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Posts Tagged ‘mental’

Are you happy with your life in general? A person might have a beautiful house, high social status and jet-setting lifestyle and still not feel happy. But a person with a more ordinary lifestyle could feel quite contented with their lot. Happiness is the secret of a good life, so they say, and it has to be nurtured.

However you live your life, what’s important is that you feel good about it and stay that way. This may sound impossible to achieve, but I have three pieces of advice I’d like to share with you to help you on your way.

First of all, exercise is an automatic catalyst in this regard. Few people realize this since it often seems like work, but the benefits of exercise couldn’t be more clear.

Exercise causes the release of chemically induced hormones, known as endorphins, into the body. These have the effect of making you feel good. So, exercise regularly and you will maintain your happiness.

Next, you should get yourself a hobby. Find an activity that you enjoy. Studies have shown that when we’re concentrating on our favorite pastimes, whatever they may be, all that positive brain activity raises our spirits.

Severely depressed people have been known to feel better during time spent on their hobbies. These occasions give them a complete break from the outside world and the anxiety it entails.

Thirdly, I would recommend making a few modifications to your diet. Food is a necessity of life, but it doesn’t always make us feel good. In fact, some food makes us feel miserable. I’m referring to foods that contain a lot of sugar, especially in a refined form. These affect our mood and are to be avoided whenever possible.

On the other hand, eating more unrefined foods such as fruits, vegetables and wholegrain cereals will boost your organism with vital nutrients that make you feel good. Why not test the theory out for the next few weeks? If you’re prepared to put in the effort, I’m sure you’ll see the benefits.

Enjoy more of this author’s tips about Lysol toilet bowl cleaners in addition to Clorox toilet bowl cleaner.

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Skimming through Real Simple magazine at the check out line of the supermarket, I came across Dr. Robert Leahy’s “10 Ways to Cope with Anxiety.” Dr. Leahy is the director of the American Institute for Cognitive Therapy and the author of many books on the subject. His suggestions will help you calm your nerves:

1) Repeat your worry until you’re bored silly.

“take the troublesome thought that’s nagging at you and say it over and over, silently, slowly, for 20 minutes. It’s hard to keep your mind on a worry if you repeat it that many times.”

Dr. Leahy calls this technique “the boredom cure. “Behavioral scientists call it ‘flooding’. I’m not so keen about this technique for my extremely anxious patients who are having trouble regulating their thoughts and emotions. If your anxiety is on the milder side, however, and you have the courage to do this, I recommend you think about your worries while practicing relaxation techniques to keep your body as calm as possible.

2) Make it worse.

“When you try too hard to control your anxieties, you only heighten them. Instead exaggerate them and see what happens.”

This is a good one. When I suggest it to my patients I call it the ‘Bring it on’ technique or ‘Fake it ’til you make it’. By inviting what scares you, you learn on your time that you can survive your fears instead of waiting to be bushwhacked by them.

Sports psychologists use this all the time. When I was terrified my horse would shy and dump me on the ground, my coach told me to stop trying to keep my mare from bolting. Instead she told me expect her to shy, to look forward to it. That attitude helped me relax and so did the horse.

3) Don’t fight the craziness.

“You mayhave thoughts that lead you to think you’ll do something terribleor that you’re going insane Remember – our minds are creativeevery now and then ‘crazy’ thoughts jump out. Everyone has them.”

In the weeks after my first child was born, when I was exhausted, sleep deprived and in the grips of baby blues, I had thoughts of throwing my screaming baby out the window. Those thoughts terrified me. Tearfully, I confessed my horrible thoughts to my mother who shrugged and said, “We all think something like that at some time. You didn’t act on it, did you?” She assured me I wasn’t crazy. I could relax.

My patients are sometimes surprised when I suggest they allow themselves to imagine doing something outrageous like throwing a banana cream pie at their nasty boss’s puss. Unleashing our creative minds may be just what we need to de-stress.

4) Recognize false alarms.

“Many thoughts and sensations that we interpret as cues for concern-even panic-are just background noise. Think of each of them [rapid heart beat, tensing of muscles] as a fire engine going to another place.”

5) Turn your anxiety into a movie.

“..imagine that your anxious thoughts are a show while you sit in the audience, eating popcorn, a calm observer.”

This is a good way to exercise ‘detachment,’ stepping outside of the anxiety just enough to keep your thinking brain working. Another technique I suggest is to imagine the worry happening to a friend, not you. Then imagine talking to your friend. What would you say to them? How can you be supportive?

