By age 32, nearly 3 out of every 5 people will have suffered from depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol dependence, or marijuana dependence, according to a new study highlighted by the Science News. That’s almost double what previous studies estimated. And the numbers could get higher, the older people get.

Does the data show that more people are getting sick? Not necessarily. This study followed people over time, while most previous studies relied on self-reports. According to the article, some have suggested “many adults forget periods of depression, and even hospitalizations for depression, from earlier in their lives.”

The study also calls into question what people define as a “disorder,” according to the article. Some have suggested that the evidence is a call-to-action for more urgent care. Others, including New York University social work professor Jerome Wakefield, believes that defining “depression” too broadly risks “pathologizing the entire population and opening the way for increases in medicating our society.”

Depression sufferers could also try taking Progenitorivox (video below), but just be careful for the side effects.

(Thanks, MindHacks.)

Source: Science News, Prescription for Change 

Do you have depression? Achy face? Do you see the world in black and white? You may be stuck inside a prescription drug commercial. Current TV’s Sarah Haskins takes viewers on a cynical tour of the drug ads in the latest episode of Target Women. Warning: Side effects may include laughter and projectile vomiting.

Source:  Current TV  

Kristina Wong’s performance art blends a biting wit with moments of disarming vulnerability, holding a mirror to both self and audience. The Los Angeles-based performer’s new one-woman show, Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest tackles the problem of high suicide rates and depression among Asian American women, exposing the charred underbelly of issues such as race, identity, and mental health with refreshing candor and yes, humor.   

Creating the show was not an easy process, and she swears she wouldn’t do it again.

Read the full interview, “Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Back Again.”

Watch an excerpt from Wong Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest:

Image by Diana Toshiko, courtesy of Kristina Wong.

Some half a million people in the United States experience seasonal affective disorder (SAD), according to the American Academy of Family Physicians. Symptoms of the condition, also known as winter-onset depression, include anxiety, fatigue, and irritability, and the problems may keep coming back every winter.

The disorder is thought to be caused by the lack of sunlight that some people experience during the winter. It also may be an evolutionary remnant of human hibernation, according to columnist Carol Venolia in Utne Reader’s sister publication, Natural Home magazine. As recently as the early 20^th century, Venolia writes that peasants in both Russia and France would shut themselves in for the cold months, huddling around the stove and barely moving until the spring thaw.

Venolia advocates giving into our hibernation tendencies, at least a little bit. If we did, “We’d sleep more and demand less from ourselves.  We’d be more inward and reflective.”

Image courtesy of OakleyOriginals, licensed under Creative Commons.

Researchers continue to explore the therapeutic benefits of meditation, and one new study on depression touts mindfulness exercises as viable alternatives to anti-depressants.  

Just two months of Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) prevented relapses better than traditional treatments, according to researchers at the University of Exeter. Forty-seven percent of patients relapsed after MBCT, compared with sixty percent who relied on traditional treatment methods, and the MBCT test groups reported higher levels of satisfaction with their physical well-being and in their day-to-day activities.

In the MBCT trials, a therapist led small groups in focusing exercises, inspired in part by Buddhist meditation techniques. The exercises encouraged participants to concentrate on the present rather than past or future events. The therapy was designed for simplicity, allowing patients to practice independently after the study ended. According to Professor Willem Kuyken, who led the study, MBCT works because it “teaches skills for life.”

Interest in the therapeutic applications of meditation isn’t particularly new—Utne Reader recently covered the issue here and here. MBCT seems promising, though, as a realistic way to integrate mindfulness practices with more conventional forms of psychological treatments. MBCT is a potentially cost-effective option for treating depression on a large scale because it’s led by a single therapist in groups of eight to fifteen, patients learn to practice the techniques without oversight, and it appears to stave off relapses. The Exeter team, encouraged by the findings, has already announced plans for further study on MBCT techniques.

(Thanks, Shambala Sun.)

