Depression

Holiday joy and happiness have two ugly cousins who lurk in the background from Thanksgiving to New Year's Day.Known as seasonal stress and depression, this dismal pair just might pay you a holiday visit, county health experts say."The holidays can be a high-pressure situation for a lot of people," said Lorna Rice, director of social services at Carroll County General Hospital (CCGH). "And when people have expectations that can't be met, that can lead to depression."Some of those expectations include a desire to return to the way things were in the past, she said.

My wife has suffered from migraines ever since we got married. She used to retreat to our bedroom for hours or even days at a time to ride them out.For the past year her physician has prescribed a drug called propranolol. She takes it daily to prevent the headaches and it has helped. But she has little or no energy, and seems depressed or moody much of the time. This is a big difference from the vivacious girl I married, and I wonder if this drug could be responsible.An underlying depression could account for these symptoms, but your suspicions might also be justified.

Words come easily for Dick Cavett, so he had no trouble yesterday capturing the periods of overpowering despair that have kept this funnyman in his bathrobe for weeks while contemplating the relief that might come from suicide.Mr. Cavett, 56, strode into a room full of reporters at Johns Hopkins Hospital, his shirt open at the collar, tie slung over his arm, and quipped, "It's no fun being a specimen."Then, asked to describe clinical depression for those who might not understand, he had this to say: "Everything turns sort of colorless.

"I can't believe this is happening again," says Patricia, 32, a soft-spoken woman. "Everything was fine until about five months ago, when our son Jimmy was born. That's when Robert started to get depressed again." In fact, looking back, Patricia can see that their five-year marriage has been dotted by Robert's alternating cycles of depression and rage.When they met, Robert was a social worker, and Patricia was banquet manager at a large hotel. He came in to arrange for a conference, and it was love at first sight for both.

Martha Manning had long rejected electroconvulsive therapy -- "shock treatments" -- as a cruel relic of a less sophisticated era. She developed that bias in the 1970s while training to become a psychologist.Her opposition began to crumble five years ago when talk therapy and medications failed to rescue her from a major depression that seemed to be pulling her inexorably toward death. She said she never planned to kill herself -- her commitment to her teen-age daughter was too strong -- but found herself fantasizing about the relief that could come from speeding cars and guns.

The Best Awful, by Carrie Fisher. Simon & Schuster. 272 pages. $24. Is mental illness funny? Suzanne Vale, the heroine of actress Carrie Fisher's fourth Hollywood novel, says it had better be. Having survived drug abuse and rehab in Fisher's debut, Postcards From the Edge, Suzanne rides the dizzying ups and terrifying downs of bipolar disorder in The Best Awful, emerging to crack jokes at benefits and otherwise comfort the similarly afflicted. Given her history with controlled substances, it's no surprise that Suzanne brings disaster on herself.

Nursing home residents with proper glasses enjoy life more and are less depressed than those with uncorrected vision problems, a study has found. Obvious? Perhaps, but nursing home residents have three to 15 times higher rates of uncorrected vision impairment than seniors living independently. Before testing their vision, researchers led by Cynthia Owsley, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, scored 150 nursing home residents on scales of quality of life and depression.

THE WAR'S on. American troops have moved into Iraq. Baghdad has been bombed. Iraqi thug-in-chief Saddam Hussein may well be the late Saddam Hussein by the time you read this. It couldn't happen to a nicer guy. Contrary to what America's - and the world's - anti-war protesters tell you, President Bush is not the bad guy here. The bad guy clearly is - or was - Hussein. Killer of Kurds, torturer of dissidents, user of poison gas, procurer of weapons of mass destruction, violator of United Nations resolutions - the guy clearly had to go. How many more times was the United Nations going to allow him to violate resolutions?

The Anne Arundel Medical Center is offering a depression seminar and screening from 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. and 6 p.m. to 8 p.m. Thursday. The screenings are conducted anonymously, with participants hearing a presentation on the symptoms of depression and treatment options.The free seminar was developed in cooperation with the American Psychiatric Association and the National Depressive and Manic-Depressive Association.Advance registration is required. Call 224-5751.*If your home or office is too small to house all the telephone books that you might want or need, don't despair.

The rate of depression among women is twice that of men, and the higher incidence is mainly related to the experience of being female in contemporary culture, an expert panel of the American Psychological Association said yesterday.In a report, the association's Task Force on Women and Depression rebutted earlier work that had suggested that a higher reported rate of depression among women could be attributed to their being more inclined to admit emotional distress or to use mental health services.