Researchers interviewed 711 St. Louis women and men who had been labeled 15 years earlier as heavy drinkers in a National Institutes of Health (news – web sites) study. The researchers found that the women, in general, were in poorer physical and mental health than the men. The women reported more difficulty with activities such as climbing stairs, walking around the neighborhood, or caring for family members.
They also had more physical disorders that forced them to either decrease the amount of time they spent at work or at social activities. And, compared with the men, they reported greater body pain and poorer mental health, including significantly higher rates of depression. “We were surprised by the magnitude of the difference between males and females,” says Kyle Grazier, author of the study and an associate professor in health management and policy at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
Grazier presented the findings at the First World Congress on Women’s Mental Health, held in Berlin, Germany. “The heavier drinking women were much more disabled than the men,” Grazier says. “We know women are more prone to depression and mental disorders, but we didn’t expect to see the functional disorders.”
But such findings echo reports from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA), which show that women are more susceptible than men to alcohol-related organ damage. And women are more likely to develop alcohol-induced liver diseases, particularly cirrhosis and hepatitis, over a shorter period of time and after consuming less alcohol than men.
Consistent gender differences in the duration, chronicity, or acute recurrence of MD have not been found. Longitudinal studies have reported that women recover more slowly than men from a depressive episode and the average duration of an episode is longer in women.[28,29] Therefore, women were significantly more likely to suffer a chronic and recurrent course of illness, with women over age 30 years having the highest rate of recurrent depression.
Cognitive behavioral analysis has a good track record of treating chronic depression in several small studies–the reason why it was chosen for the Chronic Depression study, Dr. Keller says. The treatment draws on several forms of therapy: Behavioral therapy, which helps people analyze the impact of their behavior, Cognitive therapy, which challenges people’s belief systems, and Interpersonal therapy, which emphasizes problem-solving and personal relationships, (including the doctor-patient bond).
It is a heterogeneous symptom complex characterized by an overwhelming sense of fatigue, neuropsychiatric symptoms (anxiety, depression), neuroimmunological disturbances (2), neuroendocrine abnormalities and various somatic complaints (1). Fatigue is the pivotal feature of the syndrome. Both the organic and psychiatric factors contribute to fatigue to an uncertain extent.
These researchers measured regional cerebral perfusion at rest using high resolution single-photon emission tomography (SPET). The subjects were in 30 patients with CFS (CDC criteria ‘94) 20 with major depressive disorder (MDD) and 15 healthy controls. Other measures included Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HAD), the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAM-D), and the Chalder Fatigue Scale. Fourteen of the patients were taking some sort of medication, mostly antidepressants.
That there is exactly ONE person in this group that would notice someone unjustifiably picking on you, shows that you have zero credibility no matter what you say. And as long as you continue to act like a bastard, people are going to treat you like one. I realize that no matter what you say or claim, you really don’t want people to accept what you have to say. You want them to dislike you and ignore you.