Here’s a shocking statistic for recent law school grads taking bar exams this week: Psychotherapy Networker reports that “while only about 3 percent of students enter law school depressed, about 30 percent graduate depressed.”

The Australian government’s recent apology to the Aboriginal people for historic wrongs could benefit people’s health, Rachel Nowak reports for the New Scientist. The Aboriginal people currently struggle with high rates of alcoholism, depression, and other physical and mental health issues. Prime Minister Paul Rudd’s apology for forced “assimilation” programs that ended in 1970 has been called “tremendously significant in mental health respects,” by medical policy researcher Marlene Kong. “It will help the healing process, and that in turn will contribute to physical well-being.”

Native Americans in the United States struggle with some of the same issues of substance abuse and depression, yet “the United States has no general program of reparations for Native Americans and no prospects for adopting one,” David C. Williams writes for Cultural Survival Quarterly. Williams believes that Americans’ aversion to guilt is holding up the reparations processes, no matter what the potential benefits could be.

Even with the formal apology, experts quoted by the New Scientist recognize that Australia has a long way to go toward closing the health gap between Aboriginal people and the rest of the country. A 17-year differential in life expectancy currently exists between some Aboriginal communities and Australia as a whole. The government has pledged to close that rift within a generation, but experts agree that greater resources are needed to address the problem.

—Bennett Gordon

Photo by Douglas Kastle, licensed under Creative Commons.

People make mistakes in the pursuit of happiness, but eventually we can all get there. “We are meant to be happy,” says psychologist Daniel Gilbert in an interview with Shambhala Sun. In his new book, Stumbling on Happiness, Gilbert tries to help people understand how to find a joyful life. He advises people to “distrust your brain, and trust your eyes a little bit more.” Don’t myopically pursue selfish and materialistic goals that you think will make you feel good. Rather, take a more scientific view, testing what makes you happy, and making natural mistakes on your way there.

This quest for bliss, however, may be entirely misguided, Eric G. Wilson writes for the Chronicle of Higher Education. Americans’ over-pursuit of happiness, and rejection of sadness, amounts to “a wanton forgetting of an essential part of a full life.” Melancholic feelings give inspiration to music, art, and literature, yet Americans try to destroy sadness through positive psychology and prescription drugs. Pharmaceutical therapies can help seriously depressed people, Wilson acknowledges, but too many people try to numb their pain instead of embracing it. This is a horrible and dangerous mistake.

—Bennett Gordon

If you’ve seen the documentary Jesus Camp, you may be alarmed about what goes on at conservative Christian summer camps. At least at some of them—my own memories consist largely of swimming, throwing a frisbee, and awkwardly chatting up girls. Writing in the Sun (article not available online), Matthew M. Quick touches on something fundamental to the Bible-camp experience: the tremendous spiritual high that Christian summer camps cultivate, and the inevitable difficulty in sustaining that feeling after you go home.

The article begins in the present, with the author as an adult. Quick answers a phone call from his mother, a devout Christian who is deeply depressed. Quick is no longer devout, but he declines to tell her that in so many words. Instead, he tries to comfort his mother in her depression—while simultaneously putting away a fair amount of whiskey.

Recalling the campfires and tearful prayers of his youth, Quick emphasizes his overwhelming sense “that Christ had come to me, as if I could have reached out and touched his robe and been made whole.” In the present, what limited peace his mother can find is immersed in a similar sense of the physical presence of Jesus. Quick now finds such belief to be out of reach—as distant as the mountaintop spiritual epiphanies he felt as a child. What he does have is the whiskey, which he drinks, not to escape so much as to imagine the divine presence he no longer feels:

When I swallow, the burn climbs my throat, and I try to imagine this burning sensation all over my body. Maybe this is what it feels like to touch the robe of Christ. Wasn’t it wine that Christ transformed into his blood? … I think if he were here right now, I would drink his wine until I could no longer stand. I would take him to my mother, so that he could lift her depression for good.

—Steve Thorngate