If you're ever faced with a frightening diagnosis or the need for major surgery, you may well end up seeking help for mental health issues. Typical reactions are anxiety and depression. The likelihood of experiencing these conditions is greater for women than for men as well as for all patients who are single. Those are the findings of a study by Jangjo Yoon, MD and Stephanie Bernell, MD of Oregon State University in Corvallis and colleagues, which they reported online in Health Services Research.
"Our most rigorous analytic model shows that an adverse physical health event is significantly associated with more than a threefold increase in the likelihood of provider visits and prescribed medication use for the treatment of mental health problems," the authors wrote. "These increases are mainly through office-based physician visits for nonsevere mental health conditions. This relationship is greater among those who experience more severe physical health events."
The study also shows that patients who suffer from anxiety and depression as the result of health scares are often prescribed medications. Here at ThirdAge, we urge you to make sure you avoid long tem use of drugs with the potential for addiction and use them only to alleviate the immediate problems associated with health crises.
