Decriminalization of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia is an unethical alternative to redressing current deficiencies in palliative care in Canada, physicians, ethicists and patient advocates argue.

Decriminalization would offer a false choice so long as Canadians lack access to palliative care, the critics contended while panning the recommendation of the Royal Society of Canada panel report, End-of-Life Decision Making, which called for sweeping reforms to the Criminal Code on the grounds that there is no ethical distinction between assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia, and withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment from competent adults (www.rsc-

The critics assert that it is “naive” and “disingenuous” for the panel to blur the line by arguing there is no ethical distinction, (www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.109-4059). The critics also contend that the Royal Society panel is giving short shrift to concerns about abuses that might occur if decriminalization of assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia is implemented.

“What about people who already feel like they're a burden? If it's very difficult for their families, it's a failure of our social services and health care system,” argues Rhonda Wiebe, cochair of the Council of Canadians with Disabilities’ end-of-life ethics committee. “They shouldn't be paying with their lives because health and social services can't step up to the plate.”

As many as 70% of Canadians lack access to hospice and palliative care, and what programs exist are uncoordinated and unevenly distributed across the country, the report states.

“When my wife passed away seven years ago, I was a guy who had worked in health care for 25 years as a physician, who knew the system, had a comfortable income, and yet I still couldn't get her home because there was no way it could be done with the resources available,” says Dr. John Haggie, president of the Canadian Medical Association. “The solutions the report suggests [represent] failures of the palliative care process. By not having a system, we have a population that are afraid of the process of dying, and that drives them [to request suicide].”

Adequate access to palliative care may not entirely prevent requests for assisted suicide, but until people have “relatively good options to manage their suffering,” decriminalizing euthanasia would present a false choice between pain and death, argues Dr. Larry Librach, director of the Temmy Latner Centre for Palliative Care at Mount Sinai Hospital in Toronto, Ontario.

The report asserts that Canada cannot wait until palliative care is optimized to have a policy on assisted dying. But Dr. Romayne Gallagher, palliative care physician lead at Providence Health Care in Vancouver, British Columbia, counters legislation isn’t needed because there isn’t a great demand for assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia.

“The uptake of the right to physician-assisted suicide in Oregon is about 1–2 deaths per 1000 deaths,” Gallagher says. “To me the low uptake of physician-assisted suicide in Oregon only demonstrates the greater need for improved palliative care.”

Critics also dismiss the proposition that high numbers of Canadians support assisted dying. “There is ongoing confusion in the general public and in some health care providers about what constitutes euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide. For example, many people will confuse the removal of life support in a terminally ill patient as euthanasia,” Gallagher says.

The Royal Society report contributed to the confusion by equating the act of killing a patient or giving a patient the means to kill themselves with withholding or withdrawing life-sustaining treatment, she charges. “This is a very simplistic way of looking at the outcome while forgetting the underlying cause of the outcome as well as the intent of the practitioner.”

When a physician withdraws or withholds treatment, the intent is to “continue to provide care aimed at symptom management but no longer intervene to prevent what is naturally going to happen,” and the patient dies “naturally from their underlying illness,” Gallagher adds. Physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia, on the other hand, is “administered with the sole intent of killing the patient,” and they die due to the physician administering a toxic substance, rather than their underlying disease.

Gallagher and others also argue the report overlooks crucial evidence of abuse in other jurisdictions that have legalized assisted death, including reports that some 32% of doctors who committed such acts in Belgium did so without patient request or consent (www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/10.1503/cmaj.091876).

Margaret Somerville, founding director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics and Law, cites increasingly lax conditions around who can request assisted suicide in the Netherlands as proof of a “slippery slope” toward abuse.

“When first allowed through a judicial decision, the conditions were that the person was an adult, terminally ill, in terrible pain and suffering … competent, had given their informed consent and had asked for euthanasia over a considerable period of time,” she explains. “Not one of those conditions now applies.”

Somerville also asserts that there have been cases in which doctors took consent to pain relief as consent to euthanasia, to the point that “old people are frightened of going into nursing homes [and] hospitals, and they're frightened of agreeing to pain relief treatment.”

At a press conference following the release of the report, panelists told reporters that instances of such abuse are unavoidable, but much less frequent in jurisdictions where euthanasia is regulated.

