Mental Health

New evidence suggests that marijuana maybe popular because it helps people cope with the pain of loneliness.

Why smoke marijuana? Users would probably reply that numbed-out bliss is its own reward. But if smoothing out the harsh edges of reality is your goal, what bruises are you attempting to avoid?

Newly published research suggests that, at least for some, the answer is: The intense discomfort of social exclusion.

“Marijuana has been used to treat physical pain,” reports a research team led by University of Kentucky psychologist Timothy Deckman, “and the current findings suggest it may also reduce emotional pain.”

Interesting. Got me fascinated.

[D]ata on 5,631 Americans, who reported their level of loneliness, described their marijuana usage (if any), and assessed their mental health and feelings of self-worth. Not surprisingly, the researchers found a relationship between loneliness and feelings of self-worth, but it was significantly weaker for regular pot smokers.

“Marijuana use buffered the lonely from both negative self-worth and poor mental health,” the researchers write.

Another experiment, featuring 537 people, found those who were experiencing social pain were less likely to have suffered a major depression in the past year if they smoked pot relatively frequently.

Still another experiment, featuring 225 people, used the computer game Cyberball to create an immediate experience of social exclusion. Half the participants in the three-person game received the ball twice early on, and then never again during the course of the game. They then reacted to a series of statements designed to assess whether their need for self-esteem and belonging felt threatened—statements such as, “I had the feeling that the other players did not like me.”

The results: Those who smoked marijuana relatively frequently felt less threatened than those who smoked it less frequently, or not at all.

I’m very interested on the effect mitigating loneliness caused by severe depression.

New research suggests that people who use first-person singular pronouns (I, Me, Myself) more frequently than others in our speech and writing tend to have more interpersonal problems and to experience more depression.

Frequent use of first-person singular pronouns went hand in hand with higher depression scores and with interpersonal distress characterised by what the researchers called an “intrusive style”, including inappropriate self-disclosure, attention seeking, and an inability to spend time alone. “First-person singular pronoun use may be part of a … strategy that pulls for friendly-submissive attention from others,” the researchers said. A “tendency to seek attention from others rather than self-focused attention.”

In contrast, greater use of first-person plural pronouns was associated with lower depression scores and lower interpersonal distress. To the researchers’ surprise, this was characterised by a “cold” interpersonal style. However, they think this is a “functional” kind of coldness – the ability to help others with their needs while also remaining appropriately detached for self-protection.  Read more »

As regular readers will know I have battled, and continue to battle depression. The hardest thing to deal with, apart from the depression itself is comments from people who just don’t have any clue.

Here are the nine things not to say to someone suffering from mental illness.

1. “Get busy, and distract yourself.”

“With significant mental illness, [distractions] won’t work, not even temporarily,” Howes said. After a person slogs through various diversions, they’re still left with the same issues. “Ignoring the issue doesn’t make it go away.”

2. “Do you want to get better?”

For mental health blogger Therese Borchard, this was the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to her. While she knows the person didn’t have ill intentions, it still had a powerful effect. “It implied that I was staying sick on purpose, and that I had no interest in pursuing health, not to mention that I was too lazy or disinterested to do what I needed to do to get better.”  Read more »

I’m a bit out of puff right now…this video is one pf my favourites and sums up quite a lot about the last few years.

This post is from someone I know. I never got an inkling all this was going on in her life, to all intents and purposes the facade of happiness always was on show. I finally knew some of the details when she asked me about my depression and how I fought it off. I still never knew as much as she has shared here until the post arrived in my inbox.

I am very proud of her for writing this, it would have been very difficult. Hopefully now though with it all written down it is all in the past…that is certainly my experience.

All the names in this story have been changed, but it is about depression and the effects on her. It takes a lot to fight depression, it takes even more to actually share it with others.

