Psychological issues and prevention techniques

Healthy men and women are subject to human tensions but they are able to find ways to relieve them without excessive anxiety. Among the ways they use: Talking over worries with a sympathetic friend, relative, physician, or anyone else whose judgment they respect.

Getting away for a while, even if only for a short walk

 Working off anger, preferably by discussing it openly with a trusted, mature person; sometimes in some physical activity

 Taking one thing at a time, especially when feeling overwhelmed by the pressures of too much to do. Giving in sometimes, even when certain they are right. Helping others, getting out of the vicious circle that preoccupation with one's own troubles can produce.

Being slow with criticism

 Cooperating, being aware that though we live in a competitive society, many situations call for cooperative effort; and aware, too, that if one competes all the time, one may be too weary and too worn to enjoy success when it is achieved. THE BASIC DISORDERS A useful way to classify abnormal behavior is by dividing it into four broad categories: psychosomatic disorders, neuroses, character disorders, and psychoses. Although there can be some overlapping and intermixing, these four types of ailments can be examined separately. Psychosomatic Disorders These illnesses, which we have discussed in earlier chapters, are understandable to anyone who has ever had a headache after a fight with spouse or employer, or experienced butterflies in the stomach before taking an important examination.

Occasional mild distress of this sort is universal and harmless. But some people experience such symptoms al- most constantly, and their discomfort is intense. Psychosomatic illnesses can assume many forms, including skin outbreaks, stomach upsets, high blood pressure, and asthma. These are not imaginary problems; even when there is no physical cause, pain can be authentic and illness very real. A person with an emotionally produced physical ailment needs psycho- logical help, but he also is as much in need of medical help as the individual whose disease has organic roots.

Depression and Treatments

Depression

Electroshock treatment is particularly valuable in severe depression when there may be danger of suicide. Recently, a new technique of electroshock has shown promise. Brief bursts of current are applied to one side of the brain instead of to both sides.The one-sided treatment has been reported to be fully as effective as two-sided, while minimizing or even completely avoiding the temporary confusion and memory disturbance that may sometimes follow the latter. 

Solving the Major Problem The big problem is recognition of depression, particularly when it leads, as it so often does, to distressing physical troubles. Keenly aware of their real aches and pains, people with depression often regard their blue feelings as results, not causes.

Many try doctoring themselves for long periods, fruitlessly. If and when they do seek medical help, many fail to mention any feelings of dejection. Some even vehemently deny feeling depressed, many doctors find, apparently out of a belief there is something shameful about depression. There is not. It is one of the most common of all disorders and hits people in all walks of life, even the most brilliant. Now something can be done about it. 

When you seek medical help for any physical complaint, a good doctor will usually want to ask many questions, get a full case history. Increasingly alert to what depression can do, to the many physical disguises it can take; he will want to probe for any clues that it may be a factor in your case. Cooperate. You can help by answering his questions and by volunteering information. 

If you have experienced a change of mood-if, along with your physical troubles, you have been aware of feeling low in mind, dejected, for months or even weeks-let him know.

The chances are that by doing so you will save yourself much misery and needless expense. Suicide is a constant threat in the depressed person. 

Depression

DEPRESSION

In a mid-western city, a 35-year~0Id engineer suddenly loses his appetite, is unable to sleep, experiences splitting headaches and alarming chest pains. A thorough medical check shows nothing organically wrong. But the doctor, refusing to leave it at that, discovers that there have been several such episodes before, not quite as bad, but always coming during periods of pressure on the job and always, as now, accompanied by feelings of discouragement and "blues." 

To the credit of the physician, not a psychiatrist but an alert general practitioner, the engineer doesn't get a medicine chest full of drugs, one for each symptom-only a prescription to combat mental depression and some counseling about depression. Before long, the symptoms disappear. In a Boston suburb, a young housewife suffers from overwhelming fatigue and constant abdominal distress.

She has tried vitamins, "tonics," assorted remedies,when finally, she consults a doctor, he notes while examining her that there is a kind of dullness and mental withdrawal about her. And when he finds no physical explanation for her troubles, he gently asks: Has anything happened to make her feel depressed? She had lost her mother ten months before, had grieved, and had thought she had recovered from the grief. Yet, true, her symptoms, she recalled, had come on not long after her mother's death. She, too, is treated for depressionand relieved. These are two of the lucky people. Mental depression is being recognized today as a critical medical problem.

According to some psychiatrists, more human suffering may result from depression than from any other single disorder. Some physicians term it "the great masquerader," noting that it has many faces and often hides behind physical complaints without betraying its presence by an obviously sad or despairing mood. Is depression, in disguised form, right now affecting someone in your family or a friend or neighbor? It could be. More Than a Mood There is nothing unusual about a brief spell of despondency or blues now and then.

 All of us have our ups and downs, days when we feel on top of the world, others when we feel a bit low. But depression-a chronic change of mood, a drawn-out lowering of the spirits-is another matter. It can be triggered by the loss of a loved one, loss of money or job, failure to get a promotion. Such a depression is called reactive or "exogenous," meaning it comes from outside.

But there is another common type that develops without apparent cause. Suddenly, a person may decide that he or she is a failure in life, when that is not really true. Unaccountably, self-confidence and self-esteem vanish. Ordinary everyday problems-family problems, social problems, economic problems-once handled as matters of course may suddenly seem too much to cope with. Such a depression is called "endogenous," indicating that it comes from within, perhaps as the result of some chemical upset in the body. 

Some authorities believe that many depressions are mixed, both endogenous and exogenous. And some argue that there must be some endogenous or internal factor, otherwise a death in the family or other loss would lead only to temporary, normal sadness. When depression occurs, it is not limited to the mind.