Posted 11/03/2014 You might not immediately think conditions as apparently disparate as depression and inflammation could be linked. Right up front, let me say if you’ve got a history of depression or anxiety, you’re not alone. With 11% of Americans over age ten taking antidepressants daily, we can probably triple that percentage to estimate the […]
Category: Mental Health
Mental health therapy can help with low energy, mood swings, appetite changes, anxiety, addiction, trauma, feelings of hopelessness or helplessness, shifting sleep patterns, thoughts of harming yourself or others, and many other symptoms.
My Favorite Herb: St. John’s Wort
It’s really annoying the way the pharmaceutical industry snookered US physicians over the herbal antidepressant St. John’s wort. If only the profession had been just a little skeptical of an article that appeared in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) a while back we might not be as up to our bellybuttons in […]
My Favorite Supplement: Magnesium
Along with most things relating to good nutrition, I wasn’t taught much of anything about supplemental magnesium either in medical school or during my internal medicine residency. It was a professional clinical nutritionist I met during a long-ago meeting of the American Holistic Medical Association who first told me, “You’ll never go wrong if you […]
Depression, Anxiety, and Acupuncture: A Major Breakthrough
Posted 04/07/2014 The statistics are simply staggering. The National Institutes of Health estimates that more than 20 million people in the US, roughly 10% of the population, have depression, defined as a recurring major depressive disorder, a constant state of depression (dysthymia), or bipolar disorder. Officially, these three are called mood disorders, considered separate from […]
Psychiatry Has Gone Bonkers
It may come as a surprise to learn that 11% of Americans over age 6 are taking one or more psychoactive drugs (also called psychotropics) daily for various forms of mental illness. In fact the fastest growing population being prescribed psychoactive drugs are children between 2 and 11. Would it surprise you to learn that […]
Coping With Work Stress
You’d need to be a fly on the wall of my secluded little exam room at WholeHealth Chicago to realize how thoroughly day-to-day stress contributes to chronic physical and emotional ill health. Stress occurs when some force to which you’ve relinquished power controls your life. The source might be work, money, relationships, caregiving…or some grim […]
Coping With Work Stress in Today’s Uncertain Job Market
Everyone has experienced some level of work-related stress. Dubbed the “21st century equivalent of the Black Death, stress is the top cause of workplace sickness. While some workplace pressures can be stimulating and motivating, when they become stressful, it means you are struggling to cope. The tension and anxiety resulting from stress plays out on […]
An Occasionally Pleasant Minimum Security Prison
What three things do the following occupations have in common: teacher, nurse, secretary (now called administrative assistant), and information technologist? First, I would classify them all as helping professions. Second, based both on surveys and my own experience as a physician, they all work under conditions of stress, suffer a lot of anxiety and depression, […]
The Chemistry of Stress
Understanding the chemistry of stress begins with an appreciation of molecules in our bodies called neurotransmitters. Dubbed “molecules of emotion” by the scientist who first discovered their existence, Dr. Candace Pert, these are produced throughout our bodies, most notably in the brain and along the gastrointestinal tract. One of the neurotransmitters, serotonin, seems to have […]
Dentist Anxieties? Fear of Flying?
Posted 01/23/2012 One of my favorite books has always been the 1964 classic The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz, MD. A psychiatrist and still writing at the ripe age of 91, Szasz castigated his fellow professionals for labeling too many people with relatively mild emotional symptoms “mentally ill,” especially when it came to […]
The Anxiety in Your Gut
Posted 01/17/2012 “That gut feeling.” We’ve all experienced it, but we may have difficulty describing the sensation. We sense or “know” something internally, feeling butterflies in our stomach, almost as if our entire intestinal tract were a second brain, low on reflective skills but high on intuitive ones. During the past decade an incredible amount […]
Health Consequences of Harassment
I’ve been tracking the health consequences of the recession among my patients. The first group of victims is obvious: those suffering the anxiety and depression that follows job loss, protracted unemployment, living on savings, cutting expenses, downsizing where they live, and, of course, losing health insurance. At the very moment these folks could benefit from […]
Belly Fat! New Research Reveals…
Between the print and TV ads and the pop-ups scuttling like mice from the four borders of your computer screen, belly fat seems to have surpassed global warming as our next great anxiety.
It’s clear these ads are aimed at women, some of whom fall for the hucksterism of what is for many little more than an annoying physiologic change occurring during a perfect storm of dietary indiscretion, genetic predisposition, and stress. As one patient laconically remarked, “My divorce from hell took a solid year. I finally got rid of him, but in the process…” (patting her tummy with both hands) “I got myself…this!”
Obsessing Over Regrets
We each have our own personal stash of regrets, and when they surface our language trends to the elegantly named counterfactual conditional phrasing: “If only I had married Bob, I would have been happy.” Well, you didn’t marry Bob (instead you married The Jerk), and in any case there’s no guarantee Bob isn’t his own brand of jerk.
Stress Less: Meditation
Meditation is the simplest relaxation technique to explain and by far the hardest to master.
Money and Happiness
“Money won’t make you happy.” A boring cliché, hammered into our heads by our moms since that gleeful afternoon when we showed her our first day’s profits from the lemonade stand. We still try our best to believe it, but secretly we don’t. In our hearts we’d like–just once–to be tested with wealth.
Don’t Shoot the Messenger
I recently listened to the sociologists-epidemiologists Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett discussing their book The Spirit Level on NPR. A few days later, they were on Book TV and soon I was reading a lengthy piece on them in the London Review of Books. The publicity worked and I bought the book. By the way, a spirit level is the same as a bubble level, the carpenter’s device containing a bubble in liquid to ensure whatever’s being constructed is plumb.
Do I Really Need My Antidepressants?
A patient I’ll call Schuyler, 31, had been using one antidepressant medication or another for more than four years and wanted to stop. As I mentioned last week, getting off prescription drugs is a fairly common reason people make appointments with us at WholeHealth Chicago.
Holiday Stress Rx: Ten Tips
December is a stressful month, especially for women and despite all the holiday cheer.
Some of you might be thinking “But he’s Jewish–what does he know about Christmas stress?” Here are my credentials: I’ve been married for many years to a Christian woman and I’ve watched as she and our extended family become fried by the stress during every holiday season. Also, my patients tell me the holidays stress them, period.
A SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder) Time of Year
Although H1N1 along with our annual “regular flu” are rightfully grabbing the headlines these days, now that it’s October we need to brace ourselves for the annual epidemic of seasonal affective disorder (SAD).