Exercise Reduce Stress

Exercise Reduce Stress
Exercise returns your body to its normal equilibrium by releasing natural chemicals that build up during the stress response.

Exercise can improve your resilience to stress in various ways. Some of its benefits are listed below. Exercise performs the following functions:

• Releases endorphins into your bloodstream creating a sense of well being.
• Decrease muscle tension caused by emotional stress and produces a relaxation response in your mind a well as in your body.
• Increases alpha-wave activity in the brain, thus allowing you to clear your mind so you can focus and concentrate more easily.
• Rids your body of toxins.
• Improves your overall flexibility and posture, thus decreasing any spinal stiffness or pain caused by stress.
• Relieves indigestion and chronic constipation caused by stress.
• Lessens fatigue and improve overall energy level.
• Combats insomnia caused by stress and produces more restful sleep.
• Provides natural outlets for your daily pressures and enables you to better cope with the stress of modern day busy life.
• Strengthens your heart and lungs, thus improving your overall physical fitness level and health.
• Increases your resting metabolism or energy expenditure and help you to lose weight thus, you both look and feel good and can shed a negative self image caused by stress.
• Helps you realize that if you can change your attitude and behavior toward exercise, then you can change you ability to manage the stress in your life.
• Improves blood flow to the brain that nourishes it with needed oxygen and helps eliminates waste products.

Exercise Reduce Stress

DSM-111-R Criteria for Melancholia

DSM-111-R Criteria for Melancholia
The presence of at least five of the following:

1. Loss of the interest or pleasure in all or almost all activities.
   
2. Lack of reactivity to usually pleasurable stimuli (does not feel much better even temporarily, when something good happens).
   
3. Depression regularly worse in the morning.
   
4. Early morning awaking (at least two hours before usually time).
   
5. Psychomotor retardation or agitation (not merely subjective complaints).
   
6. Significant anorexia or weight lost (e.g., more than 5% of body weight in a month).
   
7. No significant personally disturbance before fist major depressive episode.
   
8. One or more previous major depressives episodes followed by a complete, or early complete recovery.
   
9. Previous good response to specific and adequate somatic antidepressant therapy.

DSM-111-R Criteria for Melancholia

Endogenous/Melancholic Depression

Endogenous/Melancholic Depression
Within the heterogenous profile of depression, it has always been assumed that endogenous depression was likely to be closest to a disease entity.

Consequently, the investigation of endogenous/melancholic depression and its distinction from other sub-types have been a main focus for studies of symptom variation.

While neurotic depressions are often regarded as milder states of heterogenous nature and course, it has been assumed that endogenous depression is somehow one thing or (core) entity and that careful description associated with a variety of statistical and other techniques will illuminate it.

An early set of criteria for identifying endogenous depression was developed by the Newcastle group and other research criteria.

The Newcastle scale assigns various weights to different symptoms due to the idea that these symptoms were associated with good outcome.

Since the advent of the Newcastle scale, other classifications have appeared. The most well known being the DSM-111-R criteria for melancholia.

Unlike the Newcastle endogenous depression scale, symptoms of melancholia (DSM-111-R) are not given weights.

Thus the idea of a hierarchy of symptoms (i.e. some symptoms are more keys or core) is not found here.
Endogenous/Melancholic Depression

Symptomatology of Depression

Symptomatology of Depression
There has been remarkable consistency in the descriptions of depression since ancient times.

The core sings and symptoms such as low mood, pessimism, self-criticism and retardation or agitation seem to have been universally accepted.

Other signs and symptoms that have been regarded as intrinsic to the depressive syndrome include autonomic symptoms, constipation, difficulty in concentrating, slow thinking and anxiety.

In 1953, Campbell listed 29 medical manifestations of autonomic disturbance, among which the most common in manic depressives were hot flashes, tachycardia, dyspnea, weakness, head pains, coldness and numbness of the extremities, frontal headaches and dizziness.

Vey few systematic studies have been designed to delineate the characteristics sign and symptoms of depression.

Among symptoms that the were endorsed significantly are often by those in the psychiatric group were anorexia sleep disturbance, low mood, suicidal thoughts, crying, irritability, fear for losing the mind, poor concentration and delusions.

Campbell reported a high frequency of medical symptoms, generally attributed to autonomic imbalance, among manic depresses.

Cassidy’s study, however found that most of these medical symptoms occurred at least as frequently among the medically ill patients as among the manic depressive patients.

Moreover, many of these symptoms were found in a group of healthy control patients. Headaches, for instances, were reported by 49 percent of the manic depressive patients, 36 percent of the medically sock controls and 25 percent of the healthy controls.

When the symptoms of manic depressives, anxiety neurotics an hysteria patients were compared, it was found that autonomic symptoms occurred at least as frequently in the latter two groups as they did in the manic depressive group.
Symptomatology of Depression