Star magazine is reporting that Lindsay Lohan could be indulging in her old habits of drinking and doing cocaine. But Linds also may have taken up a new compulsion—cutting. Although we don’t always believe Star, Pop Eater did a little photographic investigation, and Lindsay does appear to have a series of scratches or scars on her forearm. Most cutters usually injure themselves on their arms or legs because the scratches can be covered with clothing. Pop Eater also has photos of Lindsay wearing long sleeves recently.

If you had brain cancer, would you date a neurologist?  Would you sleep with a chiropractor to ease your chronic back pain?  Around my twentieth birthday, I was hit with a sudden onset of crippling depression and anxiety.  After two years, several doctors and a veritable rainbow of colored mood-altering capsules, I still felt hopeless.  With no cure in sight, I fell for a psychotherapist.

While Viagra is an invention that has helped grandpa’s around the country get it back up for their spouses, nurses, and right hands, it now may be able to help women too! A recent eight-week experiment, funded by pharmaceutical company Pfizer, followed 98 women who were having trouble orgasming due to antidepressant medication.  They were given Viagra and asked to have sex once a week with the pill’s aide.  Seventy-two percent of the girls gave the erectile dysfunction drug the thumbs up! Although it didn’t increase their libido, the ladies reported that it did help them climax. But the findings certainly have some critics—27% of the women in the control group who were given a placebo pill also reported satisfaction. However, despite shelling out cash for the study, Pfizer says it will not seek FDA approval for females to use Viagra, since it concluded in 2004 that there were no explicit benefits. If you’re still searching for a pick me up that’ll work with your anti-depressant, there’s a clitoral therapy device approved by the FDA already, and libido enhancing LibiGel is currently being tested. It looks like women will have plenty of options without having to pop pills like Bob Dole. [Orlando Sentinel]

We’ve all taken risks—tried things and people we weren’t sure of and chalked it up to experimentation.  It’s all part of being a liberated woman. But sadly we’re are missing out on some of the most important testing that is actually guaranteed to give us what we need: clinical trials.  Research has shown that gender can truly affect a medication’s ability to work on such widespread health issues as depression and lung cancer.  Despite the growing need for a pool of available and even in some cases, healthy women, a mere 9% of test subjects are female. So, many drugs are being prescribed without ever being tested on a lady. To alleviate this dilemma, the rules for clinical tests changed in 1993 to always include women who still intended to bear children.  However, a decade and a half later, not much more has changed.  Scientists blame everything from lack of time to lack of awareness; 93% of women surveyed said they had never even been asked to participate in a clinical trial.

Hold on to your Prozac, because women who suffer from depression have 1/3 more sex than their “normal” counterparts.  Finally, some news to cheer up my sad sisters! A study of 107 women, published in the British Medical Journal, found that when you’re down, you put out—no matter whether you’re in a committed relationship or ho-ing the road alone. Dr. Sabura Allen, who headed the study at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, says, “When people are depressed they feel more insecure about their relationships and concerned that their partner may not care about them or find them valuable.” So they overcompensate to feel secure by getting naked, and as often as possible. As for the single girls they studied, researchers found they were more inclined to let loose and have adventurous casual sex. They make depression sound like Spring Break, without the hassle of traveling!  [NY Daily News]