Depression

 In the ongoing Interdisciplinary Nursing Quality Research Initiative Program study, we are testing the impact of Function-Focused Care, which is an approach to care in which we work with assisted living (AL) residents and staff to optimize the functional and physical activities of residents during daily activity. The purpose of this article is to evaluate life satisfaction of AL residents with a focus on the impact of physical activity.

Latino immigrants have unique stressors that can influence mental health. The challenges of adapting to a new society include language barriers, separation from family, and feelings of loss, which can lead to depression. Low health literacy may make it difficult to obtain health care services, and depression may then go untreated. This secondary data analysis examined the relationships of immigration demands, health literacy, and depression in a sample of recent Latino immigrants.

  This year's announcement of psychiatrist Professor Patrick McGorry as Australian of the Year has brought mental health into the spotlight.  In a public sense, the award represents a significant acknowledgement of mental health as a growing national concern. After all, 30 per cent of the Australian population experience a mental health problem at any given time.

 Background

Fatigue is both a symptom and a predictor of depression in women after childbirth. At the same time, postpartum fatigue is experienced by most non-depressed women. Health care providers experientially know that not all women who experience postpartum fatigue will manifest depression. However, while researchers agree that fatigue and depression are distinct concepts, they have not yet identified a means for describing or measuring this distinctness. A new model proposing how fatigue may be differentiated from depression after childbirth is presented.

The purpose of this study was to identify whether severe postpartum fatigue at 1 and 3 months postpartum was associated with depressive symptomatology at 6 months in lower-income urban women. A convenience sample of 43 lower-income postpartum women completed the Modified Fatigue Symptoms Checklist and Edinburgh Postpartum Depression scale at 1, 3, and 6 months postpartum. Participants who were severely fatigued at both 1 and 3 months postpartum were significantly more likely to exhibit depressive symptomatology at 6 months.

OBJECTIVES: To explore associations between psychiatric comorbidity and rehospitalization risk, length of hospitalization, and costs. DESIGN: Cross-sectional study of 1-year hospital administrative data. SETTING: Claims-based study of older adults hospitalized in the United States. PARTICIPANTS: Twenty-one thousand four hundred twenty-nine patients from a 5% national random sample of U.S. Medicare beneficiaries aged 65 and older, with at least one acute care hospitalization in 1999 with a Diagnostic-Related Group of congestive heart failure.

Fatigue and depression are among the most frequently rated symptoms of people with HIV/AIDS. This study aimed: (1) to describe severity of fatigue and depression in an outpatient sample (n=372) of men and women with HIV/AIDS, (2) to evaluate sensitivity and discriminant validity for two fatigue and three depression scales and (3) to investigate whether fatigue and depression are conceptually distinct concepts or reciprocally dependent. This was a secondary analysis of a descriptive, cross-sectional study with convenience sampling.