Resilience is in psychiatry the positive capacity of people to cope with stress and catastrophe. In this post it's used as having an adaptive system that uses exposure to stress to provide resistance to future negative events. Stress can lead to depression accompanied by atrophy and loss of neurons in the adult hippocampus in experimental studies. The effect of stress or whether you can become depressed due to stress seem to depend on individual characteristics. One characteristic is gene expression. Is it in your genes? Caspi et al showed that the 5-HTT genotype (serotonin transporter gene) moderates the depressogenic influence of .....read more »

Depression is common in patients with Parkinson's disease (mean prevalence 17% in patients with Parkinson's). It can be the first sign of the disease. It can be treated with antidepressants. There is little evidence that patients with Parkinson’s disease might benefi t more from any one particular class of antidepressants than any others. The problem with that is side-effects and interactions with the Parkinson medication. ECT is an option for the treatment of depression in Parkinson's disease. It also helps for the motor symptoms although mostly temporary. As the disease progresses the motor symptoms return or become worse. Since Parkinson's disease is .....read more »

After searching for websites about depression (‘‘depression,’’ ‘‘depression treatment,’’ and ‘‘depression help’’) with a popular search engine: Google, the authors of this work carefully examined the websites. The websites were evaluated on accountability, interactivity, esthetics, readability and content quality. They also used the brief DISCERN as a content quality indicator for general consumers. They found 58 sites from which 13 were excluded: 8 were not websites, 3 were blogs or discussion forum, 1 required an access login, and 1 was inaccessible. They analyzed 45 websites, the overall quality of the websites about depression was good. Those with a high score on the .....read more »

This video shows the hallmarks of depression which is not only low or sad mood but also being irritable, grumpy and seeking social isolation. These features are xecelnt expressed in this video. For a more precise description of the hallmarks of depression in this video please see: Grinch likely depressed, suffers from lack of love, joy, expert says at physorg. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill psychologist Cynthia Bulik, Ph.D. tells you more about these symptoms in the video So, Bulik says, besides learning that Christmas doesn’t come from a store, we can learn from the Grinch that depression doesn’t .....read more »

Depression is common the estimated lifetime prevalence is 15%. Most patients with depressive disorders are treated by primary care physicians. Approximately 43% of such primary care patients report some degree of suicidal ideation within the previous week. So treating these patients is no sinecure. Moreover, diagnosing depressive disorder in primary care is not easy. Is it useful to do screening for depression in primary care? A review was conducted for the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force about the benefits and harms of screening adult patients for depression. The articles were reviewed by two investigators against in and exclusion criteria, the articles .....read more »

In a recent previous post the topic was the neuroanatomy of depression, or which sites of the brain can play a role in depression. Which parts of the brain show the dysfunction underlying depression. MRI scans can link neurobiology of depression with clinical findings through brain imaging studies that examine regional structure, regional function or connectivity. This can aid the diagnosis of depression. But can structural and functional MRI predict response to an antidepressant or psychotherapy? From a recent review including studies examining the relations between imaging and clinical outcome in patients with depression: In general, patients who remit have larger pretreatment .....read more »

Based on the results from functional neuroimaging studies, lesion patient studies and brain stimulation studies two important brain areas play an important role in the pathophysiology of depression. These two brain area s are the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is depicted in red on the picture above and the dorsolateral prefrontalcortex in blue. The red part is in the forehead on the inside of the two brain half's (hemispheres) (A) and the blue part is on the outside of the frontal part of both brain parts (B). The funny thing is that .....read more »

Stanford Professor Robert Sapolsky says "depression is like the worst disease you can get." Here is an excerpt from that lecture. A video of the complete lecture is available here. During a recent workshop presented by Stanford's Faculty and Staff Help Center, biologist Robert Sapolsky talked about the biological and psychological causes of depression, how to recognize its symptoms and how to handle the disease. In short depression is an illness not a weakness. Related posts:Understanding Depression in Kidney Disease Parkinson’s Disease and Depression Depression and Coronary Heart Disease in Women ..read more »

patients with depression often complain of difficulty getting to sleep, frequent awakenings during the night, early morning awakening, or nonrestorative sleep patients with mood disorders exhibit higher rates of sleep disturbance than the general population, and sleep disturbance can continue even during periods of remission patients with insomnia are up to 10 times more likely to have depression than normal sleepers individuals with persistent insomnia have a significantly higher risk of developing new-onset depression than those who have no sleep complaints 14% of patients with persistent insomnia had concurrent depression whereas depression occurred in less than 1% of patients who had no sleep complaints patients .....read more »

QUEST on KQED Public Media. A very good video about the symptoms of depression and antidepressants. It shows how antidepressants are supposed to work with nice graphics. The next topic is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation or TMS. An option when medication isn't working. One of 9 options for treatment resistant depression. A treatment is shown with some explanation of how it works. The FDA has approved TMS for depression, but is still costs a lot of money. Personally I am not impressed with the evidence of the efficacy of TMS for depression Also shown is .....read more »