Receptionist Yvonne at the Clinic

In her office.

Merry Christmas from the Relationship Clinic

Some of the decorations at the Clinic.

Dr. Brock in his office at the Clinic

Preparing for the next client.

Causes of Depression

Popeye the sailorman clearly knows how to keep his mental health shipshape. If you turn your nose up at vegetables, Mayo Clinic researchers have found that you may be more prone to depression due to folic acid and B-12 deficiencies. Both vitamins play a role in producing neurotransmitters necessary for regulating mood. To keep that spring in your step, pair dark, leafy greens rich in folic acid, such as spinach or broccoli, with shellfish or fish, which contain high amounts of B-12.

A study conducted by Australia's Monash University found that women taking birth control pills are almost twice as likely to be depressed as those who are not on the pill. Progestin, a synthetic version of the female hormone progesterone used in the combination pill, has been shown to lower the body's serotonin levels, and progestin-only contraceptives, such as Depo-Provera injections, may worsen depressive symptoms.

There have been numerous studies linking alcohol abuse and depression in the past, but researchers at University of North Carolina recently found that abstinence after prolonged drinking may lead to depression. The study found that moderate social drinkers may experience depression-like behavior after 14 days without alcohol due to the brain's inability to produce mood-regulating neurons.

Brook Shields's acknowledgment of her use of therapy and drugs to combat postpartum depression sparked a public discussion about this common problem. Since then, research from the National Institute of Health has shown that 50 percent of new mothers experience feelings of restlessness and depression in the first two weeks after childbirth due to a combination of hormone fluctuations and stress.

Research has shown that people who exhibit certain personality traits, including aggression, excess worry and low self esteem are likely to have repeated bouts with depression. An American Journal of Psychiatry study conducted by Kenneth S. Kendler, M.D., a professor of psychiatry and human genetics at Virginia Commonwealth University, also determined that people who exhibit characteristics of neuroticism, including anxiety and instability, are more likely to develop major depression than their extroversive counterparts.

Prolonged use of anabolic steroids not only results in manic outbursts known as "roid rage," but can also exacerbate withdrawal symptoms and lead to mood swings, insomnia and a low sex drive. The National Institute of Drug Abuse reports that the most dangerous ramification of extended steroid use is depression, which can often lead to suicide attempts. Similarly, prednisone, a steroid given to leukemia and lymphoma patients to inhibit inflammation, can also cause depression.

Research documenting the effects of Accutane by The University of Texas has shown that the drug belongs to a group of chemicals called retinoids, which affect the nervous system and are capable of influencing depression-related behavior. Beyond the now-infamous acne medication, beta-blockers used to control hypertension, sleeping pills and, in some cases, cold medicine can also cause or aggravate depressive symptoms.

While the stress of living with a chronic illness may result in patient depression, biological effects incurred from diseases, including diabetes, Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis and hypothyroidism, result in a higher risk for depression. Research from the Parkinson's Disease Foundation has shown that at least 40 percent of patients experience clinical depression and that later stage depression may be due to a disease-related chemical imbalance.

Beyond struggling in the classroom and at work, children and adults combating ADD or ADHD may also experience depression. Diagnosing adults with ADHD proves especially difficult because symptoms of ADHD often mimic depression. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, adults often first seek help for depression before discovering that they actually have ADHD.

[AOL Health]

Is Your Marriage Normal?

If you're thinking something is missing, check out the six signs of a top-of-the-line relationship.

I picked up an eye-opening book a few years ago called In An Average Lifetime. Compiling data from a variety of sources, author Tom Heymann provides a wacky list detailing the amount of time that a "normal" American spends on certain activities throughout his or her life.

