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Depression Stressful life events, like the death of a spouse or a serious illness or disability, can make life difficult. Often, people find ways to get through these periods. But sometimes a loss or difficult change can lead to depression, a medical condition that can affect both mental and physical health.
Depression is a serious illness that can take a terrible toll on individuals and families. Untreated, depression can lead to a downward spiral of disability, dependency and suicide. Up to 70 % of people who commit suicide may have some form of depression.New medications are available that are generally safe and effective, even for the most severe depression. With proper treatment, most people with serious depression improve, depression is a brain disorder that affects your thoughts, moods, feelings, behavior and physical health. Experts believe depression may be caused by imbalances in brain chemicals called neurotransmitters. However, scientists do not fully understand how imbalances in neurotransmitters cause symptoms of depression. And it is not certain whether changes in neurotransmitters are a cause or a result of depression.
Arousal and stress reactions play an important role in human survival; they enable people to respond appropriately to danger. The stress response (fight, fright, or flight) is provoked by a genuine threat or challenge. Anxiety, an excessive arousal is characterized by feelings of apprehension, uncertainty, and fear.
August 10, 1999
The Los Angeles Daily News
Recent scientific studies prove that balancing the body's volatile cocktail of emotions may be just as important as eating a well-balanced diet. Rage when unchecked, can cause sickness even death. Most folks simply make themselves sick by keeping hostility bottled up inside.
Dr. George Solomon, professor emeritus of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, explains: Pent-up emotions trigger a complex series of biochemical reactions that ultimately sap the body's ability to fight off disease.
"The mind and body are inseparable. The brain controls bodily functions, and the mind exists within the brain,'' Solomon said. "People who have repressive styles tend to be more prone to illness. The concept there isn't of expressed anger, but unexpressed anger. If one doesn't let it out, that could have adverse consequences.''
Anger, turned inward, can lead to depression, which many studies show to be the most harmful emotion. Solomon's work at UCLA found people who who did not overtly respond to deliberately provoked anger underwent a fight-or-flight response that caused decreased activity in the body's front-line of defensive immune cells. Those who asserted themselves showed no significant change in body chemistry.
A University of Michigan study found men who bottle up their emotions until they spill out in violent outbursts have twice the risk of stroke when compared to men who manage to keep their emotions on a more even keel. Researchers plan a similar study on women, who express anger differently.
A recent Duke University study found that students with low hostility levels had about one-fourth the risk of coronary heart disease compared to students with high hostility scores.
Dr. Bruce Raybin, a professor of pathology and psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said it pays to think positively. "It's not the emotion that's critical, it's what the emotion does; how it changes the chemistry of the body,'' Raybin said. ``Hostility seems to have a greater effect on increasing the concentration of hormones that are detrimental to the immune system.
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