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Depression and Anxiety
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Rejection Massively Reduces IQ
Rejection can dramatically reduce a person's IQ and their ability to reason analytically, while increasing
their aggression, according to new research.
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Depressed More At Risk of Parkinson's
Parkinson's Disease joins the growing list of illnesses linked to depression.
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September 11 Footage Linked to Depression and PTSD
Yet more evidence of the long term harm of the terror attack, both in New York and worldwide.
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Placebos as Good as Antidepressants
The secret magic ingredient? Care and concern.
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Depressed Women Live Longer
Mildly depressed older women tend to live longer than those who are not depressed at all, a surprising new study suggests.
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Adolescent Depression May Lead to Teen Smoking
Research claims that adolescent depression, combined with high receptivity to tobacco advertising, plays a powerful
role in whether a teen smokes cigarettes.
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Women Doctors Face Higher Suicide Risk
Women who chose a career in medicine are much more likely to commit suicide than other females, research show.
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Fatigue May Cause Postnatal Depression
A simple questionnaire on fatigue could, if given after childbirth, identify women who are at an increased risk of
developing moderate to severe postnatal depression, say US researchers.
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Gender Difference, Cancer and Depression
Recent studies show that the sexes have profound differences in they way they cope with cancer and depressive responses.
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Midnight Eating Due to Depression and Stress
The reason some people raid the fridge at night may have nothing to do with their insatiable appetite.
Researchers believe that it is more likely to be down to their inability to deal with stress.
Rejection Massively Reduces IQ
June 10, 2002
"It's been known for a long time that rejected kids tend to be more violent and aggressive," says Roy Baumeister of the Case Western Reserve University in Ohio, who led the work. "But we've found that randomly assigning students to rejection experiences can lower their IQ scores and make them aggressive."
Baumeister's team used two separate procedures to investigate the effects of rejection. In the first, a group of strangers met, got to know each other, and then separated. Each individual was asked to list which two other people they would like to work with on a task. They were then told they had been chosen by none or all of the others.
In the second, people taking a personality test were given false feedback, telling them they would end up alone in life or surrounded by friends and family. Aggression scores increased in the rejected groups. But the IQ scores also immediately dropped by about 25 per cent, and their analytical reasoning scores dropped by 30 per cent.
"These are very big effects -- the biggest I've got in 25 years of research," says Baumeister. "This tells us a lot about human nature. People really seem designed to get along with others, and when you're excluded, this has significant effects."
Baumeister thinks rejection interferes with a person's self-control. "To live in society, people have to have an inner mechanism that regulates their behavior. Rejection defeats the purpose of this, and people become impulsive and self-destructive. You have to use self-control to analyse a problem in an IQ test, for example -- and instead, you behave impulsively."
Baumeister presented his results at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society in Blackpool, Lancashire, UK.
Read more in New Scientist
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Depressed More At Risk of Parkinson's
June 10, 2002
People with depression are three times more likely to develop Parkinson's Disease than people who are not depressed, scientists writing in the journal Neurology have suggested.
People who have already developed Parkinson's -- an incurable degenerative disease of the nervous system -- often suffer from depression. But the study from Maastricht University in the Netherlands is the first to suggest depression can precede symptoms of Parkinson's becoming evident. Parkinson's slowly renders sufferers increasingly immobile and eventually leads to death.
People with the disease develop tremors and facial tics. As the disease progresses, sufferers develop trembling of the arms and legs, stiffness and rigidity of the muscles and slowness of movement. It tends to affect people over 40, though 10% of sufferers are younger.
Researchers looked at health records for all 1,358 people diagnosed with depression in the southern Netherlands over a 15 year period. They compared them with 67,570 people of the same age who had never been diagnosed with depression. Both groups were followed for up to 25 years to see how many developed Parkinson's.
Nineteen of the depressed people developed Parkinson's, compared to 259 of those with no depression. The research team say low levels of a particular brain chemical in both depression and Parkinson's could explain why depression occurs in Parkinson's patients and perhaps also why depression precedes Parkinson's.
People with Parkinson's have been shown to have low serotonin levels, something also seen in depression. Serotonin also acts to regulate another chemical, dopamine, in the brain. As the level of dopamine activity falls in Parkinson's, the researchers suggest, the amount of serotonin activity also falls. That reduction increases the risk of depression.