However, the evidence used to assert that abuse is relatively uncommon in such jurisdictions is “not very complete,” Gallagher says, adding that the data is based on voluntary physician reporting and surveys have indicated that in such cases, physician response rates are under 60%.

Critics also argue that the Royal Society did not address several other ethical dimensions of the euthanasia debate. “If the basic principle is autonomy and that's always the overriding value, which is what they argue in the report, then if you've got a brokenhearted 18-year-old who wants euthanasia, how can you reject what she's asking for?” Somerville contends.

Librach, who doesn't oppose euthanasia for the terminally ill, nevertheless “shudders” at the notion of an assisted suicide for someone having a “rough patch in life.” Rather, he says, they should receive treatment for “existential suffering.”

Wiebe argues the report fails to account for societal pressure that will be placed on vulnerable populations, such as people with disabilities, to end their lives. “There's this continual apology for your own existence and when you start internalizing that, what happens when you go to a doctor who is supposed to be helping you negotiate life with a disability, and they're saying death is always an option?”

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Monday night, mid-weight actor and professed "walking time-bomb" Matthew Newton described to an audience of millions his laundry list of mental illness.

Interviewer Tracy Grimshaw thanked Newton for his honest account and appended the story, which included many shots of its subject walking thoughtfully through a forest, with the appeal that similarly unsound viewers call Lifeline.

The facade of civic-mindedness was curious. Generally, A Current Affair has no captain greater than commerce; its stories function chiefly to funnel us all into Aldi. On Monday, though, the program served agendas other than discount soap. The first, written by Newton's publicity and legal teams, is one of bog-standard redemption. The second, however, is a little more interesting. Last night, ACA was brought to us by the emerging business of psycho-pharmacology.

Not so very long ago, any man alleged to have cruelly attacked his partner was called a "wife beater" and widely reviled as a coward and a brute. None of us excepted his actions and few of us outside the health and corrective professions cared to examine his motives. This is not to say, of course, that a lack of understanding is a good thing. It is, however, to suggest that a glut of understanding, particularly in a public forum, is not especially useful.

As ACA has it, Newton, reportedly diagnosed with bipolar affective disorder, has a "destructive alter-ego". One Matthew walks in forests and sits quietly writing film treatments on a MacBook Air. Another is alleged to destroy hotel rooms and batter the bodies of young women. Our prime-time Dr Jekyll has no volition; instead, he now has a large bag of pharmaceuticals which he introduces to Grimshaw as his "partner". He implores us to understand that no-one, not even his former human partners, has been hurt by his disease more than him.

Short on detail and long on faith in a branch of medicine that increasingly attributes all bad behaviour to vaguely described chemistry, Newton pointed to the invisible scars of his own self-loathing. "One of my eyes doesn't open properly," he told Grimshaw as he pointed to a perfectly groomed, apparently functional eyebrow. "Most of the damage I have done has been with my body," he said, in a twist of grammatical logic that would give Wittgenstein a run for his money. The damage has been done with his body. The repair, it seems will be done by public disclosure and a bag full of drugs.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Newtown, against whom an Apprehended Violence Order has been sought, is barking mad and needs a doctor. Certainly, he seems to require some sort of regular scrutiny. Even if this is the case, he does not need, nor will he be assisted by, the scrutiny of viewers. Any psychiatrist who claims otherwise needs a psychiatrist.

At best, we saw less-than-ideal therapeutic conditions for a psychiatric patient. At worst, we saw the new reflex of psychiatric medicine. To wit, to strip all human action of its social context and to dump it in a vat of diagnosis.

Nowhere is this gesture observed more clearly than in the everyday treatment of depression; a malady said to impact one in five Australians and one for which more than 12 million prescriptions are annually administered. We patients now take it as read that feelings of sadness are not normal reactions to life but evidence of disease. Psychiatry's most influential book, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is largely responsible for this shift.

According to the DSM, one need only feel symptoms including a lack of focus, energy or hunger for a fortnight and one is clinically depressed. In arriving at a diagnosis, a doctor need not consider his patient's circumstances. The only exception to a rule that overlooks divorce, job loss or diagnosis of a terminal illness is bereavement. So, unless your spouse is newly dead, you're not sad. You're depressed.

Increasingly, mental illness has no context beyond the confines of our skull. Earlier this year, reports arose that prominent mental illness advocacy group Beyond Blue had shelved a report specific to the gay and lesbian community. Unsurprisingly, gay and lesbian groups expressed outrage at this omission hinting that homophobia was to blame. Given the credentials of Beyond Blue's founding chairman, this is an unsurprising charge. But, in the terms of psychiatry's current logic, it makes perfect sense to overlook sexuality as a factor in the study of mental illness.

