by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSistersWhile binge-watching Season 4 of Grace and Frankie on Netflix the other day, I heard Frankie’s sweetheart, Jacob the Yam Man, trying to calm her down with a statement that has proven to be very true for me since my heart attack:
I think I’ll go embroider that on a pillow. . . Continue reading “You’re not always going to feel this way”
by Carolyn Thomas ♥ @HeartSisters
I can vividly remember those early days and weeks at home after surviving a heart attack, especially that cold creeping anxiety around how I “should” be feeling. I had just survived what many do not: what doctors still call the “widow maker” heart attack. (By the way, note the gender semantics there, please: doctors are not, after all, calling this the “widower maker”).
I was now resting comfortably, both of my darling kidlets had flown back home to be with their Mum, our home was filled with flowers, get-well cards and casseroles delivered by the daily line-up of concerned friends, family, neighbours and co-workers.
So why was I feeling so bleak inside, and even worse, now feeling guilty for all that bleakness? Continue reading “When are cardiologists going to start talking about depression?”
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 “More drugs, less talk for post-heart attack depression?”
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 “Depressed? Who, me? Myths and facts about depression after a heart attack”
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 ““I’m the least depressed person on earth, except when I’m depressed””
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 “When survivors feel depressed instead of lucky”
Heart Sisters 