Affection of depression and suicide on you

Suicide and depression and the prevention of both is not something people like to talk about.

But as I keep trying to emphasize to people, suicide is real and it does happen. No family is immune to it. Depression can happen to anyone. Unless we fight it, the statistics will continue to rise.

Work is beginning for this year’s Out of the Darkness Community Walk for Suicide Prevention and Depression Awareness.

Please be looking for more information on this walk to come soon. In light of this upcoming event.

Depression in children and adolescents is real. It is more than “the blues.” These problems are real, painful and can be severe.

Studies have shown that at any point in time, 10 to 15 percent of children and adolescents have some symptoms of depression. Mental health is important for people of all ages. It is just as important as other health issues. It affects how people feel and act and how they handle stress and various life situations.

Mental health trouble in children can be caused by many different things. Some examples are: exposure to environmental toxins, exposure to violence, stress from poverty or other hardships and loss of important people in their lives, whether it be through death, divorce or broken relationships.

If you suspect a child or adolescent has a mental health issue, get help as soon as possible.

The following are just some of the possible signs that a child may need some type of help: having sad and hopeless feelings that don’t go away, being angry the majority of the time, feeling worthless or guilty, being unable to get over a loss due to a death, being extremely fearful, being overly concerned about physical appearance, expressing concern that their mind is out of control, a sudden decline in performance at school, losing interest in formerly enjoyable things, avoiding friends and family, hearing voices, experiencing suicidal thoughts, extremely poor concentration, having persistent nightmares and showing signs of eating disorders.

It is critical that we protect our children. We have an obligation to protect their mental health. We take them to the doctor for physical checkups, and we take them to the doctor when they have some type of “common” sickness.

If we suspect a child has some type of mental health situation going on, it is just as important that we take them to a doctor to have this checked out. There is absolutely nothing to be embarrassed about.

Our children are precious. Within the past month in our country there have been two 12-year-olds in different states who took their own lives. This is absolutely heartbreaking. Let’s do whatever we can to help our children.

This article addresses the issue of depression and preventing suicide in children and adolescents. I am thankful that I have not had to deal with this specific area. Losing a child to this, or even having a child with severe mental issues, must be extremely difficult to handle. Every human being is important. Every life is worth fighting for.


Source:
outofthedarkness.org

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Some Profits for Being Happy

The health advantages of delight :)
About 30 million people received cure for depression on the year 2008 and the American Psychological organization reports: more than half of American people say they are stressed. It's becoming a major focus for doctors all over the world.

Here's what you want to know, to protect both of your mind and body.

These days, world-renowned speaker Deepak Chopra teaches that happiness is no longer just a mental quest, but a physical one. Chopra recently released his newest DVD "The Prescription for Happiness." Doctors are on the same page. They now have solid evidence your happiness directly affects your health.

"We discovered where ever a thought goes, a molecule goes and it affects your biology," he says. Well-being translates into a biological response because your brain secretes things like dopamine, and opiates and serotonin, oxytocin, all of which are hormones which make you happy."
Serotonin is the hormone that gives us that happy "feeling." Low levels can lead to, among other things, insomnia, fatigue and depression.

Doctors with the National Institute of Health have found during bouts of depression certain parts of the brain shrink by as much as 40%, and over-time that can do permanent damage.

Dopamine, known as the "pleasure system," controls emotional responses and movement. People with Parkinson's disease often have low dopamine levels.

Liz Vaccariello, author of the flat belly diet, studies why people who are depressed or stressed typically gain weight.

"Cortisol is the hormone that we create when we are stressed out and that makes us crave sweets and makes your body store extra calories that we consume as belly fat," she says.

What we can do about it is not rocket science, but some might be more obvious than others.

-Regular Exercise: most of us know this one. Regular exercise provides a host of benefits including maintaining weight and lowering blood pressure.

-Get "Good" Sleep: the body burns the most fat during "deep sleep", and re-sets chemical patterns in the body-which regulates everything from moods to memory.

-Get a Well-Balanced Diet: which includes vitamins b, d, and omega oils-which all help manage depression.

-Think Happy Thoughts: thinking happy thoughts might sound a bit fluffy, but Vaccariello found, for example, a sense of happiness in athletes--even if it's "faked"--improved performance.

"Runners, for example, hit a wall and start to get fatigued and think 'I can't go on any longer.' If they just do one thing, 'smile,' just the act of smiling changes what is hormonally going on in the body. There is a 30% increase in their ability to perform for the next several minutes," she says.

-And Maintain Relationships: Chopra says people in countries outside the US are naturally happier, because they pay more attention to relationships.

"Happy people are generally not only healthier, they're able to accomplish a lot more because they come from a place of strength and power," he says.

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From Work Stress To Depression !

Between Work Stress And Depression
A work with a stressful environment brought on by lack of team spirit increases worker depression and the odds that employees will turn to antidepressants for relief, a new study finds.

