Anxiety Self HelpFind helpful information about anxiety.

Skimming through Real Simple magazine at the check out line of the supermarket, I came across Dr. Robert Leahy’s “10 Ways to Cope with Anxiety.” Dr. Leahy is the director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy and the author of many books on the subject. His suggestions will help you calm your nerves:

The closer you live to nature, the healthier you’re likely to be.

Before you go into psychotherapy, you should be informed of your rights as a patient ahead of time by the therapist. The therapist should, in addition, give you a printed copy of something that reads similar to the below, so that you can take it home with you. We’ve long had a version of these rights here on our website, but I thought it might be helpful to further describe or explain each right in a little more detail.

Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.

New research clarifies how neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, are regulated – a finding that may help fine-tune therapies for depression.

A nervous breakdown refers to a mainstream and often-used term to generically describe someone who experiences a bout of mental illness that is so severe, it directly impacts their ability to function in everyday life. The specific mental illness can be anything – depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or something else. But the reference to a “nervous breakdown” usually refers to the fact that the person has basically stopped their daily routines – going to work, interacting with loved ones or friends, even just getting out of bed to eat or shower.

This past week we saw the news media captivated by the idea that a 6-year-old boy, Falcon Heene had been carried off by a weather balloon. That is until the boy was later found in his own garage attic and shortly thereafter it was revealed on a television news show that the entire incident was likely a hoax. In replying to a reporter’s question, the young Falcon turned to his dad on camera and said, “You guys said that, umm, we did this for the show.” Oops.

All antidepressants may not be created equal when it comes to worsening of suicidal ideation during treatment, researchers found.

Nortriptyline has been found to cause a ten-fold increase in suicidal thoughts in men when compared to its competitor escitalopram. These findings are published in the open access journal BMC Medicine.

Part of the problem in finding drugs which may be effective for dementia is that our ideas about what constitutes dementia have been undergoing radical change in recent years. It had been traditional to distinguish between Alzheimer’s dementia, or senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (SDAT) and multi-infarct dementia (MID), which is theoretically caused by small strokes which insidiously pick off brain tissue to the point where an individual’s cognitive function is compromised.