Women health center » Anxiety Disorders

Women and Drug Abuse

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 19:03:02 +0000

According to the National Institute of Drug Abuse, more than 4 million women use drugs today in America. In the past year alone, 9 million women used drugs illegally and another 50% of all women between the ages of 15 to 44 will try drugs at least once in their lifetime. These troubling numbers are compounded by the fact that many instances of women and drug abuse go unreported. Many women suffer from their drug abuse and addictions silently, secretly hiding their problem from friends and family.

Finding help, therefore, can be a difficult task for women who abuse drugs. Admitting that they have a problem is often difficult particularly when friends and family are unaware of the drug use. Women may deny drug abuse out of fear and shame that their family will be taken away from them if they appear to be unfit caretakers, a stigma associated with women and drug abuse.

Often, women who use drugs have underlying problems which not only exasperate their drug abuse, but are the root cause of it. Women may seek the use of drugs as self-medication for depression, anxiety, and other mental disorders. In fact, the link between drug abuse and mental disorders often go hand in hand, complicating the diagnosis and treatment. A special method called dual diagnosis is therefore necessary to assess patients with co-occurring disorders.

Though every rehabilitation program may claim to offer dual diagnosis, only a few have licensed practitioners who specialize in it. Individuals seeking treatment for drug and/or alcohol abuse can find more information at HarmonyPlace.net.

By: Y. Tilden

Anxiety Disorders Associated With Women – The Kinds of Anxiety Disorders

admin — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 09:55:45 +0000

Anxiety disorders are psychiatric disorders that affects the life of a person adversely. The anxiety disorders generally lead to deterioration of the overall health.

Women and anxiety are inseparable as anxiety is all about the emotional effect that is accompanied by the physiological sensations. It is caused due to emotions experienced over different issues such as family problems, financial issues as well as concerns about children.

It is generally characterized by doubts, worries as well as painful awareness. The heightened emotions can even lead to heart palpitations, dizziness, sweating, gastrointestinal upsets, trembling, restlessness and increased urination among others.

Kinds of anxiety disorders

Anxiety disorders in women are one of the most prevalent psychiatric disorders and influence the quality of their life adversely. These disorders lead to expensive and frequent medical check ups. They can also cause deterioration of the overall health. The detection of anxiety disorder is done when challenges of the everyday living become overwhelming. Below are listed some of them:

Generalized disorder:

Also known as GAD, is more common among women than among men and children. This form of anxiety disorder includes non stop worrying about different issues, aches as well as pains including trembling, headaches, and muscle tension. Apart from this, constant fatigue, grouchiness and sleep disorders are some of the symptoms of this problem.

Obsessive-compulsive disorder:

In this anxiety disorder, the person suffers from frequently recurring thoughts known as obsessions. Compulsive components of this form of anxiety disorder also include cyclical actions known as compulsions. These are attempts to control the obsessive thought process. Women having OCD tend to hurt themselves and others and develop strange ideas about sexual activity or religion, among other issues.

Panic disorder:

Panic disorder is generally present in those women who have uncontrollable intense feelings of panic and fear known as panic attacks. Other symptoms linked with this anxiety disorder are chest pain, breathing difficulty, rapid heart beat, hot flashes and tingling feelings.

This disorder is normally seen between the age group of 18 and 24 years. There is no reason for these panic attacks. They can happen at any point of time. Through studies and researches it has been found that panic attacks usually occur at places where the patient has already faced panic attacks in the past.

Phobia:

This is another common kind of abnormal fear wherein a person reacts unusually to a particular element. In other words, a person is afraid of things like fire, height, water, insects, loneliness, darkness and flying – just to name a few. Some people also develop social phobia such as fear of embarrassment among others. The common symptoms include sleep disorders, nightmares, feeling of aloofness, irritability, anxiety, numbness and startled reactions.

There is cognitive-behavioral therapy done in order to treat these anxiety disorders that focuses upon changing behavioral, emotional and cognitive patterns. The therapists attempt to the reconditioning of thought process of the women so that they can think healthy and integrate the relaxation techniques to alter their mood swings to a large extent.

It is a proven theory and has helped in the treatment of numerous patients across the globe.

By: James S. Pendergraft

The Hormone Connection to Women’s Mental health

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:59:30 +0000

Do hormones really affect women’ mood?

In the past fifteen years the field of endocrinology has produced vast amounts of evidence showing that the loss of estrogen that occurs normally during menstrual cycle changes puts women at greater risk for mood, anxiety, and craving disorders. Considering the prevalence of these illnesses among women, we’re fortunate to be gaining a better understanding of them.

Women are more than twice as likely to become depressed. Research shows that they’re also more likely to suffer from anxiety. More develop phobias. It’s the same ratio for agoraphobia: nearly 8% of women become agoraphobic, compared to only 3% of men. More succumb to post traumatic stress syndrome. Seventy percent of those with social phobia are women. What could be happening here?

The cyclic nature of estrogen secretion may account for women’s special vulnerability to mood and anxiety disorders, Dr. Mary Seeman reported, in the Journal of the American Psychiatric Association, in an analysis of dozens of studies on how female hormones affect psychopathology in both men and women.

The theory of “recurrent estrogen withdrawal” proposes that a low estrogen state drives the onset, or worsening, of mood symptoms in women who are predisposed–by virtue of already low serotonin levels–to mood and anxiety disorders. In 1996, researchers at the University of Edinburgh published a report discussing the molecular level at which these changes occur. Struck by estrogen’s “profound effects on mood, mental state and memory” they described the hormone as “nature’s psychoprotectant.” Sufficient levels of estrogen must be present in the brain, that is, if psychic stability is to be maintained. Estrogen’s importance to cognitive processing and memory is not a slight matter. It’s been discovered that actually buffers the brain’s neurons against degeneration.

