This is my term for when a mood-disorder patient is put on a medication, the dosage is raised, then another is tried, the dosage of that one raised, etc., in a fast-and-furious effort to find something — anything — that works. While providers often have good intentions behind putting a patient on the “medication mill,” [...]

Perhaps no single development has had more of an impact on the treatment of mood disorders, than the discovery of antidepressant medications, and for bipolar folks, mood stabilizers. Medications are the best-known treatments for mood disorders, and they are what most doctors will want to try first, when someone is initially diagnosed.While medications are often [...]

While I cannot really tell you how to build up self-esteem in someone who has little of it, I can describe ways in which self-esteem can be destroyed. Self-esteem is like almost anything that’s built; it’s far easier to demolish, than to construct. In fact, if you put your mind to it, I’m sure you [...]

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s famous quip about the weather, “A lot of people talk about self-esteem, but no one ever does anything about it.” Self-esteem has been identified as a “risk factor” in developing any number of mental, physical, and emotional problems. A strong self-esteem movement is alive in the world of education, attempting to [...]

I’ve referred to depression as a perception disorder, several times. I’d like to explore this in greater depth, as it affects how depressives relate to life. Note that I will be making some gross generalizations here — but even if these assertions don’t apply to everyone, experience has shown me that they’re valid observations nonetheless.Depressives [...]

The gulf separating patient and care-provider accounts for at least some of the reason why a majority of people who suffer a depressive episode, will suffer another within five years. Psychiatry calls this “recurrent depression,” and in cases when treatment is tried steadily, but episodes keep returning nonetheless, it’s called “refractory depression.”These are both clinical [...]

There’s another aspect of the divide between patient and care-provider when it comes to mood-disorder treatment; People with mood disorders see things — everything — differently than “normal” folks do. Depression is not merely a mood, or emotional, disorder; it’s a perception disorder. Depressives sometimes appear to have poor judgement, or obsess over unimportant things. [...]

The field of psychiatry (which, for purposes of my discussion includes clinical psychology, even though they are not the same thing), is fundamentally divided — between care providers and patients. Perhaps in no other area of medicine are patients and providers so deeply divided as in this one.I would like to say at the outset, [...]

One of the problems with discussing clinical depression, is the word “depression” itself. Many people confuse a state of clinical depression — i.e. the mental illness that manifests as (sometimes periodic) states of sadness — with the normal depressed emotions that people experience from time to time. They are not the same, however. In fact, [...]

Depression. Or, “clinical depression.” Whatever you call it, it seems to be everywhere, these days.Go into any bookstore, and you see dozens of volumes on depression, in the self-help or psychology sections. Ditto for many libraries. Watch television or listen to radio, and you’ll hear commercials for antidepressant medications. Read the newspaper and listen to [...]