View From The High Peak

Given that we have recently had Mental Health awareness week, I feel that I should highlight one more very important thing: untreated depression can easily morph into something more serious. Psychosis and/or suicide are scary terms, the first one perhaps not always fully understood (click link to learn more). I have noted that several dramas and British soaps on TV have had psychosis as a theme in recent months (Silent Witness and Emmerdale among them). This suggests that perhaps either it is becoming more prevalent, or that it is becoming more recognised - or just that we are edging towards being better able to talk about such things. Perhaps the stigma really is beginning to lift on mental health? And if it is, then it is perhaps also because we are starting to publicly acknowledge it.

A few years back I knew someone locally whose brother had started to suffer from depression as a teenager. There were family traumas going on and he'd started a drug habit, unfortunately neither …

Leading on from my previous two posts about depression, here are some signs to watch out for and some suggestions of how you deal with them:-

if you have a sleep problem, if you grind your teeth, if you feel permanently low, if you struggle to get out of bed in the morning, if you start to avoid human contact and become ever more reclusiveif you start to lose interest in all the things you used to love.... .....then you need to take a long hard look at where you are and what help you might need.

Often the first step is pharmacology. Speak to your GP, no holds barred, and they should be able to decide whether indeed you need to be put on medication to help your body do what it can no longer do in terms of regulation of serotonin levels in the bloodstream. If you would like to understand current medical thinking on the link between serotonin and depression/anxiety etc then click here. Essentially, low levels of serotonin recorded in the bloodstream seem to equate with depression - but i…

One of the problems with mental health is that it is not visible. If you walked into the room clutching your severed arm, someone would react. If you were covered head to foot in a rash, someone would take notice. If you have a red, streaming nose, a croaky voice and sneeze and cough incessantly, people know you're ill. If you walk into a room full of people and have to summon all the energy you have left to even raise a smile and a hello, no-one will know what effort that took. If you struggle to complete mundane tasks during the day, people will just think you're lazy and useless. Unless they spend a lot of time with you, or know the person you used to be, they will not spot that something is wrong. Only you know that life has become an uphill struggle. Only you know how defeated you feel. Only you know how you are trapped in a bubble of negative thoughts and feelings which often go round on an endless loop, never achieving resolution. Only you know how you wake up at 4am, …