Dr Agnes Schuurman who led the research, said: "This raises the question of whether depression is the first symptom of Parkinson's disease -- that appears before patients have other symptoms and a diagnosis. Because the reduced serotonin activity already exists before any motor symptoms begin, the risk of depression is also increased long before any Parkinson's symptoms become apparent."
Robert Meadowcroft, director of policy and research at the Parkinson's Disease Society, told BBC News: "We think it's the first time that a direct link has been made between a history of depression and the later development of Parkinson's."
Depression seems to be at the root of so many diseases it is no wonder that studies have shown that up to 80% of all people who visit doctors, or other health care workers, are depressed. BM
Read the research abstract in Neurology
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September 11 Footage Linked to Depression and PTSD
May 20, 2002
Evidence has been flooding in of late of the deep harm that the September 11 attacks have had. This has spread far from the scene of the devastation and tragic loss of life to affect the long-term psychological health of all those who witnessed the images on their TV screens.
The latest warning of this damage came at the conference of the Australasian College of Surgeons in Adelaide, South Australia. The conference heard that repeated exposure to last year's terrorist attacks could have long-term psychological effects, particularly in young children.
Yale University Professor Jay Winter warned that the saturation media coverage of the horrific images could produce effects similar to post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by soldiers after battle.
Of course the worst effects have been found in those living in the proximity of ground zero. A study by the New York Academy of Medicine, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, estimates that more than 100,000 New Yorkers have suffered from post traumatic stress disorder in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.
It says that nearly one in ten people living in the lower third of Manhattan reported major depression they believe was linked to the atrocity. Many had trouble sleeping and, when they did, repeatedly dreamt about the disaster. The study, compiled by Dr Sandro Galea, is the first major investigation of the lasting psychological impact of September 11.
One in five people living in the immediate neighbourhood of Ground Zero suffered from post traumatic stress disorder. Symptoms included flashbacks or nightmares in which they re-lived the terrifying feelings they experienced during the attack. Many of the 1,000 people from Manhattan surveyed had seen the disaster in person and had suffered panic attacks during or after the planes hit the towers.
To find out more about Post Traumatic Stress Disorder see Bob Murray's article "PTSD and Childhood Trauma."
Read more on ABC News, Australia
Read more in New England Journal of Medicine
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Placebos as Good as Antidepressants
May 20, 2002
After thousands of studies, hundreds of millions of prescriptions and tens of billions of dollars in sales, two things are certain about pills that treat depression: Antidepressants like Prozac, Paxil and Zoloft work. And so do sugar pills.
First it was a study by London University, then the landmark study by researchers at the University of Connecticut. Now a new analysis published in the Journal of the American Medical Association has found that in the majority of trials conducted by drug companies in recent decades, sugar pills have done as well as -- or better than -- antidepressants.
What's more, the sugar pills, or placebos, cause profound changes in the same areas of the brain affected by the medicines, according to research published last week. One researcher has ruefully concluded that a higher percentage of depressed patients gets better on placebos today than 20 years ago.
Placebos -- or dud pills -- have long been used to help scientists separate the "real" effectiveness of medicines from the "illusory" feelings of patients. The placebo effect -- the phenomenon of patients feeling better after they have been treated with dud pills -- is seen throughout the field of medicine. But new research suggests that the placebo may play an extraordinary role in the treatment of depression -- where how people feel spells the difference between sickness and health.
The new research may shed light on findings such as those from a trial last month that compared the herbal remedy St John's Wort against Zoloft. St John's Wort fully cured 24 percent of the depressed people who received it, and Zoloft cured 25 percent -- but the placebo fully cured 32 percent.
The confounding and controversial findings do not mean that antidepressants do not work. But clinicians and researchers say the results do suggest that people may be overestimating the power of the drugs and that the medicines' greatest benefits may come from the care and concern shown to patients during a clinical trial -- a context that does not exist for millions of patients using the drugs in the real world.
"The drugs work, and I prescribe them, but they are not what they are cracked up to be," said Wayne Blackmon, a Washington psychiatrist told the Washington Post. "I know from clinical experience the drugs alone don't do the job."
Still, drugs may have become the reflexive treatment for the vast majority of Americans receiving medical attention for depression. As the number of doctor visits for depression rose from 14 million in 1987 to almost 25 million last year, medication was prescribed for nine in 10 patients, according to research published recently.
