How Can Therapy Help Me?

Therapy can help you understand and reframe your problems and concerns. It can teach you specific emotional and social skills, and can help you reap more satisfaction from your work and your relationships. A therapist’s office can be a sanctuary where you are free to express private thoughts and struggles.

Friends and family members can provide excellent emotional support, but a therapist can give you a trained, and more impartial, perspective on your life. Because subjective feelings and thoughts are involved, therapy’s effectiveness is harder to measure than, say, a cure for a medical ailment. But many studies have shown the effectiveness of therapy in improving quality of life. A landmark 1995 Consumer Reports study concluded that patients benefited very substantially from psychotherapy. Interestingly, no specific type of psychotherapy fared better than any other, and psychologists, psychiatrists, and social workers did not differ in their effectiveness as therapists.

Other studies have shown cognitive behavioral therapy to be very effective for anxiety disorders and chronic depression—particularly for patients who don’t fully respond to medication. The key to successful therapy is a connected, trusting relationship between client and therapist.
- Source: psychologytoday.com

DEPRESSION
INCREASES RISK FOR HEART DISEASE

A history of major depression increases the risk of heart disease over and above any genetic risks common to depression and heart disease, according to researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the VA. The researchers analyzed data gathered from more than 1,200 male twins who served in the U.S. military during the Vietnam War. The men were surveyed on a variety of health issues in 1992, including depression, and were assessed again in 2005.

In the study, investigators looked at the onset of heart disease in depressed study participants between 1993 and 2005. Men with depression in 1992 were twice as likely to develop heart disease in the ensuing years, compared to men with no history of depression.

“Based on our findings, we can say that after adjusting for other risk factors, depression remains a significant predictor of heart disease,” says first author Jeffrey F. Scherrer, Ph.D., research assistant professor of psychiatry at Washington University School of Medicine and the St. Louis Veterans Affairs Medical Center. “In this study, we have demonstrated that exposure to depression is contributing to heart disease only in twins who have high genetic risk and who actually develop clinical depression. In twins with high genetic risk common to depression and heart disease, but who never develop depression itself, there was no increased risk for heart disease.

The findings strongly suggest that depression itself independently contributes to risk for heart disease.”
- Source: Sciencedaily.com. Adapted from materials provided by Washington University School of Medicine