8 ms·

I do not know how many people here have "Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders" but I am on disability for all three and it runs in my family on my mother's side

• codeknight11 6y ago
  I am curious. How does protein intake affect mental health?
  • podgaj 6y ago
    Since we do not make enough BH4 (tetrahydrobiopterin) with this enzyme deficiency we cannot metabolize the amino acids needed to make serotonin, dopamine, and Nirtic Oxide. And then some of these amino acids turn into trace amines that act like meth. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/779279 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamaneurology/fullarticle/7... https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/382815/fnins-12-00499-HTML/image_m/fnins-12-00499-g002.jpg https://www.frontiersin.org/files/Articles/382815/fnins-12-0...
  • pygy_ 6y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTP_cyclohydrolase_I https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GTP_cyclohydrolase_I The deficiency causes problems with amino acid metabolism, which themselves mess up the brain. The depression was a mere symptom of the underlying disease. When you read the DSM, you realize there are no mental illnesses, just syndromes: sets of signs and symptoms. Except in select few cases, the pathophysiology is unknown.
    • podgaj 6y ago
      That is what I tell everyone struggling with unknown health issues: There are no diseases, only symptoms.
  • thesz 6y ago
    Not mental health, but mental state. Protein is split into amino acids and then recombined into proteins inside body. The splitting process and recombination process need glucose in blood and, effectively, drain glucose from blood. In my experience, some of the amino acid sport drinks can drain glucose from blood to the point where I had clear signs of very low glucose levels, including restlessness and shaking limbs. The glucose level may affect mood and has other interesting effects. If you look at what carbs, fats and proteins do with you mood, I think you will see that carbs make one relaxed (see relation between carbs and orexin), fats make one jolly (due to endocannabioids) and proteins make one awake (draining carbs from blood, mainly).
• PaulKeeble 6y ago
  The more I am unfortunately exposed to this after catching ME/CFS the more I realise medicine has a huge professionalism problem. Maybe a better term is a religious problem. Anything they cant currently explain is the patients fault. Having chronic energy fatigue issues is just me being lazy apparently and the enormous crashes I get after exercise are me doing wrong. The hundreds of thousands of c19 patients that develop this condition will get the same thing. To me it looks like most of them lack professional curiosity and certainly basic empathy. I lost all my respect for doctors over the 6 years based on how I have been treated.
  • podgaj 6y ago
    Both myself and my mother were diagnosed with ME at one point. And I agree, even when my tests came back weird my primary care doctor would say, "What do you want to do now?" Argh
    • PaulKeeble 6y ago
      Alas I am living that. I did my homework I have worked out what I want to do next and I am being told no. The tests I want they can't order as they are apparently too specialist for general practice and the drugs to find the issue via treatment are too far too off label for them to justify despite studies and clinical efficicacy from other countries. I just view that as a refusal to diagnose and treat me, no point putting it on me if you aren't then going to let me treat myself. It is frankly absurd to put this onto the patient. It is all about their perceived Physchological basis of the disease, they will humour you on tests and some low harm drugs until you run out of stuff and hope you will finally see the light that CBT will help you.
      • podgaj 6y ago
        If there is any test you should get is is a serum amino acid test. I have done much of the foot work on ME/CFS. Start looking into aldehydes (malondialdehyde specifically) and the role they play. Also, if you can get your genetics from Ancestry it could help you understand yourself more.
  • 6y ago
• taneq 6y ago
  > So what is this article saying? Me and my family just do not have perseverance? I think it's more likely that if you're not depressed, chronically anxious or having panic attacks, you'll find it far easier to muster some perseverance.
  • cpncrunch 6y ago
    No, it is saying that having perseverence and working towards goals helps: “Our findings suggest that people can improve their mental health by raising or maintaining high levels of tenacity, resilience and optimism,” she said. “Aspiring toward personal and career goals can make people feel like their lives have meaning. On the other hand, disengaging from striving toward those aims or having a cynical attitude can have high mental health costs.”
    • podgaj 6y ago
      And I am saying they are mistaking correlation with causation.
      • cpncrunch 6y ago
        That seems unlikely, since they didn't find any correlation between baseline depression and future goals, only between baseline goals and future depression. "Greater within-subject increased goal persistence (but not positive reappraisal or self-mastery) led to larger future declines in disorder counts. However, within-subject change in disorder counts did not substantially influence future change in each cognitive or behavioral strategy"
        • podgaj 6y ago
          They were not studying people with depression and anxiety, it was a general population. So this might work for people in general, but not with people with depression and anxiety. Participants were 3,294 community-dwelling adults ages 45.62 years
• scott_siskind 6y ago
  Out of curiosity, what country offers disability benefits for these conditions? This is for me a (as a fellow sufferer of some of these conditions, who has never received any state support and doesn't even have health insurance) an extremely shaky moral ground. Because 95% of the homeless population and drug addicts are clinically diagnosable of most of these conditions under DSM IV definitions. And almost none of them receive anything.
  • podgaj 6y ago
    I am in the U.S. and I am lucky because I am white and my OCD kept me from using any drugs to cope. But I was hospitalized several times and had a few suicide attempts, plus my family history. Those are all big factors in getting disability. If you are homeless and do not have an address there is zero chance to get disability. That is why we should house them first without any qualifications. Or maybe they justneed to set better goals. :)
    • fsloth 6y ago
      Did I understand this correctly - if you are homeless in US you are automatically ineligible for disability benefits from state?
      • podgaj 6y ago
        Legally, no. Functionally, yes. Even though they no longer mail checks you need a bank account as well. And then the issue with getting in contact with you. There is only wealth in this country because we treat the most vulnerable like garbage.
