Psychiatry
Healing the Mind...Helping the Whole
  ur goal is your emotional, physical, and spiritual wellness. Our
psychiatrists are deeply interested in your day-to-day difficulties
and successes, your family and background, and your aspirations.
They are traditionally schooled and use traditional therapies. They
prescribe and monitor standard medications, but they also recommend
herb and other holistic remedies when appropriate. They provide
general medical backup for our other practitioners.
As medical doctors, our psychiatrists are in a unique position to
evaluate physical manifestations of stress-related disorders such as
migraine, digestive disturbances, chronic pain and asthma. We can
work closely with your primary care physician to coordinate
treatment.
Psychiatry has been very effective in alleviating emotional pain.
We offer solace and solutions when you are in difficulty. We have
unconditional positive regard for all of our clients, who respond
well to our care and compassion.
St. John’s Wort and
SAM-e: The Mood Menders
 ometimes,
you can't sleep, and others, you can't drag yourself out of
bed. Life seems pointless and empty; your emotions are erratic
and uncontrollable. That's the way more than 19 million
Americans will feel this year when they experience a
depressive disorder. So it's no wonder that many people are
seeking out dietary supplements used to treat mild to moderate
depression—especially St. John's Wort and SAM-e.
St. John’s Wort
 
German study of 268 people reported the groundbreaking news
that St. John's Wort is at least as effective as the
prescription antidepressant Tofranil at relieving moderate
depression. In the study, subjects given 350 mg of St. John's
Wort three times a day reported relief of depressive symptoms
and experienced fewer side effects than subjects taking the
prescription drug.
SAM-e
newer, highly touted natural antidepressant is SAM-e, which
has only been available on drugstore shelves for a year; it
seems to relieve depression by boosting brain levels of
serotonin and dopamine.
A caveat: When thinking about using SAM-e or St.
John's Wort for low mood, don't forget that depression can be
a very serious illness. "If one has a mild case, then
self-therapy is fine...But anything
more serious should be evaluated by a professional." At
New England Holistic Health, we're here to help.
Article summarized from “St. John’s Wort and
SAM-e: The Mood Menders,” Psychology Today, March/April
2000.
See the full article here. |
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Children and Ritalin
 he number of preschool children being treated with medication for
ADHD tripled between 1990 and 1995.
he number of children ages 15 to 19 taking medication for ADHD has
increased by 311 percent over 15 years.
 any children who do meet the criteria for ADHD are not being
treated.
bout 80 percent of the 11 million prescriptions written for Ritalin each year are written
for children.
Statistics taken from “Statistics Confirm Rise in
Childhood ADHD and Medication Use,” Diane Weaver Dunne, Education
World® (Copyright © 2000 Education World).
See the full article here.
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Kissing Cousins: Anxiety and Depression May Be Two Faces of One
Disorder
 t's an
axiom of modern psychiatry that anxiety and depression are two
distinct conditions. However, evidence is amassing that they are
really two manifestations of one disorder. Looking at them that
way, some experts say, could speed the development of drugs that
better subdue both conditions.
Surveys have long shown that 60 to
70 percent of people with major depression also have an anxiety
disorder, while half of anxiety-disorder sufferers also have
symptoms of clinical depression.
Now there’s evidence of genetic
commonalities between the two conditions. Researchers at the
National Institute of Mental Health have found that in people with
both panic disorder and depression, there is a significant decrease
in a type of receptor (5-HTIA) for the neurotransmitter serotonin. Other studies have shown that the stress response system is
overactive in patients with both anxiety and depression. Secretions
of the stress hormone cortisol, triggered by repeated trauma, reduce
expression of the gene that produces the 5-HTIA serotonin receptor.
“They’re probably two sides of the same coin,” says David Barlow,
director of the Center for Anxiety and Related Disorders at Boston
University. “The genetics seem to be the same; the neurobiology
seems to overlap. Some people with the vulnerability react with
anxiety to life stressors and some, in addition, go beyond that to
become depressed.”
By Hara Estroff Marano
Psychology Today
March/April 2004
Vulnerable people may react with anxiety to stress and go on
to become depressed. |
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