Genetic

Why Am I Still Depressed? Recognizing and Managing the Ups and Downs of Bipolar II and Soft Bipolar Disorder

Tried everything but still not feeling better?

If your depression keeps coming back or is even getting worse, then you may be suffering from bipolar II or “soft” bipolar disorder. Commonly misdiagnosed, these mood disorders are characterized by recurring bouts of depression along with anxiety, irritability, mood swings, sleep problems, or intrusive thoughts.

Why Am I Still Depressed? shows you how to identify if you have a nonmanic form of bipolar disorder and how to work with your doctor to safely and effectively treat it.

Author James R. Phelps, M.D., gives you the latest tools and knowledge so you can:

• Understand the Mood Spectrum, a powerful new tool for diagnosis
• Know all your treatment options, including mood-stabilizing medications and research-tested psychotherapies
• Examine the potential hazards of taking antidepressant medications
• Manage your condition with exercise and lifestyle changes
• Help family and friends with this condition understand their diagnosis and find treatment

Exercises for Multiple Sclerosis: A Safe and Effective Program to Fight Fatigue, Build Strength, and Improve Balance (Exercises for)

Fight the impact of MS through fitness with specially designed exercises.

In the U.S. alone, approximately 400,000 people have multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is an autoimmune disease that affects the central nervous system. There are a variety of symptoms of MS and it affects people in different ways, but there is no cure.

Fitness can help strengthen debilitated bodies, and make living with the disease a little easier. Exercises for Multiple Sclerosis outlines a detailed exercise plan that can help MS sufferers overcome their symptoms, especially fatigue and mobility problems. The latest book in the popular Exercises for series, Exercises for Multiple Sclerosis provides a tested program for people living with MS, making it an essential reference for anyone who suffers from MS.

The exercises are clearly photographed in easy-to-follow sequences and contain complete descriptions. If you or someone you know suffers from MS, you need this book. Exercises for Multiple Sclerosis will help MS sufferers to achieve a healthier, happier, more productive life. 100 photos.

The Iron Disorders Institute Guide to Hemochromatosis (Iron Disorders Institute)

The Power of Two: A Twin Triumph over Cystic Fibrosis

The tragedy of cystic fibrosis has been touchingly recounted before, but this is the first book to portray the symbiotic relationship between twins who share this life-threatening disease through adulthood. Isabel Stenzel Byrnes and Anabel Stenzel tell of their struggle to pursue normal lives while grappling with the realization that they might die young. Their story reflects the physical and emotional challenges of a particularly aggressive form of CF and tells how the twins bicultural heritage Japanese and German influenced the way they coped. The Power of Two is an honest and gripping portrayal of day-to-day health care, the impact of chronic illness on marriage and family, and the importance of a support network to continuing survival. These two remarkable sisters have much to teach about the power of perseverance and about the ultimate power of hope.

When a Parent Has Cancer: A Guide to Caring for Your Children

At some point in our lives, many of us will face the crisis of an unexpected illness. For parents, the fear, anxiety and confusion resulting from a cancer diagnosis can be particularly devastating.

When A Parent Has Cancer is a book for families written from the heart of experience. A mother, physician, and cancer survivor, Dr Wendy Harpham offers clear, direct, and sympathetic advice for parents challenged with the task of raising normal, healthy children while they struggle with a potentially life–threatening disease.

Dr Harpham lays the groundwork of her book with specific plans for helping children through the upheaval of a parent's diagnosis and treatment, remission and recovery, and if necessary, confronting the possibility of death. She emphasises the importance of being honest with children about the gravity of the illness, while assuring them that their basic needs will always be met.

Included is Becky and the Worry Cup, an illustrated children's book that tells the story of a seven–year–old girl's experiences with her mother's cancer.

