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Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder: A Philosophy of Perfection

Psycological Health

Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder: A Philosophy of Perfection

2013-06-07

Television has entertained us for decades with their more than extreme characterization of people who have obsessive compulsive personality disorder. First, there was Felix Unger, the anxious, perfectionistic, and above-board neurotic character played by Tony Randall who drove his messier roommate Oscar Madison (played by Jack Klugman) crazy with his OCPD behavior (The Odd Couple). Next, we had TV’s lovable, neurotic detective Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk and also TV psychiatrist Dr. Niles Crane (played by David Hyde Pierce) of Frazier. And, today, we have Bravo reality star  Jeff Lewis of Flipping Out; the OCPD real-estate developer who will not let his employees use the bathroom in his home office if they have to make a bowel movement.

These highly intelligent, neurotic and very lovable characters wipe seats with napkins before sitting, neurotically honk their noses without cause, and also possess dogged will when it comes to living up to their standards. They have an obsessive-compulsive personality disorder that like all disorders of personality has both its strengths and weaknesses.

But, don’t think just because I’m mentioning television’s famously fussy who seem to be primarily men does not mean that women are immune to this disorder. The rates of OCPD appear to be the same for men as they are for women. About 1 in 100 people in the United States is estimated to have OCPD with a lifetime prevalence rate of 7.8% (National Center for Biotechnology Information; and OCFoundation.org).

OCD or OCPD?

People often mistake Obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) as the same conditions. But, they are very different disorders in cause, symptoms, and treatment (National Institute of Mental Health).

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is an anxiety disorder that is a dysfunction of brain chemistry rather than personality development. Unreasonable thoughts and fears lead to intrusive ideas (obsessions) and repetitive behaviors (compulsions), like chronic hand washing or door checking that are unrealistic, irrational, and foreign to the person’s sense of who he or she would be normally. These symptoms cause them disabling anxiety and stress. They obsessively worry about harm coming to them or loved ones, and have unreasonable fears of contamination, and unwanted religious, violent, or sexual thoughts randomly popping into their heads. These symptoms disrupt their ability to function normally at home, work, or school. And, if their symptoms are severe enough or left untreated, the risk for suicide increases  (MayoClinic.com).

In contrast, OCPD is primarily a disorder of personality development that has no single cause. But, it is generally considered to be a disorder brought about by the effects of childrearing. The parent’s childrearing style squelches their children’s spontaneous self-expression. Either personality conflicts from their own past or social and economic pressures cause the parents to be intolerant of less than perfect behavior in their children. They may withdraw approval and affection or even punish the child, when the child’s behavior doesn’t live up to their standards.

In contrast, some OCPD persons were labeled the family savior by their parents. The child takes on the oppressive burden of either having to raise the family out of some adverse social or economic situation or having to bring happiness to a narcissistic, depressed parent who is using the child to fulfill unrealized desires of his or her own. OCPD traits arise in the child’s attempt to accomplish this formidable task.

No matter the particular relationship dynamics between parent and child, OCPD children learn that there is little room for imperfection, so that they begin to obsessively calculate every thought, feeling, and action to minimize the risk of falling below the  impossible standards they set for themselves.

But, what is this risk really all about? At its heart, it is the risk of disappointing themselves by falling below a standard of behavior that is really a consolidation of their parents’ hopes, fears, and expectations. This is what drives OCPD character traits. OCPD persons are trying to avoid disapproval, withholding of affection and love, or punishment, even more so than achieving perfection. They take on superhuman characteristics to assure that they feel good about themselves. All of their traits are meant to support a rigid ego that has only one way of dealing with the world. That is perfection. Anything that gets in their way of fulfilling this goal makes them highly anxious and fearful.

Because OCPD people run a tight ship on themselves, they usually excel at their professions and often become leaders of society. But, they also put impossible standards on family, coworkers, and friends. Thus, intimate relating can be problematic for them. They don’t know there is anything unusual or wrong about their behavior until lovers, family, and friends begin to point it out to them. But, intimate relating can actually become their greatest vehicle for emotional growth. They are fiercely loyal and want to do the right thing, so that it is possible to get them to negotiate needs, although they may kick and scream along the way.