6) Set aside worry time.

“Try setting aside 20 minutes everyday-let’s say 4:30 PM-just for your worries. If you are fretting at 10 AM, jot down the reason and resolve to think about it later. By the time 4:30 comes around, many of your troubles won’t even matter anymore.”

7) Take your hand off the horn.

“When you desperately try to take command of things that can’t be controlled, you’re more like the swimmer who panics and slaps the water screaming Instead, imagine that you are floating along on the water with your arms spread outIt’s a paradox, but when you surrender to the moment, you actually feel far more in control.”

Breathe it out.

“Focusing on breathing is a common but effective technique for calming the nerves.”

This a classic, oldy, but goody. If you do it right, deep, mindful breathing is better than Valium.

9) Make peace with time.

“Every feeling of panic comes to an end, every concern eventually wears itself out, every so-called emergency seems to evaporate.”

When we are in the midst of a panic attack we feel it will last forever or else we will die. Remembering the fact that panic attacks and anxiety in milder form is finite, usually not lasting more than ten minutes. Dr. Leahy also counsels:

“Ask yourself, ‘How will I feel about this in a week or a month?’ This one, too, really will pass.”

10) Don’t let your worries stop you from living your life.

“What can you still do even if you feel anxious? Almost anything.”

Not all anxiety is bad. Keep in mind that some highly productive people transform their anxiety into motivation to do better and achieve much, both great and small.

Carlo Mueres is a excellent depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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Surfing the Internet just might be a way to preserve your mental skills as you age.

Researchers found that older adults who started browsing the Web experienced improved brain function after only a few days.

“You can teach an old brain new technology tricks,” said Dr. Gary Small, a psychiatry professor at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of iBrain. With people who had little Internet experience, “we found that after just a week of practice, there was a much greater extent of activity particularly in the areas of the brain that make decisions, the thinking brain – which makes sense because, when you’re searching online, you’re making a lot of decisions,” he said. “It’s interactive.”

Small is co-author of the research, which was scheduled to be presented Monday in Chicago at the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting.

“This makes intuitive sense, that getting on the Internet and exploring and getting new information and learning would help,” said Paul Sanberg, director of the University of South Florida Center of Excellence for Aging and Brain Repair in Tampa. “It supports the value of exploring the Internet for the elderly.”

Most experts now advocate a “use-it-or-lose-it” approach to mental functioning.

“We found a number of years ago that people who engaged in cognitive activities had better functioning and perspective than those who did not,” said Dr. Richard Lipton, a professor of neurology and epidemiology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York City and director of the Einstein Aging Study. “Our study is often referenced as the crossword-puzzle study – that doing puzzles, writing for pleasure, playing chess and engaging in a broader array of cognitive activities seem to protect against age-related decline in cognitive function and also dementia.”

The new study takes the use-it-or-lose-it concept into the 21st century.

For the research, 24 neurologically normal adults, aged 55 to 78, were asked to surf the Internet while hooked up to an MRI machine. Before the study began, half the participants had used the Internet daily, and the other half had little experience with it.

After an initial MRI scan, the participants were instructed to do Internet searches for an hour on each of seven days in the next two weeks. They then returned to the clinic for more brain scans.

“At baseline, those with prior Internet experience showed a much greater extent of brain activation,” Small said.

After at-home practice, however, those who had just been introduced to the Internet were catching up to those who were old hands, the study found.

“This is a demonstration that, over a relatively short period of time, patterns of brain activation while engaging in cognitive activities change,” Lipton said. “That is at least a first step toward gaining insight into the mechanisms that might allow cognitive engagement to influence brain function.”

But, Small said, beware how you use the Internet.

“You can exercise your mind by using the Internet, but it depends on how it’s used,” he explained. “If you get hooked on gambling or eBay shopping, that may not be positive.

Carlo Mueres is a talented depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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Part of the problem in finding drugs which may be effective for dementia is that our ideas about what constitutes dementia have been undergoing radical change in recent years. It had been traditional to distinguish between Alzheimer’s dementia, or senile dementia of the Alzheimer’s type (SDAT) and multi-infarct dementia (MID), which is theoretically caused by small strokes which insidiously pick off brain tissue to the point where an individual’s cognitive function is compromised.

