In a post on 27 January I wrote about "savouring" - the appreciation of positive experiences. Savouring is, as it's name suggests, a sort of running the positive experience around in one's mouth, really tasting, valuing and enjoying it - a bit like slow, careful appreciation of a good wine. Bryant and Veroff, authors of the key current text on savouring (see below), draw parallels between the importance of being good at coping with negative life experiences and the importance of being good at savouring positive life experiences. Savouring well increases one's happiness, wellbeing and appreciation of being alive. On the fine Authentic Happiness website, Seligman and colleagues discuss three entwining roads to happiness and what they call "the full life". One of these three roads is maximising and appreciating positive emotions - very much the territory of savouring.

A recent study in the British Journal of Nutrition (Rogers, Appleton et al. 2008) throws doubt on the value of fish oil supplementation as a treatment for depression. The authors stated " ...

The UK National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence is "the independent organisation responsible for providing national guidance on the promotion of good health and the prevention and tr

Here are details and links for a couple of dozen mainly February articles that I found interesting. Most of these articles (and many others) are also listed on my searchable Connotea online database.

Barbui, C. M. D., T. A. M. D. Furukawa, et al. (2008). "Effectiveness of paroxetine in the treatment of acute major depression in adults: a systematic re-examination of published and unpublished data from randomized trials." CMAJ 178(3): 296-305. [Abstract/Full Text]
Blakely, T., M. Tobias, et al. (2008). "Inequalities in mortality during and after restructuring of the New Zealand economy: repeated cohort studies." BMJ 336(7640): 371-375. [Abstract/Full Text]
Bradley, R. G., E. B. Binder, et al. (2008). "Influence of Child Abuse on Adult Depression: Moderation by the Corticotropin-Releasing Hormone Receptor Gene." Arch Gen Psychiatry 65(2): 190-200. [Abstract/Full Text]

"The truth is rarely pure, and never simple"  Oscar Wilde

There has been a lot of media publicity about the article on the value of antidepressants by Irving Kirsch and colleagues which was published in PLoS Medicine last month (Kirsch, Deacon et al. 2008). The authors wrote "We obtained data on all clinical trials submitted to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for the licensing of the four new-generation antidepressants for which full datasets were available. We then used meta-analytic techniques to assess ... effects of initial severity on improvement scores for drug and placebo groups and on drug-placebo difference scores." The four antidepressants studied were fluoxetine, paroxetine, nefazodone and venlafaxine.

Honest criticism is hard to take, particularly from a relative, a friend, an acquaintance, or a stranger. Franklin Jones

I wrote in a blog posting on February 12^th that Depersonalizati

The young man sitting in front of me thought he was going mad.

There's a helpful editorial in last month's American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) - "Fruit and vegetables: think variety, go ahead, eat!" As with many journals, one doesn't have to pay anything to look at the full text of AJCN editorials. It's a good read. It comments on a paper in the journal by Myint et al showing a 42% reduction in stroke for those in the highest quartile - the top 25% - of plasma vitamin C compared with those in the lowest quartile (independently of other risk factors such as smoking, exercise, age, weight and so on).

I spend about three hours weekly scanning medical and psychological journals on the internet.