Constant dieting & recreation drugs play a huge roll in depleting the body of the neccesary vitamins and minerals the brain needs in order to function properly. Over the past few years we have lost a few fighters to this disease – and I'm sure many more are suffering from it.
My question is: Who here does/ or has suffered from depression and what did you do or take to help your symptoms ?
I always get a kick out of people who say " Suck it up man – grow some balls – snap out of it ". What they don't understand is that when you have a chemical imbalance – thinking positive isn't the cure.
I'm no "fighter" but I do train and have dealt with the issue for nearly 20 years.
Very difficult situation to deal with or get other people to understand. On the outside you look like you should be able to move mountains, yet you have trouble even getting out of bed some days.
Did the Paxel thing for 8 years and then it stopped working so just swtiched to cymbalta this year. It works about 60% of the time and the rest of the time, unfortunately, you just have to "suck it up".
Doctors say I should eliminate stress if I want to get better but that always reminds me of the scene in Amedeus where the king tells Mozart his opera has too many notes and he should "trim a few" and Mozart asks "which ones?".
Thanks for keeping this issue alive on this forum.
I wrote the article that appears in the current issue of "Fighters Only" magazine.
The proceeds from the article, instead of payment, will be donated to the fund established for Jeremy's Williams' daughters.
Vince Lucero - a pro MMA fighter who posts regularly here - has courageously shared his story on this forum and allowed me to share it in the article.
One in five Americans, in the course of their lifetimes, will have at least one episode of "major depression." Not just a period of feeling down, which nearly everyone has from time to time, but a serious depressive disorder. There is no evidence that fighters are immune to this - so depression will likely touch our lives or the life of someone close to us.
I am preparing to launch - within the next week or so - a University-based study on psychological factors affecting combat sport performance. Depression is one of the factors to be studied, though this is not exclusively a depression study. I am also interested to know how some of the positive mental skills and coping strategies that fighters often have or develop might help to buffer the impact of depression risk.
My objective is to try to bring some science to inform our collective concern about depression in the lives of fighters. To my knowledge, no scientific study has examined this issue in this particular population. I am not just interested to point out a problem, but to help steer us toward some potential solutions - both at the individual level (as a fighter, what can I do), but also at the systems/support level (how might managers/coaches/promotions take better care of fighters).
My hope is that this will begin a line of discussion, not only about depression and other "problems", but about how we might be able to build more sport psychology and mental skill development into MMA and other combat sport training - to improve lives and to help fighters take their game to the next level.
I will post a thread about the study on this forum once we are given final clearance to begin. It will be an anonymous, internet based survey - and I am going to offer to give participants who want it some summary written feedback about their survey responses. I won't be able to do an individualized mental training plan for everyone, but it will give an opportunity for a systematic mental skills assessment for combat sport athletes who might not otherwise have access to those tests or to a sport psychologist.
To all the UGers who read the FOM article, I am open and interested in your feedback.
I have known friends to party hard, drugs drink the lot for years and they have had no effect on them, then I have had friends who live healthy who are the most down depressed people, so go figure.
My opinion on this is if you have a genetic link to depression then the party hard rout is not the one to take i.e if you have a predisposition to depression then maybe the chance of an imbalance is more possible.
Kennedy SH, Konarski JZ, Segal ZV, Lau MA, Bieling PJ, McIntyre RS, Mayberg HS.
University Health Network, Institute of Medical Science, University of Toronto, Department of Psychiatry, and Toronto General Hospital, 200 Elizabeth St., Eaton North Wing 8-222, Toronto, Ontario M5G 2C4, Canada. sidney.kennedy@uhn.on.ca
OBJECTIVE: Neuroimaging investigations reveal changes in glucose metabolism (fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose positron emission tomography [PET]) associated with response to disparate antidepressant treatment modalities, including cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), antidepressant pharmacotherapies, and deep brain stimulation. Using a nonrandomized design, the authors previously compared changes following CBT or paroxetine in depressed patients. In this study, the authors report changes in fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose PET in responders to CBT or venlafaxine during a randomized controlled trial. METHODS: Subjects meeting DSM-IV-TR criteria for a major depressive episode and a diagnosis of a major depressive disorder received a fluorine-18-fluorodeoxyglucose PET scan before randomization and after 16 weeks of antidepressant treatment with either CBT (N=12) or venlafaxine (N=12). Modality-specific and modality-independent regional brain metabolic changes associated with response status were analyzed. RESULTS: Response rates were comparable between the CBT (7/12) and venlafaxine (9/12) groups. Response to either treatment modality was associated with decreased glucose metabolism bilaterally in the orbitofrontal cortex and left medial prefrontal cortex, along with increased metabolism in the right occipital-temporal cortex. Changes in metabolism in the anterior and posterior parts of the subgenual cingulate cortex and the caudate differentiated CBT and venlafaxine responders. CONCLUSIONS: Responders to either treatment modality demonstrated reduced metabolism in several prefrontal regions. Consistent with earlier reports, response to CBT was associated with a reciprocal modulation of cortical-limbic connectivity, while venlafaxine engaged additional cortical and striatal regions previously unreported in neuroimaging investigations.