It was originally thought that MID accounted for 60%+ of the dementias. Accordingly, early attempts to treat the dementias concentrated on the multi-infarct dementias. The initial hypothesis was that these multiple small strokes were being caused by a process of hardening of the arteries, sometimes called arteriosclerosis and sometimes atherosclerosis (although these terms refer to two quite different disorders) which impaired blood supply to the brain. The logical treatment, therefore, for this condition was to attempt to dilate blood vessels. This led to the use of a wide number of vasodilating drugs such as hydralazine.

It is quite rare now for such drugs to be used for this purpose. Arguably, if anything, such treatment may have made the condition somewhat worse in that a potential effect of vasodilators is the reduction of blood pressure and reducing blood pressure would mean that the brain would be less perfused with blood, as one of the functions of blood pressure in the first instance is to provide the propulsive force to send blood up against the force of gravity to perfuse the brain.

Stage 2

More recent attempts to treat the dementias have proceeded on the basis that Alzheimer’s dementia is the commonest form of dementia. For many years, the term Alzheimer’s dementia was reserved for dementias that came on before the age of 65 (for this reason it was also called persenile dementia), which were not obviously caused by strokes. It was conceded that there was another dementia that was like Alzheimer’s dementia, which appeared to come on after the age of 65 but this was thought to be less common. Distinctions on the basis of age have now collapsed and both dementias of the Alzheimer type are now called senile dementia of the Alzheimer type. The amalgamation of these two groups led to an awareness that Alzheimer’s-type dementia is the commonest form. The primary therapeutic focus in the field, therefore, has been on an attempt to reverse the deficits which are supposed to be present in SDAT.

In particular, it has been held that in Alzheimer’s, there is a dysfunction of cholinergic pathways in the brain, for which there are both historical and clinical reason. Historically, when early work in psychopharmacology began, there were only four known neurotransmitters – noradrenaline, 5-HT, dopamine and acetylcholine (ACh). Noradrenaline quickly became the neurotransmitter involved in depression and mood disorders. Dopamine was known to be involved in Parkinson’s disease, and, when it became clear that neuroleptics acted on it, schizophrenia, after which the psychoses in general came to be seen as disorders of dopamine neurotransmission. For the most part, 5-HT was associated with either depression or anxiety. This left ACh without a function. It seemed convenient to parcel it out to the dementias.

There was, in addition, some clinical evidence in favour of an association between the cholinergic system and dementia. Part of the reason for this claim can be seen in a number of the chapters of this blog, in which drugs with anticholinergic effects have been noted as potentially causing amnesia or confusion (see The Management of Side Effects & Side Effects of Antidepressants articles).

Stage 3

In the last 5 years, a number of other dementias have been described. A distinction has been drawn between cortical and subcortical dementias. The cortex of the brain is the area responsible for higher cognitive functions, such as speaking, reading, planning and executing actions, etc In the cortical dementias, memory is usually the function most noticeably affected but those who are affected also have problems with planning even simple functions such as dressing and they typically cannot read, draw or execute any complex tasks. Alzheimer’s and MID are cortical dementias. There are also subcortical parts to the brain which are common to humans and other mammals. They involve a number of what are termed midbrain and brainstem structures.

Read more at dementia managing

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Before you go into psychotherapy, you should be informed of your rights as a patient ahead of time by the therapist. The therapist should, in addition, give you a printed copy of something that reads similar to the below, so that you can take it home with you. We’ve long had a version of these rights here on our website, but I thought it might be helpful to further describe or explain each right in a little more detail.

Therapists nowadays may also often offer you their guidelines for electronic and/or outside contact, (such as through Facebook, email, telephone, etc). This sets the ground rules for how you may contact the therapist outside of session, in event of an emergency, or in the event that you just want to share something with your therapist (or change your appointment or such).

You should know that these rights are not absolutes, and there may be exceptions based upon what kind of treatment you’re undertaking, under what conditions, and in what country or province you live in (even state laws vary that may alter some of these rights). If you have a specific concern with one of these rights, you should discuss it with your therapist during your next session.

Every patient engaging in psychotherapy with a professional has the following rights:

You have a right to participate in developing an individual plan of treatment. Every client in psychotherapy should have a treatment plan that describes general goals of therapy, and specific objectives the client will work on in order to achieve their goals. Without such a plan, how would you know you’ve made progress?

You have a right to receive an explanation of services in accordance with the treatment plan. The therapist should describe the process of how they work with clients, in as much detail as you prefer and time allows.

You have a right to participate voluntarily in and to consent to treatment. You are there voluntarily and should understand and consent to all treatment provided you (unless you have been court-ordered or have other state-imposed restrictions).