Mental illness is now understood as a discrete biological state that arises regardless of external influence. This would include influence such as everyone calling you a pervert every second of every day. The depressive, an invention of our era, is not impacted by his circumstance. The patient with bipolar affective disorder has no control over his violence. As Matthew Newton has it, 'Mental illness does not discriminate', it just occurs, apparently, in a vacuum.

A telling story about changing attitudes to mental illness was printed in the New York Times at the time of the 50th anniversary revival of the play Death of a Salesman. When the director hired a psychiatrist to explain Wily Loman's "depression" to the cast, Arthur Miller was aghast. He'd carefully written a suicidal man who was a product of his times; not the subject of too little serotonin. "Willy Loman is not a depressive," said the great playwright. "He is weighed down by life."

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cIn patients with depression, anxiety and other psychiatric problems, doctors often find abnormal blood levels of thyroid hormone. Treating the problem, they have found, can lead to improvements in mood, memory and cognition.

Now researchers are exploring a somewhat controversial link between minor, or subclinical, thyroid problems and some patients’ psychiatric difficulties. After reviewing the literature on subclinical hypothyroidism and mood, Dr. Russell Joffe, a psychiatrist at the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, and colleagues recently concluded that treating the condition, which affects about 2 percent of Americans, could alleviate some patients’ psychiatric symptoms and might even prevent future cognitive decline. Patients with psychiatric symptoms, Dr. Joffe said, “tell us that given thyroid hormones, they get better.”

The thyroid, a bow-tie-shaped gland that wraps around the trachea, produces two hormones: thyroxine, or T4, and triiodothyronine, known as T3. These hormones play a role in a surprising range of physical processes, from regulation of body temperature and heartbeat to cognitive functioning.

Any number of things can cause the thyroid to malfunction, including exposure to radiation, too much or too little iodine in the diet, medications like lithium, and autoimmune disease. And the incidence of thyroid disease rises with age. Too much thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism) speeds the metabolism, causing symptoms like sweating, palpitations, weight loss and anxiety. Too little (hypothyroidism) can cause physical fatigue, weight gain and sluggishness, as well as depression, inability to concentrate and memory problems.

“In the early 20th century, the best descriptions of clinical depression were actually in textbooks on thyroid disease, not psychiatric textbooks,” Dr. Joffe said. But doctors have long disagreed about the nature of links between psychiatric symptoms and thyroid problems.

“It’s the chicken-and-egg question,” said Jennifer Davis, assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. “Is there an underlying thyroid problem that causes psychiatric symptoms, or is it the other way around?”

Dr. Davis said it is common for people with thyroid problems to be given a misdiagnosis of psychiatric illness. Leah Christian, 29, tried antidepressants 10 years ago for depression and anxiety. They did not help. “I just stayed down,” said Ms. Christian, a child care worker in San Francisco.

A few years ago, still struggling, she asked her doctor to refer her to a therapist. The doctor ran a thyroid panel first and found that Ms. Christian had an autoimmune disease called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, a common cause of hypothyroidism.

Ms. Christian was given levothyroxine, a synthetic thyroid hormone replacement. Her depression and anxiety disappeared, she said: “Turns out, all my symptoms were thyroid-related.”

In a sense, she was lucky; her hormone levels were clearly in the abnormal range. “Normal” levels of thyroid stimulating hormone, or TSH, range from 0.4 to 5. (The higher the TSH level, the less active the thyroid.) Most endocrinologists agree that a score of 10 or over requires treatment for hypothyroidism.

But for people with scores between, say, 4 and 10, things get murkier, especially for those who experience such vague psychiatric symptoms as fatigue, mild depression or just not feeling like themselves.

Some doctors believe these patients should be treated. “If somebody has a mood disorder and subclinical hypothyroidism, that could be significant,” said Dr. Thomas Geracioti, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine.

Dr. Geracioti has used thyroid hormones to treat performers with debilitating stage fright; one high-level musician recovered completely, he said.

The idea of treating subclinical hypothyroidism is controversial, especially among endocrinologists. Thyroid hormone treatment can strain the heart and may aggravate osteoporosis in women, noted Dr. Joffe. On the other hand, failing to treat the condition can also stress the heart, and some studies suggest it may increase risk of Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias.

