At one time or another, almost every teen may appear to be depressed. Usually, the depression is slight and goes away with time. But some kinds of depression need medical intervention. With such an intervention, writing a prescription for Prozac (fluoxetine) or some other antidepressant drug (Figure 1.1) has become the first order of business. Yet, less than twenty years ago, adolescents were rarely diagnosed as depressed, much less given antidepressants. Today, however, teenagers are now receiving medications almost routinely for symptoms that can hardly be termed “depressive” — attention deficit disorder, social anxiety, or drug addiction, for example. Read the rest of this entry »

Now I think that it will not be an exaggeration if I say that I am a person with a great experience of anxiety / panic disorder. The feeling, which now has its diagnosis, appeared about thirty years ago and I may say that the most amazing thing was the fact that it appeared so unexpectedly and without any reason that I hardly could guess what happened to me. I understood that my state of health was getting worse and worse but I even did not try to manage it as I did not realize that I had a disease and needed a consultation of professional doctors. Read the rest of this entry »