  • fsloth 6y ago
    I would guess most European welfare states offer disability benefits for severe depression. For example Finland has disability pension system for people who are verified by a doctor unable to work anymore. Severe depression is an acceptable condition for this benefit.
• AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
  > After I yelled at my doctors for years to look more deeply This is the thing I hate most about dealing with doctors. As a child doctors failed to diagnose in me a condition so obvious that a friend of my mother, who works at an airport, was able to figure it out from a mere description. Still my mother had to get angry with the doctor before he would perform a simple blood test for it! Like in any profession, most of them suck at their job. That wouldn't be such a big deal except that the system in the US is set up to make it absurdly difficult and ludicrously expensive to shop around.
  • podgaj 6y ago
    And, once you are diagnosed with a mood disorder they will not look at anything else. Anything other symptom arises from "my mood disorder". Skin issues, hyperlipidemia, gut issues, pain, etc...all in my head.
    • mr_overalls 6y ago
      In medical school, many doctors learn the saying, “When you hear hoof beats, think horses, not zebras.” Most physicians are taught to focus on the likeliest possibilities when making a diagnosis, not the unusual ones. However, it seems that some physicians oversimplify diagnosis so that _only_ the likeliest scenarios are considered. It's also an opportunity for subjective biases to influence an individual doctors definition of "likely." E.g. Trans broken-arm syndrome https://en.everybodywiki.com/Trans_Broken_Arm_Syndrome https://en.everybodywiki.com/Trans_Broken_Arm_Syndrome
• gfodor 6y ago
  I empathize with your frustration, but you're letting your personal experience override logic. You've made a simple logical error: a study claiming that people who have goals can fend off depression does not imply that those with depression have it because they do not have goals. It means that some people who don't have goals, but do have depression, may remedy it by getting goals. But not everyone. If the research above is resulting in psychiatrists becoming lazy, it's because they're making the same logical error you are making. So in that sense, you should avoid doing so, since the kind of error you are making is the very thing which leads to the behavior you've experienced. The proper response (by you, and psychiatrists) is to conclude that trying to encourage goal formation in those with depression seems wise, and will help some, but many (like yourself) will not benefit. Nor should we invert causation and assume the reason people have depression is due to lack of goals, much like if we determined that eating a specific kind of food helped prevent cancer meant that those who for whatever reason didn't have that food in their diet were somehow causing their own cancer by neglecting to eat it.
  • podgaj 6y ago
    That was my point. This study tells us nothing. The problem is not with people or the doctors, it is with these idiotic studies. From the study: "People who showed more goal persistence and optimism during the first assessment in the mid-1990s had greater reductions in depression, anxiety and panic disorders across the 18 years, according to the authors. And throughout those years, people who began with fewer mental health problems showed more increased perseverance toward life goals and were better at focusing on the positive side of unfortunate events, said Zainal." and they conclude with your inverted causation: "Our findings suggest that people can improve their mental health by raising or maintaining high levels of tenacity, resilience and optimism,” she said. “Aspiring toward personal and career goals can make people feel like their lives have meaning. On the other hand, disengaging from striving toward those aims or having a cynical attitude can have high mental health costs.” So people who are not depressed do not easily get depressed. Really? That is the ground breaking work? Re read that part, again and again, and tell me where my logic is wrong. They are saying correlation is causal.
    • 6y ago
• vmchale 6y ago
  > they finally found that it was not that I did not have goals, but that I needed a low protein diet and some medications that a psychiatrist could not give me, and now I am doing better. I think that's a problem with the influence of psychology within psychiatry? There is little ability to distinguish organic disorders and the endogenous vs. exogenous question only really gets resolved with respect to whole diagnoses, less common to distinguish w.r.t. an individual.
• stronglikedan 6y ago
  > some medications that a psychiatrist could not give me Curious, were these medications for the symptoms you mentioned in general (Depression, Anxiety, Panic Disorders), or specific to the genetic disorder that caused those symptoms? (I assume the latter, but I hate to assume.)
  • podgaj 6y ago
    Both. The drug is called Kuvan and it is a BH4 replacement. I helps me metabolize the amino acids. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrobiopterin_deficiency#Treatment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrahydrobiopterin_deficiency...
• auganov 6y ago
  Having an underlying disorder that can be treated with pharmaceuticals and other approaches working aren't mutually exclusive. Perhaps everybody struggling with anything has a yet-unknown condition that could be treated with drugs. Yet based on how we act, even with a handicap, our outcomes will vary widely.
• Shared404 6y ago
  > I was "lazy" and just needed a hobby. I feel this. I hate all of these phrases. "Just get a hobby","Go outside more","Set better goals","Pray more","Eat Better","Just adjust your mindset","Just work harder","Make your bed","Read a book","Try meditation","Take a nap","Drink more water","Doubt your doubt", and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, and on, ... /rant
• agumonkey 6y ago
  I'm so torn on this. I "only" had a bad situational depression but when I was at the bottom it was clear that nothing normal, pep talk etc was connected to my reality. And even long after that it was infuriating to be talked down by people with 'lazy' innuendos. Yet ... I myself realize that in my brain there's a little 'will' part that you can focus on which kinda resonnated with the self part of depression and how you may (in time) give it a push to move away from the depressive state faster. Sorry if it annoys you, I'm mostly trying to share my experience. Do the best you can in you context. Best wishes.
• Allower 6y ago
  No your family has likely made bad decision after bad decision for multiple generations now, eating poor quality food, cultivating bad habits that erode mental health. So yeah, you do lack perseverance, your family has lacked it for a long time more than likely. Righteous indignation is not evidence of veracity (as much I as might wish it was).