And then there is the misery quotient, which is hard to quantify. “People tend to discount the quality-of-life issues related to residual depression and anxiety,” Dr. Joffe said. Women are far more likely to develop thyroid problems than men, especially past age 50, and some experts believe that gender accounts for some reluctance to treat subclinical disease. “There’s a terrible bias against women who come in with subtle emotional complaints,” Dr. Davis said. “These complaints tend to be pushed aside or attributed to stress or anxiety.”

Psychiatric symptoms can be vague, subtle and highly individual, noted Dr. James Hennessey, director of clinical endocrinology at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. Another complication: It’s not clear to many experts what “normal” thyroid levels really are.

“A patient might have a TSH of 5, which many clinicians would say isn’t high enough to be associated with symptoms,” Dr. Hennessey said. “But if that person’s set point was around 0.5, that 5 would represent a tenfold increase in TSH, which might very well represent disease for that individual.”

In a study published in 2006, researchers in Anhui Province, China, used brain scans to evaluate patients with subclinical hypothyroidism both before and after treatment. They found tangible improvements in both memory and executive function after six months of levothyroxine therapy.

With funds from the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Joffe and researchers at Boston University recently began a trial to tease apart the relationship between subclinical hypothyroidism and certain mood and cognitive symptoms in people over age 60. The results won’t be known for at least a few years. But some clinicians aren’t waiting.

“I personally feel patients with TSH between 5 and 10, especially with psychiatric symptoms, warrant a trial of thyroid medication,” Dr. Hennessey said.

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I started feeling “It” a couple of weeks ago. I thought “It” was a cold. I went from feeling tired to weary. There were weird dreams and the muscles under my eyes had gone slack. I had been around some folks with nasty colds so I figured it was my turn. On Halloween weekend I got two, 12-hour nights of sleep. I felt better.

But something still dogged me and “It” was not a cold. I have this feeling deep down inside of me that I have done something wrong. I have not been working hard enough.  I am not a good friend. Back in my drinking days, this feeling would have been perfectly normal and justified. I was a blackout drinker and spent countless hungover hours trying to piece together what I had done the night before with just a few snippets of memory and evidence. But I haven’t had a drink in over 13 years.

I have been bouncing up and down that last couple of weeks. Pretty happy and grateful much of the time, until  I regurgitated that icky shame every now and then. But I am beginning to spend more time down than up. This morning was bad. It was a perfectly lovely fall morning in Florida – partly sunny, 67-degrees, slight wind out of the north.


I rode my bike to the park with my dog, “Dog,” like I do every morning. But everything looked and felt thick and heavy. Exactly 24-hours earlier I made the same ride and was feeling wonderful. Nothing had much changed since then. I still hadn’t dusted or vacuumed and the grass needed cutting.

This is my depression. This is how it works. It comes in little waves at first. Ebb and flow. Ebb and flow. Then the big rollers come in, followed by the breakers and finally the tsunami. Game over.

On days when I feel fine, when the water is perfectly still,  my depression doesn’t cross my mind – even while I am opening up my prescription bottles to take my meds. Same for my alcoholism. Most days I don’t even think about a Corona with lime. But the seas can turn rough very, very quickly for no apparent reason other than some phantom, icky shame.

So, I tell myself: “You are not a bad person. You haven’t done anything wrong. You are not a bad person. You haven’t done anything wrong.” Over and over and over and over and over and over and over… Because, you know, I am really not a bad person and I really haven’t done anything wrong.

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One in 12 teens deliberately harm themselves, but 90 percent give up the behavior by the time they're young adults, a new study shows. Self-harm, which includes cutting and burning, is one of the strongest predictors of suicide and is especially common among females aged 15 to 24, according to a news release from The Lancet, where the finding appears Nov. 16 online. In this study, researchers followed a group of young people in Victoria, Australia, from 1992 to 2008. The participants' average age was 15 in 1992-93 and 29 in 2008.

Of the 1,802 participants who took part while they were teens, 149 (8 percent) reported self-harm. More girls (10 percent) than boys (6 percent) reported self-harm. There was a substantial decline in self-harm during the late teens and by age 29, fewer than 1 percent of the participants reported self-harm.
Of the 1,652 participants who took part both when they were teens and young adults, 136 reported self-harm while they were teens. Of those 136 participants, 122 (90 percent) reported no self-harm in young adulthood and 14 (10 percent) reported continuing self-harm (13 females and one male).
Cutting and burning were the most common form of self-harm among teens. Other forms of self-harm included self-battery and poisoning/overdose. No single type of self-harm was most common among young adults.