By the end of the nineties mounting evidence had begun to show a unique and persistent hormone connection to almost all mental illness in women. For example, binging and purging behaviors in bulimics worsened during the premenstruum, when estrogen levels go down. So did panic attacks in women with panic disorder. Impulse disorders, too, seemed to get worse during that week or ten days before the period begins–kleptomaniacs went on more stealing escapades, trichotillomaniacs pulled more hair, skin cutters cut more skin.. All of these illnesses are related to serotonin dysfunction, and, as we’ve seen, serotonin and estrogen are inextricably linked.

In the nineties a Canadian psychologist, Barbara Sherwin, was conducting very interesting studies on how estrogen loss affects cognition and memory. I went to Toronto to spend a day with Dr. Sherwin in her office at McGill University. I needed a mini-course in estrogen and she was willing to give it to me.

From early fetal life, hormone receptors are present in the hypothalamus of the brain. It is here that they begin organizing brain circuitry, setting the stage for puberty, regulating subsequent adult sexual behavior, and controlling the frequency and intensity of emotional disorders. Research in neuroendocrinology has much to tell us about the pre-menopausal malaise that used to be thought the result of women’s sadness over the loss of reproductive function. Now it’s known that the mood and cognitive changes experienced are physical in origin.

Low estrogen affects mood. What I hadn’t known, until speaking with Dr. Sherwin, is that in order to produce serotonin the brain needs estrogen. I didn’t even known that estrogen existed in the brain. “There are estrogen receptors in various organs throughout the body, the brain included,” she explained. “That’s why estrogen loss produces so many different bodily symptoms–loss of skin elasticity, bone shrinkage, mood and cognitive decline”.

When estrogen levels rise, on the other hand, as they do in the first week of menses, their overall effect is to increase the amount of serotonin available in the spaces between the brain’s nerve cells. That improves mood. Within the brain, estrogen may in fact act as a natural antidepressant and mood stabilizer.

Dr. Sherwin introduced me to the work of researchers who were doing important basic science, including Bruce McEwen at Rockefeller Institute, in New York, and Joseph LeDoux, at New York University, who were discovering the molecular changes supporting the view that estrogen had profound effects on the mind and its capacities.

It wasn’t long after my visit with Dr. Sherwin that I learned of an important review of ten years’ worth of studies entitled, Estrogen, Serotonin, and Mood Disturbance: Where is the Therapeutic Bridge? Two researchers in the Perinatal and Reproductive Psychiatry Program at Harvard Medical School had essentially been motivated by the same question that I had: What is the hormone connection to women’s mental health? Joffe and Cohen looked at a hundred-and-twenty five studies on the relationship between women’s reproductive cycle hormone changes and their mental status. In study after study they found that women with histories of depression are apparently more vulnerable to recurrent episodes during periods of “significant reproductive endocrine change”.

Correlation does not prove causality. The fact that someone becomes morbidly depressed exactly on the day ovulation begins and remains that way until the day she starts bleeding doesn’t prove that premenstrual drops in estrogen cause mood changes, but it damn well raised suspicions. Once information from new brain imaging techniques was added to the mix, the case for a hormone connection to women’s mental vulnerabilities became as close to an open and shut case as are you’re likely to get. Neuro-imaging has improved our understanding considerably, indicating lightening flashes of activity in different parts of the brain during what used to be called, dimly, “that time of the month.”

It is the dance between two kinds of hormones, ovarian hormones and brain hormones, that ultimately determines how symptomatic any given woman will become during her menstrual cycle, and at other reproductive risk points as well. If, for example, a woman is genetically coded to have low, or borderline levels of brain serotonin, the estrogen drop that occurs premenstrually may be all it takes to send her serotonin spiraling below the level of optimum functioning, putting her in a mental state that, for all its upsetting symptoms, mysteriously vanishes as soon as her period starts and her estrogen levels go back up.

Why does this happen? Because serotonin needs estrogen for its metabolization in the brain. The two hormones are a dynamic duo, functioning arm in arm. As estrogen levels drop, so does serotonin. When estrogen rises (as it does, for example, once menstruation begins) serotonin levels come right back up with it, and calm is restored. The ebb and flow of womens’ menstrual moods is orchestrated not by the moon but by secretions in her brain and ovaries. What we now know is that the sometimes negative outcome of these secretion changes is not inevitable. Just as science has learned to modify insulin changes and thyroid changes, it can now modify ovarian changes. If you don’t want to blame your mood on your ovaries, blame it on the brain. Blame it on whatever pleases you, just don’t resign yourself to the view that women were born to suffer.

To me it’s fascinating that the individual pieces of this important puzzle were not available to us twenty years ago. And the dynamite effect of putting those pieces together has occurred only in the last decade. Building on previous knowledge and assembling the picture step by step, endocrinologists at places like the Neuropsychiatric Institute in California, and the Reproductive Mood Disorder Program at the University of Texas Medical Center have come to understand that women are not only vulnerable during the premenstruum, they are vulnerable at all the reproductive risk points. Moreover, a woman who suffers at one of these risk points is vulnerable to becoming symptomatic at others. If she has genetically low serotonin in her brain, estrogen drops are going to affect her, simple as that.

Things have taken a more enlightened turn since then, thank God, but we are only now coming to understand what actually happens to women’s mental well-being at times of hormonal stress. Women scientists in particular, including psychiatrists and reproductive endocrinologists like Barbara Sherwin, are making a unique and important contribution to the massive surge of research that is currently shaping a whole new paradigm for understanding the role of hormonally created change in female well-being and mental status.

By: Colette Dowling