antidepressants, serendipity and sex

Extra post for today, since I missed yesterday’s post. Putting sex in the title is sure to attract more visitors.

Today  someone sent me this article – new antidepressant increases sex drive - about a new antidepressant called flibanserin. The article refers to the drug as a “female Viagra” but really it’s nothing like Viagra at all (which affects blood circulation) but works on the brain in a similar way to other antidepressants.

The aphrodisiac properties of the medication were discovered by accident, at the end of a research trial. Basically, women tried on this drug were doing everything they could to hold onto it at the end of the trial, so someone started asking the questions.

It seems funny to me that many of our major medical breakthroughs were discovered by accident. Penicillin is the obvious one, but also lithium for Bipolar disorder – I just can’t think of any others, but feel free to leave a comment if you know one.

Anyone who is familiar with our common antidepressants will know that they often cause problems with libido. The patient is sometimes left with a choice of being depressed, or having no sex life – a really fun choice, at that. I imagine this drug will be one to watch when it is finally released, which may be several years in Australia at least.

Another interesting antidepressant to watch is agomelatine, a melatonin agonist. Melatonin is an important hormone in regulating our sleep-wake cycle and insomnia is a huge feature (cause and effect) of depression. So this one will be an interesting drug for the treatment of depression and insomnia. It’s already available in the UK but not Australia or the USA.

 

experiment not going well

Hm, we are in about day 5 of this ridiculous no-internet caper and I am about to cave in. Surely I never said a month? How about a week??

The non-virtual world is overrated. Obviously I was just harking back to some nostalgic fantasy about being more authentic and interacting face to face. The reality of life with no internet is just inconvenience.

So here I am wandering around a University campus at the age of much-too-old-to-be-here, at 6am holding a coffee cup and a lap top computer. I haven’t been able to organise our family trip for the summer or paid any bills, or find out what’s on at the movies. I am completely starved of any news or information, I don’t know what’s happened on FB this week, and I am having to find other ways to occupy myself while eating.

I also missed my blog post yesterday because it was 35 degree heat and I just did not have the energy to take myself to the library at night. Which means that I have officially failed BloPoMo. Or perhaps I will just post twice today and cheat (extenuating circumstances).

Having no internet has also changed my relationship with my computer. It used to be my best friend, but now I am no longer feeling such fondness for it any more. It just sits in the corner at home, lifeless. No longer animated by the presence of the whole world inside it.

It’s a funny world when you can keep all your friends and the whole world inside your computer on the shelf… Who would have dreamt about this even 20 years ago?

Having said all that, this experiment may possibly be good for the kids. They seem to appreciate having a person who is actually in the room with them rather than off in cyberspace while keeping an “eye” on them. Sitting around with other adults and chatting while kids play is possibly not much different for the adult but maybe is a different experience for the kid, rather than having a parent type into a screen.

I read a novel.

 

Mental health of Australians

Here’s my summary of the 2007 Australian National Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing

This was a national face-to-face household survey of 8841 (60% response rate) community residents aged between 16 and 85. And the main points were:

• Nearly half of all Australians (45.5%) have experienced a mental disorder in their lifetime. One in five Australians had experienced a mental disorder in the past 12 months

• Anxiety disorders (14.4% in past 12 months) were the most common class of mental disorder. 6.2% had experienced mood disorders in past year (ie depression, bipolar disorder) 5.1% had experienced substance use disorders in past year

• Disability: Mental disorders, particularly mood disorders, were disabling. On average, people with a mental disorder experienced nearly 4 days per month when they were unable to perform some or all of their usual activities. People with an anxiety disorder had 4 days out of role, people with a substance use disorder had 3 days out of role, while people with a mood disorder had 6 days out of role.

• Comorbidity: One in four people (25.4%) with mental disorders in the past 12 month had more than one class of mental disorder. • One-third (34.9%) of people with a mental disorder (about 7% of population) used health services for mental health problems in the 12 months prior to the interview.

