Depression Mental

As symptoms of depression go, there is none much clearer than having thoughts of suicide. But a spate of recent announcements from federal health officials suggests a surprising new interpretation of suicidal fantasies and the depression they are thought to signal: Sometimes, sadness, anxiety and self-destructive thoughts are not symptoms but side effects -- of medicine.

The White House drug czar said in a warning to parents Friday that depressed teens are medicating themselves with marijuana, running risks of even deeper depression. A new report by the Office of National Drug Control Policy said that frequent marijuana ingestion doubles a teen's risk of depression and anxiety, based on data compiled from published studies.

People with otherwise untreatable depression improved in a small clinical trial after receiving continuous electrical stimulation of a part of the brain that scientists believe regulates sadness. A report this week in the journal Biological Psychiatry said 12 of 20 patients with chronic major depression benefited from the electronic device. For seven of the 12, the disease went into remission. The benefits were sustained over the course of the one-year study, researchers said.

Layoffs, foreclosures, cutbacks -- there are plenty of grim economic stats out there this holiday season. Here's perhaps the grimmest one of all: Calls to Los Angeles' busiest suicide hotline have soared as much as 60% over the last year. Mental health experts say the sour economy has turned what usually manifests as seasonal blues into a full-blown crisis.

A study reported last week that people who take anti-depressants known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) put themselves at greater risk for fractures. Researchers are working to understand how depression and its therapies affect skeleton strength. One thing they know: Several hormones and neurotransmitters affect, to varying degrees, the building and breaking down of bone. --- From the outside, bones look stiff, unyielding, unchanging.

IN the fall of 2005, psychiatrist J. Anderson Thomson Jr. was treating an 18-year-old college freshman whom he describes as "intensely depressed, feeling suicidal and doing self-cutting." A few years before, Thomson says, he would have interpreted her depression as anger turned inward. But instead he decided that her symptoms might be a way of signaling her unhappiness to people close to her.

At 21, Jennifer Holliday brought Broadway audiences to their feet when she sang as the tortured Effie White in the musical "Dreamgirls," for which she won a Tony Award. But after every eight-times-a-week performance, the young actress went home to an empty apartment. She had no boyfriend and no room for a social life amid her fame. Food was her friend, and weight became her enemy.

Accepted wisdom says that when a loved one dies, people go through five stages of grieving: disbelief, yearning, anger, depression and acceptance. Now the first large-scale study of the five stages suggests that they are accurate, and that if a person has not moved through the negative stages after six months, he or she may need professional help to deal with the bereavement. The study, published in Wednesday's Journal of the American Medical Assn.

Daylight saving time begins three weeks earlier this year and lasts one week longer -- welcome news for people who relish the extra afternoon light to garden, ride a bicycle, walk the dog or just take out the trash when they can still see the curb. But the extension, which begins Sunday, could actually make millions of Americans feel less sunny.

IF all babies were born weighing at least 5.5 pounds, the prevalence of later adolescent depression among girls would drop by 18%, suggests a new study published in the March issue of Archives of General Psychiatry. To reach this surprising finding, a team of researchers at Duke University School of Medicine examined more than 1,400 children between 9 and 16 years old, half of them girls.