Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (28 page)

To wage war
Andrew Solomon,
The Noonday Demon
, Chatto & Windus, London, 2001

personal account
Sally Brampton,
Daily Telegraph
, 5 March 2003

The dirty little secret
Interview with Martin Seligman, ‘Eudaemonia, The Good Life’, 23 March 2004.
Edge
magazine. Edge is also a website devoted to an interplay of science, society and culture. www.edge.org

Around 5 million
Study of treatment-resistant depression at the Clinical Neuroscience Research Centre, published in
Biological Psychiatry
, 15 October 2003. The Clinical Neuroscience Centre, Dartford, UK, is headed up by Professor Tonmoy Sharma and dedicated to innovative research into more accurate diagnoses of, and more effective treatments for, a range of conditions including depression, schizophrenia, mild cognitive impairment, and Alzheimer’s disease.

If by ‘cure’
Interview with Professor John F. Greden, director of the University of Michigan Depression Center, published in
Medicine at Michigan
, Volume 4, Summer 2002. John F. Greden is Rachel Upjohn Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience, Chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Senior Research Scientist at Michigan’s Mental Health Research Institute.

My creative powers
Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
The Sorrows of Young Werther
, 1774. Goethe was famously a depressive.

Mild to moderate depression
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition (DSM-IV)
is published by the American Psychiatric Association and covers all mental health disorders for both children and adults. It lists known causes of these disorders, statistics in terms of gender, age at onset, and prognosis as well as research concerning optimal treatment approaches.

Most depressives
Smoking and depression. Dr Gregory A. Ordway, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, and collaborator Dr Violetta Klimek, compared brain-tissue samples from long-term smokers with samples from non-smokers and concluded that chronic smoking produces ‘antidepressant-like’ effects on the human brain. This may contribute to the high incidence of smoking and difficulty to quit in those who are depressed.
Archives of General Psychiatry
, September 2001. In September 2006 researchers at Duke University Medical Centre gave nicotine or placebo patches to a group of non-smokers diagnosed with depression, then measured their symptoms using a standardised questionnaire. They found that who wore the nicotine patch for at least eight days experienced significant declines in depressive symptoms.

Beck Depression Inventory
The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI, BDI-II), created by Dr Aaron T. Beck, is one of the most widely used instruments for measuring the severity of depression. There are three versions of the BDI—the original, first published in 1961 and later revised in 1971 as the BDI-1A, and the BDI-II, published in 1996.

The severity of depression
Kay Redfield Jamison,
Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide
, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999. Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Honorary Professor of English at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. She has bipolar disorder and wrote a first hand account of her illness in her first book,
An Unquiet Mind
, Picador, London, 1995.

By 2020
Facts on depression taken from the the World Health Organisation (WHO). Depression was the leading cause of disability as measured by YLDs (years lived with disability) and the fourth leading contributor to the global burden of disease, measured by disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), in 2000. By the year 2020, depression is projected to reach second place in the ranking of DALYs calculated for all ages and sexes. Depression is already the second cause of DALYs in the age category 15–44 years for both sexes combined. It is common, affecting about 121 million people worldwide but can be reliably diagnosed and treated in primary care. However, fewer than twenty-five per cent of those affected have access to effective treatments.

Bruce Charlton
Bruce Charlton, research psychiatrist at the Department of Psychology, University of Newcastle upon Tyne. ‘The Malaise Theory of Depression: Major Depressive Disorder is Sickness Behaviour and Antidepressants are Analgesic’,
Medical Hypotheses
, 2000.

According to a study
‘A Swedish National Twin Study of Lifetime Major Depression’, Kenneth S. Kendler, MD, Margaret Gatz, PhD, Charles O. Gardner, PhD, and Nancy L. Pedersen, PhD. Objective: substantial evidence supports the heritability of lifetime major depression. Less clear is whether genetic influences in major depression are more important in women than in men and whether genetic risk factors are the same in the two sexes.
American Journal of Psychiatry
, January 2006.

Because parents may
A three-generation study showing new evidence that major depression can afflict families from one generation to the next. The twenty-year longitudinal family study found twice the rate of depression or anxiety in children whose parents and grandparents also had depression than in children without such a history. Myrna M. Weissman et al.,
Archives of General Psychiatry
, 2005.

conducted a study
News Archive, 2003, King’s College London. ‘Variations in a region of DNA next to the serotonin transporter gene help to determine whether stressful events will make you depressed’, lead author Professor Terri Moffitt at the Institute of Psychiatry. Published in
Science
, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, July 2003.

‘adapted child’
Eric Berne (1910–70) was a prominent psychiatrist and author who felt increasingly frustrated with the psychoanalytic approaches of the time. As a result, he began developing a new and revolutionary theory, which he called Transactional Analysis. In 1958 he published the paper ‘Transactional Analysis: A New and Effective Method of Group Therapy’, where he outlined this new approach. After creating Transactional Analysis, Berne continued to develop and apply this new methodology, most prominently in his book
Games People Play
, Penguin, London, 1964.

