Information on popular complementary and alternative medical topics » Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT TO RECOGNIZE BDD IN CHILDREN AND ADOLESCENTS: PSYCHIATRIC DISORDERS

admin — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 17:59:12 +0000

Adolescents with BDD may be so excessively and exclusively focused on the supposed defect that they ignore and don’t develop their strengths. They may struggle with school and avoid hobbies and other activities. They may neglect other aspects of identity formation, such as career goals.Other psychiatric disorders that begin during adolescence and have been better studied than BDD have been shown to interfere with identity formation and similar adolescent developmental tasks. Because adolescents’ self-concept hasn’t yet crystallized, they may be particularly vulnerable to the negative effect psychiatric disorders can have on identity and personality formation. Studies have shown, for example, that school phobia interferes with developmental tasks. One study found that young adults who suffered from school phobia in childhood were more likely than other adults to be dependent, and they had more difficulty completing school and earning a living. They were more socially isolated, were less likely to be in a healthy, intimate relationship, and had more problems in sexual adjustment. BDD may be particularly prone to have these kinds of effects because it’s highly interpersonal in nature, perhaps increasing the risk to relationships. In addition, untreated BDD appears to often be chronic, making it difficult to get back on track and resume developmental tasks. Indeed, as Appendix A shows, a significant percentage of adults with BDD (30%) live with their parents; others are unemployed, haven’t graduated from school, and aren’t dating or socially interacting with others. Some do progress in life but much less than they’d like.*158\204\8*

STRESS AND MARRIAGE BREAKDOWN: LOSS OF MUTUAL RESPECT AS A RESULT OF CHANGED ATTITUDES AND IDEAS

admin — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 12:52:48 +0000

Although marriages are made between people who have significant differences in personality, and I believe this to be part of God’s overall design, it is essential that there be common ground and common interests.A love relationship can be seen as a plant with a life of its own; the good soil it needs is the soil of common goals and ideas. A marriage cannot survive easily between people with greatly differing cultural values and concepts. We need a fair amount of things in common, although, as I said before, we tend to be attracted to people who have qualities we ourselves lack in our personalities.One of the effects of stage three breakdown is that a person is no longer capable of holding strong views on any subject, views which would require that person to use psychic energy to negate an opposing view. A person in third stage breakdown is more easily talked out of holding political views contrary to his own; thus, brainwashing techniques usually require the breaking down of the person emotionally until he is experiencing stage three symptoms.Likewise, religious and racial intolerance is likely to be unable to be sustained by a person in stage three stress breakdown. Some people have even regarded their coming through a stress breakdown and experiencing their own inability to hold strongly negative views as a purifying experience which has ultimately done them some good.Some of the concepts by which some people are united in marriage might come into the category of binding concepts, imposing a negating obligation on each person. Marriages contracted under rules and customs of different religious groups, where roles and responsibilities differ from those otherwise held in society, might therefore come under threat from a change in the person’s ability to accept some binding contract requiring that person to negate normally held views.For example, if a strict Roman Catholic couple felt their marriage was valid only if no contraceptive technique were used, then stress breakdown symptoms in the wife might cause her to reject this view; because the validity of the marriage rested on that view, she might reject the marriage as well.Some fundamentalist Protestant sects do not encourage women in further education. If an intelligent woman in such a marriage, experiencing stress breakdown symptoms, began to doubt the wisdom of such a belief, she might let the marriage go as well, if the husband strenuously insisted that she could not educate herself while she stayed married to him.Or a couple might have been married with the resultant union having the effect of uniting the collective hatreds of two families of bigots. A stress breakdown affecting the husband’s 0r wife’s ability to hold such bigoted views might put him or her at odds with the entire clan, forcing an end to the marriage. Such happenings are not unheard of.
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DEPRESSION: A COSTLY PROBLEM AND A PROFITABLE BUSINESS

admin — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:44:34 +0000

A recent study reported the annual cost of depression in the US to be approximately $43 billion a year. This amount includes the cost of treating the condition and the loss of productivity and positive contribution to the economy resulting from the illness. Even without taking into account the human suffering involved in the condition, depression is considered to be one of the ten costliest conditions to any nation’s economy.

While depression is costly, its treatment is lucrative. Thus, the anti-depressants such as Prozac and Lustral are among the best-selling medications, representing billions in revenue for their manufacturers. While these medications can literally be life-savers, those who offer these commodities have a marked vested interest in maintaining their share of the market. They might be understandably concerned by the advent of an effective, off-prescription alternative treatment for depression. While some concerns about this new way of treating depression are warranted, others may be suspect, motivated by an attempt to protect economic turf.

In all cases, arguments against the self-administration of St John’s Wort need to be considered on their merits. For example, a leading psychiatrist was quoted in a recent article in the Washington Post on St John’s Wort as saying, ‘If a drug has enough activity to actually treat something that is real and substantial, then it ought to be administered under somebody’s supervision.’ If you consider the many active drugs available without prescription, which are routinely self-administered to treat real and substantial problems, such as aspirin for arthritis or antihistamines for allergies, it is clear that this argument is not universally applied in other areas of medicine. Nor, in my opinion, does it necessarily apply in psychiatry either. Perhaps the psychiatric establishment has yet to get used to the novelty of an over-the-counter treatment for depression.

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