Sometimes your dude may need a pick-me-up rather than mere relationship maintenance. Here are six quick (non-sexual, because AM Delight is not always an option) things you can do for your dude if he’s feeling a little blue.

It sounds like something out of a mind-control horror movie: France Télécom, the European telecommunications giant, has now seen 25 of their employees commit suicide in the past 18 months. The most recent incident occurred yesterday when a 48-year-old engineer with a wife and family hanged himself in his home. These suicides aren’t coincidental. Victims have left notes indicating that the reasons they took their lives had to do with highly stressful work conditions and company policies. France Télécom, which employs upwards of 100,000 people, began significantly cutting down its workforce and implementing new structures last year, which brought fear, new stress and oppressive management to the workplace. A new evaluation system also put employees on a scale of personal achievement, putting added pressure on the individual. Wrote one woman in a suicide email to her father: “I can’t accept the new reorganization in my department. I’m getting a new boss and I’d rather die. I’m leaving my handbag with my mobiles and keys in the office, but I’ll take my donor card with me, you never know.”

At 13, it was being the odd kid and Zoloft. At 16, dark self-loathing and Prozac. My 17th birthday brought parental issues and Celexa, while my 19th pushed me to anorexia and Prozac again. My early 20s: failed relationships, Effexor, Ativan, fear of getting nowhere, issues at work, and Lexapro. Long story short: I’ve never been a happy camper. True, depression does run in my family, but being diagnosed with it so young, it’s come to be something that’s part of my personality.

If you’ve ever experienced anxiety or depression, you know the appeal of simply staying home and hiding in your bed forever. Sounds kind of dangerous right? Maybe not. Scientists in the UK were trying to come up with alternative ways—other than flippantly prescribing meds—to treat anxious and depressed patients, who often have to wait over a year to visit a shrink. And they came up with the idea of virtual therapy—essentially, IMing a shrink. Turns out, it’s just as effective if not more so than actual talk therapy. The study looked at 297 people, half of whom had 10 sessions of therapy, each lasting about an hour, where they used instant messaging to chat one-on-one with a trained therapist. The results? About four in 10 people who had online therapy improved to the point where they were no longer depressed. Only two in 10 people recovered without any therapy.

A year ago, my average week was something like a “Sex and The City” episode. Maybe it wasn’t that funny, maybe my clothes weren’t that fabulous, and maybe there weren’t that many hot-yet-problematic men, but there were guys, quite a few of them. I’d never had a boyfriend in high school. Then I went to an all-women’s college. In my senior year, I was in a serious relationship. When that didn’t work out, I found a Pandora’s Box of pleasures in the City.

Looks like, as a country, we’re feeling the blues. A new study shows that, since 1996, the number of people taking antidepressants has doubled. These days, about one out of every ten people in the U.S. is poppin’ depression meds. Oddly enough, during the same period, the number of people seeing psychiatrists has decreased by over ten percent. So, what’s up with this seemingly contradictory trend?

I could have just said “I don’t know” or deflected the question. I didn’t have to say anything. But when my boyfriend’s parents asked me over a family dinner the other night what I might want write a book about, I answered honestly: my struggles with depression.

Surprised, I think, neither parent said anything in response, which made me feel nervously awkward. But then another relative chimed in with her own depression story. She said when she started taking anti-depressants, she would sleep all day, so I shared that Lexapro used to make me conk out, too. Then the relative kept on talking, and pretty soon, the dinner convo had veered onto other topics entirely.

I’m not ashamed that sometimes I feel unbelievably sad and my life is temporarily derailed. My extended family knows about it, my roommate knows about it, even my boss knows about it. But I woke up the next morning and asked myself, “Did I really just tell my boyfriend’s parents that?”

“Some women are just happier in a relationship.”

As my shrink said this, my jaw dropped to the floor. Did she really just say that? The woman who had feminist literature on her bookshelf and never failed to induce a pep rally of self-empowerment at the end of each session?

We were, of course, discussing (OK fine, I was complaining) about my lack of a boyfriend, and inability to get over some of the ones I did have. For me, I surmised from my psychotherapy high horse, the issue was about loneliness and, therefore, about some childhood father complex. I thought I sounded smart; it seemed like something my psychiatrist would say herself.

Most people couldn’t be happier come summer, what with the beach weather and BBQs and all. But there are a few folks out there who get sad and anxious when the weather heats up. Peeps who feel this way may have Summer-Onset Depression, a form of Seasonal Affective Disorder. However, where we usually think of SAD as starting in the fall, the summer version begins in the late spring and ends when the weather starts to get all cold and icky again.