Treatment of OCPD

The treatment of OCPD can be lengthy because their difficulties have become part of their general life philosophy. Their character traits are deeply entrenched in ego-behaviors that have brought them considerable reward in life. Research shows that one of the best treatment approaches for OCPD is cognitive-behavioral therapy. This therapy treats symptoms that disable the person rather than deep psychological complexes. Cognitive therapy needs to help these patients to identify distorted thinking that reinforces their philosophy of perfection, undermines relationships, and leads to a rigidity that actually thwarts their relationships and goals. Also, stress management can help them to deal with anxiety that results from their fears of letting go of OCPD ways.

But, I also recommend psychodynamic exploration so that the person can bring into full awareness the developmental contributions to their belief system and character traits. The goal of therapy is to help these persons to cope with change and unpredictability better, manage anxiety and stress, and become more spontaneous and comfortable with feeling. The aim is to get their character traits to loosen up enough to allow for new learning and emotional growth.

Remember, there’s usually an upside to our weaknesses and emotional problems. And, this is true of OCPD. These persons have an uncompromising standard of excellence, an unshakable commitment to their beliefs that helps them to endure suffering and opposition. Their nose to the grindstone mentality, integrity, and high intellect can be used as a treatment tool for personal change. OCPD people love to understand, so that a treatment that increases their awareness and ability to be in the world in new, more functional ways will hold their interest. Therapy can become a powerful vehicle for becoming better—only, now, in a healthy way.

To learn more about OCPD, you may want to explore the links in today’s post. There’s a wealth of information on OCPD on the internet, today. Some of these websites include Psychcentral.com; MentalHealth.com; OCFoundation.org; and The Gift of OCPD.

I hope you liked today’s post and gained some new understanding into OCPD and the making of a personality disorder. If you did, please let me know by selecting the Like icon that immediately follows. You can also Tweet or Google+1 to let your friends know about it. Take good care friends. Warmly Deborah.

How Vinegar Could Save 73,000 Women A Year From Cancer

featured, Sexual Health

How Vinegar Could Save 73,000 Women A Year From Cancer

Almost two decades ago, a doctor named Surendra S. Shastri was put in charge of preventative oncology at Tata Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, India. One of his biggest jobs: to figure out how to cut the toll from cervical cancer, which kills 200,000 women a year in the developing world but is rare in developed countries.

In the United States, that death toll is just 4,000, the result of the most successful story of early detection preventing cancer death. Unlike most other cancers, cervical cancer starts as a pre-cancerous lesion that accumulates mutations. The Pap smear, a technique invented in the 1920s by George Papanicolau, a Greek pathologist at Cornell University, involves a doctor taking cells from the lining of the cervix and sending them to a lab to be analyzed under a microscope. Annual pap smears mean most cases of cervical cancer that would happen in the U.S. are caught before they become deadly tumors. In India, which has the world’s worst cervical cancer burden, the introduction of annual Pap smears for all women seems impossible.

“We don’t have the kind of laboratories or the kind of trained manpower needed for having a Pap smear. The Pap smear has succeeded in the countries where it has because of good quality control and frequency of screening,” Shastri says. He needed something far cheaper. The idea that he and others hit upon was to steal a step from from the procedure that follows a suspicious Pap smear. Doctors pour acetic acid – basically a sterile vinegar solution – onto the cervix and look at it under a magnifier. Cancer and precancer cells have less of the gooey cytoplasm than healthy cervix, and the acetic acid makes them actually turn white after just a minute. The normal cells remain a healthy pink.

Shastri skipped the magnifier and the doctor, and decided to train the same health care workers who give immunizations and other basic preventative measures to apply an acetic acid solution in the field. In 1998, he obtained funding from the National Cancer Institute, one of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to conduct a fifteen-year clinical trial comparing using the vinegar screen once every two years to not screening in 150,000 women. The results are being presented today here at the annual meeting of the American Society for Clinical Oncology. The vinegar test reduced the rate of cervical cancer death from 16.2 women per 100,000 to 11.1 women per 100,000, a 31% reduction.

