Category: Depression

Imagine if everyone coped with stress in this surprisingly effective way…

Giving others a small helping hand is a surprisingly effective way to deal with everyday stressors, a new study finds.

Dr Emily Ansell, a clinical psychologist who led the study, said:

“Our research shows that when we help others we can also help ourselves.

Stressful days usually lead us to have a worse mood and poorer mental health, but our findings suggest that if we do small things for others, such as holding a door open for someone, we won’t feel as poorly on stressful days.”

And everyday stressors can be surprisingly harmful to health.

So when stressed, it may feel like we need the help of others, rather than providing help to others.

But being a little proactive can benefit the self.

For the research 77 adults between the ages of 18 and 44 reported on their daily lives over two weeks.

Each day they listed stressful events and any times they’d given others a little helping hand.

Small things like opening a door or just asking someone if they needed help were included.

The results showed helping others helped buffer people’s emotions against stress and made them feel happier.

Dr Ansell said:

“It was surprising how strong and uniform the effects were across daily experiences.

For example, if a participant did engage in more prosocial behaviors on stressful days there was essentially no impact of stress on positive emotion or daily mental health.

And there was only a slight increase in negative emotion from stress if the participant engaged in more prosocial behaviors.”

Perhaps the findings could be helpful at this time of year, Dr Ansell said:

“The holiday season can be a very stressful time, so think about giving directions, asking someone if they need help, or holding that elevator door over the next month.

It may end up helping you feel just a little bit better.”

The next stage is to run an experiment telling people to engage in more prosocial beheviours and see how that influences mood, Dr Ansell said:

“This would help clarify whether prescribing prosocial behaviors can be used as a potential intervention to deal with stress, particularly in individuals who are experiencing depressed mood or high acute stress.”

The study was published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science (Raposa et al., 2015).

Relaxed image from Shutterstock

One-third of people experiencing major depression could be of this new type.

Inflammation in the brain could explain episodes of major depression in some people, new studies suggest.

Around one-third of people experiencing major depression have high-levels of inflammation markers in their blood.

This persistent inflammation could explain some of the worst symptoms of depression.

The inability to feel pleasure — called anhedonia — is a particularly stubborn symptom.

Depressed people often find it hard to experience pleasure from everyday activities like eating or spending time with friends and family.

Dr Jennifer Felger, author of a new study on the link between inflammation and depression, said:

“Some patients taking antidepressants continue to suffer from anhedonia.

Our data suggest that by blocking inflammation or its effects on the brain, we may be able to reverse anhedonia and help depressed individuals who fail to respond to antidepressants.”

Dr Felger and colleagues scanned the brains of depressed people as part of their research.

They found that those with high levels of inflammation also had critical communication problems in the brain.

It turned out that regions central to motivation and reward showed lower levels of communication.

Dr Felger said:

“We were interested in these regions of the brain because of their known importance for response to reward.

In addition, we had seen reduced activation of these areas in people receiving immuno-stimulatory treatments for hepatitis C virus or cancer, which suggested that they may be sensitive to inflammation.”

Scientists are now considering ways to fight the inflammation so as to help treat the depression.

One option is L-DOPA, which may increase reward connectivity in the brain.

Another option is an anti-inflammatory antibody called infliximab.

This has been found in a recent study to help some depressed people with high levels of inflammation.

Dr Felger said:

“We hope our investigations may lead to new therapies to treat anhedonia in high-inflammation depression.”

The study was published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry (Felger et al., 2015).

Depression image from Shutterstock

…and if you weren’t mom’s favourite, there’s is an unexpected upside.

Being mom’s favourite child has an unexpected disadvantage: they are more likely to be depressed.

Professor Jill Suitor, the study’s first author, explained:

“There is a cost for those who perceive they are the closest emotionally to their mothers, and these children report higher depressive symptoms, as do those who experience the greatest conflict with their mothers or who believe they are the children in whom their mothers are the most disappointed.”

The results come from a study of 725 adult children in 309 families.

They were surveyed across seven years when the mothers were between 65 and 75.

The results showed that the sibling who was felt closest to their mother also had the highest depressive symptoms.

Dr Megan Gilligan, who co-authored the study, said:

“This cost comes from higher sibling tension experienced by adult children who are favored for emotional closeness, or the greater feelings of responsibility for the emotional care of their older mothers.”

Less surprisingly, siblings who felt their mother was most disappointed in them were also more likely to be depressed.

This finding was particularly strong in black families, said Professor Suitor:

“What we found suggests that the black offspring were particularly distressed when they, as opposed to their siblings, were the children in whom mothers were most disappointed.”

The study was published in the Journal of Gerontology: Social Sciences (Suitor et al., 2015).

Siblings image from Shutterstock

Even people who only followed this tip a little had 50% better mental health.

Compared with inactivity, even ‘mild’ levels of physical activity are linked to 50% better mental health, a new study finds.

The more exercise people performed, the more protected they were against mental disorders, the research also found.

The conclusions come from a Spanish study of 1,422 people living in Madrid.

They were asked about how much exercise they did and their general state of health, both mental and physical.

The results showed that people who did low or high levels of physical exercise both had better mental health than those who were relatively inactive.

Both low and high levels of exercise were also linked to more than 50% reductions in the risk of suffering mental illness compared with the inactive.

