Stigma - and people speaking out

Living with depression isn't easy, and this condition can affect anyone. One of the many challenges that people face is stigma. The Mental Health Commission of Canada and Bell Canada have a major national initiative underway. Many famous and successful people that have struggled with depression are speaking out about it. This can only help.

Link.

There are some statistics that fly around concerning mental health that are not easy to understand or validate. Recently, another blog interviewed me, and wrote up a story on the commonly cited statistic that 1 in 5 people will have a mental illness at some point in their life. The blog posting is quite interesting, and can be found here.

Two medical students at the University of Calgary have just received a Social Accountability Award for looking at the usefulness of screening in the Calgary Drop-in Centre. This is a major study that they organized and conducted while in the middle of Medical School. They are just beginning to analyze the data that they have collected. Once results are available, I will post information on the prevalence of depression in this population - one of several conditions that their study examined.

More Smoking and Depression

Smoking isn't something that comes to mind for most people as an important risk factor for depression. However, studies have shown that smoking increases the risk of depression, and that is aggravates the course of depression. Although smokers often develop the impression that smoking is improving the mental well-being, in the longer term it seems to make things much worse.

See comments in this blog.

http://brainblogger.com/2011/12/10/risk-factors-for-recurrence-of-depression/

Smoking and Depression

Dr. Ian Colman at the University of Ottawa has carried out a sophisticated analysis of predictors of a negative course using data collected in a longitudinal Canadian study. The intention was to identify indicators of negative outcome, as determined by subsequent recurrences of depression. Not surprisingly, past episodes were predictive of future ones and a psychological construct "mastery" was also predictive, however, a very strong association was found between smoking and negative course. This adds to mounting evidence linking smoking to depression. In the past there has been a tendency, for some reason, to treat the association between depression and smoking as an epiphenomenon, perhaps reflecting shared genetic vulnerability. But, this study adds weight to the idea that depression and smoking are a bad mix. Contrary to the beliefs of some smokers, who feel that smoking makes them feel better, smoking may be contributing to deterioration in mental health over the longer term. A copy of the paper may be found here.

Depression and Chronic Illness

The association between depression and chronic illness and depression persists across the lifetime - the strongest connection is with painful conditions. A graduate student at the University of Calgary has examined this issue in elderly persons, the age category where chronic conditions are most common. Her results indicated that these associations are strong and important in elderly members of the general population - here is a media summary of her report.

Suicide

Depression dramatically increases the risk of suicide, although many suicides occur in non-depressed persons. Schizophrenia and substance-use disorders are also associated with dramatically elevated risk. Canadians were recently reminded of these realities with the suicide of a professional hockey player that had long struggled with depression. Toronto Star link here.