Last year I was reading a private "divorce support" blog. This was a group of ladies discussing their STRESS problems and some ways they developed to raise money to pay for extras after their bum of a hubby left them etc. I sent one of them some Cardboard and Christmas palm seeds and a few other things from my garden and they let me in to read the blog. They had some good ideas that I used in my own ebay selling account. The story was of a gal selling her handmade craft items on ebay and from a small website. She also sold seeds, plants and bulbs she grew from her garden in Florida. She was doing great and everyone in the blog was cheering her on. One day she was very upset. A seller on ebay stole her pictures and some of the wording from her website... and her sales were falling. The seller took her wording from her ebay listings and turned it around. They were careful not to steal her ebay pictures but they took the pictures from her website and copied her designs etc. They made some changes that sound similar to these ebay sellers in your story. Ebay never replied to this gal. And the nasty seller was very nasty to her. Anyway evidently the blog members are located all over the USA... and around 15 members living outside the state of this victim... all bought one item from this seller... the cheapest items offered. After the purchase, they baited the seller with silly questions and comments... and the seller got upset in an email with each of them... threatening wording and snotty remarks from the seller to these buyers. So each buyer had a good reason to give this seller Negative feedback and ratings of 1 and 2 DSR stars. What do you think happens if a seller gets 15 negatives and 1-2 DRS stars? Ha! Ha! Ebay will protect their MEGA sellers by changing ratings but not any seller under that catagory. If a seller gets that many 1-2 star DSR ratings, then ebay suspends the seller... so simple. I was laughing my head off reading the blog story. It happened over a 45 day period. They all used credit cards in Paypal and all got refunds on a DOA or crushed auction. Several buyers claimed they never received the auction when they saw there was no DC on the package. The blog members spaced out the negative feedback so it would not look obvious and each had a different comment depending on what the seller said to them in the email. The nasty seller probably suspected something was up but there was no way he could complain to ebay. In eBay's eyes, he was now a bad seller. They spotted this same seller under a new ID and 10 more blog members stepped up to the plate with 10 different ebay ID's. This seller was still using their blogmate's pictures and wording. They put this guy down within 30 days this time. It was great mental therapy for all these women too... banding together to protect the economy of one of their own members. The women all thought it was a good deed because the seller was also using the pictures from other websites and other ebay sellers too. I would hate to be the ebay seller that stiffs any of these divorced ladies in the future.

I've also had a sleeping problem all my life, I was diagnosed through a sleep clinic. I choose not to use artificial means to go to sleep- I worry about my liver and other organs. I use relaxation techniques, and remind myself that my body will sleep when it needs to. This isn't always easy, because I work in an office all day, and it's really hard to function sometimes when I've been on a long stretch of poor sleep. But those times are usually the times I don't bother getting enough exercise and using relaxation techniques. And it seems like it's when I tell myself I'm too tired to exercise that I really have trouble sleeping (I too go to sleep just fine and then I wake up and can't go back to sleep). You need to rid your body of excess physical tension to get a restful sleep- that's why relaxation techniques work so well. It's a very healthy solution.

yes, they still do it, it's called ECT. It's usually only used for very, very severe depression and I've actually seen it work pretty well. It's much improved from the "old days", although it still seems barbaric to me, in theory. I used to work with a older lady who got it whenever she was in the depressive phase of her bipolar disorder. But, she was really bad off, wouldn't get out of bed at all, etc. After ECT she usually slept for the day, but then would wake up the next day in a miraculously good mood. It would usually help for a few weeks, and then she would have to go back. ECT still has a lot of negatives though. People have to wear diapers while getting it because they often lose their urine/bowels, and it makes them very confused and forgetful for awhile after the treatment. I'm shocked though that someone would still be "sentenced" to ECT as a punishment. It's generally just used as another form of mental health treatment, like medications or anything else, and done WITH consent. I can't believe someone would be forced to undergo shock therapy for committing a crime! That's really messed up.

mdln, thank you for posting your information and experience. It is helpful. I appreciate your mentioning psychological therapy, especially CBT, as a non-drug treatment for depression. It is one I left off the list...my bad. My fear and experience may have led me to overstate the side effects of SSRIs, which are, as you say, supposed to be better than earlier generations of drugs. But then again, from the NIH However, questions about the safety and tolerability of SSRIs have emerged with their continued use. For example, in the original placebo-controlled clinical trials of fluoxetine in depressed patients, sexual dysfunction was reported in 1.9% of trial participants receiving fluoxetine. However, postmarketing clinical trials have reported rates of sexual dysfunction as high as 75%. Given that these drugs are viewed as relatively safe and efficacious heavily marketed by drug cos prescribed to larger populations including even preschoolers prescribed for use beyond depression prescribed for longer periods of time preferred by insurance cos as cheaper than therapy use of these drugs has skyrocketed. According to the CDC, antidepressant use has increased 400% from 1988 to 2008. Moreover, less than one third of those taking a single antidepressant have seen a mental health professional in the prior year. Add to that evidence that these drugs may not as effective as purported to be... Altogether, there were forty-two trials of the six drugs. Most of them were negative. Overall, placebos were 82 percent as effective as the drugs, as measured by the Hamilton Depression Scale (HAM-D), a widely used score of symptoms of depression. The average difference between drug and placebo was only 1.8 points on the HAM-D, a difference that, while statistically significant, was clinically meaningless. The results were much the same for all six drugs: they were all equally unimpressive. Yet because the positive studies were extensively publicized, while the negative ones were hidden, the public and the medical profession came to believe that these drugs were highly effective antidepressants. Moreover, ...he observed that even treatments that were not considered to be antidepressants -- "such as synthetic thyroid hormone, opiates, sedatives, stimulants, and some herbal remedies" -- were as effective as antidepressants in alleviating the symptoms of depression. Kirsch writes, “When administered as antidepressants, drugs that increase, decrease or have no effect on serotonin all relieve depression to about the same degree.” What all these “effective” drugs had in common was that they produced side effects... See The Epidemic of Mental Illness: Why? So, IMHO, what we have are drugs with potentially serious side effects, of questionable efficacy being prescribed for mental health conditions and other conditions by non mental health professionals at increasing rates for longer periods of time. Especially when there...