“It’s amazing,” says Carol Aghajanian, chief of gynecologic oncology at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York. “Thousands of lives could be saved by this inexpensive technique.”

Shastri and his co-authors estimate that in India alone, the introduction of acetic acid screening could prevent 22,000 cervical cancer deaths annually. If it could be instituted across the developing world, that would save 73,000 lives.

Based on those results, the national government in India and the state government of Maharashtra, the state of which Mumbai is the capital, are instituting screening programs for all women. But translating this procedure from Tata Memorial Hospital to the rest of India or from India to the rest of the world does pose challenges.

Ted Trimble, the Director of the Center for Global Health at the NCI, notes that the health care workers did more than just use tests. They made innovative use of new technology – using digital cameras to record exams so they could be reviewed later and geomapping of the slums of Mumbai so women could be found – and of super-organized records. More than that, he says, the workers did a great job of making sure women who were screened as potentially having cancer did get to Tata Memorial for their exams. Will other hospitals in other countries be as diligent outside of a controlled clinical trial? It’s impossible to know.

Still, this is a striking example of how a low-tech, low-cost intervention can sometimes take the place of a more high-tech innovation. In 2009, Shastri co-authored a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine showing that a single round of acetic acid screening was about the same as a single pap smear for detecting cervical cancer, but neither were as good as a newer invention, which tests for the viral DNA of the strains of the human papilloma virus that are the main cause of cervical cancer.

But the viral DNA test is expensive. Even in the U.S., it is so costly that it has not replaced Pap smears. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has partnered with Qiagen QGEN -0.38%, the Dutch diagnostics company, to create a cheaper version that might be useful in the developing world. Irma Alfaro-Beitz, a senior director of global health at Qiagen, says that Qiagen worries about introducing the test in countries that lack the equipment and processes to perform it or the ability to make sure women are helped once cervical cancer is found. “It is very important that when we introduce a test into a country that country is ready for the test,” she says.

The Gates Foundation still says that the new test should cost about $5, and that it has received regulatory approval from the European Union and been granted marketing authorization in many emerging markets, including India. But approval from the World Health Organization is still pending, and that will be necessary to allow agencies of the United Nations to procure the test.

Shastri says that even if the test becomes available, he is likely to use it only as a second step after the acetic acid screen. The current cost of screening one woman is about 30 Indian rupees, about half a U.S. dollar. Even if the cost of HPV viral testing can drop to $2, it will still best be used to make sure that cancer is detected in women whose cervixes show white areas after being exposed to acetic acid.

Other methods are also being used to help to reduce the number of cervical cancer deaths, too. Last month, Merck and GlaxoSmithKline dropped the prices of the two vaccines against HPV, Gardasil and Cervarix, to $4.50 and $4.60 per dose for use in the developing world. That’s less than one-twentieth the price in the developed world.

There is also some good news on the treatment front: researchers at the ASCO meeting announced that Roche’s Avastin can extend the life of an average woman with late-stage cervical cancer by four months to 17 months. It is not yet clear what can be done to get Avastin, which costs tens of thousands per year, available to rural women in the developing world.

Yes, oral sex can lead to cancer

Sexual Health

Yes, oral sex can lead to cancer

Actor Michael Douglas made headlines on Monday after telling The Guardian that his throat cancer may have been caused by the human papillomavirus transmitted through oral sex.

The link between oral sex, HPV and cancer has been receiving more attention in recent years.

HPV is a virus that’s transmitted through sexual contact — genital or oral. There are more than 40 types, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and approximately 79 million Americans are currently infected. Most people have no symptoms.

“HPV is so common that nearly all sexually active men and women will get at least one type of HPV at some point in their lives,” the CDC’s website states. “In most cases, the virus goes away and it does not lead to any health problems. There is no certain way to know which people infected with HPV will go on to develop cancer.”

Douglas’ publicist told CNN that the actor did not intend to point to HPV as the sole cause of his throat cancer, but was suggesting it as one possible cause.

HPV is thought to cause 1,700 oropharyngeal, or throat, cancers in women and 6,700 oropharyngeal cancers in men each year, according to the CDC. Tobacco and alcohol use may play a role in who develops cancer from the virus, the government agency notes.