More …

Parenting Relationships

Here are several relationship building blocks you can use to construct a closeness with your children:

1. Take a 30 minute walk together. By taking a walk with your child, you are teaching your child the importance of exercise and healthy living. In addition, you'll usually find out more about your child's life as you walk together.
2. Work on a project together. Get closer to your child by finding a common goal. You can work on a school project or complete a 1000 piece puzzle together. The idea is to bond over a common interest you both share. Some parents find it rewarding to volunteer with a charitable organization with their child and share the satisfaction of helping others.
3. Get behind your child's hobby. If your child is interested in baseball or volleyball, then support your child by showing up at his or her games. Your child will remember your presence at his games more than what happened in the game itself. If your kid is interested in finding weird looking bugs, then go on a nature hunt with them.
4. Play a game with your child. When was the last time you played Monopoly with your daughter or son? According to an organization called Family Education, enjoying games with your child is one way to open up lines of communication. All you need is an hour just to sit, talk and play.
5. Share dinner together. In light of our busy schedules, many families have dropped the tradition of eating dinner together. Instead, families opt to watch TV or the kids grab their dinner plates and eat in their bedrooms while playing video games. Plan special meals together - nothing fancy. Teach your child how important it is to eat together as a family.
6. Create rituals with your children. Besides the traditional Thanksgiving and Christmas get-togethers, be creative with some new rituals. You can create a habit with your child to take him or her out to lunch every Saturday afternoon. This is one way your child can feel connected with you and have something to look forward to. Sunday afternoons can be reserved for watching a favorite movie together while munching on freshly cooked popcorn. Too many times people use the holidays as their time to be with the kids.
7. Make sure your kids have responsibilities around the house. Your children need to have a sense of personal responsibility around the house. Rather than giving them an allowance, they should earn one. You should not have to tell them over and over to clean up their room, take out the garbage, rake the leaves off the front lawn or whatever other chores you give to them. Teach your children the value of every dollar you give them by making them do some work around the house.

[by John Tesh]

Relationship Rules

1. Get along with yourself - The one relationship you will have until you die is yourself.
2. Value people - You cannot make another person feel important if you secretly feel that he or she is a nobody.
3. Make the effort to form relationships - The result of a person who has never served others? Loneliness.
4. Understand the Reciprocity Rule - Over time, people come to share reciprocal, similar attitudes toward each other.
5. Follow the Golden Rule - The timeless principle: treat others the way you want to be treated.

Spoiling Your Kids?

Can parents give too much to their kids? Of course! It's called "spoiling your children."

Many kids don't hear the word "no." Parents today tend to be weak and soft with their kids. They give in to their kid's demands because it's easier to buy whatever it is they want than to spend the time explaining why they won't buy it or deal with the sulking when the child doesn't get what they want.

In addition, many children don't know what it is to work for something. They are not given chores to do around the house. Rather than a strong work ethic, they grow up with an ethic of "give me."

The major problem is that as soon as the children grow up, their requests get bigger and more expensive. They expect to get everything they want. In the continued process of spoiling their adult children, parents will reach for their checkbook whenever their grown children ask for money to pay their credit card bills, parking tickets, medical expenses, real estate fees, car payments and insurance premiums.

Today parents buy their kids condos, clothes, new cars and vacations and don't expect a dime in return. Hardly anything they own is earned; it was all given to them by their hardworking parents. Something needs to be fixed.

The best gift you can give your child right now is to tell them they cannot have everything they want. They need to know that life is filled with disappointments and the world will not fulfill their every request and demand.

In life you will be disappointed. They will have to learn to live with it.

Yes, the economic scene has changed since our parents launched their lives. Young people today will spend a higher percentage of their income on rent than their parents did. Transportation and medical premiums are more costly. Add these financial obligations to an already existing college loan and credit-card debt; today's young people are finding it hard to make it.

Over-indulgent parents surely don't want their kids to feel what it's like not to be able to pay a bill. So they step in as rescuers. As a result young couples are ill-equipped when it comes to delayed gratification and self-help. They feel weak in the face of the responsibilities of life.

For adult children who are pulling their weight and working hard, you don't mind lending them money to buy a car or pay the security deposit on an apartment or helping them alleviate the burden of college-debt payments.

However, a limit should be set or a repayment schedule arranged. Even if an adult child is living at home, they should pay some rent if only to grasp they will have housing costs later.