You have a right to object to, or terminate, treatment. Don’t like therapy or a specific type of treatment? You can leave at any time without any kind of repercussions (unless you have been court-ordered to attend therapy).

You have a right to have access to one’s records. Yes, although many professionals don’t like it, you have a right to review the records they keep on you.

You have a right to receive clinically appropriate care and treatment that is suited to their needs and skillfully, safely, and humanely administered with full respect for their dignity and personal integrity. Your therapist should be skilled and trained to administer the treatment he or she said they would, and do so in a dignified and humane manner. You should never feel unsafe in your therapist’s presence.

You have a right to be treated in a manner which is ethical and free from abuse, discrimination, mistreatment, and/or exploitation. Therapists shouldn’t use your story to write a book, a screenplay, a movie, or have you appear on a television show. They shouldn’t attempt to leverage the therapeutic relationship in an inappropriate manner (e.g., sexually or romantically), and they shouldn’t pass judgment upon you based upon your background, race, handicaps, etc.

You have a right to be treated by staff who are sensitive to one’s cultural background. No matter what your background or culture, you should expect to be treated with respect and dignity, by all staff (including billing staff, receptionists, etc.).

You have a right to be afforded privacy. Your sessions are confidential and private and will not be overheard or shared with others.

You have a right to be free to report grievances regarding services or staff to a supervisor. More of an issue if you’re being seen in a clinic or hospital.

You have a right to be informed of expected results of all therapies prescribed, including their possible adverse effects (e.g., medications). Psychiatrists should go through the list of common adverse and side effects of any medication they prescribe. If a type of psychotherapy treatment also has adverse events, those should be described to you at the onset of treatment.

You have a right to request a change in therapist. Sometimes it just doesn’t work out with the therapist chosen. That’s nobody’s fault and the therapist should help you find his or her replacement (through a referral, at minimum).

You have a right to request that another clinician review the individual treatment plan for a second opinion. You are entitled to a second opinion by a professional of your choosing at any time.

You have a right to have records protected by confidentiality and not be revealed to anyone without my written authorization.

Carlo Mueres is a excellent depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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This past week we saw the news media captivated by the idea that a 6-year-old boy, Falcon Heene had been carried off by a weather balloon. That is until the boy was later found in his own garage attic and shortly thereafter it was revealed on a television news show that the entire incident was likely a hoax. In replying to a reporter’s question, the young Falcon turned to his dad on camera and said, “You guys said that, umm, we did this for the show.” Oops.

The parents – Richard Heene and Mayumi Heene – have all along claimed it was not a hoax or a publicity stunt. Now, according to The New York Times, the parents will voluntarily surrender to police as soon as charges are filed, which is expected to happen on Wednesday.

While the truth continues to unfold, the police in the investigation have concluded it was likely indeed a publicity stunt: “We have evidence to indicate it was a publicity stunt done with the hope of marketing themselves to a reality-television show sometime in the future,” said Larimer County sheriff Jim Alderden on Sunday afternoon at a news conference in Fort Collins, Colorado.

So that leaves us with the inevitable question – what could possibly psychologically motivate parents to use their child’s very life in order to further themselves?

We see clues to the answer in some other information that’s trickling out about the parents. ABC News noted that former business partner Barbara Slusser – who chased hurricanes and other storms with the Heenes – that they parted ways when Slusser felt that the Heenes often put their kids in harm’s way. Slusser told ABC News, “The last straw for us was when Hurricane Gustav and Hurricane Ike were heading toward the Texas coastline and Heene wanted to go back there and take the kids.”

So we seem to have a set of parents who already don’t quite understand the idea of how to raise children in a safe, responsible and thoughtful manner, thinking nothing of storm-chasing hurricanes and tornadoes with their young children in tow. Storm-chasing, of course, can be a very dangerous and unpredictable endeavor. One of the reasons adults do it is for the thrill of the unpredictability of the storm – putting oneself in harm’s way to experience a ferocious component of nature. But your children? They aren’t old enough to make such decisions for themselves – they trust their parents’ good judgment and experience.

But an account on Gawker by someone who worked with Richard Heene sheds even more light on the Heenes’ motivation – money and additional fame. This was a family that had been on the television program, Wife Swap, and they had already tasted celebrity. They wanted more of it.