A 2011 study found that the proportion of oropharyngeal cancers related to HPV increased from 16.3% to 71.7% between 1984 and 2004. Data presented that same year at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting suggested HPV was overtaking tobacco as the leading cause of oral cancers in Americans under the age of 50.

The virus is transmissible regardless of whether the sexual contact is heterosexual or homosexual.

Approximately 42,000 people in the United States will be newly diagnosed with oral cancer in 2013, according to the Oral Cancer Foundation. This includes neck, mouth and throat cancers. When they’re found early, oral cancers have an 80 to 90% survival rate, the foundation says.

“Patients with HPV-positive cancers have better survival rates,” Dr. Anil Chaturvedi of the National Cancer Institute told CNN in 2011. “The precise reasons for the survival benefits are not clear, but tumors in HPV-positive patients tend to have less genetic damage. Because of that, they are more responsive to cancer therapies like radiation treatment.”

The CDC and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend both boys and girls get the HPV vaccine between the ages of 11 and 12. Doctors say the vaccine is most effective if administered before a child becomes sexually active.

HPV has also been linked to cervical cancer, penile cancer and anal cancer, according to the CDC. The HPV vaccine prevents the most common types of the virus. There are two approved for use in the United States: Gardasil and Cervarix.

Of course, HPV is not the only danger of having unprotected oral sex. Sexually transmitted diseases like herpes, syphilis, gonorrhea and HIV can be also be spread through the act.

To stay safe, the CDC recommends always using a condom and getting tested regularly.

“The good news is that all STIs are preventable and most are curable,” writes Gail Bolan, the CDC’s director of STD prevention division. “But, because most STIs have no symptoms, testing is the necessary first step to treatment.”

Teens who text and drive more likely to take other risks

Psycological Health

Teens who text and drive more likely to take other risks

2013-05-15

High school students who acknowledge texting while driving are more likely to engage in other risky behaviors, such as riding with a driver who has been drinking alcohol; not wearing a seat belt; or drinking and driving themselves, according to a new study.

“This suggests there is a subgroup of students who may place themselves, their passengers and others on the road at elevated risk for a crash-related injury or fatality by engaging in multiple risky MV (motor vehicle) behaviors,” wrote the authors of the study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics.

Continue reading Teens who text and drive more likely to take other risks →

High-tech tools for STDs

Sexual Health

High-tech tools for STDs

Ramin Bastani believed he was about to get lucky. A woman he’d met earlier that night was making her way toward his bedroom.

Suddenly, he hesitated. It didn’t go unnoticed.

“What’s your deal? Are you gay?” the woman asked.

No. He wasn’t gay.

“What is it?” she wondered. “Oh my gosh! Do you have an STD?”

No, it wasn’t that either.

Alarmed, she stepped away from him.

“Oh my God! Yes, you do. You have an STD,” he recalls her saying emphatically.

Bastani confessed what was bothering him — he barely knew this woman.

“No,” he told her. “I’m afraid you might.”

She slapped him across the face and walked out of the room.

It’s the kind of awkward moment a lot of men might prefer to forget, but for Bastani it was the impetus for starting his company, Qpid.me, a free website that lets users text and share their verified sexually transmitted disease results with potential partners.

Continue reading High-tech tools for STDs →

How You Deal With Your Emotions Can Influence Your Anxiety

Psycological Health

How You Deal With Your Emotions Can Influence Your Anxiety

2013-05-14

By

When faced with a challenge, whether you deny the problems it poses or dive in to solve them in a positive way may determine how much anxiety you feel overall.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 40 million Americans aged 18 and older are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder every year. To dig deeper into who may be at greatest risk, investigators from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign surveyed 179 healthy men and women and asked them how they dealt with their emotions and how their answers correlated with their level of anxiety in a variety of settings.

Continue reading How You Deal With Your Emotions Can Influence Your Anxiety →

How Exercise May Lower Breast Cancer Risk

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How Exercise May Lower Breast Cancer Risk

2013-05-08

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Breaking a sweat does more for your body than just trim your waistline. Exercise may lower a woman’s risk for breast cancer and researchers are finding out why.

