Depression has been known for well over 2,000 years. The famed ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates, called it melancholia. This name comes from the Greek words μελας χωλη, or “black bile;” the Greeks thought an overabundance of black bile, a fluid formed by the liver, made one melancholy (a word which has come to mean “depressed”). [...]

For a lot of people, mental illness is something they know only in the headlines, usually when a mentally-ill person commits a crime. The case of Andrea Yates leaps to mind, but many others have graced the pages of our newspapers or the screens of our television sets.When mental illness is something one hears about [...]

While psychiatric-ward stays have saved many lives (including mine), overall, they aren’t always the best way to deal with a depressive. Since psychiatry has become crisis-oriented, however, they’re a necessary evil. They will continue to be, until psychiatry becomes less crisis-oriented.One of the main problems with putting depressed patients into psychiatric wards, is that they’re [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]