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If you - or someone you know - are having thoughts about suicide, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Calls are connected to a certified crisis center nearest the caller's location. Services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.                                                                            If you - or someone you know - are having thoughts about suicide, call 1-800-273-TALK (8255). Calls are connected to a certified crisis center nearest the caller's location. Services are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

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Our vision is to advance the public awareness of mental health issues so as to eliminate the stigma that surrounds depression and mood disorders through education and advocacy, as well as striving to obtain quality medical care for mental health patients, as it is no different from any other medical illness.

 

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Why We 'Self-Medicate' Our Own Depression or Anxiety

This is mental health awareness month.

 


 05/09/2013 Which means, in my experience, that it is still, to some extent at least, alcohol awareness month. Many people who suffer with undiagnosed depression or anxiety reach for alcohol or drugs to calm their nerves or relieve them of emotional pain. In other words, they self-medicate. Rather than seek out some help in managing depression, anxiety or chronic resentment, they seek their own solution -- a solution which, while it works pretty well for a while, eventually complicates the issues and leads to more pain. It's the same sort of premise as having access to your own morphine drip: You administer your own dose whenever you begin to feel pain.

Hiding in Plain Sight
Many people can get rid of temporary pain by having a couple of drinks and calming down in the evening, say, or by knocking back some "liquid courage" before facing a social event. For some, there's no more to it than this, and their use of alcohol remains fairly benign. But for another group, a group that is larger than any one cares to admit, the solution slips into a dependency, and the dependency slips into an addiction. Slowly, this group becomes trapped in their own solution. Not only can they not quite face an evening without some "help," but their own healthy coping strategies begin to atrophy through lack of use. And as they increasingly depend more and more on a substance to change their mood, their relationship with that substance comes to have a life of its own. Pretty soon you aren't really sure who you are talking to at dinner: Is it the person you remember or that person "under the influence"? Is it the "booze talking" expansively, angrily, or overly confidently, or is it them?

The connection between alcohol/drugs and mental health is not made enough and cannot be made too often. Once a using pattern begins, often innocently enough, it can come to have a life of its own. No longer is the person downing a drink -- now the drink is downing the person.



Published By Lindsay, 2013-05-12 22:48:21 Read More...
Psychotherapy

Relationship Advice: Women Need Love, Men Need Respect

Women naturally give love, but our men really want something else.

 

 

 

My husband and I recently went to a “marriage conference” attended by (and highly recommended by) some of our friends. One would think that a relationship-focused conference would be something that most men would avoid at all costs, equating it to sitting for seven straight hours in a women’s clothing store while their wife tries on outfit after outfit, asking “do I look fat in this?”

Yet the atmosphere at this event, the Love & Respect Live Conference, was something the likes of which I’ve never experienced. As the primary speaker, Dr. Emerson Eggerichs, spoke, the men in the audience laughed out loud, nodded their heads and visibly appeared moved. According to my husband, Eggerichs was expressing concepts that uncannily described what matters most to men in a relationship. The thing is - men being men - most don’t actually know what they most deeply need from a woman (other than the obvious!) and would not be able to describe or articulate it.



Published By Lindsay, 2013-04-27 16:13:45 Read More...
Med & Health News

Differences Between Boys and Girls With ADHD

 
Despite these factors, girls with ADHD remain at significant psychosocial risk into adulthood.

 

By E. Mark Mahone, PhD | October 3, 2012

Childhood ADHD is a major public health problem, with prevalence estimated to be over 5 million children in the US alone. Of particular concern is the recent increase in diagnosis of the disorder. In 2011, the CDC estimated that nearly 9% of children in the US (1 of 11 children between the ages of 5 and 17) have ADHD; the diagnosis is made in approximately twice as many boys as girls.1 Moreover, ADHD rarely exists alone. In most children with ADHD (75% to 80%), a second (or even third) psychiatric disorder develops at some point in their lives.
 



Published By Lindsay, 2013-04-21 19:20:08 Read More...
Featured Topics

Is mental health seasonal?

 

New Google-based research suggests that we're happier -- and saner -- in the summer months

 

Is mental health seasonal? (Credit: Shutterstock)
This piece originally appeared on Pacific Standard.

Pacific StandardSpring has sprung, at least for most of us, which means sundresses, seersucker and boozy croquet parties on the front lawn. Goodbye happy lamp, hello mimosa.

But it’s not just champagne that’s lifting our spirits and banishing the wintertime blues. According to Google (and a team of researchers from the University of Southern California, Harvard and Johns Hopkins) mental illnesses — such as obsessive compulsive disorder, depression and anorexia — are far more seasonal than we think.

The epidemiologists, led by John Ayers, combed through every Google search performed in the United States and Australia between 2006 and 2010, looking for queries like “symptoms of” and “medications for” OCD, anxiety, ADHD, bipolar, depression, anorexia, bulimia and schizophrenia.

 



Published By Lindsay, 2013-04-22 13:13:21 Read More...
Announcements

Moderator of the Month Of April

Hello Members!   LGJ and I are announcing the Moderator of the Month of April

April came in like a like a Lion and went out like March..a gentle Lion!

 

 

We had a new Moderator of the Month of April

 

NorthernStar.jpg

 

NorthernStar!

 

She is fairly new and has caught on like a super aurora borealis star that she is!

I am amazed at how quickly she has learned her basic skills and I am so proud of her.



Published By Forum Admin, 2013-04-07 20:24:50 Read More...
Meds

Things You Want to Know About Psychiatric Medications But Didn't Know Who (or How) to Ask



 

 April 21, 2013 
Psychiatric medications are among the most frequently-prescribed medications in this country and throughout the world. One in 10 Americans takes an anti-depressant. Yet despite the incessant barrage of multi-media drug promotions, you may not have the answers to the questions you most want answered.

I asked more than a dozen expert psychiatric colleagues, and myself, the questions they most frequently receive about psychiatric medications from people who take them or their families. Here are a dozen of those many questions; the responses are mine.



Published By Lindsay, 2013-04-21 18:31:21 Read More...
Stories

I’m One of the 26 Percent with Mental Illness

 In Crisis

 

  • Annmarie Timmins, age 9 (left), with her brother on vacation in Franconia Notch.

    Annmarie Timmins, age 9 (left), with her brother on vacation in Franconia Notch.

  •  
  •  

After the Monitor’s mental health series, “In Crisis,” was published last week, I got one reaction more than any other: Readers were surprised, some unconvinced, that 26 percent of New Hampshire’s residents have a mental health disorder.

The statistic appeared in the second story of the series and came from a 2010 study by the Concord-based New Hampshire Center for Public Policy Studies. The percentage includes a range of diagnoses, from major depression to anxiety problems to bipolar disorder.

“Didn’t 26 percent seem high?” a caller asked me last week.

Not to me. But I’m one of the 26 percent.

I have been hospitalized twice for “suicidal ideation,” most recently for eight days in 2009 with a diagnosis of “major depressive order and anxiety disorder,” according to my records. I take four medications a day and have my counselor’s name and number in my emergency contacts on my cell phone.

This will be news to most of the people who know me, family members included. That’s because with lots of help from my husband, a lot of exercise (one of my therapies) and medication, I’m able to keep my depression and breakdowns private.

So, I understand the reaction to the 26 percent.



Published By Forum Admin, 2013-04-08 21:23:50 Read More...
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