Among teens, symptoms of depression and anxiety were associated with a 3.7 times increased risk of self harm, cigarette smoking was associated with a 2.4 times increased risk, antisocial behavior and high-risk alcohol use were associated with a doubling of risk and marijuana use was associated with a near-doubling of risk.

Young adults who had depression or anxiety when they were teens were about six times more likely to self-harm, compared to those who had no depression and anxiety when they were teens. "Our findings suggest that most adolescent self-harming behavior resolves spontaneously. However, young people who self-harm often have mental health problems that might not resolve without treatment, as evident in the strong relation detected between adolescent anxiety and depression and an increased risk of self-harm in young adulthood," wrote Dr. Paul Moran, of King's College London, Institute of Psychiatry, in England, and George C Patton, a professor at the Centre for Adolescent Health at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute in Melbourne, Australia, and colleagues.

"Our findings suggest that the treatment of such problems might have additional benefits in terms of reducing the suffering and disability associated with self-harm in later years. Moreover, because of the association between self-harm and suicide, we suggest that the treatment of common mental disorders during adolescence could constitute an important and hitherto unrecognized component of suicide prevention in young adults," they concluded.

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In the first study of its kind, Australian researchers followed about 2000 Victorian students from age 15 to see how many self-harmed during adolescence and into their 20s. They found self-harm was most common among 15-year-olds, particularly girls and teenagers with symptoms of depression and anxiety.

But most teens who deliberately hurt themselves in various ways stopped by the time they hit adulthood. The researchers believe the reasons for self-harm - one of the strongest predictors of suicide - are linked to the struggle some teens have in dealing with emotional problems. "Most of the self-harm was not about attempting suicide," lead researcher Prof George Patton said, ahead of the study's publication in the latest edition of The Lancet.

"Rather, it was an attempt to deal with emotions that the individual felt were overwhelming. "But most of it is a phase and they move on to different strategies of dealing with these emotions."The group of young people involved in the study, run by Melbourne's Murdoch Children's Research Institute and King's College in London, were asked at regular intervals between 1992 and 2008 about whether they self-harmed. Eight per cent, or one in 12, reported self-harm from age 13 to 19, with 10 per cent of girls and 6 per cent of boys deliberately hurting themselves at least once.

Self-cutting or burning were the most common forms of self-harm, followed by overdosing/poisoning, hitting themselves and indulging in risky behaviour. Adolescents who were depressed or anxious were four times more likely to self-harm than those without those conditions. Drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes or cannabis and indulging in antisocial behaviour all doubled the risk.

But only 10 per cent still self-harmed in their 20s. Prof Patton said the hormonal changes teens underwent and the way their brain developed around puberty could affect how they dealt with emotions. Readers seeking support and information about suicide prevention can contact Lifeline on 13 11 14.

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Life on the land is challenging enough for the nation’s food and fibre producers without the added strain of mental illness. But for the farmers who live in the far-flung corners of our nation, their voices are not always heard, as Patrick Tombola discovered after spending several months living on farms in Western NSW.

The third Rural Mental Health Symposium was hosted by Victoria’s third largest city, Ballarat, from November 14 to 16. It attracted more than 250 delegates from Australia and New Zealand. Among the high-profile speakers was Professor Patrick McGorry – the 2010 Australian of the Year, renowned for his research in early psychosis and youth mental health

Fairfax journalist Jennifer Grieve attended Professor McGorry’s address titled “A 21st Century Approach to Mental Health Care”. “What I found most interesting were the results of a New Zealand study which followed 1,000 adolescents from their entry into high school to the age of 30 years,” Ms Grieve explained.

“In that time, it found that 50.1 per cent had met the criteria for having a mental disorder – 60 per cent of those disorders were moderate to severe and 54 per cent were recurrent. “That’s a pretty shocking statistic when you consider that most families have about two children. In effect, really all families are affected by mental disorders.”

Professor McGorry said because most mental disorders appear during adolescence or early adulthood early intervention was critical. “People are building their friendship networks, they’re building careers, their futures. “If something goes wrong – and in 50 per cent of young people there will be a period of mental ill health – that can derail everything.”

