“I’m Just Mad About Saffron. And Saffron’s Mad About…Treating Depression.” New Study Says.

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saffronI’m just mad about saffron and saffron’s mad about me.  –Mellow Yellow by Donovan

A new review of 6 randomized, controlled trials found that the spice, saffron, was as effective for treating depression as Prozac and Tofranil.  The sample sizes of the studies are small but the results are tremendously promising insofar as study participants using  saffron as an anti-depressant do not appear to suffer from the side effects that are common to pharmaceuticals, such as sleepiness, constipation and sexual problems.  According to Dr. Adrian Lopresti, the lead author of the study, “Saffron has had a number of really well designed, robust studies investigating its antidepressant properties and pretty much all the studies have been positive.”

Why does saffron work?  According to Lopresti, “What’s been found in the literature over the last ten years is that people with depression have high levels of inflammation and free radical damage associated with oxidative stress. That led to interesting work looking into antioxidants and anti-inflammatories as antidepressants”  It turns, saffron has both strong anti-inflammatory and anti-oxidant properties which enables it to have a potentially powerful impact on the physiological symptoms of depression; the aches, the lethargy, the feelings of sluggishness.

According to the study, the effective dose appears to be 15mg twice daily and results are usually apparent wishing 6-8 weeks.  There needs to be much more research done with much larger sample sizes before we can say whether saffron could be a consistently effective treatment for depression but early results are very encouraging.

 

Liar, Liar: New Study Reveals 3 Types of Lies

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New research points to three different ways we deceive others.

Most people are aware of first two categories of lies; deception and withholding.  Deception, involves intentionally giving false information, and withholding, involves intentionally failing to disclose information.  But have you ever heard about “paltering?”

Other than being a great SAT word, paltering involves misleading by telling the truth.  Often, a palterer uses truth in an overly-specific and legalistic way. For instance, imagine a philandering husband who had a one-night stand with a woman on a business trip saying to his wife, “I’m not in a relationship with anyone but you, darling.”  In his mind, he is telling the truth, because he had a one-and-done fling.  He didn’t have, and doesn’t want, a relationship.  Just sex.  Or, think of the presidential candidate who says, “I won’t raise taxes” because it is technically congress’ job to pass new taxes.  He might want new taxes.  He might even advocate for them.  But he won’t raise them, himself, because that would be outside of his authority as president.  Paltering, as you might imagine, is a particularly insidious form of lying.

A new study looked at how palterers and those who experience paltering view this attempt at what Stephen Colbert referred to as “truthiness.”  According to PsychCentral…

In the experiments, the researchers discovered that people preferred paltering to lying by commission, but the results of being found out can be just as harsh.

While palterers tended to think of their actions as more ethical because they essentially told the truth, when the deception was revealed, they were graded as harshly by their counterparts as if they had lied by commission, according to the study’s findings.

“When individuals discover that a prospective negotiation partner has paltered to them in the past, they are less likely to trust that partner and, therefore, less likely to negotiate with that person again,” said Rogers. “Taken together, our studies identify paltering as a distinct and frequently employed form of deception.” READ MORE

If you’re tired of being hurt by the dishonest people in your life, check out God Help Me, These People Are Driving Me Nuts!  to discover how you can set appropriate boundaries and protect your heart.

Therapy Alone Is Better Than Meds or Combined Approach for Treating Anxiety, Says New Research

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A new study found that cognitive therapy alone is the most effective treatment for anxiety, beating both medication-only and combined medication and therapy.  The ten-year study found that 85% of people who received CBT alone for anxiety had successful treatment outcomes, which was a significantly higher recovery rate than either those who are treated with medication alone or with medication and therapy.

The reason, researchers point out, is that people who are treated with meds (either alone or combined with therapy) tend to rely too much on their medication to cure them.  As a result, they tend not to work as hard to learn and use the anxiety-busting techniques they can gain from therapy. According to researchers…

Many patients with social anxiety disorder are treated with a combination of talk therapy and medication, such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), said Nordahl. However, these drugs may do more harm than good for these particular patients. He says that while SSRIs often work well in patients with depressive disorders, they actually have the opposite effect in people with social anxiety disorders.  SSRIs often have strong physical side effects as well. When patients have been on medications for some time and want to reduce them, the bodily feelings associated with social phobia, like shivering, flushing, and dizziness in social situations tend to return. Patients often end up in a state of severe social anxiety again.  “Patients often rely more on the medication and don’t place as much importance on therapy. They think it’s the drugs that will make them healthier, and they become dependent on something external rather than learning to regulate themselves. So the medication camouflages a very important patient discovery: that by learning effective techniques, they have the ability to handle their anxiety themselves,” says Nordahl. READ MORE

To learn more about faithful approaches to treating stress, anxiety and worry, check out God Help Me, This Stress is Driving Me Crazy or contact the Pastoral Solutions Institute (740-266-6461) to learn more about how our Catholic tele-counseling practice can help you cultivate a more peaceful heart.

 

Is Anxiety Sinful? A Faithful Response to the Problem of Fear

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Of course, anxiety is not sinful, but saying that is little comfort to Christians who suffer with anxiety and feel that, somehow, they are letting God down by feeling the way they do. If you, or someone you love, is struggling with persistent worry or anxiety, I hope you will find this article I wrote for the latest issue of America magazine a source of comfort and strength.

Here is a sample of what you’ll find….

We are not to blame for our anxiety. But if we can, we must cultivate our ability to respond to our initial emotional reactions in thoughtful, graceful and productive ways that work for our good, facilitate godly relations with others and empower us to build God’s kingdom. This is exactly the skill that mindfulness-based approaches to anxiety treatment teach even to clients suffering from severe anxiety, although people who experience more common levels of stress and worry can also benefit from this approach.

That said, doing this often requires people to both make a mental shift about how they think about their feelings and learn new skills to deal with them. Many people experience their emotions—especially feelings of anxiety—as a tsunami against which resistance is futile. They feel that the best they can do is “manage” the onrushing emotional tide, desperately trying to limit the damage, but research shows we are capable of much more.

Brain scientists sometimes suggest that free will might more accurately be understood as “free won’t.” Although emotions rise up from the unconscious mind before our conscious mind is ever aware they are present, we can train our conscious mind to catch these surges of emotional energy and say, “I won’t react that way. I will respond this way instead.” Learning to take advantage of the tiny gap between our experience and our reaction to that experience is what psychologists call “response flexibility,” and it is the key to learning to modulate our own stress/anxiety response.

In a sense, mindfulness-based practices increase this space that exists between the trigger for our anxiety and our experience of anxiety, allowing us to respond to situations in ways that are healthy and ultimately healing. It takes practice, but the basic capacity to develop this skill is one of every human person’s most basic God-given freedoms. In the words of the psychoanalyst Viktor Frankl, who studied what gave concentration camp survivors the will to live—in some cases, heroically—despite their terrible conditions, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Response flexibility is the very heart of free will.  READ THE REST.