If you’ve decided to investigate treatment options for your mental health, your health insurer will cheerfully refer you to a list of hundreds of providers — but as STAT’s Jack Turban discovered, this “network” of providers is actually a “ghost network,” filled with wrong numbers that ring in McDonald’s restaurants and jewelers. If you happen to reach an actual mental health professional, they’ll probably tell you they’re not accepting new patients.
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Tag: depression
Ketamine works great for depression and other conditions, and costs $10/dose; the new FDA-approved “ketamine” performs badly in trials and costs a fortune
Ketamine is a sedative first synthesized in 1962; its patents have long elapsed and it costs pennies; it has many uses and is also sold illegally for use as a recreational drug, but in recent years it has been used with remarkable efficacy as a treatment for a variety of disorders, including depression, anxiety, and chronic pain (I have lifelong chronic pain and my specialist has prescribed very low doses of it for me at bedtime).
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Teens are cyberbullying themselves as a form of self-harm
Child psychologists have observed an increasing trend in which teens cyberbully themselves, creating anonymous accounts in which they post vicious insults and slurs that seem to be directed to them by strangers.
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Wil Wheaton’s frank, brave speech about his depression and anxiety
Wil Wheaton has publicly discussed his anxiety and depression before; I know several people whose lives were improved by reading what he had to say.
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Social scientists have warned Zuck all along that the Facebook theory of interaction would make people angry and miserable
Since the earliest days of Facebook, social scientists have sent up warnings saying that the ability to maintain separate “contexts” (where you reveal different aspects of yourself to different people) was key to creating and maintaining meaningful relationships, but Mark Zuckerberg ignored this advice, insisting that everyone be identified only by their real names and present a single identity to everyone in their lives, because anything else was “two-faced.”
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Trials confirm the use of psilocybin for depression without the “dulling” effects of traditional antidepressants
The prohibition on psychedelics was memorably described as “the worst case of scientific censorship since the Catholic Church banned the works of Copernicus and Galileo” by former UK Drugs Czar David Nutt, and despite the ban, there has been a consistent, determined, very promising (sometimes surprising) drumbeat of scientific papers about the use of psilocybin (“magic mushrooms”) and other psychedelics in treating a range of chronic illnesses, including mental illnesses.
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Some thoughts on whether intelligence is linked to anxiety and depression
In High intelligence: A risk factor for psychological and physiological overexcitabilities, a group of academic and industry neuroscientists survey a self-selected group of 3,715 MENSA members about their mental health history and find a correlation between high IQ and clinical anxiety and depression disorders, an effect they attribute to “overexitabilities” — “the same heightened awareness that inspires an intellectually gifted artist to create can also potentially drive that same individual to withdraw into a deep depression.”
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Facebook use is a predictor of depression
A pair of social scientists from UCSD and Yale conducted an NIH study published in the American Journal of Epidemiology on the link between Facebook use and mental health, drawing on data from the Gallup Panel Social Network Study combined with “objective measures of Facebook use” and self-reported data for 5,208 subjects, and concluded that increased Facebook use is causally linked with depression.
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Human advice for exercising while depressed
Sarah Kurchak, a personal trainer who has experienced clinical depression, offers the most humane advice for using exercise you’re likely to find.
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There’s a new Hyperbole and a Half book coming!
In 2014, Allie Brosh’s outstanding, hilarious, and gut-wrenching webcomic Hyperbole and a Half made the jump to print with an incredible book (review); now Simon and Schuster have announced a followup, Solutions and Other Problems, to be published next October — I just pre-ordered my copy! (via Wil Wheaton)
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