Depression is the price
Alice Miller,
The Drama of Being a Child
, Virago, London, 1987. Miller, a psychoanalyst, became strongly disenchanted with her chosen field after many years in practice. Her first three books stemmed from a reaction to what she felt were major blind spots in her field. By the time her fourth book was published she no longer believed that psychoanalysis was viable.

an emotional cue
The paper on emotional memory and a self-reinforcing ‘memory loop’, by Florin Dolcos, Kevin LaBar and Roberto Cabeza, was published online 9 February 2005, in
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
. The researchers are in Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, and Brain Imaging and Analysis Center.

A study by
E. Mark Cummings, the Notre Dame Professor of Psychology, and researchers from Rochester University and the Catholic University of America examined the effect of marital conflict on the 9- to-18-year-old children of 226 parents for three years. A second study also examined the connection between marital conflict and emotional problems over a three-year period, with a different group of 232 parents and kindergarten-aged children. The researchers again found that destructive marital conflict led to similar problems. Published in the Jan/Feb 2006 issue of the journal
Child Development
.

According to research
Dr Alan Booth, Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Human Development, and co-researcher Dr Paul R. Amato, Professor of Sociology, Penn State University, in ‘The Legacy of Parents’ Marital Discord: Consequences for Children’s Marital Quality’, published in the October 2001 issue of the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
. Their data were based on a longitudinal study of marital quality spanning twenty-one years, analysing a sample of 297 parents and comparing the quality of their marriages in 1980 with those of their children in 1997.

Difficulty understanding
‘Asperger’s Syndrome’, Stephen M. Edelson, PhD, Center for the Study of Autism, Salem, Oregon, 1995. www.autism.org/asperger

Whether a child
John Bowlby and Attachment Theory
, Jeremy Holmes, Taylor & Francis, Oxford, 1993.

Madness need not
R. D. Laing,
The Politics of Experience
, Penguin, London, 1967. One of the most famous and controversial psychiatrists of his generation, Ronald Laing admitted to suffering from periodic bouts of alcoholism and clinical depression during a BBC interview for
In the Psychiatrist’s Chair
with Dr Anthony Clare in 1983.

Suicidal thoughts
Interview with Professor John F. Greden, director of the University of Michigan Depression Center, published in
Medicine at Michigan
, Volume 4, Summer 2002.

pilot clinical trial
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, pilot clinical trial; adding exercise to antidepressant medications significantly reduces depressive symptoms in patients with major depressive disorders. Study led by Dr Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern’s mood disorders research programme. News release, Society for Neuroscience, 2003.

Another study
Thirty-minute aerobic workouts done three to five times a week cut depressive symptoms by fifty per cent in young adults. Study led by Dr Madhukar Trivedi, professor of psychiatry and director of UT Southwestern’s mood disorders research programme. Results published in the January 2005 issue of the
American Journal of Preventive Medicine
.

while research at
Exercise as effective a treatment for depression as antidepressants. Study led by psychologist James Blumenthal, Duke University, North Carolina. Results published in the journal
Psychosomatic Medicine
, October 2000.

A study carried out
Study of depression as a risk factor for the onset of severe neck and lower-back pain. Study led by Dr Linda Carroll, professor in the University of Alberta Department of Public Health Sciences, published in the journal
Pain
, March 2004.

In a study
Seattle study findings that fifty per cent of all depressed patients worldwide report multiple unexplained physical symptoms. ‘An International Study of the Relationship between Somatic Symptoms and Depression’ published in the
New England Journal of Medicine
, October 1999.

As with any
‘Some of the most extensive medical research on yoga therapy is being done in India but will it ever be accepted by Western medicine?’ Timothy B. McCall, MD,
Yoga Journal
, January/February 2003.

pranayama
The National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience (Demeed University), India. The yoga research group in NIMHANS has been studying the therapeutic use of yoga in various psychiatric conditions for some years, with active collaboration from the Art of Living foundation and the Swami Vivekannada Yoga Anusandhana Samsthana (SVYASA).

an accessible form
Stephen Cope,
Yoga and the Quest for the True Self
, Bantam Dell, New York, 2000. Cope is a psychotherapist, senior Kripalu yoga teacher, and Senior Scholar in Residence at the Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Lenox, Massachusetts.

You don’t take
Amy Weintraub,
Yoga For Depression
, Broadway Books, New York, 2004. Weintraub is a senior Kripalu yoga teacher and founder and director of the LifeForce Yoga Healing Institute. She is also a consultant to the Program in Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona.

Among psychiatric disorders
Extracts from ‘Anxiety and Alcohol Abuse in Patients in Treatment for Depression’, Edward H. Fischer and John W. Goethe,
American Journal of Drug and Alcohol Abuse
, August 1998.