This is a very cost efficient alternative to smoking. Its also probably one of the easiest routes to edible cannabis out there.  The high lasts a lot longer than smoking, and is a lot more of a physical, sedating high.

Click here for instructions

So is apathy part of depression? The DSM is virtually silent on the topic, as is the depression literature. Depression is generally characterized by too much emotion, but the DSM implicitly acknowledges we can experience too little. One of the two major depression symptoms is loss of interest or pleasure, such as in a hobby. Basically, we stop caring.

What’s missing here is that lack of caring doesn’t necessarily stop at pleasure (see article). We can also become desensitized to grief or to something bad happening, but we’re not likely to see psychiatry weigh in on this any time soon.

Read more Here

By Edwin Harkness Spina

Probably the most debilitating emotion that humans must confront is that of fear. Fear confuses. Fear paralyzes. Fear prevents you from thinking clearly, accessing your spiritual gifts and being who you truly are.

Fear is the anticipation of future pain. It’s been said that 90% of humans are motivated to avoid pain, while only 10% seek pleasure. It’s no surprise that we suffer from fear. We’ve been trained to fear from an early age. Don’t play in traffic – fear of getting run over. Don’t talk to strangers – fear of being abducted. Don’t misbehave or Mommy won’t love you – fear of abandonment.

As we grow older, we learn new fears: Fear of not being loved. Fear of being rejected. Fear of not having enough. Fear of being unworthy or inadequate. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of being restricted. Fear of getting fired. Fear of being annihilated by nuclear-armed terrorists.

Every day, we are bombarded with new fear-based messages by advertisers, politicians and the media. It’s easy to understand why: Fearful people are easy to control.

Fear is one of humanity’s most primitive emotions, triggering the adrenaline rush associated with the fight or flight response to danger. In life-threatening situations, this is helpful, better preparing you to do battle or to escape. But in non-lethal situations, fear clouds judgment and encourages you to REACT – rather than carefully consider alternatives – thus ensuring a less than optimal response to your problem.

Even worse, attachment to fear inhibits your ability to tap into your innermost self. Connecting with your inner master requires you to be balanced and your brain hemispheres be in synch. Fear causes your brain to automatically return to its dominant side – logical or emotional – again, ensuring unbalanced input into solving your problem.

Fear is a low vibration, dense emotion. Clinging to this negative, energy-draining emotion guarantees you will be unable to transcend to higher states of consciousness, characterized by higher vibration emotions such as love, joy, peace and happiness. You can’t take your baggage to the higher worlds, so eliminating fear is critical.

All people, even warriors, have some degree of fear. What separates warriors from timid souls is not their inability to recognize danger. What makes some people warriors is their willingness to act in the face of fear. By repeated experience, warriors come to know that fear dissolves with conscious action.

Action has another benefit. It focuses you in the Now. By definition, fear is the anticipation of future pain, that is, in the future – not in the Now. Acting keeps you focused in the Now, which is how you reach higher states of consciousness – where time is malleable and fear does not exist.

As a 17-year old youth driving our family car with my new driver’s license, I remember being threatened by a crazed driver on a deserted highway. It happened so quickly, I had no time to become fearful. Everything began moving in slow motion, giving me time to observe the situation. I had a bigger car, more horsepower and, if need be, I could run him off the road. I accelerated and left him behind. Only years later did I realize that by acting in the Now, time had stretched to assist me.

Look at your life and observe where you are stuck. Likely the cause is fear, in some form or another.

Ask yourself: What is the worst thing that can happen to you if you act and confront your fears? Will you look foolish? Will your self image suffer? Will you be rejected?

Recognize that all of these fears are ego-based. Your true self is not affected by any of these consequences.

In addition to dissolving fear and placing you in the Now, consciously choosing a course of action will take the focus off of you and your ego, and places it on the task at hand.

So what to do? Begin simply by taking small steps. If you have a social anxiety disorder, you don’t start to conquer your fear by signing up to address the UN. You begin by attending a meeting of people that share your interests. You don’t even have to speak; just be there. If you immerse yourself in a subject that you love, you will lose yourself, you will have fun, and you will be in the Now, as you act or interact with others.

Remember, also, that failing to act will compound your problem. To protect your ego, you may come up with justifications for why you didn’t do anything. You may convince yourself it was prudent, smart, unimportant, wouldn’t matter, etc. Soon, you have convinced yourself that you did the ‘right’ thing. This makes it harder to act in the future. Recognize that it is your ego that is busy justifying your inaction, not your true self. It is a self-reinforcing, bad habit you are developing.

You can nip this habit in the bud by bringing conscious awareness to your problem and then acting. People that act in accord with their true self are not constrained by fear. They are not driven by their egos, and consequently are free to do what they like. These people are charismatic. They act from their innermost self. They are unconcerned with how others perceive them. They are not controlled by others. They are their own person, free to love and be loved.