Carlo Mueres is a experienced depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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A nervous breakdown refers to a mainstream and often-used term to generically describe someone who experiences a bout of mental illness that is so severe, it directly impacts their ability to function in everyday life. The specific mental illness can be anything – depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or something else. But the reference to a “nervous breakdown” usually refers to the fact that the person has basically stopped their daily routines – going to work, interacting with loved ones or friends, even just getting out of bed to eat or shower.

A nervous breakdown can be seen as a sign that one’s ability to cope with life or a mental illness has been overwhelmed by stress, life events, work or relationship issues. By disconnecting from their regular responsibilities and routines, an individual’s nervous breakdown may allow them to try and regroup their coping skills and temporarily relieve the stress in their life.

Someone with a nervous breakdown may be seen as having “checked out” from society temporarily. They no longer maintain their social relationships with others, and find it difficult or impossible to go to work and may call in sick multiple days in a row. People with a nervous breakdown often don’t even have the coping resources available to take care of themselves, or do much more than rudimentary self-care and maintaining. They may over-eat (if it provides them comfort) or simply fail to eat altogether, not feeling the need or energy to do so.

Since a nervous breakdown is not a clinical or scientific term, it’s meaning can also vary in terms of its length and severity, as well as outcomes. Many people who suffer from a nervous breakdown usually seek out treatment (or have treatment sought out on their behalf by a loved one), and treatment is usually on the serious end of the spectrum of all the interventions available. Inpatient hospitalization for a serious nervous breakdown would not be unusual, to help a person become stabilized and find an effective treatment strategy for the mental disorder they’re affected by.

People who suffer from a nervous breakdown and seek out treatment for it will usually recover from the most extreme depths of the “breakdown” within a few weeks’ time (which may be quickened with inpatient psychiatric treatment). Longer-term recovery usually takes months of ongoing outpatient treatment with mental health specialists, such as a psychiatrist or psychologist.

A nervous breakdown is not a condition to be afraid of, as it is simply an indication of overhwelming stress and mental illness in a person’s life. Loved ones and friends of someone who is suffering from a nervous breakdown should be supportive of the individual’s efforts in seeking help for it.

Carlo Mueres is a excellent depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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New research clarifies how neurotransmitters like norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine, are regulated – a finding that may help fine-tune therapies for depression.

Current drugs for depression target the regulatory process for neurotransmitters, and while effective in some cases, do not appear to work in other cases.

Recent findings suggest that synucleins, a family of small proteins in the brain, are key players in the management of neurotransmitters – specifically, alpha- and gamma-synuclein. Additionally, researchers have found elevated levels of gamma-synuclein in the brains of both depressed animals and humans.

In a study presented at the 39th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, Georgetown University Medical Center researchers observed increased depressive-like behavior in mice where gamma-synuclein acts alone to regulate neurotransmitters, confirming earlier studies by this group.

“These findings show the importance of, and clarify a functional role for, gamma synuclein in depression and may provide new therapeutic targets in treatment of this disease,” says Adam Oaks, a student researcher in the Laboratory of Molecular Neurochemistry at GUMC. “Understanding how current therapies work with the synucleins is important because the drugs don’t work for all patients, and some are associated with side effects including an increased risk of suicide.”

The study was funded by grants from the National Institutes of Health. A provision patent application has been filed by Georgetown University related to the technology described in this paper, on which Anita Sidhu, one of the authors, is an inventor.

However, some symptoms of depression, such as sleep and appetite disturbances, significant concentration problems, and chronic fatigue, interfere with your ability to make the life changes necessary to eliminate the depression. In more serious depression, suicidal thoughts and urges, and preoccupation with death, may require medication in addition to psychotherapy. Antidepressant medication can help relieve those symptoms, and allow you to make needed life changes. The decision to take medication, in addition to participating in psychological treatment, should be discussed with your treating psychologist and your primary care physician.

Carlo Mueres is a experienced depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

categories: depression,family,psychology,sickness,mental,health,help,internet,treatment,fitness,recreation,education,food

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All antidepressants may not be created equal when it comes to worsening of suicidal ideation during treatment, researchers found.

Men taking nortriptyline (Aventyl, Pamelor) were 2.4 times more likely to have an increase in suicidal thoughts than were those taking escitalopram (Lexapro), Nader Perroud, MD, of King’s College London, and colleagues reported online in BMC Medicine.

Nortriptyline, a tricyclic antidepressant, was also associated with a 9.8-fold higher risk of new onset of suicidal ideation compared with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) in the prospective open-label trial.

The reason behind the difference may be that nortriptyline acts predominantly on the noradrenergic system, which, when overactive, is associated with anxiety and agitation.