Scientists from the University of Minnesota in St. Paul conducted a study of 391 inactive, healthy, premenopausal women whom they split into two groups. They found that the 179 women in the intervention group, who received 30 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise five times a week for over 16 weeks, showed changes in their estrogen metabolism that could explain the anti-cancer benefits of working out.

Continue reading How Exercise May Lower Breast Cancer Risk →

New Test Distinguishes Physical From Emotional Pain in Brain for First Time

Psycological Health

New Test Distinguishes Physical From Emotional Pain in Brain for First Time

2013-05-07

New research suggests physical pain may have a distinct brain “signature” that distinguishes it from emotional hurt.

In the brain, the pain from broken leg and the anguish of a broken heart share much of same circuitry. But the latest evidence points to distinct ways that the brain processes each type of pain and could lead to a greater understanding of how to detect and treat them.

“Of all the things I’ve observed in the brain, nothing is more similar to physical pain than social pain,” says lead author Tor Wager, associate professor of neuroscience at the University of Colorado in Boulder, “What we’ve done in the latest paper is to develop something that predicts physical pain at a much more fine-grained level.”

Continue reading New Test Distinguishes Physical From Emotional Pain in Brain for First Time →

The Role of Inflammation in Depression and a Lifestyle Program To Manage It

Psycological Health

The Role of Inflammation in Depression and a Lifestyle Program To Manage It

2013-05-06

It is in moments of illness that we are compelled to recognize that we live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom, whole worlds apart, who has no knowledge of us and by whom it is impossible to make ourselves understood: our body. Marcel Proust: BrainyQuote.com

Some of you are fortunate to have only an occasional cold or flu from time to time. For the most part, you can depend upon the health of your body to support you. But, others of you are struggling with physical illnesses (e.g., cancer, diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis, crone’s disease, irritable bowel syndrome, allergies, and chronic fatigue/Epstein-Barr syndrome) that force you to chronically contend with downward changes in your health. How well you feel, think and act fluctuates from one day to the next. To be sure, your body may seem to you like a creature of a different sort that you are forever trying to tame, manage, repair, strengthen, and boost up.

People with mental health disorders often feel the same way. They too cannot depend upon their bodies to support them from one day to the next, as the symptoms that debilitate them are also physical. Weakness, fatigue, muscle pain, slowed motor movements, inability to concentrate and think, insomnia, changes in eating pattern, and nausea, headache, and constipation are physical symptoms that accompany major depression, anxiety, Bipolar Disorder, and even the attention-deficit and thought disorders.

There is a reason why physical and mental illnesses share many of the same symptoms. It’s the body’s response to stress. The body treats injury as a threat, no matter if it is through infection, physical or emotional harm, or by environmental toxin or irritant. The body calls for an all out response to stress to help you to cope with the threat on hand. The brain reacts to the threat by releasing stress hormones (cortisol), fat and sugar, and stimulating nerve transmitters into the bloodstream to help you to fight the threat or run away from it. This gives an immediate rise in blood pressure that leads to a pounding heart, sweaty palms, shakiness, rapid breathing and all of the other symptoms related to brain and body arousal. But, it doesn’t stop there.

Emotional and physical stress also affects the activity of the immune system that causes a widespread inflammatory impact on the brain and body. The brain signals the immune system’s cytokines (pro-inflammatory hormone) to tell the white blood cells to clean up the infected or damaged tissue resulting from the threat. It is these pro-inflammatory cytokines and the white blood cell cleaning up process that actually causes the symptoms in both physical and mental health illness rather than the stress or injuries themselves.

Weakness, fatigue, muscle pain, slowed motor movements, inability to concentrate and think, insomnia, changes in eating pattern, and even nausea, headache, and constipation are just some of the physical symptoms of inflammation that exist in all types of illness. Thus, although the death of a loved one, sexual or emotional abuse, social anxiety and fears, physical injury, infection, and environmental toxins and irritants differ in the type of injury, the body’s stress response is always the same.