The study was published in the journal Revista de Psycologia del Deporte (Romo et al., 2015).

Personality image from Shutterstock

Drug combination encourage autophagy of brain cancer cells — they eat themselves.

Antidepressants in combination with blood thinners have been found to fight brain cancer.

The study on mice found the treatment doubled their lifespan.

Both drugs encourage the cancer cells to eat themselves (called autophagy).

Professor Douglas Hanahan, one of the study’s author, said:

“It is exciting to envision that combining two relatively inexpensive and non-toxic classes of generic drugs holds promise to make a difference in the treatment of patients with lethal brain cancer.

However, it is presently unclear whether patients might benefit from this treatment.

This new mechanism-based strategy to therapeutically target glioblastoma is provocative, but at an early stage of evaluation, and will require considerable follow-up to assess its potential.”

The studies on mice will hopefully lead to trials in human patients, Professor Hanahan said:

“Importantly, the combination therapy did not cure the mice; rather, it delayed disease progression and modestly extended their lifespan.

It seems likely that these drugs will need to be combined with other classes of anticancer drugs to have benefit in treating gliblastoma patients.

One can also envision ‘co-clinical trials’ wherein experimental therapeutic trials in the mouse models of glioblastom are linked to analogous small proof-of-concept trials in GBM patients. Such trials may not be far off.”

The research was published in the journal Cancer Cell (Shchors et al., 2015).

Brain illustration image from Shutterstock

Huge study concludes that a food can reduce depression risk in men and women.

Eating fish reduces the risk of depression by 17%, a new study concludes.

A fishy diet may aid the mental health of both men and women.

While some recent studies have been inconclusive, this research pooled data from 26 different studies.

Altogether they included 150,278 people.

The study’s authors conclude:

“Higher fish consumption may be beneficial in the primary prevention of depression.

Future studies are needed to further investigate whether this association varies according to the type of fish.”

The researchers, however, did not see the link in studies conducted outside Europe.

Recent research has also found that a high intake of fruits, vegetables, fish and whole grains is linked to lower risk of developing depression.

The research was published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health (Li et al., 2015).

Nutrients image from Shutterstock

People in general become more forgiving as they get older — but one type of forgiveness reduces depression.

Women who forgive others are less likely to feel depressed, a new study finds.

This was unaffected by whether they felt others had forgiven them.

For men, though, forgiving others and feeling unforgiven was linked to higher levels of depression.

Self-forgiveness, meanwhile, had little impact on depression for either men or women.

Dr Christine Proulx, one of the study’s authors, said:

“It doesn’t feel good when we perceive that others haven’t forgiven us for something.

When we think about forgiveness and characteristics of people who are forgiving — altruistic, compassionate, empathetic — these people forgive others and seem to compensate for the fact that others aren’t forgiving them.

It sounds like moral superiority, but it’s not about being a better person.

It’s ‘I know that this hurts because it’s hurting me,’ and those people are more likely to forgive others, which appears to help decrease levels of depression, particularly for women.”

As people age, they have a tendency to look back on their lives and reflect.

This includes thinking about people who have wronged them and others they have wronged.

How people frame their personal history can change how they feel about their lives.

The research recruited over 1,000 people who were 67 years or older.

They answered questions about their psychological well-being, health and religion.

Ms Ashley Ermer, the study’s first author, said:

“As people get older, they become more forgiving.

Our population also predominately was Christian, which may influence individuals’ willingness to forgive and could function differently among individuals with different beliefs.”

The researchers were surprised to discover that self-forgiveness had little effect on depression.

The real key is to forgive others.

Indeed forgiving others really can lead to forgetting, according to another recent study.

Dr Proulx said:

“Self-forgiveness didn’t act as the protector against depression.

It’s really about whether individuals can forgive other people and their willingness to forgive others.”

The research was published in the journal Aging and Mental Health (Ermer & Proulx, 2015).

Forgiveness image from Shutterstock

Feeling sad can change your vision.

Feeling sad can change the perception of colour, a new study finds.

People who were feeling sad found it more difficult to identify colours between blue and yellow on the spectrum, researchers found.

Dr Christopher Thorstenson, the study’s first author, said:

“Our results show that mood and emotion can affect how we see the world around us.

Our work advances the study of perception by showing that sadness specifically impairs basic visual processes that are involved in perceiving color.”

The study adds to the evidence that depression changes the way people perceive the world in all sorts of ways.

For example, people in a depressed mood are worse at detecting visual contrast.

The scientists were inspired by common phrases like ‘feeling blue’, which suggest a connection between colour and mood.

Dr Thorstenson said:

“We were already deeply familiar with how often people use color terms to describe common phenomena, like mood, even when these concepts seem unrelated.

We thought that maybe a reason these metaphors emerge was because there really was a connection between mood and perceiving colors in a different way.”

For the research people were put into different moods then asked to judge the colours.

Dr Thorstenson explained the results:

“We were surprised by how specific the effect was, that color was only impaired along the blue-yellow axis.

We did not predict this specific finding, although it might give us a clue to the reason for the effect in neurotransmitter functioning.”

The research was published in the journal  Psychological Science (Thorstenson et al., 2015).

Sad eyes image from Shutterstock