There’s a cartoon picturing a chicken and an egg in bed together. The chicken is smoking a cigarette with a very satisfied expression on his face, and the egg is restless and disgruntled. The egg finally looks over to the chicken and says, “Well, I guess that answers that question.”

That’s how I think of the relationship between religion and depression: like the chicken and the egg debacle.

I can’t say which came first in my life, because they were both there from the start. And you need only read through a few of the lives of the saints or walk the exhibition aisles at the Religious Booksellers Trade Exhibit to see that holy people aren’t all that happy much of the time.

How is it that we depressives tend to be more spiritual? Or is it that the more religion you get in your life, the more depressed?

Inspiring. Sobering. Entertaining. Touching. Enriching.

This year has been great for brain and behavior videos, with an ever-growing number of lectures and educational videos appearing online, as well as savvy homemade videos in social media. Conversations about mental health are increasingly entering the mainstream, and videos like these spark dialogue, reduce ignorance, assist viewers, and fight stigma. They’re also a great distraction, and a way to relax without feeling guilty about wasting time.

Each of the videos on this list has been chosen as being among the best of its kind made this year, ranging from a contest winner to viral videos to high profile lectures. With so much great work out there, I can’t wait to see more in 2012 (follow Channel N to view what I find).

But first, let’s celebrate 2011 in videos.

Sharecare, a website that launched just two months ago, released its “Top 10 Online Influencers in Depression” last week. Of the 10 people named, half of them are Psych Central contributors or bloggers. No other organization online came anywhere close. We’re very honored and proud to have so many amazing people working for us here, and we’re flattered their tireless work in the name of mental health and depression is recognized.

Here are the 5 amazing Psych Central contributors honored on the list:

#1 – Julie Hanks, MSW, LCSW, BCD – Ask the Therapist and Private Practice Toolbox
#3 – Therese J. Borchard – World of Psychology contributor
#4 – Chato B. Stweart – Mental Health Humor
#6 – Daniel J. Tomasulo, PhD, TEP, MFA – Ask the Therapist and Proof Positive
#8 – Rick Nauert, Ph.D. – Senior Editor, Psych Central News

We’re also pleased to announce that we were a winner this year of an Award of Excellence for health-related websites in the Aesculapius Awards of Excellence. We’re in good company with the likes of Autism Speaks and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office on Women’s Health as fellow award recipients.

What an amazing year 2011 has been for Psych Central. As a site we’ve built from the ground-up to service the needs of people from around the world who have questions about mental health, psychotherapy, treatment and psychology, we continue to reach more than 2 million people each month (making us, by far, the largest mental health network in the world today). We hope to get that up to 3 million/month in 2012, and with your help in spreading the word, I see no reason why we can’t attain that goal!

Anger can be expressed in a multitude of ways. If we attempt to hide it, it can fester leading to resentment. If we ignore it, it can use food, shopping and other addictions to get our attention. If we focus all our energy on it, it can seep out, toxic and destructive, hurting everyone it touches. But if we simply listen to it, quietly, non-judgmentally, we may learn something.

Anger is an emotion that we’re often afraid of. As a kid, you’re taught to “play nice,”or to keep quiet when you’re upset. Sometimes the things adults don’t say in response to our negative emotions have the greatest impact of all. Maybe the adults in your life were fearful of their own anger and so you didn’t learn how to healthily express your own.

The bright side is that we can always make different choices. You could seek help from a professional, support from a friend and/or use the top posts below to start to become aware of how anger works or doesn’t work in your life. What will you choose to make better choices and live free of being afraid of your emotions?

Help save lives by sharing this list.

Online Suicide Prevention Resources is a small wiki focussed on crisis resources available online without a telephone. There are listings for social media, secure IM chat, and public forums.

It was inspired by the International Suicide Prevention Wiki, created by Post Secret, which features a table of links and directories for telephone crisis hotlines and resources all over the world. The list I created today is solely for non-phone contacts. Included are details of the hours for each service.

Here is our roundup of posts from the Psych Central Blog Network that blogged about mental health today as a part of the American Psychological Association’s (APA) Mental Health “Blog Party.” Psych Central is the world’s largest independent mental health network run by ordinary mental health professionals. Each month, over 1.5 million people visit our site from around the world to learn more about better mental health and conditions like depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD and anxiety.

Psych Central bloggers are some of the most dedicated and passionate people I’ve met in the field of mental health. Some are professionals, some are not, but all share one thing in common — they have a knack for writing about psychology and mental health issues with a dedication and enthusiasm you don’t see elsewhere. We love our bloggers — they are simply some of the best people you’ll ever meet (virtually!).

We’re proud to represent mental health and wellness awareness this day, in our own unique and personalized way. We’ll be updating this post throughout the day with new posts that are published from our bloggers, so stay tuned!

Recently, I’ve talked quite a bit about connecting to our creative selves. (Yes, everyone is creative!)

One way to access our creativity, I believe, is through inspiration from other amazing minds.

In honor of that, I wanted to share 10 blogs that help me get creative (this is by no means an exhaustive list), find tons of right answers and most importantly, get super-excited about the world and all there is to see.

In no particular order, they are:

1. Scoutie Girl.

This blog features interesting independent craft and design work. As their about page states, “Simply put, Scoutie Girl is the blog with a penchant for the passionately handmade.” The posts are always a lovely surprise. Topics include creative living and mindful spending.

We, like most people, enjoy it when we receive …

The good (and bad) news about blogging about depression in 2010 is that there’s less of it. Bloggers who were solely devoted to writing personal posts about depression, psychic pain, melancholy and stress in their lives found themselves, for whatever reasons, with less to say on traditional blogs.

But depression hasn’t vanished, and neither has blogging, so where’s it all going? Twitter, drop boxes, text, media, and mobile — watch for blogging to evolve across platforms. And there are professionals sharing tips, artists gathering, and advocates to support each other. Although it may seem a quiet time, under the surface it’s changing.

Blogs most likely to be triggering if you’re in a fragile state are marked with a (T). So, without further adieu, here are the picks for our favorite places we found depression blogged about in 2010…

Our newest blogger, Dr. Kelly McAleer, has an interesting two-part post about the use of fMRI imaging technologies to try and detect psychopathology in criminals:

In my last post, I discussed how Dr. Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist, is using fMRI technology to detect brain abnormalities in people with psychopathy. His participants are prison inmates who score high on the PCL-R, a psychodiagnostic measure used to assess psychopathy. Once he determines that the participant is, in fact, a psychopath based on their PCL-R score, he takes scans of their brains using an fMRI to determine if there are brain differences between psychopathic participants and normal controls. He has found defects in the paralimbic system that he believes relate to psychopathy.

Interestingly, Dr. Kiehl’s research is being used by perpetrators to avoid prison or to reduce sentencing. One such case has plagued the Chicago area for over two decades. Brian Dugan, a 52-year-old man with a 13-year crime spree, including murders, rapes, arson, and burglaries, spanning the 1970s and 80s finally went to trial for his crimes in late 2009. For those interested in death penalty laws, this case has a lot of history, and contributed to the moratorium on the death penalty in Illinois due to the wrongful conviction of three men for one of the murders (Jeanine Nicarico) that Dugan committed.

After the publication of our 2008 top ten online psychology experiments list — which detailed the best psychological science research projects seeking online participants — we’re back with a follow-up.

At any given time, hundreds of online psychology experiments are going on. They are a great, cost-efficient method to gather experimental data from the multitudes of people online. These experiments can be fun to try, but also provide researchers with valuable data that future research may be based upon. Here are all-new experiments as well as a couple of classics:

Another year is over, and so brings us …