Now, here’s the clincher. Once physical or emotional stress subsides, anti-inflammatory agents move in to begin the healing process. ?In a normal immune system, anti-inflammatory agents are able to restore balance throughout the body so that inflammation diminishes. But, in some cases, the immune system gets stuck in high gear, and symptoms of inflammation do not go away. This is known as chronic inflammation. Here, the immune system watchmen never  rest, so to speak, so that the body ends up attacking itself resulting in auto-immune diseases, like Rheumatoid Arthritis, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Crone’s Disease, Type II diabetes, and allergies.

Research is showing that chronic brain inflammation is also connected to virtually all types of mental illness that suggests that mood disorders may actually result from a dysfunction in the immune system (Depression linked to Brain Inflammation; The Role of Adipose Tissue in Inflammation and Depression; Allergy and Depression; Inflammation Theory of Depression; Antidepressants Suppress Inflammation; Suicide Attempts Linked to Brain Inflammation and Brain Inflammation).

Specifically, it is the increased inflammatory markers seen in depressed patients, the ability of the immune system’s pro-inflammatory cytokines to influence the neurotransmitter system relevant to stabilizing mood, and also the ability of administered cytokines and other inflammatory stimuli to induce depressive symptoms in mice that supports the strong role of brain inflammation in depression.

Additionally, scientists studying the developmental roots of mental illness have zeroed in on the body’s stress response as the likely culprit (The Beginnings of Mental Illness, The American Psychological Association; APA Monitor, Feb. 2012). Thus, it seems that inflammation not only plays a role in the symptoms of mental illnesses like depression but may also influence their onset.

What Does The Role of Inflammation in Depression Mean To You?

You need to start thinking about mental health disorders, especially depression, as not only having their roots in the body’s response to stress but also being problems of brain and body inflammation. This is good news, as you have another way to manage your symptoms besides prescribed medication and psychotherapy alone. You can make changes in your lifestyle (eating, sleeping, exercise, attitude and coping habits) that help to reduce inflammation that underlies many of your symptoms.

Inflammation Reduction Lifestyle Program

The six steps that follow make you less physically reactive to stressful changes and help you to reduce symptoms of depression that involve brain and body inflammation. You can start to make lifestyle changes that work with, rather than against, your body. You are going to befriend your body through your good habits, so that it does not seem to you like a creature from another kingdom that is always threatening your health, performance, and joy.

1. Calm Body: To lower inflammation, you need to relax your brain and body at a cellular level. Just laughing, socializing, playing tennis or golf isn’t enough, as any activity that requires that your mind and body be alert involves brain and body arousal. This means that stimulating chemicals and hormones, like the immune system’s cytokines are chronically circulating through your system. Only deep breathing can help to tone down the fight-or-flight response to stress and diminish these chemicals, so that the calming and anti-inflammatory nerve transmitters and hormones can come out. Thus, you need to set aside times in the day where you treat yourself to exercises that involve deep breathing.  Muscle relaxation, visualization and deep breathing, alternate nostril breathing, and even a good nap are excellent ways to restore well being. Deep rest and relaxation is vital to keeping your immune system in proper working order. Even 10 minutes two to three times per day can do much to restore your nervous system to calm.

2. Contemplative Mind: Much of our daily stress has to do with the way we think about the things happening to us. We tend to dramatize experience by emotions and value statements that do little more than give us anxiety and stress. A meditative mind is just as important as a calm body.

Mindfulness practice reduces stress by focusing your attention, so that do not dramatize what’s happening or ruminate on stressful thoughts, and it also lowers your reactivity to stressful situations that activates the fight or flight response and kicks your immune system into high gear. Just like the stress management techniques that relax the body, mindfulness suppresses the activity of pro-inflammatory cytokines. Mindfulness practice not only protects the immune system, but over time can help it to recover.

At the very least, a practice of mindfulness can stop a stress response from carrying itself out. There’s an abundance of research showing the benefits of mindfulness on physical and mental health (Mindfulness and the Immune System on Early Stage Breast Cancer; Alterations in Brain and Immune Function Produced by Mindfulness Meditation; Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Loneliness and Immune Function; Mindfulness Meditation has Positive Health Benefits; and Mindfulness Practice Helps Fibromyalgia Patients). Also, take a look at my  articles on mindfulness for more understanding of its benefits on well being (Become Mindful: Take Charge of Your Life; What You Say To Yourself Matters; and Strengthen the Empathy Muscle).