• Females had a higher rates of depression & anxiety disorders • Males had higher rates of substance use disorders

• Young adults: 25% (age 16-24) had experienced a mental disorder in the past 12 months, and young adults are the least likely group to access health services (22%)

• the prevalence of mental disorders declined with age

• Service use: Females were more likely to use services than males. Those with mood disorders were most likely to make use of services (58.6%), followed by those with anxiety (37.8%) and substance use disorders (24.0%), respectively. 2.6% received treatment from a hospital, whereas 35% consulted a community-based provider – particularly general practitioners and psychologists. People aged 45-54 most likely to access services (42%)

• Comparison with 1997 Survey: It would appear that the 12 month prevalence of any anxiety disorder is higher in the 2007 NSMHWB (14.4%) compared to the 1997 NSMHWB (9.7%, 3). Although this may reflect a true change in prevalence over time, it may also be explained, at least in part, by differences in the two instruments used in the two surveys.

• The results of the survey place Australia as a country with one of the highest rates of mental disorder worldwide, in line with other developed countries such as the USA (26.2%, 25) and New Zealand (20.7%, 26).

• As was found in the Australian survey, anxiety disorders were the most common class of mental disorder in both the USA and New Zealand surveys. The prevalence of mood disorder was lower in the Australian survey compared to the USA and the New Zealand surveys. In contrast, the prevalence of substance use disorder was higher in the Australian survey compared to both the USA and New Zealand surveys.

• Limitations: the survey interview does not attempt to detect low-prevalence and difficult-to-assess mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, personality disorders and dementia. Homeless people, people resident in nursing homes, hostels, and hospices and those in prison or other corrective service facilities were not surveyed • There was a lower than expected response rate (60%) which has implications for the validity of any estimates of the survey

clothing concerns

What are words but thoughts, and every piece of writing a series of thoughts, the connections between them are somewhat unpredictable and lead to the uniqueness of the piece.

Today I went to visit a brand new shopping mall in my area, blah blah. Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be exactly like every other shopping mall in the city, country and possibly many other countries like ours…

Anyway the mall looked good initially, some of the clothing stores even held items that I found appealing – on the rack. Because I usually have so much trouble with clothing shops I tried a new strategy, which was to picture each item of clothing on an extremely fat person I know, and if it seemed a reasonable outfit for them, I would try it on.

Not that I am morbidly obese but size 12-14, a few kg overweight, with many saggy areas. I also happen to be short and shall we say well endowed, and this has created a lot of difficulty for me in recent times. So what that means is having spent the first 30 years of my life as a size 8, I tend to still imagine myself that way and then get a nasty surprise when I find myself hanging out of the wrong clothes in all sorts of inappropriate places. I am not big enough for plus-size shops but find myself staring longingly at them for items that just look more wearable.

I have heard that young inhabitants of the province of Ning Bo in China sometimes come to Australia and at first they might feel terribly excited about the amount of shops we have. After a few visits to the malls they can be found gathering in small groups and giggling whenever shops are mentioned. It may take a bit of questioning but what they find really funny is the lack of choice in Australian clothes. At home they seem to have a wide variety of choice. The way it is here, all clothes are a certain type, so that it doesn’t matter which of the thousands of shops you go to, everything is still the same. All jeans are hipsters, all boots are Western style if that’s this season’s look.

In my case for the past few years it means all necklines come down somewhere around my belly button. What is this?? It seems like a carefully crafted piece of torture. Shop assistants peer down their noses in a perplexed fashion when I say I want a higher neck line, as if I must be Amish or something. Meanwhile the problem seems quite obviously, fairly to hit them in the face, but no one is perturbed by this.  I have tried lots of tricks, getting things altered  or “layering” with singlets etc. This just means I get too hot in summer – in the rare event that I find a singlet that stays up.

I guess I must be what fashion magazines now trendily refer to as a “real woman” body shape. Sure, I’ve had 3 children. Yes, I was motivated to lose weight after the first 2 but haven’t quite got back on the program after the 3rd. So as far as I know some of the magazines are running campaigns to use normal size women in their ads, which is great, but I’m not sure what they are going to find them to wear.

I don’t remember having this problem in my 20s at all, when I was size 8. Has my body changed shape so much that I am no longer suitable for clothing -  or have all the clothes changed, leaving a lot less choice in what items are available? If so, what’s behind this kind of fashion fascism?

