People who feel chronically stressed on the job may face an increased risk of depression, a large study suggests.

Researchers found that among more than 24,000 working Canadian adults, nearly 5 percent had suffered from major depression in the past year. Those under heavy stress at work appeared to be at particular risk, according to findings in the American Journal of Public Health.

A number of studies have found health risks associated with chronic job stress, including high blood pressure and heart disease, as well as depression. However, the depression studies have been limited to either certain occupations or single companies, noted Dr. Emma Robertson Blackmore, the lead author of the new study and an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Rochester Medical School in New York.

Among patients who have had a heart attack and subsequently develop depression, a lack of response to antidepressant treatment signals a high risk of another cardiac episode, according to a secondary analysis of data from Myocardial Infarction and Depression-Intervention Trial (MIND-IT).

MIND-IT involved 2,177 patients who were hospitalized with an acute heart attack. During follow-up, 375 patients developed post-heart attack depression. Two hundred nine of these patients were randomly assigned to receive mirtazapine, sold under the trade name Remeron, or to "care as usual."

If there was an inadequate response to mirtazapine after 8 weeks, the patients were switched to citalopram, sold under the trade name Celexa, according to the report in the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Eli Lilly yesterday added strong warnings to the label of Zyprexa, its best-selling medicine for schizophrenia, citing the drug’s tendency to cause weight gain, high blood sugar, high cholesterol and other metabolic problems.

For the first time, Zyprexa’s label now acknowledges that the drug causes high blood sugar more than some other medicines for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, called atypical antipsychotics.

Lilly previously argued that Zyprexa had not been proved to cause high blood sugar at a more frequent rate than its competitors.

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A perplexing finding about suicide rates:
As many know, the CDC has reported that the suicide rates have jumped since 2004, especially in young people, and especially in girls aged 10-14. While this is noteworthy in itself, it is also near the time when the first black box warnings concerning the link between antidepressants and suicide came out.
The controversy about antidepressants and suicide has a long history, but it can be summarized with a few key points:
First, even in the early psychoanalytic days, experts observed that people often attempted suicide as they began to improve from depression. Consider that suicide attempts are often highest immediately following discharge from a hospital. The explanation was that their motivation, or cognition, improved before their sadness; so while at first they were too depressed to do anything-- including suicide, as they began to improve they got well enough to plan and execute a suicide.

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