Biogenealogy: Decoding the Psychic Roots of Illness: Freedom from the Ancestral Origins of Disease

Reveals the psychic causes of illness and how to decode and resolve them

• Explains how we inherit illness from our ancestors via cellular memory and provides protocols for diagnosis and treatment

• Demonstrates how illness is an ally that enables individuals to restore balance to both their life and that of their family tree

Biogenealogy: Decoding the Psychic Roots of Illness offers protocols for diagnosis and treatment for conflicts that can span generations. While the idea that emotional stress lies at the origin of every illness is becoming more readily acceptable today, it also is possible to trace the root cause of an illness to our ancestors--their unresolved psychic distress can become part of the cellular memory inherited by their descendants. Until the issue has been settled successfully, it will continue to trigger illnesses in the generations that follow to offset the mind’s inability to resolve the problem. Illness is the body’s way of protecting those who experience severe emotional shock or excessive amounts of stress.

Illness is therefore an ally, rather than the adversary conventional medicine purports it to be. Understanding illness in this way directs us to look for the psychic conflict that underlies it in order to eliminate the disease, rather than merely dealing with its overt physical symptoms. For example, diabetes, which creates excess sugar in the bloodstream, can be triggered by the stress caused by feelings of powerlessness: To compensate for the sense of powerlessness, the body manufactures more sugar to fuel the muscles. To stop this excess sugar production, the psychic distress beneath it must be resolved or it will be passed on to the next generation. When we discover the solutions that create harmony in the body and in our life, the body will no longer have to manufacture illness to restore a sense of balance, and illness will no longer be part of the bequest we leave our descendants.

Spelling Love with an X: A Mother, a Son, and the Gene That Binds Them

A medical memoir and poetic meditation on raising a child with a genetic disorder

Clare Dunsford is the mother of a twenty-one-yearold son with Fragile X syndrome, the most common inherited cause of mental retardation. Spelling Love with an X is the first literary memoir about living with Fragile X, which affects the lives of over a million people in the U.S., including those with the full mutation, their families, and treatment professionals.

When her son was first diagnosed, at age seven, Dunsford received the devastating news that she and three of her four siblings carry the Fragile X premutation and had therefore unknowingly passed on the full mutation to several of their children. An English professor by training, Dunsford draws on classic poetry to explore her new identity as a genetically "flawed" individual and reflect on her life with J.P., a colorful young man with great verbal dexterity and a lovably cheeky streak. "My instinct to find order and consolation in literature," she writes, "lends a distinct voice to the story of my family's DNA." Brimming with warmth and intelligence, Spelling Love with an X shares the disarming insights of a compassionate scholar on motherhood, literature, and genetic inheritance.

"Part poetry, part scientific inquiry, this wonderful memoir is, above all, the story of being complexly human in a world filled with fragility and strength, shadow and light. Clare Dunsford navigates the X that has mapped her own and her son's paths with humor, honesty, and clear-sighted intelligence—and in prose that sings."
—Elizabeth Graver, author of The Honey Thief and Awake

"Clare Dunsford does much more than inform us concerning a disorder we know too little about. Through a prose both lucid and beautiful, she is able to communicate the strangeness, even the poetry, of fragile X."
—Clara Claiborne Park, author of The Siege: A Family's Journey into the World of an Autistic Child and Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter's Life with Autism

"Spelling Love with an X is a beautifully written journey of a woman toward understanding—of herself, her son, and the twists of fate and DNA that bind them and all of us. Clare Dunsford's powerful and moving memoir is rich with humor, poetry and, most of all, love."
—Mitchell Zuckoff, author of Choosing Naia: A Family's Journey

Choosing Assisted Reproduction: Social, Emotional & Ethical Considerations

Hgh: Age-Reversing Miracle (Woodland Health Ser)

Mapping Fate: A Memoir of Family, Risk, and Genetic Research

In Mapping Fate, Alice Wexler tells the story of a family at risk for a hereditary, incurable, fatal disorder: Huntington's disease, once called Huntington's chorea. That her mother died of the disease, that her own chance of inheriting it was fifty-fifty, that her sister and father directed much of the extraordinary biomedical research to find the gene and a cure, make Wexler's story both astonishingly intimate and scientifically compelling.
Alice Wexler's graceful and eloquent account goes beyond the specifics of Huntington's disease to explore the dynamics of family secrets, of living at risk, and the drama and limits of biomedical research. Mapping Fate will be a touchstone for anyone with questions about genetic illness and the possibilites and perils of genetic testing.