According to parenting experts, the real problem with adult children is chronic rescuing. Some kids are bailed out on a majority of their dilemmas and never learn how to cope or make wise choices.

Parents are there to guide and teach, not to pamper and rescue. The best way to help children is NOT to help them. This may sound hard to some, but it is the only way they'll be able to build character and cope with the realities of life.

[By John Tesh]

Avoiding Holiday Depression

The holiday season for most people is a fun time of the year filled with parties, celebrations, and social gatherings with family and friends. For many people, it is a time filled with sadness, self-reflection, loneliness, and anxiety.

What causes holiday blues?

Sadness is a truly personal feeling. What makes one person feel sad may not affect another person. Typical sources of holiday sadness include:

- Stress
- Fatigue
- Unrealistic expectations
- Over-commercialization
- Financial stress
- The inability to be with one's family and friends

Balancing the demands of shopping, parties, family obligations, and house guests may contribute to feelings of being overwhelmed and increased tension. People who do not view themselves as depressed may develop stress responses, such as:

- Headaches
- Excessive drinking
- Over-eating
- Insomnia

Others may experience post-holiday sadness after New Year's Day. This can result from built-up expectations and disappointments from the previous year, coupled with stress and fatigue.

19 tips for coping with holiday stress and depression:
- Make realistic expectations for the holiday season.
- Set realistic goals for yourself.
- Pace yourself. Do not take on more responsibilities than you can handle.
- Make a list and prioritize the important activities. This can help make holiday tasks more manageable.
- Be realistic about what you can and cannot do.
- Do not put all your energy into just one day (i.e., Thanksgiving Day, New Year's Eve). The holiday cheer can be spread from one holiday event to the next.
- Live and enjoy the present.
- Look to the future with optimism.
- Don't set yourself up for disappointment and sadness by comparing today with the good old days of the past.
- If you are lonely, try volunteering some time to help others.
- Find holiday activities that are free, such as looking at holiday decorations, going window shopping without buying, and watching the winter weather, whether it's a snowflake or a raindrop.
- Limit your drinking, since excessive drinking will only increase your feelings of depression.
- Try something new. Celebrate the holidays in a new way.
- Spend time with supportive and caring people.
- Reach out and make new friends.
- Make time to contact a long-lost friend or relative and spread some holiday cheer.
- Make time for yourself!
- Let others share the responsibilities of holiday tasks.
- Keep track of your holiday spending. Overspending can lead to depression when the bills arrive after the holidays are over. Extra bills with little budget to pay them can lead to further stress and depression.

Is the environment and reduced daylight a factor in winter time sadness? Animals react to the changing season with changes in mood and behavior. People change behaviors as well, when there is less sunlight. Most people find they eat and sleep slightly more in wintertime and dislike the dark mornings and short days. For some, however, symptoms are severe enough to disrupt their lives and to cause considerable distress. These people may be suffering from seasonal affective disorder (SAD).

Research studies have that found phototherapy is effective in treating people that suffer from SAD. Phototherapy is a treatment involving a few hours of exposure to intense light.

Be Careful About Complaining

From an article on complaining, here are several reasons why negative talk is so bad:

• Complaining makes legitimate gripes appear worse than they are. When you complain, you are focusing on one thing - what's wrong. There may be some actual good things in the company or workplace, but you only focus on the annoyances. If you're in a workplace where 80 percent of it is good and 20 percent is bad, and you spend most of your time zeroed in on the bad, your situation will appear to be worse than it really is.

• Complaining becomes part of your personality. It starts to get easier and easier to complain if you keep doing it. After awhile, everything starts looking bad. Every situation you face is a crisis and every person you deal with is a moron. Nothing is good anymore.

• Complaining destroys all hope that things will ever get better. To the complainer. where you work is the worst place ever. Where you live is a dump. Everyone in your neighborhood is unfriendly. You become a complaint magnet and eventually you lose all hope that anything good can ever happen for you. In fact, if someone comes along with a new idea, you're the first to shoot it down.