Effects of meditation on frontal alpha-asymmetry in previously suicidal individuals.Barnhofer T, Duggan D, Crane C, Hepburn S, Fennell MJ, Williams JM.
Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford, Warneford Hospital, Oxford, UK. thorsten.barnhofer@psych.ox.ac.uk
This study investigated the effects of a meditation-based treatment for preventing relapse to depression, mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT), on prefrontal alpha-asymmetry in resting electroencephalogram (EEG), a biological indicator of affective style. Twenty-two individuals with a previous history of suicidal depression were randomly assigned to either MBCT (N=10) or treatment-as-usual (TAU, N=12). Resting electroencephalogram was measured before and after an 8-week course of treatment. The TAU group showed a significant deterioration toward decreased relative left-frontal activation, indexing decreases in positive affective style, while there was no significant change in the MBCT group. The findings suggest that MBCT can help individuals at high risk for suicidal depression to retain a balanced pattern of baseline emotion-related brain activation.
Use of FMRI to predict recovery from unipolar depression with cognitive behavior therapy.Siegle GJ, Carter CS, Thase ME.
Western Psychiatric Institute and Clinic, 3811 O'Hara St., Pittsburgh, PA 15213-2593, USA. gsiegle@pitt.edu
OBJECTIVE: In controlled treatment trials, 40%-60% of unmedicated depressed individuals respond to cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The authors examined whether pretreatment neural reactivity to emotional stimuli accounted for this variation. METHOD: Unmedicated depressed individuals (N=14) and never depressed comparison subjects (N=21) underwent fMRI during performance of a task sensitive to sustained emotional information processing. Afterward, depressed participants completed 16 sessions of CBT. RESULTS: Participants whose sustained reactivity to emotional stimuli was low in the subgenual cingulate cortex (Brodmann's area 25) and high in the amygdala displayed the strongest improvement with CBT. CONCLUSIONS: The presence of emotion regulation disruptions, which are targeted in CBT, may be the key to recovery with this intervention.
How psychotherapy changes the brain--the contribution of functional neuroimaging.Linden DE.
School of Psychology, University of Wales Bangor, Bangor, UK. d.linden@bangor.ac.uk
A thorough investigation of the neural effects of psychotherapy is needed in order to provide a neurobiological foundation for widely used treatment protocols. This paper reviews functional neuroimaging studies on psychotherapy effects and their methodological background, including the development of symptom provocation techniques. Studies of cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) effects in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) were consistent in showing decreased metabolism in the right caudate nucleus. Cognitive behavioural therapy in phobia resulted in decreased activity in limbic and paralimbic areas. Interestingly, similar effects were observed after successful intervention with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRI) in both diseases, indicating commonalities in the biological mechanisms of psycho- and pharmacotherapy. These findings are discussed in the context of current neurobiological models of anxiety disorders. Findings in depression, where both decreases and increases in prefrontal metabolism after treatment and considerable differences between pharmacological and psychological interventions were reported, seem still too heterogeneous to allow for an integrative account, but point to important differences between the mechanisms through which these interventions attain their clinical effects. Further studies with larger patient numbers, use of standardised imaging protocols across studies, and ideally integration with molecular imaging are needed to clarify the remaining contradictions. This effort is worthwhile because functional imaging can then be potentially used to monitor treatment effects and aid in the choice of the optimal therapy. Finally, recent advances in the functional imaging of hypnosis and the application of neurofeedback are evaluated for their potential use in the development of psychotherapy protocols that use the direct modulation of brain activity as a way of improving symptoms.
The only thing that works for me is Zoloft. Tried some other drugs in the past. Some of them didn't do anything and some made me feel worse. Zoloft is the only one that works well for me I've found. I'm very emotionally unstable without it. Extreme high's and lows. I can go from elated to suicidal in 5 minutes. I say I live in an emotional roller coaster. It isn't completely gone with the drugs but under control.