The average participant in an eight-week trial spends about 20 hours being examined by top experts and highly trained caregivers, said a Seattle psychiatrist, Arif Khan, who studied the placebo effect in trials submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. Participants -- including those being given sugar pills -- are asked detailed questions about how they are feeling, and their every psychological change is closely noted. In comparison, Khan noted, the average patient with depression sees a doctor perhaps 20 minutes a month.
His analysis of 96 antidepressant trials between 1979 and 1996 showed that in 52 percent of them, the effect of the antidepressant could not be distinguished from that of the placebo. Khan, who expects his research to be published later this year, said that the makers of Prozac had had to run five trials to obtain two that were positive, and that the makers of Paxil and Zoloft had had to run even more.
"It speaks to the difficulty we have in classifying and identifying the disorders we deal with," said Thomas Laughren, who heads the group of scientists at the Food and Drug Administration, which evaluates the medicines. "Psychiatric diagnosis is descriptive. We don't really understand psychiatric disorders at a biological level."
In January, Leuchter published a study in the American Journal of Psychiatry in which he tracked some of the brain changes associated with drugs such as Prozac and Effexor, which are called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. When Leuchter compared the brain changes in patients on placebos, he was amazed to find that many of them had changes in the same parts of the brain that are thought to control important facets of mood.
Patients who got better on placebos showed heightened activity in the prefrontal lobe, and that activity continued to rise during the eight weeks of the study. Those who responded to medicine initially showed a decline in prefrontal brain activity, then a rise that eventually tapered off. Thirty-eight percent of patients responded to the placebo, and 52 percent to the medicines.
Once the trial was over and the patients who had been given placebos were told as much, they quickly deteriorated. People's belief in the power of antidepressants may explain why they do well on placebos. Patients in trials are not told which they are receiving.
Some observers assert that the medicine itself works because of the placebo effect, but most psychiatrists believe the drugs do have an effect of their own. Drugs are a "placebo-plus" treatment, said Helen Mayberg, head of neuropsychiatry at the Rotman Research Institute at the University of Toronto.
Doubts cast on the effectiveness, safety of antidepressants
As we reported earlier, the prestigious UK Royal College of Psychiatrists has scaled back it's estimate for the number of people who can be helped by antidepressants from 70% to 50%. And recent studies have pointed to other, more serious problems with the drugs.
A study reported in the British Medical Journal claims that "the odds ratios for ischaemic heart disease were significantly raised for patients who had ever received a prescription for tricyclic antidepressants even after diabetes, hypertension, smoking, body mass index, and use of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors had been adjusted for."
Recent studies, also previously reported, have linked Prozac to an increase in brain tumors and suicides.
We are not at all suggesting that people go off antidepressants, especially if they seem to be doing them good. In any case suddenly stopping, or drastically reducing the dosage, can be dangerous. What we do suggest is that you discuss your fears with your doctor.
Surveys indicate that the Uplift Program has a far higher success rate (94%) than either antidepressants or conventional therapy. The Uplift enables participants to create relationships that offer "care and concern" in all areas of their lives and to change life patterns at the emotional and physical level. The Uplift Audio-programs will allow you to enhance both your relationships and life patterns on your own. BM
Read more in the Journal of the American Medical Association
Read more in the Washington Post
Read more about risks associated with antidepressants in the British Medical Journal
And in the journal Blood
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Depressed Women Live Longer
May 20, 2002
The findings are contrary to most other studies on the link between depression and mortality. Those studies have generally shown that depression increases the likelihood of death within a certain time period.
"This is totally counterintuitive to what you expect to see," said Dan G Blazer, a Duke University professor of psychiatry and behavioral science. "We know that depression in younger populations is very clearly associated with mortality. It's not so clear in older populations."
The results might support the theory that mild depression is a survival mechanism, he said. The Duke study, published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, is the first known examination of mild depression and death, Blazer said. Other studies looked only at people with severe depression.
The Duke study was based on a group that started with 2,401 women and 1,269 men, all older than 65. They were interviewed about their health at roughly three-year intervals from 1986 to 1997 and were separated into three categories -- depressed, mildly depressed and not depressed -- based on their answers to a 20-question test.
The women with mild depression were, on average, 60 percent less likely than other women to die during any three-year period, Blazer said. Researchers took into account age, chronic illness and other factors in calculating the mortality rate.