3. Anti-Inflammatory Diet. Some foods inflame the brain and body, while other foods lower inflammation. If you have physical or mental disorders that involve inflammation, it’s especially important for you to eat an anti-inflammatory diet. Dr. Andrew Weil is a leading authority on the topic. He maintains that by”following an anti-inflammatory diet, you can help counteract the chronic inflammation that is a root cause of many serious diseases, including those that become more frequent as people age.” You can learn how to select and prepare foods that do not stress your body. Dr. Weil gives you an anti-inflammatory food pyramid and anti-inflammatory vitamin advisor. But, there’s a lot of information available on the web that you can find on the subject matter (15 Top Anti-inflammatory Herbs and Spices; What You Need to Know About Inflammation.

Additionally, over-eating can lead to too much brain and body inflammation. The accumulation of lipids (fat) in the body in the form of white adipose tissue in the abdomen is now known to activate immune mechanisms (Eating Ourselves To Death, National Center for Biotechnology Information). One primary source of inflammation in depression involves adipose tissue (fat tissue) that is a rich source of inflammatory factors (adipokines, chemokines, and cytokines). Not only can fat increase depression, but depression in turn influences the inflammatory capability of fat tissue (Inflammation in Depression: Is Adiposity the Cause?, National Center for Biotechnology Information). By maintaining a healthy weight, you will do much to lower inflammation related to symptoms of depression.

4. Exercise. There’s a large body of research that shows the benefit of exercise on depression. Exercise stimulates your body’s anti-inflammatory abilities and keeps your blood circulating at its optimum level. This may underly the lift in mood that often accompanies an exercise regimen. Some advocates of exercise emphasize exercising to reduce whole body inflammation rather than to lose or maintain weight (GeneSmart.com). This is especially good advice for those of you struggling with a mental health disorder, as many of you have sensitive immune systems that too little or too much exercise can activate.

Start off slowly, and work your way up until you are getting 20 to 30 minutes of exercise at a minimum of 3 times per week. But, remember too much exercise increases inflammation and breaks down the body. It is especially critical in immune-system disorders, like allergies, chronic fatigue and arthritis disorders.

5) Social Support. You don’t need research to tell you the importance of having loving, warm, and supportive people in your life. Nonetheless, there is a vast body of research extolling the health and well being virtues of social support. The quality and quantity of social relationships affect gene expression and also inflammatory markers of the immune system. Relationship conflict and lower social support produces a pro-inflammatory cytokine response in the body. Thus, if you don’t have enough meaningful, supportive friendships, you need to find a way to get more, to reduce the stress response and the brain and body inflammation that comes with it (Social Support, Social Strain, and Chronic Inflammation; Princeton University Press; Close Relationships, Inflammation and Health).

6) Self Love. What you think about yourself affects your body. If you hate or disapprove of yourself, your body hears this message and responds in kind. Eating well and exercising isn’t enough. You have to appreciate and value who you are to create an emotional state that is friendly to your body.  Thus, give yourself a break. Don’t be so hard on yourself. Self-love is an integral part of a healthy lifestyle. Learn to accept yourself for who you are with your strengths, talents, weaknesses and flaws. See my Seven Step Prescription for Self-Love for steps you can take to start to love yourself more. But, if you need professional help here, don’t hesitate to see a therapist.

One thing has become very clear to me, in treating people for many years. You cannot easily understand or adequately treat a mental health condition, without a full assessment of one’s physiology and lifestyle habits. If you don’t approach depression, anxiety, addiction disorders, and anger and stress conditions through lifestyle, as well as prescribed medication and psychotherapy, you lessen the effectiveness of treatment and recovery.

Thus, get into good relationship with your body starting today. Treat your mental health condition through a whole lifestyle. The good news is that you may not have to take as much medication for the problem or may be able to forgo medication altogether.