Because “suicidal ideation is more common in agitated and irritable types of depression,” the researchers said, “it is possible that nortriptyline may induce or worsen suicidal thoughts in some male subjects possibly through an induction of this more agitated type of depression.”

Another possibility is that nortriptyline is less effective against mood symptoms, they noted.

All antidepressants now carry black box warnings of suicidality risk, particularly in children and young adults, and especially early in treatment, but whether this risk differs between agents or by gender has been debated.

Prior studies have looked only at emergence of suicidal thoughts in patients who reported none initially, which “highlights the relatively rare cases with de novo treatment-emergent suicidal ideation,” Perroud’s group said, but could be “‘throwing the baby out with the bath water’ through removing a large proportion of patients at risk.”

So they analyzed findings from the Genome-Based Therapeutic Drugs for Depression (GENDEP) trial, “the largest comparative study of an SSRI and tricyclic antidepressant,” to look at both issues.

The multicenter study included 811 adults with moderate to severe unipolar depression allocated to open-label, flexible dose escitalopram or nortriptyline for 12 weeks. Among them, 473 reported suicidal ideation at baseline.

Overall, suicidal ideation dropped significantly over time in both treatment groups (P less than 0.0001).

And although nortriptyline was associated with higher mean suicidal scores than escitalopram throughout treatment (P less than 0.0001), the difference disappeared after adjusting for baseline scores (P=0.449).

Increases in suicidal ideation – defined as 0.5 standard deviation or greater score increase – were seen at some point in 31.9% of patients.

Treatment group did not appear to have an impact on suicidal ideation changes during therapy in the overall cohort, but it did make a difference in men.

Among men, the overall rate of increase in suicidal thoughts was 35.29% with nortriptyline compared with 23.7% with escitalopram. Even after adjustment for depression severity at baseline and during the study, the effect remained significant.

Carlo Mueres is a talented depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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The closer you live to nature, the healthier you’re likely to be.

For instance, people who live within 1 kilometer of a park or wooded area experience less anxiety and depression, Dutch researchers report.

The findings put concrete numbers on a concept that many health experts had assumed to be true.

“It’s nice to see that it shows that, that the closer humans are to the natural environment, that seems to have a healthy influence,” said Dr. David Rakel, director of integrative medicine and assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.

One previous study had noted fewer health inequalities between rich and poor people in areas with lots of green space, and other studies have echoed these health benefits. But much of this research had relied on people’s perceptions of their physical and mental health.

This new objective look at the matter involved scouring medical records of 345,143 people in Holland, assessing health status for 24 conditions, including cardiovascular, respiratory and neurological diseases. This information was then correlated with how much green space was located within 1 kilometer and 3 kilometers of a person’s postal code.

People living in more urban environments had a higher prevalence of 15 of the 24 conditions, with the relationship strongest for anxiety disorder and depression.

In areas with only 10 percent of green space, about 2.6 percent of people experienced anxiety disorders, compared to 1.8 percent of people in areas with 90 percent green space. The disparity was evident for depression as well – 3.2 percent of people living in more urbanized areas had depression versus 2.4 percent of those in more rural areas.

The health benefits were evident only when the green acres were within a kilometer, not at the 3 kilometer perimeter, except for anxiety disorders, gastrointestinal digestive disorders and so-called medically unexplained physical symptoms, the researchers said.

Children and poor people suffered disproportionately from lack of green acres, the researchers found.

The study findings were published online Thursday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.

Any number of factors could account for the benefits of green space, experts said.

More natural sunlight, for instance, has been linked with a lower incidence of Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and other benefits.

“If patients in hospitals have direct exposure to sunlight through a window or natural sunlight, hospital stays are shorter and patients have less complications,” Rakel said. “That’s been well-established.

More light also means more vitamin D in the skin, which has been found to elevate mood and improve muscle strength, he added.

And fresh air, obviously, has a benefit as well, as do the exercise opportunities that come with more open space.

But much of the relief may come from the simple ability to de-stress.

“If we’re in a busy street with more technology and artificial things, we’re going to be multi-tasking more, which prevents us from focusing on one thing,” Rakel said. “In this day and age, we really need some sort of centering practice. We need to get our mind out of its own stories and focus on something that’s pure. Nature is a beautiful example of that – it’s the way things were meant to be.

Carlo Mueres is a gifted depression therapist who have been working with depression for seven years. If you want more his help please check his depression and anxiety guide!

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