The researchers found that depression had no influence on the mortality of men.
Blazer said the study may support a theory advanced by University of Michigan psychiatrist Randolph M Nesse that says mild depression may allow people to cope more easily with their problems and remove themselves from dangerous or harmful situations.
According to Nesse humans may need "low mood" or mild depression to deal with failure and disappointment. "People who don't have it waste their whole lives trying to do things they won't ever do," he said.
Nesse is saying something that we have said for a long time -- that depression may be a safety mechanism and a way of withdrawing from an intolerable situation. Learned in childhood, this mild dissociation becomes chronic depression later on in life. BM
Read more in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry
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Adolescent Depression May Lead to Teen Smoking
May 3, 2002
While research has demonstrated the effects of a number of factors on adolescent smoking behavior (including exposure to smoking by family and friends, high receptivity to tobacco advertising, and positive attitudes and beliefs about smoking), this is one of the first studies to examine how depression combines with these factors to influence the likelihood of smoking. The study, entitled "Interacting Effects of Depression and Tobacco Advertising Receptivity on Adolescent Smoking," is published in the Journal of Pediatric Psychology.
"This study demonstrates the complex interplay of factors that influence the initiation of smoking by youth and identifies subgroups of adolescents at especially high risk, such as those who are depressed and those with a high level of receptivity to tobacco advertising. These findings will be useful in targeting prevention messages," said NIDA Acting Director Dr Glen Hanson.
The senior author of the study, Dr Janet Audrain of the University of Pennsylvania, said, "Adolescents with elevated levels of depression may find the messages delivered by tobacco advertisements more appealing than adolescents without elevated levels of depression. Smoking prevention messages should educate youth about the tobacco industry's manipulation of youth that may be psychologically vulnerable to smoking, and dispel the myths about the benefits of smoking and the images that these advertisements portray (for example, cigarette smoking is associated with happiness and good times)." Dr Audrain and the research team surveyed 1,123 high school freshmen as part of a longitudinal investigation of the biobehavioral predictors of adolescent smoking. Students completed a survey that assessed current smoking practices, exposure to other smokers, including family and peers, self-reported levels of depression and receptivity to tobacco advertising.
Sixty percent of the freshmen reported that they had never smoked (never tried or experimented with smoking), and 40 percent reported having smoked at least a partial or whole cigarette. Across both groups 34 percent had high receptivity to tobacco advertising (ie, ability to name an often-advertised cigarette brand, had a favorite tobacco ad, and reported that they possessed or were willing to use a tobacco industry product).
Researchers found that, overall, more adolescents with high receptivity to tobacco advertising had smoked, as compared to those with low receptivity, and these results were further affected by depression. "Among participants with clinically significant depression scores, the effects of tobacco advertising receptivity were heightened," said Kenneth P Tercyak PhD of Georgetown University, study co-investigator, and the article's lead author. "These adolescents may be less likely to successfully say 'no' when presented with the opportunity to receive and try promotional products and are more attracted to and influenced by the promises portrayed in tobacco ads."
I believe that teen smoking and teen suicide are linked. I feel that the link between smoking and the desire to die is extremely close, not only among teens but among all smokers. The Surgeon General's warning on cigarette packs is thus unwittingly an advertising medium that may actually encourage the depressed, those with low self-esteem and the potentially suicidal to smoke. BM
Read more on the Penn/Georgetown Transdisciplinary Tobacco Use Research Center website
Read more on Intelihealth from Johns Hopkins University
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Women Doctors Face Higher Suicide Risk
May 3, 2002
Work by the Centre for Suicide Research at Oxford University found women doctors were twice as likely to take their own lives than women in the general population. However, male doctors were less likely to kill themselves than other men.
General population statistics show that suicide rates among men are significantly higher than among women. The study also found that those doctors most at risk were community health doctors, anaesthetists, psychiatrists, and GPs.
The researchers calculated that the suicide rate among women doctors was 12.6 per 100,000 for the years 1991 to 1995. Over the same period, the rate for female suicides in the general population was just 6.3 per 100,000. Among male doctors, the rate was 14.28 per 100,000 -- a third less than the 21 per 100,000 rate among the male population.
The research team found that anaesthetists were almost seven times, psychiatrists five, and GPs over 3.5 times as likely to commit suicide than other doctors.