The choice is yours. Love or Fear. Clarity or Confusion. Higher consciousness or stagnation. Eliminate fear by taking conscious action and being your true self.

To eliminate the underlying low-vibration energies that manifest as fear and stress, practice the program I developed, Energy Center Clearing, described below…

Edwin Harkness Spina is an award-winning author and speaker. Ed is dedicated to presenting practical mystical techniques to improve people’s lives and expand their minds. His workshops and seminars emphasize the practical application of these techniques to help others manifest their dreams.

Scientists have warned that growing tendency to medicate against sadness like a disease stops us embracing our miserable side and removes the motivation to mature emotionally.

Like the saying “what does not kill me, makes me stronger”, being sad and melancholic can leave sufferers better able to cope with life’s challenges, more resilient and spur them to greater achievements, it is claimed.

The researchers point out that today’s society prizes personal happiness above all else and there is little tolerance for wallowing in despair after losing a job, the break-up of a relationship or the death of a loved one.

But a growing number of mental health experts fear the increasing tendency to take a pill to beat the blues could actually affect human evolution.

Far from the disorder being a modern malaise, humans have suffered from depression for thousands of years – and it has survived partly because it is beneficial to the species in the long-term, they claim.

Estimates suggest as many as one in four people will suffer from depression at some stage in their lives – and five per cent of the population is currently living with it.

A growing number of psychiatrists are questioning whether doctors and drug companies are too keen to treat the condition with powerful and potentially harmful drugs.

Psychiatrist Professor Jerome Wakefield said: “When you find something this deeply in us biologically you presume it was selected because it had some advantage – otherwise we wouldn’t have been burdened with it. We’re fooling around with part of our biological make-up.”

Prof Wakefield, of New York University, believes human sadness helps us learn from our mistakes.

He said: “I think one of the functions of intense negative emotions is to stop our normal functioning – to make us focus on something else for a while.”

It also might act as a psychological deterrent to prevent us from making those mistakes in the first place, reports New Scientist.

The risk of sadness may deter us from being too impetuous or cavalier, especially in relationships or with other things we value.

Dr Paul Keedwell, a psychiatrist at Cardiff University, said even full-blown depression may save us from the effects of long-term stress.

He says without taking time out to reflect “you might stay in a state of chronic stress until you’re exhausted or dead.”

For more information, log on to the New Scientist website

British scientists’ new research shows that mood may actually change how one’s dinner tastes, making the bitter and salty flavors recede.

In a new research to unpick the relationship between the chemical balance in brain and sense of taste, scientists at the University of Bristol, UK, gave 20 healthy volunteers two antidepressant drugs, and checked their sensitivity to different tastes, The Nature reported Wednesday on its website.

The scientists found that the drug that raised serotonin levels made people more sensitive to sweet and bitter tastes, while the other, which increased noradrenaline, enhanced recognition of bitter and sour tastes.

In healthy people, volunteers whose anxiety levels were naturally higher were less sensitive to bitter and salty tastes. ” What hasn’t been done before is to look precisely at which tastes are affected in depression. Now the results are in. We can discriminate between the chemicals and the tastes that seem to be altered,” Lucy Donaldson who led the research was quoted as saying.

It has long been known that people who are depressed have lower- than-usual levels of the brain chemicals serotonin or noradrenaline, or in some cases both, and many also have a blunted sense of taste, which is presumably caused by changes in brain chemistry.

The scientists plan to perform similar tests in depressed people, and in healthy volunteers given another brain chemical called tryptophan which would lower the healthy subjects’ levels of serotonin, as actually happens in depressed patients, according to the report.

Source

Results from a clinical trial show that patients with treatment-resistant depression who underwent deep brain stimulation (DBS) report significant improvements as early as one month after treatment.

The patients also experienced continued and sustained improvement over time.

The data are reported in the online issue of Biological Psychiatry by scientists from the University of Toronto and Emory Emory University School of Medicine.

The study began at the University of Toronto in 2002, led by Helen S. Mayberg, MD, and collaborators Andres Lozano, MD, PhD, neurosurgeon, and psychiatrist Sidney Kennedy, MD.

This clinical trial is the culmination of Mayberg’s 20 years of research using brain imaging technology that has worked to characterize functional brain abnormalities in major depression and to identify the mechanisms of various antidepressant treatments.

A report on the first six patients in the study was published in the Journal Neuron in 2005. The new paper reports on an expanded sample of patients and an extended period of clinical follow-up.

DBS uses high-frequency electrical stimulation targeted to the specific areas of the brain involved in neuropsychiatric disease. Twenty patients received SCG DBS for 12 months.

