Depressed Patients Don’t Get Enough Follow-Up
Recent controversy in antidepressant therapies centered on an increased risk of suicidal thoughts in new patients who started antidepressant medications. However, a new study published in American Journal of Managed Care suggests that this concern about increased risk of suicidal thoughts in patients taking antidepressants did not translate into physicians following up on patients who started antidepressant therapy. Read more
UK Mental Health Worker Opens Up About Bipolar Disorder
BBC News Online published a story about Robert Westhead, a 33-year old National Institute of Mental Health (NIHME) worker who suffered from bipolar disorder.
Robert began experiencing symptoms at age 19 and became seriously ill with severe mood swings. His moodswings happened in cycles of 8 days where he would be manic for 8 days and depressive for 8 days. Robert described some of the symptoms of mania and depression that are common among bipolar disorder sufferers; feelings of grandeur (”I was on a divine mission seeing God personified in a black dog and the eyes of a cat”), needing very little sleep, racing thoughts - before crashing down and bursting into tears at various moments.
Robert’s story was important in illustrating that sometimes patients can forget what it felt like to feel “normal” that when he was in a mildly depressed state from cutting back medication dosage. Essentially, Robert stabilized at a depressed level and thought it was a normal mood until he began to experience physical pain from the depression. Then, Robert came to a dangerous state of becoming suicidal. He attempted suicide from a lithium overdose.
Robert took another year to stabilize with different drug combination and eventually finding an effective combination for him.
Nevada Has 3rd Highest Suicide Rate in the US and More than a Third by Young People
Alex Newman’s article, “Struggling with suicide” points out a sobering statistic: College students die from accidents and suicides, and each year, young people ages 15-24 kill themselves. About 1 out of 4 of those young people are college students.
When a Nevada college student killed himself, the state declared this a public health crisis.
American Association of Suicidology is an organization for understanding and preventing suicides, and released figures that showed Nevada has the 3rd highest suicide rates in the US in its 2003 data. Wyoming is #1 and Montana is #2. You can click here to get the PDF statistics.
Alex’s article includes helpful resources for warning signs, statistics, and speaking with someone about suicide. Many of these come from a compilation of resources including information from AAS.