Leonard Lipson, M.A. Articles

Article Title	Brief Description
DIABETES & DEPRESSION: Letter from a Reader: Focusing on “The Can’ts”	In my last article, “Recognizing & Approaching Depression”, I promised to provide suggestions you could make to patients struggling with depression. I will do that in my next article. For now however, I’d like to answer an email sent to Diabetes in Control from someone I regard as sad, but not depressed.
Exuberance Over Exubera: Some Cautionary Notes	We appreciate the over 3000 readers who have requested more information on Exubera. You obviously have an intense interest in finding out the right way to use this exciting new medicine for your patients. Leonard Lipson, M.A. Psychology, LMHC takes a look at some of the psychological challenges that this new medicine could present.
Ways to Talk About Depression & What You Can Offer Patients	Often we can sense that our patients are having troubles adapting to their diabetes. First they are in denial then they feel despair. It is so easy to just overlook how this affects their diabetes and just focus on the rest.
Diabetes & Depression: What’s Going On and	To quote the lyrics from a song long ago, “Something’s happening here, what it is ain’t exactly clear.” That there are connections between depression and diabetes has been established. The exact nature of those connections is under investigation. Obviously, we can’t sit around waiting for the last word on whether Diabetes causes Depression or vise versa before taking the connections seriously. Both conditions are life altering and life threatening and together, are cause for legitimate alarm.
Why Examine Your “Urge?	Towards the end of the first article of this series, I suggested that you attend to the experience of the “Urge”, which is what you feel, think and do when you turn away from adherence. I didn’t give you much of an explanation of why you should be doing this, other than using the exercise as a way to clarify and then target the exact form that self-obstruction takes in you. Not a bad reason. In this article however, I intend to do even better. Examination of the “Urge” has many other benefits. Learning about more of these benefits can motivate you to continue your examination and can show you how to use the examination of the “Urge” to benefit your patients.
The Mind and Diabetes: Their Many Connections	My college’s motto was “The Truth Shall Make You Free.” It’s a noble sounding idea but, like a lot of what I learned during those years, many things in life are not quite that simple. Effective management of diabetes certainly requires truthful information. Following the motto, we would then expect this truth to set patients free. Once informed of the effective way to treat their disease, the incidents of heart attacks, stroke, blindness, neuropathy and kidney failure should all return to the levels found in the general population, right? Anyone who has worked with a diabetic population or who struggles with the disease themselves, can tell you that it’s just not that simple.