It’s Sunday night at 8 p.m., and your heart is:

a. Fluttering because someone special just fixed you a sumptuous and romantic supper.

b. Thumping with anticipation because “Desperate Housewives” is about to come on and you can’t wait to find out what’s happening on Wisteria Lane.

c. Pounding because you are totally freaked out by the thought of another stressful workweek.

Young love! Ah, so romantic. Like any other bride-to-be Kendra Wilkinson, Playboy model and “Girls Next Door” star, is walking on air. And when asked by People magazine how she’s keeping fit for her big day, the 23-year-old extolled the health benefits of good sex! “A lot of it,” her fiancé, Philadelphia Eagles player Hank Baskett, added.

Really, what else would you expect one of Hugh Hefner’s former “girlfriends” to say? But the girl’s got a point. A healthy sex life—from the deed itself to the messy cleanup afterwards—does a body good in all kinds of ways.

Although men and women have experienced more equal employment opportunities in recent decades, men still connect their masculinity to their role as breadwinner. And when men feel insecure about their jobs or fear becoming redundant at work, they’re more likely to be stressed or depressed than women, according to a study conducted in Britain by Cambridge University. More women than men have lost their jobs in Britain during the recession and a recent poll released earlier this year showed that women, more than men, were worried about losing their jobs, so you’d think women would be the depressed ones. Not so! Even when unemployed men found an insecure job, their psychological health didn’t improve. For unemployed women, on the other hand, finding an insecure job helped restore psychological health. Men may be better at saving face in a crisis, but women, it seems, are more equipped to deal with the crisis—after the tears and screaming, that is. [Reuters]

We’ve all seen the commercial that asks, “Where does depression hurt?” And anyone who’s been depressed knows that it hurts everywhere. But did you know that depression can damage the physical health of a woman more than a man?

The first year of marriage is the hardest, I’d been told many times by my friends. While I wasn’t sure if I was prepared for the uncertain road that lay ahead, I certainly felt like I’d gotten fair warning and couldn’t expect to be surprised by the challenges that would come once I entered marriage. Once the wedding is over, it’s the two of you, making a life together, and that’s not easy for anyone.

So, I felt ready to encounter squabbles and misunderstandings and the taking-for-granted that comes when you know someone really well and expect to be around them for a long time. When something came up, I could tell myself, “OK, this is normal.”

But there were some other parts of newlywed life that bummed me out, stuff that I never thought would have mattered to me ... until it did. 

Not long ago, I met a guy that reminded me of that sexy NPR storyteller Ira Glass. Instantly, I fell in nerd-love with this doppelganger. After dating for a while, though, we realized we had only one thing in common: sex. So we decided to be friends with benefits. According to a Michigan State University study, sixty-percent of college co-eds have been involved in an FWB relationship, and plenty of my thirty-something girlfriends were doing it to stay satisfied, so I figured I’d give the laid back, no-romantic-attachments approach to getting laid a whirl. A year later, faux-Ira and I still hang out and hump. After our most recent rendezvous last weekend, I began to wonder what I’m doing. What are the real benefits to friends with benefits? Sure, now I have an in-case-of-sexual-emergency-hit-Glass-lookalike. At the same time, I’ve started to realize my situation is causing me to question the meaning of friendship, challenging my chances at romances, and wobbling my emotional stability.

Though the stigma is lessening, men are still far more likely than women to let their depression go untreated. Blame it on Rambo, Brando, or the lure of the martini, but many guys still aren’t getting the help they need. As the traditionally stressful, dark days of winter set in, here are some signs that the guy you love might be suffering from more than a loss in fantasy football ...

Last week I wrote a blog post about the 10 Ways To Survive The First Week Of Heartbreak. Just to be clear, these tips referenced the things that helped me personally during that rough week and certainly should not be taken as gospel for every single person reading The Frisky. I mean, that would be kind of unfair to those of you who are not within driving distance of an amusement park that throws a Gay Night party every year! Jokes aside, I also did not intend to imply that “popping pills” was something everyone should run out and do. In the interest of full-disclosure, I’ve been on anti-d’s (as we call ‘em) for the last year and a half (for a variety of reasons, in conjunction with talk therapy), so I didn’t just start taking them because my lame-o fiance dumped me. That said, I do know that being on them helped me get through that first week (and continue to help me get through the second and third).

The comments and emails we received that were concerned I was too flippantly recommending that the heartbroken should pop pills (truthfully, just a shout out to Jacqueline Susann!) made me think we should address the issue in depth. So, after the jump, two women in their 20’s who have taken psychiatric medication and can report on their positive and negative experiences.