• Complainers nurture bad relationships. People who complain together stay together. Check your relationships. Are they built on the fact you share the same complaints with another person? That's not too healthy. If your relationship is based on complaints, then the one who complains the most is the most popular and if you stop complaining, the relationship falls apart. If you're negative, you have less friends and a social life that is suffering.

Constant complaining will drain any happiness you have. It will diminish your drive to be a creative and fun human being to be around. People have a tendency to not want to be around someone who complains too much.

Teen Pregnancies on Rise in Alabama

After years of decline, teen pregnancy rates increased in 2006 and 2007.

After nearly 10 years of steady decline, Alabama's teen pregnancy rate increased in 2006 and 2007, according to the Alabama Department of Public Health.

In 2007, there were 12,398 pregnancies among girls ages 10 to 19.

An increase in teen pregnancies in 2006 marked the end of a steady decrease in teen pregnancy rates. There were 57.1 births per 1,000 teens in 1996 and 37.5 births per 1,000 in 2005.

There were 39.7 births per 1,000 teens in 2007 and 39.6 in 2006. The number of teen births in Alabama increased by 106 between 2006 and 2007 and by 767 between 2005 and 2006, according to the ADPH.

"We need to be aware that teen pregnancy is interrelated to health problems we're seeing with infant mortality," state health officer Don Williamson said in a press release. "Also, we're concerned that risk behaviors seem to be increasing among our teenagers."

Parenting challenges? Counseling could help.

What to do about financial stress?

The current financial crisis has been taking place for months. The collapse of Wall Street was preceded by rising gasoline prices and home foreclosures. Major lending agencies and investment banks have been going under and retail prices are on the upswing. Now we're heaping anxiety on top of anxiety.

People feel out of control. Our leaders are not giving us any indication when the current monetary fallout will come to an end.

Counsellors and Doctors are seeing people with sleep issues, gastrointestinal illnesses and people who are dealing with a surge of autoimmune deficiency conditions. Levels of alcohol consumption are up as well.

BusinessWeek referred to a poll that has found Americans are indeed more stressed than they were six months ago.

So what advice can we follow during this current time of emotional upset?

• Remain calm. The worst thing you can do is to start panicking in a crisis and make bad decisions. Some amount of anxiety is good for you. When you're a bit on edge, you're more motivated to make changes and think about the consequences of your decisions. However, if you're overanxious, your emotional state can interfere with your ability to make healthy decisions.

Don't allow your anxiety to cloud your ability to be cautious, careful and full of confidence. It's never easy to go through a crisis, but when you have the confidence that you'll make it through a tough time, it makes all the difference. If you've gone through stressful times before and survived, you can do it again.

• Refuse to accept everything you hear. This nation has survived many incredible catastrophes from Wall Street crashes, the Great Depression, the attack on Pearl Harbor and 9/11. If listening to media and news reports gets you all riled up, you may need to go on a media fast for a few days. Please, whatever you do, don't spend all day checking the stock market averages.

• Be proactive. The worst thing you can do is to watch everything fall apart and do nothing but complain. Any action - big or small - you can take to get your finances under control will be helpful for reducing anxiety. Keep your focus on what you can do and not on what is not happening.

• Keep your life in balance. Prevent yourself from becoming consumed with all of the financial information streaming across the TV screen and ignoring your own needs. Do not neglect your eating habits, make sure you engage in activities you enjoy and keep that balance between how much time you devote to staying up on the current financial crisis and how much attention you pay to your own sense of well-being.

• Take stock of your life. Use this time to assess how you handle your money. If you lose your job, you may want to consider that this is the time to change your line of work. Perhaps your hours have been reduced. Yes, you'll go through a tight squeeze financially, but it may be an opportune time to start looking elsewhere and initiate a career change.

• Seek good counseling. Stress and anxiety are treatable by a qualified therapist. Start feeling better today. Get into counseling.

[Research by John Tesh]