Christopher Lukas
Patient ExpertChristopher Lukas wrote for HealthCentral as a prostate cancer expert. He is the author of “The First Year: Prostate Cancer" and other publications.
Latest by Christopher Lukas
Understanding Teen Depression
The other day my daughter asked me what I was going to write next. I told her that I had no idea, that I’d actually written everything I had to say about depression. Horse-pucky, she said, using a wonderful family euphemism. You have lots more to say ...
Tips for Identifying Depression in Loved Ones from Lewis and Clark
When I was reading the Stephen Ambrose book about Lewis and Clark, from time to time Ambrose interjected comments about Lewis’s inability to write his famous journals. There are huge gaps in the two year period of the expedition - gaps in which Lewis ...
The Controversial Death of Meriweather Lewis
The question for today: was Meriwether Lewis of Lewis & Clark fame a man suffering from bipolar disorder (manic-depression)? Or did he commit suicide because he had syphilis, and it made him crazy? This is not a made-up question, but one of some ...
The Ripple Effect of Suicide
There are millions of people who are seriously enough depressed to consider killing themselves. That doesn’t mean they do so, but it’s very worrisome when anyone we know talks about taking his or her own life. We hear a great deal about this among te...
Anger, anxiety, and Depression
**I notice that we - including myself - spend a lot of time on this site talking about depression and medication, depression and psychotherapy, depression and support groups. That may be because most of you write in about major depression, and for ma...
Therapies for Dysthymia
Of course, there are others who write for this site who are much better able to talk about some of the appropriate therapies for dysthymia* than am I. Still, having gone through 55 years or more of mild and more than mild depression, I have had a var...
Prostatectomy for an 80-something-year-old
Editor’s Note: A new Mayo Clinic Cancer Center study indicates that prostatectomy does not need to be automatically excluded as an option for octogenarians. The father of a friend of mine turned 88. Shortly afterwards, he had a massive heart attack, ...