It made the news this past week — researchers have found what they believe to be a blood test that may identify depression in teenagers. But some write-ups of the news got the importance of this possible test completely wrong.

Melissa Healy, writing for the LA Times, for instance, suggested in her opening sentence that, “Even among psychiatric disorders, depression is a difficult disease to diagnose.”

Nothing could be further from the truth. Depression is so easy to diagnose, in fact, that family doctors — who have no special training in psychiatric disorders — feel perfectly qualified to do it every day. You simply ask a person about 9 possible symptoms, and if they agree to 5 or more of them, and have felt that way longer than 2 weeks, they likely have depression.

In fact, it’s so easy to diagnose, we have an online 8 question depression quiz that research has shown can screen for depression nearly as accurately as a professional.

So what’s the real significance of this potential blood test for depression? And what unintended consequences might it have?

It’s common to have some concerns and worries about being pregnant, having a healthy child, giving birth, and parenting your little one, according to Pamela S. Wiegartz, Ph.D, and Kevin L. Gyoerkoe, PsyD, in their book, The Pregnancy & Postpartum Anxiety Workbook: Practical Skills to Help You Overcome Anxiety, Worry, Panic Attacks, Obsessions and Compulsions.

However, for some moms-to-be, anxiety becomes so severe and distressing that they’re unable to function day-to-day.

It’s only recently — over about the last decade — that researchers have begun exploring anxiety in pregnancy. Consequently, much more work is still needed.

But here’s what we do know.

Moms aren’t the only ones who struggle with postpartum depression. Dads struggle, too.

In this 2010 meta-analysis published in The Journal of the American Medical Association, researchers reviewed 43 studies with over 28,000 participants and found that 10 percent of men had prenatal or postpartum depression. That’s more than double the rate of men who suffer from depression in the general population — 4.8 percent.

Symptoms of Depression

In their book The Pregnancy & Postpartum Anxiety Workbook: Practical Skills to Help You Overcome Anxiety, Worry, Panic Attacks, Obsessions and Compulsions, authors Pamela S. Wiegartz, Ph.D, and Kevin L. Gyoerkoe, PsyD, note that depression can strike dads at any time, from their wife’s pregnancy to months after their child’s birth.

Symptoms of depression can include depressed mood; loss of interest in activities; fatigue; changes in sleep; changes in appetite or weight; difficulty concentrating or making decisions; feelings of guilt or worthlessness; and thoughts of death or suicide.

Men, however, may struggle with different symptoms. The lead author of the above meta-analysis, James Paulson, told Scientific American (in this piece by Katherine Harmon) that some researchers have called for a change in the diagnostic criteria because men tend to struggle with irritability, detachment and emotional withdrawal.

This isn’t the blog post I planned to write. I might get to that one eventually; it’s still kicking around in my head and I still know what I want to say. But this one — I needed to make a couple of stops on the way home, and I didn’t, because I had to race back to the laptop. The words kept wanting out. When you’re a writer, that’s how you know you’re on to something.

While I was out driving around, this old song, “Hold On,” by Kansas, came on the radio station. I grew up — in Kansas, poetically enough — listening to Kansas and Styx and Rush and Van Halen and Peter Frampton, and yes, even Rick Springfield.¹

But here are the opening lyrics to the song:

Look in the mirror and tell me
Just what you see
What have the years of your life
Taught you to be?
Innocence dyin’ in so many ways
Things that you dream of are lost
Lost in the haze

Most people, somehow or another, are tormented — whether by cruel others or the workings of their own cruel minds — throughout adolescence.

Lucky me: I got both.

1. I have a soft spot for Rick Springfield. Try not to mock me. He’s 62 and he’s still smokin’ hot, and he can still sing, and he was the cause of some happy memories from my teens. [↩]

We all have a few tricks for beating the blues — things we do when we’re feeling down.

It turns out, however, that several popular strategies don’t actually work very well in the long term. Beware if you’re tempted to try any of the following (all of which I often, and unsuccessfully, have tried)…

1. Comforting yourself with a “treat.”

Often, the things we choose as “treats” aren’t good for us. The pleasure lasts a minute, but then feelings of guilt, loss of control, and other negative consequences just deepen the lousiness of the day. So when you find yourself thinking, “I’ll feel better after I have a few beers… a pint of ice cream… a cigarette… a new pair of jeans,” ask yourself — will it really make you feel better? It might make you feel worse. In particular, beware of…

Online crisis services have proven to reach young people in crisis that will not reach out for help in any other way. Every day, we know of hundreds of people who turn to the Internet for suicide support and crisis help. A service called CrisisChat is run by a group of local crisis centers. It is a free online crisis service, and it needs your help.

