Diabetes and Mental Health

In the year 2008 scientist had found that diabetes is associated with depression. Diabetes also known to doctors as Diabetes Mellitus is a disorder which affects the way our bodies digest food for energy and growth.
Almost all the food we eat is changed into glucose (a form of sugar), and this is the primary source of energy for our body. The cells in our bodies use the glucose for energy, sometimes the glucose cannot get inside the cells of our bodies without having insulin and it is this insulin that makes it possible for our cells to use glucose.
Insulin is a hormone that is produced by an organ in the body called a pancreas. After you eat, the pancreas releases insulin to move the glucose in the blood to the cells and lowers the blood sugar level. When a person has diabetes, they have too much glucose in the blood called (hyperglycemia). This means the body has not produced enough insulin or no insulin at all and the pancreas is without cells that do not respond to the insulin of the pancreas. With Type 1 Diabetes you produce no insulin at all; with Type 2 Diabetes you don’t produce enough insulin to process the glucose in the blood stream. Both Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes are chronic medical conditions.
What does this have to do with Mental Health?
Doctors who study both diabetes and depression have for many years associated the two illnesses as being in tandem when a person has one or the other disease. Approximately 30 million people have had at least one bout with depression having also diabetes.
The groups of people vary ethnically and over the years as this study went on people were examined for depression and Type 2 diabetes. The disease is genetic and usually occurs in overweight people or people who have a diet high in sugars. The people in the higher levels of depression had a 50 percent chance more, in developing diabetes, than those people who were not depressed. The people who were in the higher levels of depression tend to smoke more, exercise less, overeat and also tend to be overweight. All of this increases the chances for diabetes and also cause higher rates for depression
Depression raises the levels of hormones in the body that cause stress. These chemicals can affect the person and cause diabetes. With all of the different illnesses such as osteoporosis, heart disease, stroke and others associated with depression it is no wonder that both diabetes and depression are linked.
People, who are known as diabetic, eventually suffer from depression, also from anxiety or worry; and have reached the chronic stage of their diseases, and these people must consider their health and change their life style and eating and exercise habits or continue to suffer even further, with nerve problems, heart disease, even blindness.
Depression as a mental illness in not just a mental illness, it is a illness of habit and it is a illness of being, diabetes is the same and without proper treatment one can no longer be dismissed of the other.

I have set before you
Life and death,
Blessing and cursing:
Therefore choose life,
That both thou and thy
Seed may live.
Deuteronomy 30:19
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Written by Donald Sammons