It’s a big mystery to me. Today I ended up with 2 tops out of about 20 that were reasonable, but not what I would call my first choice of clothing, and a couple of singlets that are already falling short of basic decency.

Next time I will head for the vintage shops. I’m just waiting for someone to design a new clothing line to fix this problem. Surely it’s a niche in the market for someone to capitalise on. There must be other ladies out there with the same issue, surely?

internet experiment

In my house, we are currently undertaking an semi-voluntary experiment in internet use. Or to put it more simply, our internet was cut off.

Unfortunately the neighbour who we were piggy-backing our connection off has decided to move house. That wasn’t part of the sharing agreement, and leaves us without connection. Fortunately we live on campus and the library is about 100m away, complete with wireless network for which we have password.

So – the experiment begins… We decide to spend a month with no internet in the house. A brave move, you say but I remind you that no one much had internet at home 12 years ago. We all went about our lives, somehow got information and somehow kept in touch with people, all without internet. It does sound incredible I will admit.

I can probably go and check emails a couple of times a day, as long as someone is with the kids. I can use it at work which is 3 times a week. I can go first thing in the morning before kids wake and last thing after they sleep. I guess that really is plenty, after all what do I really need it for? My regular haunts are facebook, wordpress, gmail, and yes a bit of Settlers of Catan…

This is likely to be good for the kids, having parents who are “present” in the room rather than “virtually” absent in e-land. This is likely to be good for the house, with more organisational stuff or housework getting done. It may also be good for my writing skills, perhaps even my marriage? I might lose the immediacy of writing and have time to consider something before sending it off.

Will I lose the convenience of looking things up? Will I get lost, miss emails or be unaware of things happening in the world?  Probably. WIll it matter? Unlikely. Don’t get me wrong, I looove the internet. Adore it, can’t get enough of it. That’s part of the problem I suppose.

Internet enables us to be connected to a wide variety of people at all times. Thanks to Facebook we now have a broader definition of what a “friend” is, and more of them. But internet also takes us away from the people we are physically co-located with, our nearest and dearest. Maybe the reason my kids love TV so much is they see me escaping into a screen regularly. I can live next to neighbours for months without much real life contact and only get to know them online. I can go to work and receive emails from someone in the next room. Convenient? Certainly. Benefical? I don’t know.

So we’ll do the experiment and see what happens.

formula for depression

Here’s a nifty little formula about depression, which is derived from some great research done in 1978 (Brown & colleagues – no reference sorry!)

This research just confirms something we know instinctively, that people develop depression when their ability to cope with life is overwhelmed. This is not always the case, with some of the more severe (melancholic) forms of depression, it may just occur without any provoking event.

But for the majority of people, we become depressed when our coping resources are overwhelmed. So adversity can trigger depression, but interestingly the researchers found that adversity did not always invariably cause depression. In a study of women they managed to isolate another factor that influenced people’s response to adversity, which was social support.

So in looking at a group of women who had experienced one or more stressful life events, those who did not have social support were more likely to become depressed. Seems obvious right? Those with good social support were more able to survive adversity without developing depression. This just goes along with the theory that humans are really herd animals.

adversity minus social support = depression

adversity plus social support = resilience

I would say that this formula does not always work for everyone; some people still get depressed with all the social support in the world (I’m sure we all know those people) and some just cope heroically on their own with all kinds of misfortunes.

And the same goes for postnatal depression. I am a huge advocate of how wonderful babies and parenting are, don’t get me wrong I believe it is the most positive life experience there is. But nevertheless it is a stressful event requiring a lot of physical and emotional resources. So the same formula can apply to postnatal depression, with the baby as the “adversity”.

What that means is we all need to support new mothers, as well as Dads who do often also develop postnatal depression from some new research. That’s something that we seem to know instinctively, from the traditions of baby showers and dinner deliveries that hopefully occur when someone has a baby.

But it also means thinking outside your own family or social group to others who may not be so well connected and maybe just dropping in on them to see how they are going. Pass on your baby clothes to someone new or deliver them a meal.