We are currently in a time-limited campaign to increase the funds raised to $10,000 by the end of March! Any amount you can contribute to making this happen would be appreciated… $5, $10, $30, $50, $100 or more.

You can also make the contribution in memory of someone lost by suicide, just post a comment at the end of your contribution.

If you haven’t already seen the video, I encourage you to watch it. A handful of dedicated and courageous people came together to make the video happen and I know you will be touched by the stories and music:

CrisisChat Promotional Video from Emotion Technology on Vimeo.

The campaign is specifically to expand hours on CrisisChat into the overnight hours, a time when many chat visitors have told us we need to be open — when suicidal support is most needed (but also most difficult to find).

If you’re a college student and you’re depressed, chances are you have a student counseling center that’s available to you, at no charge.

Sounds good, right? In an ideal world, the student counseling center would properly assess, diagnose and even treat students with mental health concerns — such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, and more.

But we don’t live in an ideal world and student counseling centers don’t make a university any money. So they aren’t necessarily well-funded, overflowing with well-paid staff or have access to all the resources they need.

That’s why Emily Merlino’s column about her experience at the University of Massachusetts (UMass), supposedly one of the better universities in the country, was a bit disheartening to read. In it, she details how she was experiencing depressive feelings and sought out help from a professional at the UMass Mental Health Services clinic.

Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is an uncommon treatment for severe, chronic depression. It is used sparingly, partially because our understanding of why and how it works is still in the dark ages. It also doesn’t help that it can cause memory loss in many patients who undergo it (usually confined to just memory around ECT treatments, but occasionally also around older, longer-term memories as well), as well as increasing attention and concentration problems in a minority of people who try ECT.

However, a new study sheds light on the possible mechanism for how electroconvulsive therapy works, based upon one theory of how depression works in the brain.

The theory goes like this — depression isn’t caused by too little brain activity. It’s actually caused by too much brain activity, an overactive brain that has accidentally “hot-wired” multiple brain networks together. (How and why this hot-wiring occurs is still a mystery.)

So how can ECT undo this hot-wiring?

If you’re feeling suicidal, don’t rely on Siri.

Today, I decided to play around with my fiance’s new iPhone. Siri, the iPhone’s “digital assistant” is capable of handling all sorts of tasks: sending text messages, scheduling reminders, determining directions, searching Google for answers to questions, and using Wolfram Alpha to compute math problems.

She’s clever, though. Ask her if she’s male or female and she’ll answer frankly: none. Ask her about the meaning of life and she cracks a snarky joke about writing a “very long play in which nothing happens.” Ask her about which religion is correct and she’ll mention something about being a “Siliconist.”

But try to ask her about suicide, and you might as well consult a freshly-mined chunk of elemental silicon instead.

I sat down with Siri for twenty minutes and pretended to be suicidal. Here’s what she had to say:

Transcript follows.

It was an unseasonably warm spring afternoon, almost 80 degrees. As a new family therapist …

I came to be the client of my therapist four years ago after an intervention with two friends, older ladies from church, one who happens to be a social worker.

I had been struggling for a long time with feelings of sadness, hopelessness, guilt and worthlessness. I had been engaging in self-injury for a long time and it was getting worse. I was suicidal off and on, never committing to a plan but just worn out from a traumatic, abuse-filled childhood, and the demands of life in general.

After the intervention, my friend the social worker interviewed therapists for me and found one that she thought would work well with me. (Ordinarily I suppose I should have done this process myself, but I was too depressed to care or to think properly.)

With their support I made the appointment and went to see the therapist.

Mugagga Kintu is the writer/director of a new independent film called “Catch the Bus” or “CTB”. As you may know, the phrase “CTB” means to commit suicide.

The Kickstarter website has a video about the film, a question & answer segment that explains the details of the film & information on how you can donate & where the donated money goes (post-production of the film). As director Kintu notes in the interview on the website, “I think it would be very beneficial for people to see this message and to see this film because the message is not suicide, but it’s really about resurrecting yourself from that dark place and finishing your dreams.”

“Like they say, sometimes you’ve got to wake up in order to make your dreams come true.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Click here to learn more about Catch the Bus.

I’m asking for your help in getting Mugagga the funding and support he needs to finish this film. Psych Central and I have pledged our support for the film, and hope that if you have even just $1 or $2 to spare, you also do the same. Time is short, however, as he only has less than 2 weeks to raise the remaining $1,400 he needs.