heart to watch it. I’m afraid it’s going to be the typical bullshit of “these poor mentally ill folks, if only they’d take their meds, all would be right with the world.” And add a rogue psychiatrist who goes out of his/her way to be cool and avant-garde. There may be a couple of them out there, but your chances of finding them is remote. And who knows if a groovy hat and James Deanesque personality means anything with respect to recovery.

This documentary is a real heartbreaker. I could so empathize with Evan. I just got him, that’s all I can say.

The quote in the title is something the psychiatrist said. It’s pretty true.

I knew this was true, but my family said it was just an excuse for me to use bad words. Can’t wait to print this out for VINDICATION, my friends.

Swearing Makes Pain More Tolerable
LiveScience Staff

LiveScience.com livescience Staff

livescience.com Sun Jul 12, 10:10 am ET

That muttered curse word that reflexively comes out when you stub your toe could actually make it easier to bear the throbbing pain, a new study suggests.

Swearing is a common response to pain, but no previous research has connected the uttering of an expletive to the actual physical experience of pain.

“Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon,” said Richard Stephens of Keele University in England and one of the authors of the new study. “It taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain.”

Stephens and his fellow Keele researchers John Atkins and Andrew Kingston sought to test how swearing would affect an individual’s tolerance to pain. Because swearing often has an exaggerating effect that can overstate the severity of pain, the team thought that swearing would lessen a person’s tolerance.

As it turned out, the opposite seems to be true.

The researchers enlisted 64 undergraduate volunteers and had them submerge their hand in a tub of ice water for as long as possible while repeating a swear word of their choice. The experiment was then repeated with the volunteer repeating a more common word that they would use to describe a table.

Contrary to what the researcher expected, the volunteers kept their hands submerged longer while repeating the swear word.

The researchers think that the increase in pain tolerance occurs because swearing triggers the body’s natural “fight-or-flight” response. Stephens and his colleagues suggest that swearing may increase aggression (seen in accelerated heart rates), which downplays weakness to appear stronger or more macho.

“Our research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists,” Stephens said.

I enjoy the study of feng shui and came across this helpful post. It lists five ways of dealing with depression without meds.

Dealing With Depression

As a child, I was allowed to breed my cocker spaniel, Skipper, and sell the puppies. One of the many little businesses I had growing up. Raising cockers was a family tradition - my mom and her siblings did it on the farm when they were growing up, too. (I wouldn’t do it now, preferring rescues to purebreds, thank you. Please adopt.)

But Skipper had this adorable litter of puppies, and I was crazy about them. I had to go to the dentist and maybe I was having a cavity filled. Don’t remember, just know that I was freaked out and getting a shot. My mom said, “Think of the puppies,” and I did. A pile of puppies wriggling around.

To this day, when I need a meditational focus to take my mind off of a root canal, or an MRI, or anything that requires me not to cuss or move, I “think of the puppies.”

I saw this picture and it’s pretty darned close to the picture in my mind that I’ve carried since I was six years old. I always think of the puppies:

by Prakhar at Flickr

One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by reporters is “Why did you start ect.org?” The answer is that I started it over a decade ago to simply share information about electroconvulsive therapy.

I am not opposed to anyone having ECT as long as it’s an informed (emphasis) choice. Unfortunately, the majority of patients are given a one-minute sales pitch that overplays the effectiveness and mostly ignores any side effects.

My strongest belief is that if doctors were candid about it all, and took the time needed to answer questions truthfully, outcomes would be better. Even when the results were bad.

In an interview with the New York Times, Dr. Dan Shapiro, who has survived battles with deadly cancer, says the very same thing:

NYT: You quizzed your radiation oncologist about treatment side effects. If all patients did this, wouldn’t some refuse treatment?

Dr. Shapiro: About 85 percent of patients are information-seeking and want to know the limitations as well as the strengths of their treatment. Unfortunately, a lot of physicians overestimate the treatment benefits and underplay the side effects. In the short term more people accept treatment, then become surprised, dismayed and often panicked when predictable side effects occur. If patients know about side effects in advance and are taught how to anticipate and cope with them, they would do a lot better.

