Feeling Down? What You Need To Know About Depression
Depression is a very serious medical issue, and you should take appropriate steps to treat it. But it takes a lot of effort, and sometimes you don't know how to deal with it. This article contains several useful tips to help you manage your depression and live your life to the fullest.
If you are going the medication route to treat your depression, try a lot of different drugs before giving up. It is a little-known fact that people who have been helped by antidepressant medication had to try an average of four different drugs to find the one that worked for them.
If you are trying to work on controlling your depression, get rid of unhealthy relationships. Many times, people who suffer from depression find their symptoms getting worse when they have people in their lives who put them down or discourage them from feeling better. Stay around positive and supportive people.
If you suffer from depression, it is crucial that you keep negative thoughts out of your mind. By thinking of negative things, you will find that your depression symptoms will just get worse. Instead, focus on the things and people in your life that make you feel good and happy.
If you have medical depression you should anticipate that many people won't be able to understand it. Most people think that depression is just like being really sad but true sufferers know that this is not the truth. If people say things like "just chin up" to you, try to realize that they mean the best and just ignore it.
In your battle against depression, challenge your negative thoughts. One of the by-products of depression is putting a negative spin on how you see yourself, your future, and situations that you encounter. If you are like many people who suffer from depression, you are a perfectionist and hold check here yourself to standards that are impossibly high. Permit yourself to be less than perfect and quit beating yourself up if you don't meet impossible standards you have set for yourself. Negative thoughts will cause depression to become an endless cycle.
Although pushing people away and wanting to be alone is an instinct when you are depressed it is the last thing you want to do. Accept any and all help that comes your way and you will soon find yourself on the pathway to healing. Whatever you do don't be a loner and isolate yourself.
When suffering from depression, sometimes it pays to forgive people who have done you wrong. Holding on to grudges and feeling hatred toward people can make you feel worse. Letting go of these negative feelings can help you learn how to feel more positive both toward yourself and toward others.
Although depression is often temporary, there are many cases where it can last for a lifetime. Because of this fact, you must learn how to live a fulfilling life, even when you are feeling depressed. This will entail different things for different people, but the key idea is to live normally.
Hopefully, these suggestions will relieve your anxiety. It could take a little while before you see any difference. Be calm and patient. Don't be afraid to ask people that are close to you for support. It may be easier for them to see small improvements in you that you haven't noticed. If you need more help, go to a qualified professional.
New Method to Improve Brain Stimulation Treatments
Stimulating brain regions to treat Parkinson’s disease, depression, and other disorders involving brain damage could become more precise, thanks to a new way of mapping the brain circuitry involved in those conditions.
The study describing this research, “Brain stimulation and brain lesions converge on common causal circuits in neuropsychiatric disease,” was published in Nature Human Behaviour.
Depression and Parkinson’s both associate with well-defined brain lesions and can be treated with deep brain stimulation (DBS) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS).
Both techniques involve stimulating electrical activity in specific brain regions. However, proving that a targeted location in the brain actually corresponds to a specific point of damage and that this affects a symptom of interest has been a challenge.
The controlled experiments that enable scientists to map neural circuits in animals rarely can be repeated in humans.
An international team of researchers addressed this issue by analyzing data on the well-defined brain lesions associated with Parkinson’s and depression, and that are commonly treated with both DBS and TMS.
The team examined 14 separate datasets, comprising 461 lesions, 151 TMS sites, and 101 DBS sites, comparing lesions, symptoms, treatments and outcomes — such as where depression improved versus showing no change. The datasets included individuals who had been evaluated and treated for depression after having strokes or penetrating brain injuries, as well as patients receiving DBS for Parkinson’s or epilepsy for whom changes in depressive symptoms were measured as a potential side effect.
“This is a new technique that uses existing data on patients with brain damage to develop new treatment targets for real-world patients with similar symptoms,” Shan Siddiqi, MD, the study’s principal investigator, said in a press release.
Using their technique, Siddiqi and his collaborators identified a pattern of activity — a neural circuit — common to brain lesions, DBS, and TMS.
To demonstrate their approach can be applied to neuropsychiatric disorders more generally, they next examined 29 lesions and 95 stimulation sites associated with Parkinson’s motor symptoms.
Similar to their depression-related results, the team found that lesions associated with symptoms such as tremors and rigidity were connected to the same circuits as the stimulation sites used to treat them.
Overall, these shared patterns imply that brain lesions associated with neuropsychological conditions, as well as both TMS and DBS sites used to treat them are all connected to similar circuits.
https://parkinsonsnewstoday.com/2021/07/15/method-improves-brain-stimulation-therapy-parkinsons/