I remember the first time I ever really thought about killing myself. This wasn’t the half arsed, self indulgent idea that most of us have thought about once or twice in our teens. This was the deadly intention of a desperate individual before a last ditch attempt at saving a relationship that was surely but slowly, making me lose my will to live. It chilled me to the bone in a way I had never truly felt before, my closest glimpse of death. I think that no one who hasn’t felt it can really understand. I hope that you won’t ever have to understand.

Tossing and turning in the spare bedroom of a friend’s house with my head swimming in wine, it was my third stay there of a similar nature. I drifted everywhere then. My parent’s, my brother’s, four different best friends. My clothes were scattered all over town, though not in a dodgy way. They, who had all helped me pick up the pieces of myself each time I tried to leave him, only to have me escape away in the night to throw myself back into the meat grinder of Blake and his heinous toxicity. I wasn’t even with close friends that night. Everyone else was sick of me, you see. I saw myself through their eyes. Weak, unable to live without my pathetic excuse for a man. Didn’t I have any respect at all for myself? It made me sick.

Torn between indecision (a classic symptom of depression) I thought, ‘What if it doesn’t work out this time?’ I clung onto hope, you see. I cursed it’s eternal spring, coursing through my neurotic veins. ‘Well… well… if it doesn’t work out this time, I’ll just kill myself. Simple as that.’ After days of messages and flower deliveries to my work I texted him, right on midnight. His birthday. The start of our third year together.

I woke the next morning free from the cloying effect of wine (always a disappointment), with the familiar choking dread settling, the first thing I felt every morning – an impending sense of doom. And a double dose of Loxamine. I tripped on the cat on the first step downstairs, my head foggy. I fell the whole way down. I lay there for a few moments – as you always do after a nasty collision to check you haven’t broken yourself – the physical pain barely registering. I remembered my late night ultimatum. But gone was my resolve, I had to get to work. I dismissed the drunken memory, the wine dulling its intensity. I put it out of my mind, it was forgotten.

It had barely begun.  Read more »

As is often the way in blogging, when there is something current, like David Fisher attacking me for being honest about my depression, along comes other news that supports the point I was trying to make.

There are those out there, like David Fisher, who think that depression is just something that we need to harden up over…take a few pills, stop having a sook and move along.   Read more »

David Fisher is supposed to be “a decent journalist, trained and skilled” and yet he fails to find any empathy or understanding about mental health issues.

Instead he uses my public honesty and discussions about depression and the battles I have had and continue to have as a weapon against me.

@Whaleoil If only you’d take your pills. How’s the *cure* working? Avoiding treatment is *not* the answer. #gethelp http://t.co/pfGwp4cJ

February 14, 2013 9:21 pm via webReplyRetweetFavorite

@DFisherJourno

David Fisher

He is meant to be a journalist, at a newspaper of record, and yet he sees fit to attack my mental health as some sort of public way to get at me.

Well I am tougher than that. I pity David Fisher that his life and his newspaper are so shallow that he feels the need to use my health as a point of attack.

It belittles him and belittles his paper.

I would now be very wary as indeed should everyone else who he approaches to do stories that he lacks the necessary empathy to even speak with sufferers of depression and other mental illnesses.

I wrote about those topics so that I amy help others, now David Fisher uses that against me as a weapon. What a shameful, sad and dishonest little man.  Read more »

Quite a bit of effort went into this web site.

Meet Dr Rich Mahogany, the inventor of Gentlemental Health.

Behind this unique presentation is actually some serious stuff.  It uses humour very effectively to act as a Trojan Horse and encourage men to have a bit of a read about things they normally just don’t think about:  depression and suicide.   Read more »

Yesterday afternoon:

 Police and other emergency services spent the afternoon at the scene of what was described as a “serious and ongoing incident” at the Sky Tower in central Auckland City.

Police staff negotiated with the man who was on the ledge of level 54 at the location of the SkyJump cable-controlled base jump operation.

A large crowd of onlookers gathered at the scene and surrounding streets, including Federal Street and Victoria Street West, were cordoned off.

Read more »

via beatyourselfup.com