Hurting bodies and suffering minds often require the same treatment.

Pain, especially chronic pain, is an emotional condition as well as a physical sensation. It is a complex experience that affects thought, mood, and behavior and can lead to isolation, immobility, and drug dependence.

In those ways, it resembles depression, and the relationship is intimate. Pain is depressing, and depression causes and intensifies pain. People with chronic pain have three times the average risk of developing psychiatric symptoms — usually mood or anxiety disorders — and depressed patients have three times the average risk of developing chronic pain.

Depression at perimenopause: More than just hormones

New research has confirmed a link between depression and the menopausal transition, or perimenopause — that time of erratic periods, chaotic hormone fluctuations, disturbed sleep, and, for some, uncomfortable hot flashes. Among the findings: little or no correlation between hormone levels and depression during perimenopause. However, a host of other factors have been implicated.

The connection

In 2006, the Harvard Study of Moods and Cycles reported that one in six participants with no history of depression developed depressive symptoms during perimenopause. In addition to hormone fluctuations, researchers have explored the possible influence of psychosocial factors, hot flashes and their impact on sleep, and genetic vulnerabilities. In 2006, the Study of Women's Health Across the Nation identified several genetic mutations that increase the likelihood of perimenopausal depressive symptoms.

Light therapy and antidepressants help people who get depressed during the winter.

The gloom of winter seems to get inside some people, the dark affecting their mood as well as their days. In the late 1990s, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) recognized these winter blues as seasonal affective disorder, a name that seems to have been coined with its acronym, SAD, very much in mind.

According to the National Comorbidity Survey Replication, only about 40% of people with major depression receive adequate conventional treatment, so it's important to get a better understanding of the other measures depressed patients are taking. A survey of American women indicates that a high proportion of them use alternative and complementary medicines for depression.

Researchers analyzed a national telephone survey of more than 3,000 women, with Mexican Americans, Chinese Americans, and African Americans somewhat over-represented in order to get a picture of ethnic differences. Of these women, 220 said they had been medically diagnosed with depression in the previous year, and 54% of them had used alternative medicine to treat the symptoms. The authors point out that the percentage would have been even higher if they had been able to include depressed women who never received a medical diagnosis.

Depression that develops for the very first time during recuperation from a heart attack affects recovery more than depression that started before the attack.

Recovering from a heart attack is tough enough without facing the fog of depression. Yet that's exactly what happens to nearly half of heart attack survivors. Depression is a painful, isolating, joyless state of mind that interferes with recovery and dulls life. It may even make it shorter "" people with post-heart attack depression are two to three times more likely to have another heart attack or to die prematurely compared with survivors who don't have depression.

Surviving a heart attack is cause for celebration. It's also a trigger for depression. Up to half of heart attack survivors get the blues, and many go on to develop clinical depression.

Early experiences with antidepressants weren't that promising because older tricyclic drugs such as clomipramine and nortriptyline sometimes threw off heart rhythms and further endangered the heart. This made doctors leery about recommending antidepressants, even when selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) such as Prozac (fluoxetine), and Zoloft (sertraline), and others came along.