Anxiety Treatment Today
Mind & Meaning: Chase the blues away with colour therapy
I stumbled upon a psychiatrist talking about the value of colour therapy in treating depression, anxiety and a host of psychiatric conditions on an American TV channel last week.
Never having heard any huge discussion of this ‘treatment’ before, I was surprised to have a patient ask me about it a few days later in my clinic — perhaps she was watching the same station.
The belief that colour can influence mood and behaviour is a popular one in the US, so much so that when adolescents in many correctional units become violent they are put in a room, distinguished by the fact that it is decorated in bubble-gum pink. They have been noted to stop yelling, relax and often go to sleep.
Around 1,500 institutions are convinced enough about this to have at least one room painted in this shade. Blackfriars Bridge in London was painted blue as a way of trying to reduce the numbers of people taking their own lives by jumping. Blue, apparently, has calming and relaxing properties.
The history of colour therapy, also known as chromatotherapy, or more recently as photobiology, dates back to Avicenna, a 10th century doctor, born in what is now Uzbekistan.
A polymath with expertise in astronomy and philosophy as well as medicine, he wrote about this treatment in his book ‘The Canon of Medicine’. It was widely used in universities, including Louvain, as late as the 17th century.
He provided details of the uses of various colours to treat a range of symptoms and held that the use of the wrong colour would result in a lack of improvement.
He believed, for example, that a person with a nose bleed should not look at red objects as this would further stimulate the bleeding, while blue would soothe it.
During the 19th century the Victorians believed that everything from meningitis to constipation could be treated by filtering light through coloured glass. Many medical historians now regard this as simple quackery.
In 1933, an Indian scientist, Dinshah P Ghadiali, published an encyclopedia of colour therapy. He postulated that certain colours produced changes in organs and that by applying the correct colour an organ could be restored to normality.
Chakras
Older traditions in medicine native to India suggested that the body consists of seven chakras, or spiritual centres, located along the spine and that each is associated with a particular bodily function, colour and organ.
By applying the correct colour to the site on the spine, the chakra was rebalanced, resulting in the cure for a particular ailment or symptom. Chakra balancing was something Tony Blair’s wife, Cherie, was reportedly an enthusiast for.
Modern-day colour therapists are placed well within the alternative grouping and they have retained many of the themes of the chakra concept, producing lists of colours and the symptoms and organs they target.
For some, the modern study of colour is more sophisticated and even the term photobiology, now replacing chromatotherapy, has distanced the topic from its somewhat magical origins.
Photobiology is the study of the effects of light on organisms. In humans it examines its effect on circadian rhythms and on our biological functions such as release of growth hormones. The impact of light on mood disorders such as seasonal affective disorder is also of interest.
But colour therapists/phototherapists are divided on how effects are achieved. Some suggest that this is physiological while others disagree, believing it to be purely psychological.
This dichotomy is mirrored in what is written about it in magazines and scientific journals. Conferences on photobiology are advertised alongside courses on holistic and colour therapy, while the uses of light for tanning are hailed beside its use for jaundice in newborns.
Only time will tell if the use of orange in bedrooms really stimulates appetite and reduces sleep or whether replacing white walls and orange carpets with blue and grey really does improve children’s classroom behaviour.
Avicenna may be right, but if he is then we should understand why and how light and colour influence our behaviour and impact on illness. If we do not gain this information then we will be no better than the Victorian quacks.
Kava might help in reducing stress
Recently, some researchers from Melbourne conducted a few trials to find the effects of on stress and anxiety level and they found that kava extract was quite safe and effective in reducing anxiety. At the same time they mentioned the need to conduct more researches of advanced level.
Dr. Sarris conducted a couple of trials in which he used this South Pacific plant as a treatment for anxiety. He belongs to an international group which is devising a framework to aid the reintroduction of kava to certain countries.
Europe, Britain and Canada have always banned the use of kava because of its association with liver problems though it’s widely available over counter in Australia where it was approved in 2005 for medical usage.