Twelve of 20 patients experienced a significant decrease in depressive symptoms (defined by a 50 percent decrease in the Hamilton Depression rating scale) by six months, with seven patients essentially well with few remaining symptoms (remission, defined as a Hamilton Depression Rating Scale score <8). Benefits were largely maintained at 12 months with continued stimulation. No long-term side effects were reported.

Each study patient was implanted with two thin wire electrodes (one on each side of the brain) in the white matter adjacent to SCG. The other end of each wire was connected under the skin of the neck to a pulse generator implanted in the chest — similar to a pacemaker — that directs the electrical current.

The researchers regulated the intensity of the current according to the response of the patient. Only patients who were unable to get better with most other types of antidepressant treatment — including medication, psychotherapy and electroconvulsive therapy — were included in the study.

“In previous studies using brain imaging, we found the subcallosal cingulate region was a key region in an emerging emotion regulation circuit implicated in major depression,” explains Mayberg.

“We postulated that if stimulation worked for the treatment of other neurological disorders where abnormal function of specific circuits was well established, such as Parkinson’s disease, then stimulation of the Cg25 region within this apparent depression circuit might provide significant benefit for patients with treatment-resistant depression.”

The researchers were able to track the clinical response of the patients over a 12-month period using standard depression rating scales as well as various quantitative measures of behavior and general functioning, neuropsychological testing and scanning of both regional brain blood flow and glucose metabolism using positron emission tomography (PET).

PET imaging of these patients demonstrated that metabolic activity changed locally at the site of stimulation but also throughout the previously identified depression network, providing evidence that modulating the circuit and not just a single region was likely responsible for the antidepressant effects.

“We see depression as a complex disturbance of the specific circuits in the brain responsible for regulating mood and emotions,” Mayberg says.

“We hypothesized that if DBS could locally modulate a critical central location within this mood circuit, such modulation would result in clinical improvement — and it appears it does.”

Mayberg initiated an expanded version of her Toronto study at Emory in 2007 with psychiatrist Paul Holtzheimer, MD, and neurosurgeon Robert Gross, MD, PhD, and with grant support from the Woodruff Fund, The Stanley Medical Research Institute and the Dana Foundation.

The new Emory clinical trial is tackling a number of unanswered issues including the testing of patients with bipolar II depression and refinement of the targeting and selection of the electrodes using new imaging techniques. The Emory study will enroll 20 patients and will be conducted over a period of at least three years.

Source: Emory University

Need a biodegradeable pipe in a hurry? that’s right, don’t be jabbing holes in a beer can like some frat-boy, do it the old fashioned organic way!  Play with your veggies, kids!

See how to make it HERE

These videos have been broken up into over 30 video segments, all of which can be watched on YouTube or from SAI.

The first videos start with the person telling about their experiences when they had social anxiety and what life was like.  As they progress, they begin to tell you what they did to overcome social anxiety and how they did it, and what progress against social anxiety means.

Here’s Max:

Significant modifications of an important gene suggests depression may play a role in changing the very makeup of the brain.

Researchers at the Robarts Research Institute at The University of Western Ontario compared the brains of people who committed suicide with those who died suddenly of natural causes, such as a heart attack. They found that the genome in suicidal, depressed people was chemically modified by a process that is normally involved in regulating the essential characteristics of all cells in the body.

The brain tissue was collected during autopsies and may eventually help explain an underlying cause of major depression and suicide.

This is apparently the first study to show that proteins that modify DNA directly are more highly expressed in the brains of people who commit suicide. These proteins are involved in chemically modifying DNA in a process called epigenomic regulation.

Michael O. Poulter, the lead researcher explains, “We have about 40,000 genes in every cell and the main reason a brain cell is a brain cell is because only a small fraction of the genes are turned on. The remaining genes that are not expressed are shut down by an epigenetic process called DNA methylation.”

The rate of methylation in the suicide brains was found to be much greater than that of the control group. Importantly, one of the genes they studied was shown to be heavily chemically modified and its expression was reduced. This particular gene plays a major role in regulating brain activity. “Interestingly, the nature of this chemical modification is long term and hard to reverse, and this fits with depression,” says Poulter.

“The whole idea that the genome is so malleable in the brain is surprising. Finding that epigenetic mechanisms continue to influence gene expression is pretty unusual,” says Poulter.

“These observations open an entirely new avenue of research and potential therapeutic interventions.”

Source: The University of Western Ontario

Depression is often lurking in the shadows. When you are depressed, most often you think that you are worthless. The worse the depression, the more you feel this way. Fortunately, you are not alone!

A survey by Dr. Aaron Beck revealed that over 80 percent of depressed people expressed dislike for themselves. According to Dr. Beck, when you are depressed, you feel “The Four Ds”:

* Defeated,
* Defective,
* Deserted, and
* Deprived.

