Depression, Obesity, and Inflammation

I’m going away for a few days to see the eclipse, so if you write, expect a delay in getting an answer. I love eclipses and am really excited. To make it even better, I will be with family (we get along great!) and I will meet an e-friend I feel very close to. It will be a wonderful experience.

August 
8/21 Total solar eclipse: totality visible in parts of Oregon, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Nebraska Iowa, Missouri, Illinois, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina; partially visible in other parts of the United States, Canada, Central America, northern South America, western Europe, and western Africa.
September
9/4 S Labor Day
9/6 Full Moon
9/5 – 9/7 Marriage to the Beast (Satan)
9/7 Feast of the Beast
9/20 – 9/21 Midnight Host
9/22 Fall Equinox
9/29 Michaelmas (?)
October
10/5 Full Moon
10/13 Backwards Halloween
10/13 Friday the Thirteenth
10/22 – 10/29 Preparation for All Hallows’ Eve
1
0/31 Halloween/Samhain/All Hallows Eve/
Important dates in Nazi groups
9/1 Start of WW2
9/17 Hitler’s alternate half-birthday
10/16 N Death of Rosenburg
10/19 Death of Goering
10/20 Hitler’s half-birthday

Depression, Obesity, and Inflammation
I subscribe to the email edition of Med Page Today because I’m sorta nerdy when it comes to articles about medicine. I’m also, thanks to a statistics course in grad school, pretty good at critiquing research design and interpretation. And that is fun, especially when I am on the verge of giving up doing something I am not very good at, like learning Cantonese. (Now why would I want to do that? Because learning a new language is supposed to ward off dementia. And why am I worried about dementia? Because I am neurotic. But that is another post.)

Okay, the article that caught my attention is “Obesity and Depression Are Related — But How?: Finding physicians who can address both is a challenge” by Shefali Luthra, Kaiser Health News August 11, 2017. https://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/67216?xid=nl_mpt_DHE_2017-08-12&eun=g620615d0r&pos=2 A lot of doctors have noticed that many depressed people are obese and many obese people are depressed. I could have told them that years ago. Self-esteem goes down as weight goes up, and that is depressing. Being depressed feels awful, so people turn to food to soothe themselves and numb out. And when you are in black depression, you are barely able to do familiar things, like get out of bed in the morning, let alone take on something new and hard like going on a diet. So it is a vicious cycle.

This affects an awful lot of people. People who are obese are 55% more likely to be depressed, and people with depression are 58% more likely to develop obesity, according to “Overweight, Obesity, and Depression: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Longitudinal Studies.” http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/210608

Exactly a year ago, 8/20/2016, I posted about the connection between depression and systemic diseases, including chronic pain. A Danish study showed that people with serious infections (read, a lot of inflammation) were apt to become depressed. My post said, “So…inflammation factors can cross the blood/brain barrier. If my body is inflamed, I get depressed. And if I am depressed, my body becomes inflamed.”

If the authors of the article I am discussing had read up on this, they might have guessed how obesity and depression are related.

The second part of the article discusses how treating depression is assigned to psychiatrists and treating obesity to nurses and dieticians. These professions, of course, don’t communicate.

Of course that is not exactly news. They never have; at best, it’s a quick referral. So there is no treatment that addresses both conditions together. The dietitians assume that you are up for cheerfully counting calories and going to the gym and the psychiatrists don’t consider weight gain when they choose medications. I know; depression meds gave me an extra eighty pounds.

And that leaves it up to us, at least for now. I think our energy would best be directed at how to cope with this double whammy and the double stigma it brings. (It’s a triple or quadruple whammy or more if other chronic inflammatory diseases like fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, lupus, arthritis, etc. etc. are factored in.)

I don’t mean to be a downer. We can do that, and we are the best people to do it. We’ve shown the value of peer support in all kinds of other situations: PTSD, grief, having a hard time getting a book published, being single mothers who have to work to feed their kids. And, I am proud to say, healing from ritual abuse.

I think that what we need is a message board that accepts a large number of people with a wide range of weight and varying length and severity of depression. Then we could support each other emotionally; grieve the unfairness, rant at society’s rejection of us and at the lack of resources in the health care system, cheer each other on, and laugh together. We could share what has and has not worked for us. Knowing that so many share our struggle would make us feel less like losers and freaks.

And, just maybe, some professionals would find the message board and be open to learning from us. Because we, who have the condition, are the experts and have so much knowledge to share.

Does such a board already exist? I hope so, for I would join in a minute. If not, anybody want to start one? I just can’t – I’m spread too thin as it is, sadly. It’s not all that hard to start, and there would be a lot of people who could help you do it. I could coach you, but I can’t actually do it myself.

Any takers?