Community health doctors were especially vulnerable, being eight times more likely to commit suicide than other doctors, while men in this specialty were 12 times as likely as their female colleagues to do so.
The researchers said: "The increased risk in female doctors is of particular concern in the light of the steadily increasing number and proportion of women in the medical workforce." They are calling for more effective ways of tackling stress and mental health problems among doctors.
Professor John Ashton, co-editor, Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, which published the research, said that nobody knew why female doctors were so apparently vulnerable. But he said: "The nature of the work of a doctor can be stressful. It can be very busy and hectic, and it is difficult to reconcile conflicting demands. It may be that the sort of women who go into medicine are high performing, very bright perfectionists who tend to become frustrated. It is known that people who are conscientious to a fault may have a tendency towards depression."
Separately, several medical schools are considering lowering entrance standards for male students because of the overwhelming proportion of female entrants.
Read more in BBC News
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Fatigue May Cause Postnatal Depression
March 25, 2002
In their study, the Pennsylvania-based team distinguished between "postpartum blues," which affects 50 to 80 percent of new mothers, and "postpartum depression," which affects only 15 to 20 percent of women. The "very dangerous mental illness," postpartum psychosis, affects less than a half percent of new mothers, according to the researchers from Penn State University.
Postpartum problems classified as "depression," rather than "blues" or "psychosis," can last from two weeks to one year and are linked to reported fatigue after the first week and fortnight following birth, their research suggests.
Women were visited within 24 hours of giving birth and subsequently on day 7, 14 and 28. "Women with high levels of fatigue on days 7 and 14 were significantly more likely to report symptoms of depression on day 28 than women with low levels of fatigue," said Ingrid Bozoky, one of the researchers who visited mothers at Pennsylvania's Center Community Hospital.
Dr Elizabeth Corwin, assistant professor at the university's school of nursing, told delegates at the Scientific Session of the Eastern Nursing Research Society that fatigue after childbirth is "normal." But she said the study suggested that depression is more likely in those mothers who do not experience a "fall off" in fatigue in the first 28 days after delivery.
Dr Corwin suggested that a questionnaire about fatigue used on the 14th day after birth could be administered as a matter of course on the baby's first visit to a paediatrician or other healthcare provider. "There certainly is some connection between fatigue and postpartum depression. Mothers should remember that they need to take care of themselves after giving birth."
Read more in Health-News
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Gender Difference, Cancer and Depression
March 25, 2002
According to psycho-oncologist Alexander Kiss, gender plays a big role in the way people respond to cancer, how they are treated by the medical fraternity and their survival prospects. He and his team from the Universities of Basel, Switzerland and Vienna, Austria, studied people suffering from breast (women) and prostate (men) cancers.
Sex and coping mechanisms
They found that gender differences are evident not only in the physical impact of the illness but also on sex, quality of life, psychosocial differences, coping, and patients' partners.
The most striking difference between the sexes is that whereas women are open to talk about their condition and their treatment with their friends, men are not. This difference may have its root in how men view themselves. According to the researchers: "If you ask men (colleagues or patients) what masculinity means for them, most are astonished, some make jokes, and you seldom get a consistent answer. How men are socialized and act as men is seldom discussed but constantly revealed in social interaction. It is influenced by beliefs and behaviour such as acting hard and strong."
Masculinity has close links to potency, not only in the biological sense but also in the social sense. Surprisingly, however, there is little awareness of, or research into, the effect of prostate cancer on male gender identity. Research on men has been limited to the fact that 80% of men who have been treated for prostate cancer by the traditional methods have been unable to maintain an erection sufficient for vaginal penetration after 55 months.
By contrast, the effect of surgical techniques (mastectomy versus lumpectomy) on femininity has been investigated extensively. 30-40% of women say that the procedure has negatively affected their sex lives but since their self-view is more social, emotional and relationship-centered this has not had nearly the same effect on their lives.
Although quality of life measures have been routinely incorporated into studies of treatments for breast cancer since the late 1980s, they were rarely included in studies of prostate cancer. The much earlier research into quality of life issues in breast cancer may be partly due to public concern about breast cancer stimulated by the feminist movement in the 1970s and 1980s. Public concern about psychosocial issues in prostate cancer has emerged only in the 1990s and has been restricted mainly to North America. The lack of information on the effect of quality of life of different treatments for prostate cancer makes it more difficult for men to decide about treatment.