Also, most counselors find that depressed individuals see themselves as deficient in those qualities of life they most highly value: intelligence, achievement, popularity, attractiveness, health and strength. And almost all negative emotional reactions cause damage by contributing to feelings of low self-esteem. The way a therapist handles these feelings of inadequacy is crucial to the treatment, as your sense of worthlessness is a key to your depression.

How can you increase your sense of “worth”? You cannot earn it through what you do. Happiness is not obtained solely by your achievements. Self-worth based on accomplishments is “pseudo-esteem”; it’s simply not the real thing.

Cognitive therapy, as taught by Dr. Beck, refuses to buy into an individual’s sense of worthlessness. Instead, his techniques help people to understand and address those factors that contribute to low self-esteem.

Source

The spiritual effects of a substance in “sacred mushrooms” can last more than a year, Johns Hopkins researchers claim.

The scientists said their investigations may lead to new ways to help people with conditions such as cancer, depression and drug dependence.

In a previous study, the researchers gave psilocybin to 36 healthy, well-educated volunteers with active spiritual lives. After taking the substance under controlled conditions, 60 percent of the participants reported have a “full mystical experience.”

When the researchers checked with the volunteers 14 months later, the same percentage said taking psilocybin increased their sense of well-being or life satisfaction.

“Most of the volunteers looked back on their experience up to 14 months later and rated it as the most, or one of the five most, personally meaningful and spiritually significant of their lives,” lead investigator Roland Griffiths, a professor in the departments of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and neuroscience, said in a prepared statement.

The study was published in the current issue of the Journal of Psychopharmacology.

“This is truly remarkable finding, “Griffiths said. “Rarely in psychological research do we see such persistently positive reports from a single event in the laboratory. This gives credence to claims that the mystical-type experiences some people have during hallucinogen sessions may help patients suffering from cancer-related anxiety or depression, and may serve as a potential treatment for drug dependence. We’re eager to move ahead with that research.”

He noted that while some of the volunteers “reported strong fear or anxiety for a portion of their day-long psilocybin sessions, none reported any lingering harmful effects, and we didn’t observe any clinical evidence of harm.”

However, if hallucinogens are used in poorly supervised settings, the possible fear or anxiety responses could lead to harmful behaviors, Griffiths warned.

More information

Scrubbing the tub and other forms of housework may clean your house and boost your mood.

In fact, as little as 20 minutes of any kind of physical activity a week helped mental health, although the more vigorous the activity, the greater the benefit, said the authors of a study published online Thursday in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

“There’s such a pervasive feeling in this country that, if there’s a problem, there’s always a pill to fix it,” said Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of Women and Heart Disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City. “This study is just reminding us that it doesn’t take much to actually have an effect even on your mood.”

The physical benefits of exercise are well known: It reduces the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and even some cancers, among other things.

The mental benefits are less clear, although exercise is thought to improve blood flow and reduce inflammation, which have been related to depression and dementia. Exercise might also improve mood by reducing stress levels.

“It’s pretty clear that physical activity does have some kind of positive relationship to good mental health,” said Dr. Jane Ripperger-Suhler, assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Texas A&M Health Science Center College of Medicine and a psychiatrist with Scott & White Mental Health Center in Temple. “They [the study authors] are trying to figure out how much you need to do.”

For the new study, almost 20,000 men and women participating in the 1995, 1998 and 2003 Scottish Health Surveys answered questionnaires about physical activity and “psychological distress.”

Daily physical activity of any kind — including housework, gardening, walking, and sports — was associated with a 41 percent lower risk of psychological distress. But sports reduced the risk of mood lows the most — by 33 percent.

And just in case women are thinking this study is a ploy to engage in more housework, think again. The study showed that more sports and overall activity increased your mood even more, but extra mopping and scrubbing didn’t.

“The message is do a little bit of housework and a lot of sports,” Ripperger-Suhler said.

According to the study authors, from University College London, this appears to be the first research to look at different specific activities in relation to mental health. The study wasn’t designed to look at a cause-and-effect relationship, only that a relationship exists.

More information

Certain variations in a gene that helps regulate stress response offer protection against depression in adults who suffered abuse when they were children, a new study says.

Adults who were abused as children and didn’t have the protective variations of the CRHR1 gene had twice the symptoms of moderate to severe depression, compared to those with the variations.

The researchers interviewed more than 400 adults and tested their DNA. About one-third of them had the protective variations in the gene that produces CRHR1, a receptor for the stress hormone corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH).
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Just as neurotransmitters help ferry signals along nerve pathways, other complex chemicals called hormones carry messages to organs or groups of cells throughout the body. These chemicals trigger or regulate certain activities, such as the release of an egg from a woman’s ovary and the delicate control of blood sugar levels.

The hypothalamus in your brain, the pituitary gland below your brain, and the adrenal glands atop your kidneys form a trio known as the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Together these structures govern a multitude of hormonal activities in the body and may play a role in depression as well.
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