Judy Foreman Author & Journalist

Feeling depressed? Ask not what your parents did or didn’t do when you were a child. Ask yourself what you had for dinner last night, and the night before, and the night before that. For half a dozen years now, the evidence has been growing that omega-3 fatty acids, the kind found in fatty fish…

The sophisticated science of brain scanning may be on the brink of revolutionizing the intuitive art of psychiatry, one of the few domains left in medicine in which a doctor’s educated guess is still the most common way to figure out what’s wrong To be sure, brain scanning is still too young a science to…

At McLean Hospital in Belmont, brain researchers have hit upon what could become a totally new way to treat depression – blocking a brain chemical called dynorphin, the “evil cousin” of  endorphin, which triggers the “runner’s high.” At the University of California, Los Angeles, psychiatrists have modified the standard EEG (or electroencephalogram) to predict which depressed…

At first, Zoloft seemed like “manna from heaven,” says this 53-year-old woman, a teacher who lives in Watertown. It was the summer of 1999 and, for reasons she still doesn’t fully understand, she had slipped into a “terrible slump.” Her doctor suggested Zoloft, America’s second most popular antidepressant, after Prozac. And for a while, it…

Michael Penney, 53, of Holliston used to have, as he puts it, “a charmed life.” Marriage. A son. A master’s degree in marine economics and law, and good jobs, including an eight-year stint at the state office of Coastal Zone Management. But his charmed life came to an end five years ago when he worked…