Recalculating: You Can Re-Mind Yourself

Laura Berman Fortgang is a bestselling author, speaker, TV personality, corporate spokesperson, and Interfaith minister. She has also struggled with depression for most of her adult life. She writes that most people seem surprised when they learn of her depression, citing how positive and energetic she presents herself. Fortgang writes that depression doesn’t rule her…

Do You Play the Blame Game in Life?

According to Mike Bundrant, the director of the iNLP Center, the blame game is where a person blames other people and his or her environment for the the things wrong with life. Playing the blame game means being inactive in life and allowing the quality of life to depend on what everyone and everything else…

Why People Worry All the Time

People who seem to worry all the time suffer a condition, though not a disorder, called generalized anxiety disorder. Some worry about everything conceivable and others have one worry that preoccupies them throughout the day. Dr. Fredric Neuman explains that some patients worry because they are trying to anticipate danger. He has a parable of…

The Inner Voice that Drives Suicide

Dr. Robert Firestone made the link between suicide and a destructive inner voice in 1986 after interviewing a woman who had recently attempted suicide. She described how the voice had goaded and instructed her through the suicide attempt. Since then, the inner voice has been identified in suicide attempts across the world. Robert Firestone and…

Can Happiness Reverse the Negative Effects of Loneliness?

In addition to experiencing the death of loved ones, older adults also witness the decline in their own physical health. These factors contribute to a special vulnerability toward loneliness in older adults which can lead to negative effects such as high blood pressure and cardiovascular problems, and have also been linked to depression and anxiety….

All about Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is an illness that occurs in approximately one percent of the population. In America, nearly three million people are diagnosed with it. About one third of those diagnosed will attempt to commit suicide and 10% will kill themselves within twenty years of diagnosis. Very few of them will reveal their intentions to anyone. Schizophrenia…

You Can Be Depressed Without Being Sad

Not only do most people who commit suicide have a depressive disorder, but people who have a depressive disorder in conjunction with a chronic physical illness are at a higher risk for disability or premature death. It is important to identify and treat depressive disorders, but identifying them may not be as easy as it…

Think Your Way to Happiness

The capacity of human beings for complex and inventive thinking has given us great advantages as a species throughout history, but we may not be prepared for some of the consequences of that complexity and invention, which can lead to depression. Albert Ellis, a rational emotive behavior therapist, thinks the source of much conflict and…

Depression, Stress Linked With Brain Shrinkage—Here’s Why

While previous research has shown that stress and depression can lead to a decrease in brain mass, researchers at Yale believe they’ve found a reason why. Their goal was to test a hypothesis that stress causes a loss of brain synapses. They found that a genetic switch known as GATA1 is connected to several genes…

Rat Study Gives Insights Into Relieving Schizophrenia

Scientists at New York University were performing an experiment on rats to study a schizophrenic trait of being unable to process competing streams of stimuli and identify relevant information when they stumbled on a discovery. Rats with brain lesions exhibit schizophrenic symptoms once they reach the equivalent maturity of a twenty-year-old human. Rats expressing these…