The makers of this framework have made sure that only high quality kava is consumed throughout the Pacific and the rest of the world.
Psychiatrist Dr. Jerome Sarris from Melbourne University, who was the part of this research, had a detailed discussion with Pacific Beat about problems associated with drinking kava.
Talk Therapy May Help Treat Social Anxiety
A 12-week course of talk therapy, when used to treat social anxiety disorder, produces changes in the electrical activity of the brain, according to new research. The findings appear in Psychological Science.
Symptoms of social phobia or social anxiety disorder include anxiety and self-consciousness in everyday social situations. This anxiety may also have associated physical symptoms such as sweating, nausea, and difficulty speaking. In some, the anxiety is limited to a specific situation, such as public speaking. In other people, it becomes so overwhelming and debilitating they can no longer leave the house.
The researchers say that there has been a substantial amount of research on how medications used to treat social anxiety disorder affect the brain but far less research on how psychotherapy produces changes in the brain.
The Study
In the new study, 25 people with social anxiety disorder completed a 12-week course of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), a time-limited type of psychotherapy that aims to alter behavior by changing the way people think about their anxiety and its triggers. Researchers used electroencephalograms (EEGs) to measure brain electrical interactions before treatment, halfway through treatment, and after the final CBT session. These readings took place at rest and during an impromptu videotaped speech they were asked to give before two people — an anxiety-producing task for many with social phobias.
EEG results were compared with those of two control groups consisting of people who had not been diagnosed with social anxiety disorder — one group with high social anxiety levels and another group of people with low levels of social anxiety.
Talk therapy produced meaningful changes in the amount of “delta-beta coupling” seen on the EEGs. Delta-beta coupling, a particular pattern of brain waves, increases with rising anxiety. After the 12-week course of therapy, EEG readings of the people who received CBT resembled those of the control group who had low levels of social anxiety. By contrast, the earlier delta-beta coupling patterns seen before the talk therapy more closely resembled those with high anxiety levels, say the researchers, who were led by Vladimir Miskovic, a PhD candidate at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.
“The main purpose of our study was not to set out to establish whether cognitive behavioral therapy is effective for the treatment of social anxiety, but rather, to determine whether there is some neural correlate that changes alongside symptomatic improvement,” the study authors tell WebMD in an email.
Whether these findings are generalizable to other anxiety or psychological disorders is not known but does seem likely based on what is already known about the effects of CBT, the researchers say. “Future studies need to specifically test individuals diagnosed with other mood and anxiety disorders,” they say.
Study Limitations
Some people in the study were also taking medication to treat their social anxiety, which could skew the findings, but researchers attempted to control for this by making sure that medication dosages remained constant throughout the study. Still, “it would be ideal to follow up with medication-free patients with CBT alone in a future study. However, it is important to note that such plans also present significant challenges, as most outpatients seeking treatment for social anxiety disorder are already taking medications, and asking them to discontinue these would obviously be unethical,” the study authors say.
Talk Therapy Is a Part of Treatment for Social Phobia
Alan Manevitz, MD, a clinical psychiatrist at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, says the new study is helping to build an evidence-based case for the positive effects of psychotherapy.
“Social anxiety disorder treatment involves a multi-pronged treatment approach targeting the biology, psychology, and behavioral aspects of the disorder,” he says. “Social anxiety can be quite disabling, and we need to approach it on all these levels.”
More studies are needed to determine the effects of medication. “We know that psychotherapy and medicine work better together than psychotherapy alone or medication alone,” he says.
Srini Pillay, MD, an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School in Boston and the author of Life Unlocked: 7 Revolutionary Lessons to Overcome Fear, is not surprised by the new findings.
“The finding that CBT changed brain function that correlated with improvements in social anxiety is expected,” he says in an email. “The fact that patients were medicated does raise the question of whether being on medication helped the treatment response and it might have, so we cannot say that CBT is a convincing first-line treatment yet,” he says. “We can say that CBT can alleviate symptoms, so for those people who decline to be on medication, there are other symptomatic treatments and some hope that they will feel better.”