Antidepressants Blog » Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid http://pharmdze.com About depression and its treatment Mon, 25 Jul 2011 14:38:48 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.1.1 BDD BEHAVIOURS – DIETING http://pharmdze.com/2011/06/bdd-behaviours-dieting/ http://pharmdze.com/2011/06/bdd-behaviours-dieting/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 14:24:28 +0000 admin http://pharmdze.com/?p=186 While dieting is a common behavior, as well as a feature of eating disorders, it can also be a symptom of BDD. I first became aware of this when reading about BDD before I’d begun my own research. I found the published case of a young man from Germany who thought his cheeks were too “rosy and round”; to make them thinner, he severely starved himself. Since then, I’ve seen peoplewho’ve dieted for similar reasons. One young man severely starved himself in the hope that losing large amounts of weight would erase wrinkles from his face. Another lost 30 pounds to make his face less wide. Other people with BDD diet for more conventional reasons. They try to flatten their stomach or slim their thighs or calves. Some people avoid salty foods or take water pills to decrease eye puffmess, stomach bloating, or facial swelling. Others eat special diets—for example, avoiding chocolate or greasy foods, or taking herbal supplements—trying to make their skin clear. One man I treated went from 160 to 120 pounds because he worried his skin would break out if he ate anything greasy or oily; in fact, he avoided most foods. After treatment with Prozac, his skin worries disappeared and his weight became normal again. Men who think their body is too small may eat high-protein low-fat diets to become larger. One man who did this, however, didn’t allow himself to get too large and muscular because he feared that compared to the rest of his body, his penis would look too small.*109\204\8*

]]> http://pharmdze.com/2011/06/bdd-behaviours-dieting/feed/ 0 SIGNS OF DEPRESSION: FAILURE – AT WORK AND IN RELATIONSHIPS http://pharmdze.com/2009/04/signs-of-depression-failure-at-work-and-in-relationships/ http://pharmdze.com/2009/04/signs-of-depression-failure-at-work-and-in-relationships/#comments Wed, 29 Apr 2009 08:46:31 +0000 admin http://pharmdze.com/2009/04/signs-of-depression-failure-at-work-and-in-relationships/ Depression cuts into a person’s ability to function so that some of the failure that they perceive does have a basis in reality Mental processes slow down and it is difficult to concentrate, to focus or to get things done. Work inevitably suffers; chores remain undone; things get botched up, leaving you with feelings of failure and inadequacy, many of which may be exaggerated but some of which may be true. It is easy to forget how competent you have been at other times and how much you have accomplished before. All these things seem insignificant when you are depressed. Dr Kay Redfield Jamison, in her wonderful memoir An Unquiet Mind, describes the difficulties in thinking she experienced during one of her depressions as follows:

Everything – every thought, word, movement – was an effort. Everything that once was sparkling now was flat. I seemed to myself to be dull, boring, inadequate, thick brained, unlit, unresponsive, chill skinned, bloodless, and sparrow drab. I doubted, completely, my ability to do anything well. It seemed as though my mind had slowed down and burned out to the point of being virtually useless. The wretched, convoluted, and pathetically confused mass of gray worked only well enough to torment me with a litany of my inadequacies and shortcomings in character, and to taunt me with the total, the desperate, hopelessness of it all.

This description of severe depression conveys many aspects of a depressed person’s thinking. In the years that followed the depression described above, Dr Jamison went on to succeed enormously as a psychologist, researcher and writer, but such a future is unthinkable when you are in the depths of a depression. It is important to realize how misleading the conclusions reached in a state of depression can be. Nevertheless, when you are depressed, the difficulty in thinking and functioning is real and has its consequences. Failure that occurs in the context of some of the symptoms of depression described here should therefore be considered a tell-tale sign of depression in its own right.

Failure occurs in the workplace, but also in personal dealings. Relationships require a capacity to attend to another person and an ability to feel engaged with that person, both of which are sorely impaired in depression. Others may well feel put off, and withdraw in response to the reclusiveness of a depressed person.

If you find you have been failing at work or in your personal relationships in a way that has not always been typical for you, and this has been going on for more than a few weeks, consider the possibility that you may be clinically depressed.

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