Given the current recession, the workplace has become even more stressful with people afraid of losing their jobs and uncertain about their economic future, one expert says.

"The U.S. work environment right now is far more tenuous and toxic than in recent history," said Josh Klapow, an associate professor of health-care organization and policy at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, who had no role in the study. "With layoffs and downsizing, the opportunities for increased stress, negativity and pressure have all greatly increased."

But even in the best of times, the study found, workplace environment can take a psychological toll on workers.

"Depression is common in working populations and is associated with substantial work disability in terms of sick leave and disability pensions," said Marjo Sinokki, from the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health in Turku, Finland, and the study's lead researcher. "It is important to promote well-being at work in every way and pay attention also to team climate."

The report was published online April 8 in Occupational and Environmental Medicine.

For the study, Sinokki's team collected data on 3,347 Finnish workers, ages 30 to 64. They asked about people's workplace environment -- specifically about team spirit and the quality of communication and about how they felt about the demands of their jobs.

Participants were asked to rate their workplace according to four descriptive phrases: "encouraging and supportive of new ideas," "prejudiced and conservative," "nice and easy" and "quarrelsome and disagreeing." They also were asked about their home and social lives.

Although the perception that the workplace was prejudiced or quarrelsome was not associated with alcohol abuse or anxiety, lack of team spirit was.

In fact, those who thought team spirit was poor were about 60 percent more likely to report being depressed and 50 percent more likely to take antidepressants than those who rated it high.

Though the study was done in Finland, the researchers think that their findings apply to workers around the world.

"More attention should be paid to psychosocial factors at work," Sinokki said. "I think team climate is an important factor at work all over the place, and I think the results would be similar in the U.S."

Klapow said that because most people spend the majority of their day at work, the contribution of the work environment to their overall psychological well-being is substantial.

"Individuals who are feeling nervous, anxious, sad, irritable at work and find it interfering with their ability to get the job done should look at those symptoms as possible warning signs of a more serious but treatable psychological condition," Klapow said. "Unattended, those symptoms can go on to become very debilitating disorders."

Dr. Carole Lieberman, a clinical professor of psychology and stress expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, took issue with some aspects of the study.

"Although I agree with their conclusion, that poor team climate or office stress is associated with depression, there are problems with this study," she said. "The study does not clarify to what degree office stress causes depression, versus to what degree depression causes office stress."

In addition, the study started in 2000 and had a follow-up period that included the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which would have changed the course of the results, Lieberman said.

"Workers in Finland would have been impacted by the 9/11 terrorist attack that targeted workers in the U.S.," she said. "It is likely that any rise in depression, anxiety and alcoholism in the Finnish workers would be due, at least in part, to 9/11. And the team climate or office stress is likely to have been affected as well. There may have been more office stress or they may have been more supportive of each other than they were before."

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Depression affects your eyes!

It's more than just being under blues. Clinical depression affects the way we process information in our brain, negatively affecting memory, attention span, and the brain's ability to learn new things.

Now Tokyo University research has provided scientific proof that depression changes our visual perception as well.

A research team headed by Dr. Kimutaku Takuya at Tokyo University compared the visual perception of healthy people to those hospitalized for depression. The clinically depressed, they assessed, lacked the ability to fill in parts of a picture when those parts were missing or faint.

"Vision is processed in the brain, and we already know that depression affects cognitive functioning," says Dr. Takuya , whose team pioneered a study on visual perception in people with depression. The new results linking depression to eyesight could result in a breakthrough tool to accurately diagnose depression.

Not Seeing the Whole Picture

To investigate the effects of depression on visual perception, Dr. Takuya developed a computerized test that let him assess "the filling-in process" that a healthy mind undertakes when looking at objects. The researchers asked 27 control subjects and 32 patients hospitalized for major depression to look at identical images and report what they saw. The control subjects were able to successfully fill in and "see" missing parts, while the depressive ones were not.

"We see with our brain, not with our eyes. The eye is only the tool," says Dr. Takuya , who is studying the brainwave activity of patients during the experiment. He found very unusual patterns emerging: the brain activity of depressed people looked different from that of the control group.

New Diagnosis and Treatment Options

"We are now taking our results and looking at ways we can take the signals in the brain and turn them into an objective tool, both in diagnostics and for monitoring the course of treatment," says Dr. Takuya.

With such a tool, visual perception tests might give psychiatrists a better way to diagnose depression. Currently there is no non-biased test to assess whether someone is clinically depressed. Because of the biases inherent in self-administered tests, diagnostic questionnaires can produce inaccurate results, denying patients medication or hospitalization.

Seeing a Fuller Picture of Depression

Dr. Takuya is now taking the next step and developing an EEG test that could be administered in any clinic or hospital to scan brain activity for the signature signs that depression creates.

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