This so clearly defines how I feel that I believe I’m going to add it to ect.org in a prominent way.

Dan Shapiro has a website at http://www.danshapiro.org

Here is a great interview with the New York Times from 2001:

May 15, 2001
A CONVERSATION WITH: Dan Shapiro; A Doctor’s Story of Hope, Humor and Deadly Cancer
By JANE E. BRODY

In May 1987, Dan Shapiro, then a 20-year-old junior at Vassar College, discovered he had Hodgkin’s disease. After seven months of treatment with four chemotherapy drugs and radiation, he seemed healthy again.

In 1988, in his first year of graduate school in clinical psychology, he counseled a young girl named Jodi who was not doing well after a bone marrow transplant for the same cancer and who soon died. Six months later, he learned that his own cancer had returned and that his only hope was a bone marrow transplant. His survival chances were 40 percent. Sixteen months after the transplant, in July 1991, he had a second relapse, and few options remained. Read more…

By chance (or was it fate?) I came across an article that appeared in Salon a few years ago. It’s called “Why Me” by Dan Shapiro, associate professor in the college of medicine at the University of Arizona.

He has an interesting perspective on medicine and mental health, as he has survived bouts with Hodgkin’s Disease. It’s quite a story, and I guess I’m going to have to make an Amazon order and read his books.

Here is his article from Salon called “Why Me?” It reminds me of a quote from The Sopranos, where Tony Soprano asks his mother’s Russian nurse why she stays so optimistic when she only has one leg.

She replies: “That’s the trouble with you Americans. You expect nothing bad ever to happen, when the rest of the world expects only bad to happen. And they are not disappointed. You have everything, and still you complain. … You’ve got too much time to think about yourselves.”

Why me?
Why not you? Misery makes the world go round, and nobody gets a free pass.

By Dan Shapiro

Aug. 06, 2002 | I can’t talk about this at work, but I’m tired. Tired of patients with illnesses moaning that this shouldn’t have happened to them. Tired of their asking the fates to explain why they’ve been singled out for solitary anguish. Tired of the relentless vocal vacuums that can suck the life out of a medical team faster than HMO reimbursement forms and billing sheets. Read more…

Radio tech guru Kim Komando discusses blogging as a sort of therapy:

click arrow to listen

I have kept journals since I was a kid. I still have them - an entire box of fabric-covered journals, some scrawled in spiral notebooks, and some are entirely in Russian. (When I was worried people might read them.) They’ve always been a place I can pour out my guts, and have a moment of feeling better.

The personal blog section on this site is exactly that - my way of getting things off my chest. I would highly encourage it as one of the tools towards working on your depression. Like the Digital Goddess Kim says, you can do it for free at blogger.com, and you can be as anonymous as you want. (Cautions below!)

If you haven’t listened to Kim’s show, do it. Even if you think you know everything there is to know about computers and Internet, you’ll find out you don’t and you’ll learn great things. What’s more, she’s just a pleasure to listen to. She’s got something special, and you can’t help but smile when you hear her voice - she’s just that pleasant and refreshing. Her radio show is on every Saturday, and if your local stations don’t carry her, find her on streaming Internet. I promise you won’t be sorry! Read more…

No matter how horrible you feel, how badly your life is going, there’s always someone worse off than you. I know that’s not much consolation when you’re in the pit of depression hell, but I can almost promise you this: if you can do something good for someone else, no matter how small, you’ll have at least a moment of warmth in your soul.

Perhaps you garden. How about growing a little extra, and donating it to your local food pantry? For those of us who feed our souls through gardening, what better way to get that juice we have when we share our goods? DONATE! It’s just a great idea, and I’m excited about it.

I hope you’ll spread the word and get gardeners to the pantries!

http://www.grow-a-row.org

Radio is carrying new PSAs emphasizing the importance of friends when dealing with mental illness.

Here’s a case where I think tax dollars have been very well spent. Some of the ads are a tad annoying, but that’s after I’ve heard them too many times. They make the point: if you have a friend who has been diagnosed with mental illness, stick around. A friend can really make a difference. Read more…