New research indicates that screening children for symptoms of depression, the most common mental health disorder in the United States, can begin a lot earlier than previously thought, as early as the second grade.

A University of Washington study that followed nearly 1,000 children from the second to the eighth grades also found five distinct patterns for the way symptoms of depression develop among adolescents.

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Taking a pill to treat depression is widely believed to work by reversing a chemical imbalance. Medication is a mainstay of mental health therapy, But in this week’s BBC Scrubbing Up health column, Dr. Joanna Moncrieff, of the department of mental health sciences at University College London, says taking pills for mental health problems is no solution, they simply put people into “drug-induced states”.

Although ideas like the serotonin theory of depression have been widely publicised, scientific research has not detected any reliable abnormalities of the serotonin system in people who are depressed.

It is often said the fact that drug treatment “works” proves there’s an underlying biological deficiency.

But there is another explanation for how psychiatric drugs affect people with emotional problems.
It is frequently overlooked that drugs used in psychiatry are psychoactive drugs, like alcohol and cannabis.
Psychoactive drugs make people feel different; they put people into an altered mental and physical state.

They affect everyone, regardless of whether they have a mental disorder or not…. Continue reading

Source: BBC News

People are routinely asked by doctors about their family history of medical problems such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. But up until now, this has not been the case for mental illnesses.

New findings by an international group including University of Otago researchers make a strong case for changing current practice. They report that a short question-and-answer session about a person’s relatives and their symptoms of depression, anxiety, or substance abuse is enough to predict not only whether the interviewee is at greater risk for developing each disorder, but also how severe that future illness is likely to be. [continue reading…]