Tag Archives: depression after heart attack

More drugs, less talk for post-heart attack depression?

11 Dec

Pill Box

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥   @HeartSisters

We know that many heart patients (like me, for example), experience some degree of situational depression immediately following a cardiac event. When we seek help, that help is far more likely to come as a prescription for an antidepressant drug rather than a referral to a professional for talk therapy. In fact, talk therapy – either by itself or in combination with medication – is actually on the decline(1) while the rate of antidepressant use has increased by almost 400% in the past two decades.(2)

This is important, because we also know from 2015 research on depression published in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) that, for most people, there is no statistically significant difference in effectiveness between talk therapy and taking drugs.(3) When researchers tracked treatment outcomes for those suffering from depression, they found patients responded equally to either treatment. So why hasn’t the rate of talk therapy gone up by 400%, too? Continue reading →

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Depressed? Who, me? Myths and facts about depression after a heart attack

24 Jan

fake-smile

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥  @HeartSisters

I have a friend who has a friend who’s been depressed, off and on, for years. During that time, my friend and I have done our fair share of eye-rolling whenever the subject of this person’s depression came up. We wondered why she just couldn’t pull up her socks and quit all this self-absorbed moping around.

Neither my friend nor I had ever had one nanosecond of actually experiencing clinical depression ourselves – which, of course, didn’t stop us from passing judgement.  Continue reading →

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“I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed”

17 Mar

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

When I learned that Dr. Sherwin Nuland was going to be doing a guest lecture at the University of Victoria here back in 2012, I was among the first in town to book tickets. I loved his book called How We Die (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize) ever since I’d featured his chapter on death and heart disease three years earlier here.

His sold-out UVic audience was enthralled by his engaging manner and compelling excerpts read from his newest book called The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Being.

But I was even more intrigued by this famous surgeon/Yale University professor’s personal stories of his own experience living with debilitating depression – a depression so crippling, so impossible to shift, that in his 40s his doctors were considering doing a pre-frontal lobotomy.   Continue reading →

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When survivors feel depressed instead of lucky

3 May

www.myheartsisters.org

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

I was recently reminded of the perverse nature of expectations (like expecting to feel happy and grateful after surviving a heart attack or other life-threatening diagnosis) when I read the following by Dr. Peter Kramer, who wrote this for The New York Times:  Continue reading →

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Top 25 treatments for anxiety

28 Feb

by Carolyn Thomas  ♥ @HeartSisters

Few things in life are as anxiety-producing as being told you have heart disease. Many heart patients become hypervigilant, on high alert to every new twinge that may or may not signal the start of another cardiac crisis. Is this something? Is it nothing? Should I call 911?  Even if symptoms are fleeting and benign, debilitating anxiety can remain.  And most remedies for easing these distressing feelings come in a pill bottle. But are there other treatments for anxiety that are as good as – or perhaps better than – pharmaceuticals? It turns out that, according to patients themselves, there very well may be.

Alexandra Carmichael is the co-founder of CureTogether, a site that collects patient-reported health data. I was intrigued by one of their reports called “6,100 Patients With Anxiety Report What Treatments Work Best”. Where did this data come from? Alexandra explains:

“CureTogether members have been anonymously sharing symptoms and treatments for three years. We analyze the data into infographic form to make it accessible.”

According to CureTogether’s crowdsourced data, here are the top 25 treatments for anxiety that thousands of other Real Live Patients – not drug reps for Big Pharma – say have worked for them:   Continue reading →

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