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Victoria Toline would hunch over the kitchen table, steady her hands and draw a bead of liquid from a vial with a small dropper. It was a delicate operation that had become a daily routine — extracting ever tinier doses of the antidepressant she had taken for three years, on and off, and was desperately trying to quit.
"Basically that's all I have been doing — dealing with the dizziness, the confusion, the fatigue, all the symptoms of withdrawal," said Ms. Toline, 27, of Tacoma, Wash. It took nine months to wean herself from the drug, Zoloft, by taking increasingly smaller doses.
Every week in Murfreesboro, Tenn., Zibin Guo guides veterans in wheelchairs through slow-motion tai chi poses as a Bluetooth speaker plays soothing instrumental music.
Companies are starting to realize what workers have long sensed: Loneliness not only impairs one's mood and health — it can also hurt productivity and profits.
The U.S. economy looks pretty good by most measures: Jobs are plentiful, growth is picking up, prices aren't rising too quickly, and unemployment is on track this year to hit the lowest level since 1969. But Americans aren't happy.
After 19 days, the fear and anxiety that have haunted the city of Austin, Texas, may have reached an end on Wednesday. The suspect in a series of bombings blew himself up in a truck as the police approached. Six different bombs, considered linked by the police, have killed two people and injured five more since March 2.
Dr. Yamanda Edwards, the daughter of a truck driver and a stay-at-home mom, grew up just a few miles from Martin Luther King/Drew Medical Center, at the time an iconic yet troubled hospital in South Los Angeles.
As a child in the 1990s, she knew little of its history — how it rose from the ashes of the Watts riots. And she knew no one in the medical profession.
Still, she wanted to become a doctor. "I didn't know how I was going to get there, but I wanted to get there," she said. "I was determined."
At the turn of the 20th century, prominent physicians who were trying to understand where mental illness comes from seized on a new theory: autointoxication. Intestinal microbes, these doctors suggested, are actually dangerous to their human hosts. They have a way of inducing "fatigue, melancholia, and the neuroses," as a historical article in the journal Gut Pathogensrecounts.
In One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey describes two kinds of patients in the psychiatric hospital where the story is set: Acutes ("because the doctors figure them still sick enough to be fixed") and Chronics (who are "in for good, the staff concedes").
When Kristopher Rodriguez, a 31-year-old man from Florida, first went into the US criminal justice system in 2008, it seemed like he would have been classified as an Acute; now nearly a decade later, he would almost certainly qualify as a Chronic.
Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian in history, is using his lofty perch and personal experience to call on the U.S. Olympic Committee to help athletes who are struggling with depression.
Ted Matthews drove past acres of fields, racing to meet with a farmer who called threatening to kill himself.
That's when he got a call from another farmer in a different part of the state who was also threatening suicide. Since he couldn't be in two places at once, he frantically got on his phone to try to find someone else who could help the second farmer.