HOW TO PREVENT SUICIDAL DEPRESSION
How can you prevent death by suicide? For those unfamiliar with the ravages of mental illness, the flippant answer is: Well, don’t. In fact, dying from the other leading killers like heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and hypertension can be a matter of choice, just like dying by suicide because psychiatric disorders cloud your judgment. Almost forty thousand Americans take their own lives each year, with depression appearing to be the leading cause. Fortunately, lifestyle interventions can help heal both your mind and your body.
In 1946 The World Health Organization defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” In other words, you can be in excellent physical shape—enjoying low cholesterol, a healthy body weight, and good general physical condition—but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re healthy. Mental health can be just as important as physical health.
Major depression is one of the most commonly diagnosed mental illnesses. About 7 percent of American adults suffer from major depression—that’s about sixteen million people who have at least one depressive episode each year. Well, everyone feels sad sometimes. The full range of emotions is what makes us human. However, depression is not just sadness. It is characterized by symptoms lasting for weeks, such as low or sad mood, decreased interest in activities that used to bring pleasure, weight gain or loss, fatigue, undue guilt, difficulty concentrating, and recurrent thoughts of death.
Indeed, severe depression can be a life-threatening illness.
However, good mental health is not “merely the absence of illness”. Just because you’re not depressed doesn’t necessarily mean you’re happy. There is twenty times more published research on health and depression than on health and happiness. In recent years, however, the discipline of “positive psychology” has emerged, whose focus is on the relationship between optimal mental and physical health.
A growing body of evidence suggests that positive psychological well-being is associated with reduced risk of physical illness, but which comes first? Are people healthier because they are happy, or are they happier because they are healthy?
Prospective studies that follow people over time have found that those who were happier at the beginning actually ended up being healthier. An analysis of seventy such mortality-related studies concluded that “positive mental well-being has a beneficial effect on survival in both healthy and diseased populations.” It seems that those who are happier live longer.
But let’s not rush. While positive mental states may be associated with less stress and greater resistance to infection, positive well-being may also be associated with a healthier lifestyle. In general, people who feel satisfied seem to smoke less, exercise more and eat healthier. So is being happier just a marker of good health, not a cause of it? To find out, researchers set out to make people sick.
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University gathered hundreds of people – some happy, some unhappy – and paid them $800 each to allow them to drop the common cold virus into their noses. Even if someone who has a cold sneezes right into your face and the virus gets into your nose, you won’t automatically get sick because your immune system may be able to fight it off. So the research question was: Whose immune system would do better in fighting a common virus—those in the group rated initially as happy, vibrant, and calm, or those in the group who were anxious, hostile, and depressed?
One in three people in the group with negative emotions was unable to fight off the virus and got a cold. But only one in five of the lucky participants got sick, even after the researchers took into account such factors as bedtime and getting up, exercise habits and stress levels. In a subsequent study, scientists even exposed participants (who were also paid) to the effects of the flu virus, a much more serious infection. Again, increased positive emotions were associated with lower documented morbidity. Apparently, happier people are less likely to get sick.
So, as it turns out, mental health does have an impact on physical health. That is why it is extremely important that the food you consume supports both your psyche and your health. As you’ll see, common foods—from green leafy vegetables to the common garden tomato—can positively affect your brain chemistry and help you avoid depression. In fact, even just smelling a simple spice can improve your emotional state.
But avoiding bad moods is far from just eating vegetables. There are certain ingredients in some foods that may increase the risk of depression, such as arachidonic acid, a pro-inflammatory compound found primarily in chicken and eggs in the diet, blamed for mood swings as a result of brain inflammation.
