More Gulf Coast residents are thinking seriously about suicide or showing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as the recovery from Hurricane Katrina inches along, a new survey finds.

The survey is a follow-up to one done six months after the hurricane, which found that few people in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama — about 3 percent — had contemplated suicide in the storm's aftermath.

That figure has now doubled in the three-state area and is up to 8 percent in the New Orleans area, according to Ronald Kessler of Harvard Medical School, lead researcher for the Hurricane Katrina Community Advisory Group.

Americans seem to like psychotherapy. Whether it’s for the mundane conflicts of everyday life or life-threatening illnesses like major depression, psychotherapy is widely viewed as a healthy, if not harmless, pursuit.

Yet unlike most other medical treatments, psychotherapy can take considerable time. An infection can be cured in days, but remission of severe depression or anxiety disorder usually takes weeks or months, and a personality disorder typically requires years of intensive psychotherapy.

So if the outcome may be months or years away, how can a person tell whether his psychotherapy is any good?

Relationships with our partners can be complicated when both people are mentally and emotionally healthy. When one person becomes depressed, it can play havoc with the dynamics of a relationship, even one that was previously stable.
As the person on "the outside," it may be hard to understand what your partner is going through, unless you've been depressed yourself. But being able to empathize with your partner's internal struggle is not as important as learning how to balance helping your partner with staying emotionally healthy yourself.

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Women who force themselves to stay quiet during marital arguments appear to have a higher risk of death, a new study shows. Depression and irritable bowel syndrome are also more common in these women.

Such "self-silencing" during conflict may have provided an evolutionary survival advantage long ago, and unfortunately may be a necessity for women in abusive relationships, Dr. Elaine D. Eaker of Eaker Epidemiology Enterprises in Gaithersburg, Maryland, the study's lead author, told Reuters Health.

Eaker and her colleagues found that, over a 10-year period, the most striking finding was that women who self-silenced were four times more likely to die than women who expressed themselves freely during marital arguments.