Depression - Poked & Prodded

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Adventures in being sick, getting better, staying well.

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YouTube Medical Video: The Weird, the Ugly, and the Sometimes Helpful

By Scott Mowbray | May 30, 2008

Want to take the measure of American health obsessions (and those of the rest of the world, for that matter)? Go fishing in YouTube, the billion-screen multiplex of the video id. The channel contains a deep and often deeply weird vein of health content, ranging from the inspiring to the neurotic, the crackpot to the almost pornographic. The following is part one of a periodic survey—periodic meaning whenever I get around to it.

Creative and inspiring
Linda Van Bael’s “Chronic Pain: A new me” is a homemade stop-motion animation showing hundreds of drug ampules and other chronic pain paraphernalia from a year of treatment. All the medical bits come together by the end of the video to form the image of a human body—the “new me” of the title. Since being posted in January 2007, it’s had an undeservedly meager 720 views in the English version (all viewing numbers were noted the hour I wrote this), compared, say, to the 4,923,931 views of a video of a Scottish Fold kitten in a shoe. Painful lesson here for YouTube artists: I don’t care if it’s about open heart surgery, put a kitten in your medical video.

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Britney Spears Is Not a Poster Child for Mental Illness

By Walter Armstrong | February 6, 2008

Britney Spears’s new role as poster girl for mental illness may be preposterous, but her escalating self-destruction sure looks like the real thing.

And I’m not alone in feeling a certain thrill at the spectacle. A multibillion-dollar gossip economy has sprung up to satisfy the cravings of a global audience for stories like Britney’s. There’s something fascinating in her boundless defiance of court orders, social norms, reason, all the restraints by which the rest of us live. She’s on an epic tear of rage and hatred.

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Could New Brain Cells Cure Your Depression?

By Walter Armstrong | January 30, 2008

New brain cells may help lift depression
This is the third—and final, I promise—course in possible new treatments for depression. For those of you who are still with me, congratulations and you have my sympathy. Even if you don’t run out and apply the latest discoveries in depression to your treatment plan, at least you will have a glimpse of where innovative research and drug development may head over the next decade.

Neurogenesis is nature’s gift to our gray matter: the ability to grow new brain cells and even heal the brain. It is likely that progress in treating depression will increasingly depend on understanding both why brain cells die in the first place and why the growth of new cells can be stopped in its tracks.

About the cause of depression, the neurogenesis theory, along with the inflammatory theory I mentioned last week, is getting close to kicking the “low level of serotonin” mantra to the curb. The mainstream media may not catch on for years. Ditto your doctor. But these new theories got a big boost when a study in 2000 demonstrated that antidepressants increased neurogenesis in the adult rat brain.

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Mood-Lifting Drugs of the Future

By Walter Armstrong | January 23, 2008

Spicemedicinedepression Last week I tested your patience by playing Mr. Science. This week allow me to introduce you to the real thing—Michael Maes, a flesh-and-blood neuropsychiatrist from Belgium. His method of diagnosing and treating patients with depression may give you and your doctor some innovative options to add to your antidepressant regimen now or down the line.

Maes runs a medical center called Molecular Care for Your Body and Mind Outpatient Clinics. Don’t be put off by its quacky name: Maes has been on the cutting-edge of depression studies for nearly a quarter of a century. His work is cited by many others as science closes in on the true neurochemical causes of this disease (in addition to genetics, lifestyle, and how your mom and dad treated you at age 3).

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Brain Trust

By Walter Armstrong | January 16, 2008

Pills Enough with the soft stuff. This week, my fellow depressees, we start getting serious about science.

Here’s why. Last year at a meeting I went to for work, Eric Kandel, a legendary neuroscientist who won a Nobel Prize for his discovery of the molecular basis of memory, learning, and much more, was asked what clinical areas were most in need of new ideas and new approaches for more effective drug development. "Antidepressants," Kandel snapped.

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Another Holiday Season of Quality Alone Time

By Walter Armstrong | January 9, 2008

Wintersolitude250 Well, it wasn’t that bad, even for Scrooges like me. The holiday spirit got into my blood—the trees and decorations, the Bing Crosby soundtracks, the crowds of gift givers loaded down with shopping bags, pushing and shoving, half drunk on the adrenaline released by buying and buying and buying.

Such expectation in the air!

My coworkers, all married or otherwise partnered, displayed enormous energy and purpose. They talked about their gift lists, travel plans. They’d never been nicer.

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Talking About Talk Therapy

By Walter Armstrong | January 2, 2008

Grouptherapy It doesn’t take long before most of the people who meet me learn that I’m in psychoanalysis and on antidepressants and other meds.

I have no qualms about popping my Cymbalta, Wellbutrin, naltrexone, and Klonopin (as needed) in public. After spending many years around gay men who were walking pharmacies of AIDS medication, it’s just second nature to dose on the go.

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Antidepressant Sexcapades, Part Two

By Walter Armstrong | December 19, 2007

Walter250blur
Something’s been bugging me all week. …

The last thing I want this blog to do is scare anyone away from getting treated for depression. In dwelling on the sexual side effects of the Prozac-type drugs, I don’t want to leave the impression that you have to choose between happiness and horniness—that in swallowing that pill, you are kissing goodbye to sex.

If anything, the sexual side effects have been blown way out of proportion by the media relative to their seriousness and to the benefits of the drugs. Even slapping on the label of “sexual dysfunction” is alarmist.

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We Try Harder

By Walter Armstrong | December 12, 2007

I originally thought of this blog entry as “Where, Oh Where, Did My Orgasm Go?” I had in mind a comic riff on that most notorious downside of antidepressants: sexual dysfunction (SD). I was going to regale you with anecdotes of my many frustrating, fumbling, ultimately heroic efforts to achieve sexual satisfaction against the seemingly insurmountable odds posed by the little green-and-yellow pill. I’m single and often solitary, by the way, so for this blog I’m going to talk about solitary sex.

Like the time I lay in bed for over an hour, sweating, swearing, starting, and stopping but refusing to yield in my bull-headed determination to reach orgasm. I was Sisyphus pushing the boulder of arousal up the hill—and not getting anywhere near the peak.

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Still Hopeful After All These Years

By Walter Armstrong | December 5, 2007

Grouptherapy250 So I was thinking: Here I am, writing a weekly blog about depression and related matters, but what makes me the expert?

I’ve never attempted suicide, never spent the weekend hiding under the covers, never gone more than two or three days without eating or sleeping. Till recently I had never even joined any of the many message boards that the so-called depression community has spawned across the World Wide Web.

It’s time for Dude to present his credentials.

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