Here’s a story that caught my eye because my father was an alcoholic.

“Reshaping of the DNA scaffolding that supports and controls the expression of genes in the brain may play a major role in the alcohol withdrawal symptoms, particularly anxiety, that make it so difficult for alcoholics to stop using alcohol.”

The idea in the article/study is to make alcoholism easier to cure by making the withdrawal less terrible. My father was unable to quit until Diabetes claimed both of his legs.

This is another story I posted on Topix.com today, because it actually have good advice in it, and it came from the television show!

A Link Between Antidepressants And Type 2 Diabetes This is interesting because

Lauren Brown, researcher with the U of A’s School of Public Health, found people with a history of depression had a 30 per cent increased risk of type 2 Diabetes.Lauren Brown, researcher with the U of A’s School of Public Health, found people with a history of depression had a 30 per cent increased risk of type 2 Diabetes.Lauren Brown, researcher with the U of A’s School of Public Health, found people with a history of depression had a 30 per cent increased risk of type 2 Diabetes.

These are just a sampling of the stories that broke today.  Throughout the day I will make new posts, and later include some of the more interesting clinical trials.

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You have to understand that about 350 newstories, researchpapaers, and clinical trials, starting up and results, all arrive in my Google Reader. Ok, no problem I go through it, select what’s important to anxiety issues in general and then write some commentary.

Lately, I’ve found it’s easier to do that by sending you for the time being to my Topix page. Now, when I learn to pump the feed directly into my sidebar, and I become a more accomplished webmaster, then things will get better.

What is important is that I am already at work on what has got to be done, every day, to get this site going. It’s for all of us whether you have the GAD, OCD, or PTSD, we are all in the same boat. This site is here to help us stay up with the science and the research, and root out the charlatans and shysters. Please keep visiting the site, and keep commenting. I am dying for comments.

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I have learned so far that the truthfulness of every website has to be checked, and double checked.  Even though I have been on the Internet since the 1990s, I still can be coerced into believing that what I am seeing is a site with legitimate information.  That is not always the case.  Some of the sites I’ve seen lately have huge grudges to grind against various drug companies or doctors, or both in some cases.

While I would love to make declarations of how this site will never do such a thing; how we would never grind an ax on a company.  Well, one can never know what the future might bring.  I currently have no ax to grind, and honestly, I’m not much of an ax grinder anymore, anyway.  That does not mean, however, that if some horrible information comes out that I will not jump on it like fly on … rotted meat.

Also, there are a large number of sites out there in cyberworld where the writers should be the patients’.   I am probably one of them, but I will try to isolate my personal situation from this site, because the success of The Anxiety Report.Com is not up to me.  This site is a call to community for all of us who have one of the five annoyingly classified ‘Anxiety-Disorders.’

Let’s list them, shall we?

1. Generalized Anxiety Disorder(GAD)
2. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
3. Panic Disorder
4. Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome (PTSD)
5. Social Phobia (or Social Anxiety Disorder.)

Here is the complexity of the issue, we have five disorders that crisscross one another, and these are all due to something chemical in our brains.  No one, psychiatrist or neurologist, knows exactly how, what, or why, this happens.  It just does  They are looking, and working for us, and so this site wants to make these people familiar faces to us, the patients, and not just a faceless Clinic or just a name from Pharmaceuticus Optimus-Maximus .  (Bit of a pun on the temple of Jumpiter Optimus Maximus)

The issues of our disorders are too complex for us to not be involved in some way with those people who work for us in the scientific fields.  So there will be some interviews on here.

Why don’t you leave a comment?  I love comments.  I’m a nice guy, and I even like dogs.  I am working night and day posting stories to Topix, where you will notice I am the editor of Anxiety.  I go through hundreds of news stories a day, and slog my way through research trying to render it into plain English.  O, Muse, send me help!  Make someone comment upon my weary efforts.  Alas and Alack.

Other than that, have a great day.  Peace

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The Sea of Klonopin

The Sea of Klonopin is 40,000 feet deep, and when you take the first couple of pills you’re held gently on the bottom.
It’s restful there, you’re neither asleep, nor awake, but half-dreaming.
Then I saw it was my mind, and a waiter comes to the table where I lay
And brings a menu called “Inner Self: Known and Unknown.”
Some are beautiful, and those you bless, and as it’s blessed it rises
through the Sea of Klonopin.

You remain with the waiter, and he warns me now the menu of self
will begin to bring fears and insecurities, old time guilts, “with things you’ve
never seen before, or thought about; all brought to you on heaping platters
of ugly, multicolored slime”

Then Klonopin says “notice it is all before you in chains! The ugliness you see here is powerless, it is here for you to judge.”

O, then I prayed, “Lord, Jesus, Blessed Mother, Saint Therese, and all the angels and saints that love me, come to and help me now.” (Guess I’m outed as a Catholic now.)