And more generally don’t be afraid to go visit people you know when they are having a hard time, especially when they are isolated.

 

reading or not

Oops – missed yesterday’s post because the internet was down. I am having to walk and sit outside the library to get wifi! But this is probably a good thing.

Books on my bedside table:

Advance Australia Where – Hugh Mackay

Cyburbia – James Harkin

The Irresistible Revolution – Shane Claiborne

The Varieties of Religious Experience – William James

The Book of Rapture – Nikki Gemmell

What a nice list of books. If only I were anywhere near reading any of them. Mostly what happens is I buy delicious tantalising books in large quantities and put them optimistically on my bedside table, where they sit for a few weeks or months. The pile grows higher and higher and once it becomes an impossible tower I take some of them away and put them in the “book room”. Meanwhile a lot of internet surfing gets done.

Yes we do have a dedicated room in the house just for books. Most of the people in this family do not have their own room, and yet the books do. Unfortunately it’s a tiny closet and does not allow any room for actual reading. The next step, in a bigger house, would be to create a proper library with an armchair and nice lighting. Computers would be forbidden there.

I’m not sure that’s actually going to happen, given the IT revolution and the impending end of print media. But maybe we will preserve the books as a kind of relic or museum piece.

the time traveller’s wife

Just went to see this movie, which in itself was a great treat (just leaving the house with husband and no children to sit in movie theatre).

I think this came off much better as a movie than did the original book, because time travel is a concept that is much more easily described visually. The movie was well directed and acted and simplified the plot nicely, whereas the writing style was not the book’s best feature.

As far as time travel stories it was a good one, with a complex enough plot to keep the audience interested. The basic “rules” of the time travel world were that you can travel back to different times but not change the events which occur, you can communicate with different versions of your self in different times.

The plot gave the impression of skipping all over the place in time, but was actually linear with a lot of flashbacks, which made it understandable.

It was a movie about loss and longing and regret and separation and grief and love. It was also a movie about wishes and second chances, about the hope of a soul mate and the heartache of little children.

satay omelette noodles

Here’s my favourite lunch, fortunately it’s extremely easy, but does not make a good work lunch because you need a stove.

Take 2 eggs, some milk and whatever veges you like and make a small omelette, cut into small squares. Then make 1 packet of 2 minute noodles (Indonesian satay variety with chilli) and chuck it all into a bowl. Add some chopped mushrooms if you have time.

Yum yum. A kiddie or husband friendly version can be made with the less chilli variety of noodles.

Cabramatta

I was lucky enough to have lunch in Cabramatta today, this is the great thing about working in Liverpool, Sydney. It’s like having a mini overseas trip to Asia, complete with extremely hot weather and food of dubious hygiene. I don’t know why we spend so much time, money and carbon gases to go overseas when a trip here is just the same.

It’s a colourful, noisy, dirty place and what I like is just the complete unexpectedness of what one might find in the shops. The public toilets are well signposted and well barred complete with sharp disposal boxes and signs that say “injecting drugs is illegal”, pointing to a darker side of Cabramatta. There are many fruits I have not seen before or can’t recognise. White Anglo people are a minority and as a half-ethnic generic looking dark haired person I even feel strange starting conversations in English.

By the time I arrive I am starving and can’t decide where to eat. I choose a “combination” white fluffy bun thingy but soon wish I had opted for the BBQ pork variety. After discovering a boiled egg and an unidentified piece of entrail I feel less enthusiastic about the eating side of the adventure. There are the customary red BBQ duck carcasses hanging in windows, and ridiculously cheap butcher shops with huge slabs of meat.

Banks and real estate agents have signs written in Asian letters. There are many jewellery, clothing, shoe and fabric shops but I don’t have time to fossick around for long enough to choose clothes or shoes. I suspect there is gold to be found here. I could find a tailor and buy fabrics, I could stock up on baby clothes and fancy little girls dresses for presents.

I buy mango stin and lychee for husband who loves this stuff, chillis for me. Couples are everywhere, I see one Vietnamese couple carrying a crates of mangos and arguing, another giggling together infectiously. I see an elderly white gay couple and several white men with Asian wives.

I will have lunch here more often.