The use of a breathing treatment called continuous positive airway pressure may improve depressive symptoms in patients with obstructive sleep apnea, according to a study in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.

Obstructive sleep apnea is a common problem in which patients stop breathing for short periods during sleep. It occurs when soft tissues in the back of the throat relax and temporarily block the airway. The condition is frequently seen in individuals who are obese and those who snort.

With continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP), the patient wears a special mask that continuously blows air into the throat, preventing the tissues from collapsing.

"The significance of our findings," Dr. Daniel J. Schwartz said, "is that symptoms which might otherwise be ascribed to depression -- feelings of sadness, discouragement about the future, feelings of excessive personal failures, perceived decreases in self-confidence, a sense of being overly self-critical, the inability to derive pleasure from things, and even suicidal (thoughts) -- may at times be attributable to obstructive sleep apnea, an easily treatable medical illness."

Please excuse me while I rant. It's 1:30am and I've given up on being able to get to sleep. I have insomnia for the third night in a row. I have insomnia a few times a year. Usually my mind just gets started and I can't slow it down enough to sleep. I think that happens to almost everyone. That's not the cause this time, though. It took till the second night for me to figure it out. I started on a new bottle of my antidepressant of choice - Wellbutrin - right about the same time this started.

Now, I've been taking Wellbutrin for a few years, excluding the time period of my pregnancy. It's worked pretty well for me. I get the feeling that this problem has something to do with this bottle being a generic version instead of the real thing. The quality of generic drugs can be pretty spotty. But who has the money to pay for the name brand? Most insurance companies charge a much higher copay for them.

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I described my search for a new therapist in an earlier blog posting. I didn't talk about why I had gone back into therapy, because it would have probably hurt my biological father's feelings. However, Stephen died three weeks ago. It was not a surprise; he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's Disease, or ALS, about three and a half years ago. I got to spend a lot of time with him in the last year, so while his passing is sad, I was able to achieve some measure of closure. But not complete closure, apparently.

First I need to clarify something. When I refer to Stephen as my "biological" father, I'm sure you're assuming I'm adopted. I am, but the actual adoption didn't take place until a few years ago (my stepfather, Larry, adopted my sister and I in an adult adoption a few years ago). Stephen and my mom got divorced when I was about two years old and my sister was about two weeks old. Two years later, my mom married Larry, who became my stepfather.

Growing up, I never thought that losing Stephen affected me. My stepfather was a wonderful father, so I never felt that anything was lacking. However, I was kidding myself in thinking that the dysfunctional nature of my relationship with Stephen had no impact on me. Among other things, in an unconscious attempt to fix the relationship, for years I had been dating men who were twice my age. My first year of therapy was focused primarily on identifying how I really felt about his lack of involvement in my childhood.

I had untreated clinical depression starting from a young age. When I was finally diagnosed at age 27, I started trying to figure out why this had happened to me.

Why would a child suffer from depression? What are the factors that can combine to create depression in a young child? In many cases, one of the usual suspects is a family history of mental illness. But there was no such history on either side of my family. So I started looking for other explanations.

What I found was very interesting to me, as a few of the risk factors had been present in my life before my depression.

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