That niggling fear you never really understood, the one that waited
in the left corner of your mind, always ready to signal the neurons
to fire, fire, fire!

Your judgment is swift. “I reject you.”

Upon which words the servants of Klonopin remove the chains,
and it becomes waterlogged, part of the bottom of the Sea of Klonopin.
A mere stain where once a terror stood. And so with the next,
and the next. The number of things you have judged away
from you are now waterlogged and cannot rise…

Yet — miracle! You do rise

During Ascent, Depression tried to attack me from my left shoulder blade,
and Klonopin walked it out the door like pair of Vegas enforcers.
It was gone from me, and my shoulder
has been quiet since then, too.
Later a rush of adrenalin came out of the back of my chest,
I knew that it was the onset of a doozy of an attack. Again, the Klonopin enforcers came
and took that rushing adrenalin threat out a side door,
where I hope they beat it to death.

All the while I rise through this Sea of Klonopin, off and on moments of . . .
So much of what it touches and fixes are little receptors in our brains, covering them over with tens of thousands of feet of Klonopin protection. Everything runs, all of me is in working order, but my own neurology can misfire and put me into four days of torment.  Klonopin, son of Bromazepam, and all you Benzodiazapines, thank you.

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First thing you should do is read this story. It seems to me that three or four suicides does not an epidemic make. When you think of the sheer numbers of people who take Singulair, three or four suicides seems statistically low. I am no scientist, so what do I know, but a lot of people I know take Singulair and it keeps them breathing with much less trouble than before they were prescribed the pill.

The report says they are probing the links between Singulair and suicide, but I think it’s a little early in the game to be publishing their probe. What will result? Oh, some will panic and stop taking it. Doctors will have a tough time getting people who need it to take it. In a way it’s like saying, people who eat Ham are more prone to suicide. Well for heaven sake, how many millions of people eat ham? Out of that number someone is going to commit suicide because suicide is one of the things we as humans do. It’s not a pretty fact, but it remains a fact.

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For a long time people have been telling me that when someone needs medication for an anxiety disorder, and they will not go to the doctor to get one, they self medicate with marijuana and alcohol. Here is a nice little selection from Univ. of Oregon.

It’s quite common for people to seek unhealthy ways to cope with anxiety. Needing to get to “get a buzz” in order function at a party is only one example. Substance, shopping, eating, sexual and other addictions often mask deeper discomforts and distress. Activities that in moderation can be quite pleasurable become problematic when they are compulsive and preclude other ways of finding release and comfort. If you think that you may be “self-medicating” in this way, it would be important to raise this with your counselor.

I liked the start, “unhealthy ways” of dealing with anxiety. When you look at some of the medications out there, pot and booze almost seem tame by comparison. However, that’s the trick of both substances: they only seem to make things better. From the Power and Control Blog I found this

Natural molecules similar to an active ingredient in marijuana play a part in helping the brain clear fearful memories and keep them from being permanently debilitating.

“Helping the brain clear fearful memories.” So perhaps in judicious amounts it’s alright, right? Well, the first problem is that Cannabis in every form is illegal. And there are a multitude of problems that can go along with a pot smoking habit. And alcohol is not a bit better, even though it is legal.

Isn’t that interesting that alcohol is legal but marijuana is not. It certainly has nothing to do with the threat to the roadways by crazed potsmokers. No, it’s the drunks that kill on roads. Sure, it makes sense, make legal the substance that helps us kill each other on the roads, or in bar fights, etc.

I am not defending Pot against Liquor, what I am doing is saying that for those who self medicate they are in between the rock and hard place. If they can’t afford good mental health care, and who can? Then they are forced either into the public clinics where you have to let go of any pretense of pride, or you can just smoke a joint and have a beer or twenty.

So the question remains, do you self medicate? What? You want me to answer that? Not on your life buddy.

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Each morning I review the news feeds that pile up in my Good Reader, and select a few for your breakfast. I try to make your Breakfast of Anxiety News, start with something sweet, and then onto the substantial material..

1. Disordered Personality is about a movie being made in India. “The film tries to show a psychiatric disorder called dissociative identity disorder (DID) or, as it was known earlier, multiple personality disorder (MPD).”
2. Neurotic Who Makes Scary World Her Banquet, is a Book Review. Patricia Pearson, author of A Brief History of Anxiety, is a woman who takes her fears, phobias, and makes something solid, a body of work — books, all related on some way with her experience with anxiety. An intersting quote “Ms. Pearson argues, in fact, that rationalism, intended to banish superstition and fear, has instead removed one of the most effective weapons against anxiety, namely religious faith and ritual.” Give it a try.
3. Harsh words may leave invisible scars on children. That should be obvious, right? Think about situations in your own life where you heard a child spoken to roughly, or perhaps that child was you. According to the article “Research conducted by Natalie Sachs-Ericsson at Florida State University suggest that people who were verbally abused as children grow up to be self-critical adults prone to depression and anxiety.” That should be so obvious to us.

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