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Last week, David Rosenberg (via Pragmatic Capitalism) stated that "we’re just 4 years into a depression that will likely last 7-10 years". Ken Rogoff, interviewed CFA Magazine, that the current slowdown that began in 2008 is likely to take 6-10 years for a recovery to take hold.

This is a secular bear. This confirms my views from August that I expect a stock market bottom about the end of this decade. This is a secular bear market characterized by flat returns and investors need to re-orient their investment policy and portfolio strategy accordingly.

To recap my first point about a secular bear market, equity valuations are not especially attractive right now. The chart below from VectorGraderNote how the bull phases, or secular bulls, coincided with expansion of the market cap to GDP ratio. The equity market then topped out went sideways and entered a secular bear market, which coincided with a corrective phase in the market cap to GDP ratio, until that "valuation" metric returned to more realistic levels.

Similarly, this chart from Naufall Sanaullah of Shadow Capitalism tells a similar story. The chart shows the require amount of work to buy the SPX as a measure of the differential between the returns to labor and capital. Just like the Market Cap to GDP chart, this relationship remains stretched in favor of equity.  

Using a rough eyeball estimate of both charts suggests a valuation bottom some time around the end of this decade given the current trajectory of adjustments. These conclusions are in accordance with the views of David Rosenberg and Ken Rogoff. Using pruning shears in a snowstorm and a snow shovel in July  

Even though I am trained as a quant, I have always thought myself to be an investment strategist first and a quant second. There are different tools for different seasons. Otherwise, you can get caught and wind up holding pruning shears in a February snowstorm or holding a snow shovel in the heat of July.

In secular bull markets, such as the one we experienced in the 1980's and 1990's, buy-and-hold was a great strategy for portfolio construction. Stocks went up. To control risk, you just added some bonds to control volatility and voila, a portfolio that balanced risk and return. To raise expected returns, you raise the equity weight at the cost of greater risk. To lower risk, you raise the bond weight at the cost of lower expected returns.

During secular bear markets characterized by flat returns, buy and hold investors are likely to see flat but volatile returns. Raising the equity component in a balanced portfolio just raises volatility, but does not significantly increase returns. Under these conditions, investors need to use dynamic asset allocation techniques such as the Asset Inflation-Deflation Trend Model to capture the swings of a flat market.

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Scientists have revealed that spending too much time watching TV can increase the risk of depression, while regular exercise can give the opposite effects. The researchers at the Harvard University found inactivity could cause a range of emotional and physical symptoms associated with the condition, whereas exercise has a positive impact boosting self-esteem, sense of control and endorphin levels.

According to the study that surveyed nearly 50,000 women, women who regularly exercised were around 20 per cent less likely to get depression compared to those who rarely exercised. “Higher levels of physical activity were associated with lower depression risk,” the Daily Mail quoted lead author Michel Lucas as saying.

The findings revealed that those who exercised the most - 90 minutes or more each day - were 20 per cent less likely to be diagnosed with depression than those who exercised 10 minutes or less a day. Meanwhile women who watched three hours or more of television a day were 13 percent more likely to be diagnosed with depression than those who hardly ever tuned in. However, Lucas added that the results don’t prove directly that watching too much television and avoiding exercise leads to depression and that there could be other variables involved.

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A study of 1500 Australians has found that one in eight adults has severe stress, with those aged 18 to 25 more stressed and depressed than any other age group. And to ease their stress, people are turning to comfort food, drinking and shopping. The executive director of the Australian Psychological Society, Lyn Littlefield, said the study found the main sources of stress for young people were money, work and relationships. "I think it's because of uncertainty, the lack of predictability in their lives, and the fact that change occurs more rapidly now than in the past," Professor Littlefield said.

"Older people are probably less stressed because they've been through lots of life experiences and come to some level of adjustment and are more philosophical."Nearly one-third of all those surveyed identified work as the main source of their stress. Those under 25 had the lowest levels of job satisfaction and felt undervalued by their employers. But the biggest source of stress for all age groups was money, followed by health issues and family problems.

More than 60 per cent said they tucked into comfort food when they were stressed, while nearly half took to the shops for retail therapy. Forty per cent sought solace in alcohol. "But they all found those things were less than effective," Prof Littlefield said. "I feel they are never good ways of coping with stress."Prof Littlefield said the best way to deal with stress was to talk to friends, family, a GP or psychologist.

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