Sex and Depression: In the Brain, if Not the Mind

As everyone knows, sex feels good.

Or does it? In recent years, I’ve come across several patients for whom sex is not just unpleasurable; it actually seems to cause harm.

One patient, a young man in his mid-20s, described it this way: “After sex, I feel literally achy and depressed for about a day.”

Otherwise, he had a clean bill of health, both medical and psychiatric: well adjusted, hard-working, lots of friends and a close-knit family.

Believe me, I could have cooked up an explanation very easily. He had hidden conflicts about sex, or he had ambivalent feelings about his partner. Who doesn’t?

But search as I could for a good explanation, I could find none. Though his symptoms and distress were quite real, I told him he did not have a major psychiatric problem that required treatment. He was clearly disappointed leaving my office.

READ MORE @ NY TIMES

Brain scans may aid anxious

U.S. researchers suggest brain scans may help predict how anxiety disorders patients react to drug therapy.

"Hopefully we'll be able to use that eventually to determine what kind of treatment to provide to people," lead author Jack Nitschke, of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.

The study, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry, used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patients with generalized anxiety disorder and found high levels of amygdala activity -- a part of the brain involved in memory of emotional reactions

This response in a "safe" lab settings was a disproportionately large response to the idea that something negative might happen, Nitschke said.

READ MORE @ UPI