Antidepressants Blog

The study of sleep is now a serious science. There are more than 170 sleep clinics and sleep laboratories in the USA alone. Sleep laboratories are designed for conducting research on sleep; they are also used to diagnose and treat sleeping problems. They are usually situated within the larger hospitals or attached to the medical schools and universities.

The first sleep laboratories were set up about 50 years ago. Scientists began to measure the electrical activities of the brain. Our brain is made up of a huge number of brain cells, and messages, in the form of electrical impulses, are transmitted from one cell to another cell and so on. This creates many electrical circuits, very much like the microchips of the present day computers. These circuits in the brain are always conducting messages, which generate electrical potentials. These electrical activities can be picked up by electrodes located outside the scalp and recorded on a moving scroll of paper as oscillating waves.

The machine which records brain waves is called an electroencephalogram or EEC It is now possible to distinguish several different kinds of wave forms according to the frequency and shape of the waves. When a person sits quietly with his eyes closed, the wave form is quite regular and the frequency is about 8 to 13 cycles per second. This is called the alpha rhythm. It is noticed that when a person falls asleep, the wave form changes to slower and slower waves. The EEG is now the most reliable objective way of telling whether a person is falling asleep and of judging how deeply he is sleeping.

Nowadays, with the advance of organ transplant between bodies, the surgeon has to know when a donor body is really dead before any of its organs can be removed and put into a recipient body.

This is especially important in the case of heart transplant, as the surgeon has to remove a beating heart from a donor body and place it into a recipient body with a failing heart. The EEG is used to determine if the brain is alive or not. When the EEG is silent and not recording any activity, the person is said to be brain dead. If a person is brain dead he is truly dead, and his organs can be used for transplant purposes. In 1976, at a conference of the Royal Medical Colleges, unanimous agreement was reached for the clinical diagnosis of brain death and very strict criteria have to be satisfied by clinicians before brain death can be pronounced.

When a person falls asleep from the fully awake state, he enters stage 1 sleep, which is a very light sleep. This is followed by stage 2, stage 3, and stage 4 sleep, where stage 4 is the deepest sleep. These four stages of sleep are differentiated by the characteristics of the brain wave forms as recorded by the EEG. Stage 1 light sleep occupies only 5 per cent of all these four stages put together, while stage 2 sleep appears to be the most important stage, occupying 50 per cent The waves become slower and bigger as the person sleeps deeper and deeper. In stage 4 sleep, the brain wave frequency is only 3 cycles per second. Both stage 3 and stage 4 sleep are called slow wave sleep.

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We are all basically insecure, and this is the root of much of our anxiety. Our bodies are frail; therefore we can never hope for real material security. At any moment, even in the most protected situations, we may be stricken down with illness or death. Aware of this, man has sought another form of security—security in the sight of God. Such security can transcend the insecurity of life and death. But man has learned to doubt, the security of religious belief has ebbed from him, and as a result his latent anxiety and tension is so much the worse.

Childhood-Insecurity In childhood we are insecure because of our relative weakness compared with those about us. This childhood feeling of insecurity may persist, and form a

pattern of tension and anxious behaviour in adult life. Whether this will happen or not depends very largely on the degree to which the child perceives his early environment as threatening.

An interesting point in this regard is that the child withstands the evil influence of a constantly hostile environment better than he does an inconsistent one, where those around him are changeable, sometimes harsh and sometimes loving. In these circumstances the child does not know what to expect, and as a result lives in a state of chronic anxiety.

At school the child may be subject to influences which further increase his insecurity. These influences may be extremely subtle and may escape the notice of both teachers and parents only to be disclosed years later in psychotherapy.

The native aggressive impulses of children are only just beneath the surface. They are easily turned on some less fortunate member of the group. Minor degrees of bullying may take a form that is scarcely perceptible to adults, but at the same time, may produce chronic tension in the unfortunate victim.

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This question could just as easily be asked in relation to any other anti-depressant. In one form or another, it is one of the more common questions on the mind of anyone who has felt the benefit of an anti-depressant medication. The relief and gratitude experience is counterbalanced in many people by a sense of unease at having to be on a medication for an undefined and possibly indefinite period of time. The honest answer is that we just can’t predict how long someone will need to be on an anti-depressant. If the depression has been a single short-lived episode, it may be possible to stop the anti-depressant after six months of remission without risking relapse. If there is a history of repeated episodes or long-standing depression, however, there is a high likelihood that depression will recur or relapse if the anti-depressant is stopped. In such people it generally makes good sense to stay on an antidepressant indefinitely. Although there have been no long-term studies of St John’s Wort in depression – and I should say that such studies are few and far between for other anti-depressants as well – there is no evidence of any long-term problems in those who have been on St John’s Wort for months or even years.

After several months on treatment, people often experiment and stop their anti-depressants just to make sure that they still really need them. If you do this, be sure to watch out for early signs of relapse and return to the anti-depressant as soon as these appear. It is much easier to reverse the symptoms of depression in their initial stages than after they are fully established again.

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