Posts Tagged ‘depression’

Polis’s Mom Shares Struggle With Depression
Congressman Jared Polis’s mom shares her struggle with depression in a new book.

Negative impact of depression on glycemic control in type 2 diabetes patients
In this German prospective representative study of patients with type 2 diabetes, baseline depression predicted problems with medication adherence, problems with health-related behaviors, and unsatisfactory glycemic control at follow-up.

Hi.
Are there any psychological characters of type 1 diabetes?
So far I have : Higher risk for eating disorders, depression, and dementia.
What am I missing?

Being diagnosed with any major disease is often traumatic.  This includes being diagnosed with diabetes and the possibility of acquiring complications along the way.

The Quiet Crisis Within Diabetes

Depression is a ‘quiet crisis’ facing diabetics, their families and their health care providers. Financially and emotionally this crisis is exacting a terrible cost.

One of the unknown and hidden dangers of diabetes is the risk of becoming depressed.  In fact, studies have shown that diabetics are two times more likely to suffer from depression than non-diabetics.  A contributing factor to depression in a diabetic can be their physiological state.  There is research indicating that high blood sugars cause biochemical changes in the brain which can lead to depression.

One of the solutions for this is to acquire the services of a hypnotist who can responsibly and effectively help a diabetic with depression.  The hypnotist can help improve the diabetic’s life by:

• reducing the suffering felt by the diabetic, whether real or imagined
• improving their diabetes management skills which will help achieve enhanced health

A hypnotist can make an huge difference because even a small reduction in a diabetic’s long term blood sugar levels can result in a marked decrease in the likelihood of diabetic complications.

Physician’s Role

Due to the high demands and nature of the physician’s work, most of them are not aware of that their diabetic clients are two times more likely to suffer from depression. If they knew this, they would probably be more likely to refer their diabetic clients with poor blood sugar control to someone who could help.

A hypnotist is an example of someone who can help.  Keep in mind that a hypnotist is trained to be a motivational coach and stress management consultant and this skill can come in handy when dealing with a diabetic.

Depression and Diabetes

It is important to realize the connection between depression and diabetes before it worsens and the treatment becomes useless.  And unless the diabetes treatment programs are sculpted to target the cause and feature of diabetes, many of those at risk will only become worse.   Those at risk include person’s with pre-diabetes as well as those with diabetes.

Untreated depression in those with diabetes is a personal tragedy for all family members especially the children. Keep in mind that children are not equipped with coping skills to handle the emotional burden of a depressed and diabetic parent.  A child feels helpless watching his mother being taken apart emotionally and physically by the deadly combination of poorly controlled diabetes and untreated depression.  No child is equipped to watch his mother go blind physically and emotionally.

The challenge with current diabetic treatments is that no amount of anti-depressants and insulin will ever ameliorate the significant cause of diabetes.  This is because these treatments do not address the root of the problem. Furthermore, no amount of medication given to one individual will ever prevent another from developing diabetes.

In relation to that, a Swedish study discovered that there is a disturbingly high correlation between traumatic childhood life events and diabetes-related auto-immune activity. This study involved 17,000 children born between 1997 and 1999.  One of many conclusions in this study is that: “Experiences of serious life events (e.g., parental separation, serious illness, or death in the family) has been suggested to trigger type 1 diabetes or the auto-immune process behind the disease.”

What a Hypnotist Can Do

A properly trained hypnotist can help to reduce or eliminate depression in a diabetic by helping them to eliminate depression by activating post-hypnotic suggestions.

A post-hypnotic response is a cause-effect belief program that powerfully dictates behavior.  When a specific stimulus becomes uniquely associated with a strong internal state, you have a post-hypnotic suggestion and effect.  You have the stimulus and the response.

When a person has a strong emotional feeling, that affect state can then become associated with whatever situation and/or thoughts they are currently experiencing. For example, an uncontrolled diabetic consequence could be associated with a relationship break-up, a job loss or any other stressful situation. These are common events but note that even a small, insignificant incident can also be implicated. This confluence of events is called an I.S.E. or Initial Sensitizing Event.

The next stage in deepening the power of this erroneous belief programming occurs when a person is next exposed to the same stimuli that were initially associated with a powerful, negative state of mind.

With enough repetition and enough time, this results to feelings which become facts cognitively and physically.  A pseudo-depression cycle is then perpetuated.

In this case, the belief syllogism is: “I feel depressed therefore there must be reasons.”  And when feelings happen, a person must make sense out of their world.  They justify this unconscious, powerful, emotional experience with a conscious understanding that usually takes the form of inappropriate cause-effect associations. They will often find a reason for their depression and will often attribute it to whatever seems like a reasonable explanation.

Summary

One’s feelings of depression can be in part or whole built on erroneous beliefs or post-hypnotic suggestions. Therefore, all a depressed person may need are the tools and coaching in order to be able to disable erroneous cause-effect belief programs.

To quote Michael D. Yapko, Ph.D., “For most people, depression is the product of a hurtful way of interpreting and responding to life experiences.”

Action Items

If you are a person with diabetes and you are hitting a ‘wall’, it is best that you consult with your physician.

If you are a nurse or physician and you have patients who don’t seem to want to take care of themselves, try to figure out why.  There are alternatives that you may not have been aware of before now.

If you are a hypnotist and you wish to help those with diabetes, please remember four things:

1) You must always obtain a fully informed referral from your client’s doctor. If you suspect your client is depressed, never diagnose. In fact, if you think they are depressed, it is incumbent upon you that you suggest they see their physician for an official assessment before you can help them further. Be sure to obtain an additional referral so that you can help them appropriately with their depression if your help is suitable. If you feel you cannot help, don’t.

2) Should a physician or nurse, have time to chat with you, please remind them that if you are only allowed one approach to helping their patient, stress management alone can produce incredible blood sugar lowering benefits over time. This is attested to by an article in a January, 2002 issue of Diabetes Care in which a study done by Dr. Surwit shows that: “stress management techniques, when added to standard care, helped reduce glucose levels. Surwit notes also that: “The change is nearly as large as you would expect to see from some diabetes-control drugs.

3) By acting in a responsible manner as part of your client’s health care team, you can in your way, make a big difference, even if only by reducing stress. Please note that stress is a contributing factor to depression. Therefore, as your client is reducing their stress levels they may also experience a reduction in depression. This will in turn create a need for your client to reduce their diabetic medication needs . This is because there is evidence that a reduction in depressive symptoms correlates with a reduction in blood sugar. This was demonstrated in a study conducted by Patrick Lustman, a psychologist at Washington State University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

4) Finally, before helping a person with diabetes or depression, you really need to know a great deal about both subjects.

Depression, acne, etc. were never really found amongst Aboriginal peoples. With all the chemicals, dyes, processing, pasteurizations, abuse, and mutiliation done to foods and animals and pesticides and chemicals added to veggies & fruits we wonder why illnesses like cancer, swine flu, obesity, and this circus of mental disorders is worse than ever before?