Even now, the researchers claim, there is no randomised trial comparing the effect on quality of life of different treatments for localised prostate cancer (surgery, brachy therapy, and external beam therapy).
Depression and support
The diagnosis of cancer is distressing, and between 20% and 30% of cancer patients continue to be depressed or anxious six months after diagnosis. Disease stage, uncontrolled pain, and absence of social support correlate more with psychological distress than cancer site. Again more data are available for breast cancer than prostate cancer. Being depressed is "in contradiction" with the core issues of male gender identity. Certain symptoms of male depression may be gender specific, for example,:stress intolerance, low impulse control, alcohol misuse, and aggressive behavior.
During stressful times most women with breast cancer want to talk about it and share their feelings with others. Most men with prostate cancer would rather not. Clinicians involved in psychosocial research in cancer think that gender affects how people cope with cancer, but there is little empirical research on this issue. The authors of a recent study of men after prostatectomy concluded: "Most men with prostate cancer avoided disclosure about their illness where possible and placed great importance on sustaining a normal life. Factors related to limiting disclosure included men's low perceived need for support, fear of stigmatization, the need to minimise the threat of illness to aid coping, practical necessities in the workplace, and the desire to avoid burdening others."
Support groups for patients with breast cancer have a longer tradition than those for men with prostate cancer, and more women than men attend support groups. Men in support groups prefer to share information, whereas women prefer to share emotion. These gender differences are even found in Internet cancer support groups. Support groups for men are more common in North America than the rest of the world. More is known about the efficacy of group intervention in breast cancer than in prostate cancer.
However what is known, from this and other studies, is that the survival chances are much higher for non-depressed patients with a supportive family and friend network.
Urologists just don't get it
Although psychological distress in cancer patients is high, according to the researchers, doctors are poor at detecting depression (a separate study two years ago found that only about 50% of UK doctors recognized the symptoms of depression).
Psychological distress is often discounted as a normal consequence of having cancer. This lack of recognition of psychological distress means that many patients do not receive treatment.
Nevertheless, treatments such as antidepressant drugs, counselling, and supportive intervention are effective in cancer patients. However a recent study found that radio-oncologists' recommendation for supportive counselling did not correlate with patient distress or the amount of perceived social support by patients but rather with progressive disease and less denial behaviour. Oncologists increasingly realise the importance of communication skills, and training has been shown to improve their ability to detect and treat psychological distress. However, many urologists are not aware that there is a problem, and training has been lacking.
Wives more distressed than husbands
Partners are the most important emotional and social support for cancer patients. To support and care for others is a core feature of female, but not male, gender identity. A recent study found that female partners possessed a more accurate understanding of their husband's experience with prostate cancer than male partners had of women's breast cancer experience.
In the few studies comparing psychological distress of patients with prostate cancer and their wives, the wives seemed to be more distressed than the husbands.
Reported in the British Medical Journal
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Midnight Eating Due to Depression and Stress
March 25, 2002
The scientists, from the University of Tromso, Norway, believe "night-eating syndrome" may also be linked to a number of other harmful psychological and physical disorders.
The body's 24-hour clock is regulated by a complex pattern of hormones, which also play a role in how the body responds to stress. The researchers set out to test the theory that a compulsion to eat at night indicates a disruption of this hormone pattern -- and consequently an inability to deal with stress.
They compared five women with night-eating syndrome with five women who had no such compulsion to eat at night. The women with the syndrome ate at least half of their daily intake of food after 8pm, and snacked at least once during the night. Tests revealed that the night eaters had significantly higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol in their blood.
Similar findings have been recorded in people with other disorders, such as obesity, fatigue syndrome, anorexia nervosa, insomnia and depression. However, it is not yet clear whether these disorders are all caused by the same disruption to hormone patterns.
One wishes the researchers had also asked about the participants' experiences in childhood. Could it be that certain traumas, such as sexual abuse and parental fights, happened after the children were put to bed? One of my patients, who suffered from night eating for many years, remembered that her father used to wake her up late at night when coming home drunk from parties and behaved inappropriately. Subsequently, any night-time noise would wake her up, and often she sought solace and safety in food. When she became anorexic, she found herself eating at night when her defences against doing so were low. AF
Read more in BBC News
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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