Stress and psoriasis can go hand-in-hand. For some people, stress can trigger a psoriasis flare-up, and the outbreaks themselves can be stressful. “Psoriasis is unpredictable,” says Madelyn Petrow-Cohen, who has moderate psoriasis and is a licensed clinical social worker and therapist in New York and New Jersey. “You can do something one time and have it work to clear your skin. But maybe then it doesn’t work the next time, which stresses people out; psoriasis affects how you feel and look, which can be frustrating.”
Doctors encourage people with psoriasis to avoid stress, especially because it can impact other potential health risks, including heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Nehal N. Mehta, MD, director of inflammatory risk at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, specializes in psoriasis care and recommends that his patients do yoga or meditate, or take 20 minutes of quiet time to help manage stress. Here are a few other suggestions on how to help a loved one with psoriasis minimize stress:
Help your loved one get great care. “People don’t necessarily get the best treatment for psoriasis, which can bring on stress,” says Julie Nelligan, a clinical psychologist in private practice who specializes in health psychology in Portland, OR. “Look for a dermatologist who is knowledgeable about psoriasis, connects with you and is helpful.” Help your loved one further by finding others who can provide referrals and offer to go with them to their doctors' appointments. Assure them that you will help continue the doctor search until, together, you find the right provider—and treatment.
Tell your loved one to say, “No.” Have your loved one reevaluate activities to determine if it's possible to eliminate any extra obligations that are causing stress, such as chairing an event or relandscaping the yard. Then, help make changes to lighten the load. Eliminating big tasks (or just renegotiating their scope) can allow a person with psoriasis to regain valuable free time and reduce stress levels, says Nelligan.
Avoid bad habits. Stress can prompt some people to indulge in alcohol, drugs, cigarettes and unhealthy foods, says Nelligan. Encourage your loved one to stick to a healthy routine (getting lots of rest and eating right) and avoid being too sedentary. Refraining from unhealthy behavior during stressful times can help prevent other health problems such as heart disease and depression—two diseases linked to psoriasis.
Provide support. If you think your loved one needs more emotional support than you can provide, suggest professional psoriasis support groups or one-on-one therapy, says Petrow-Cohen.
Emphasize the positive in your loved one. Problems arise when one’s self-esteem becomes intertwined with psoriasis. Give your loved one a boost with reminders that everyone deserves happiness. “Don’t let psoriasis rob someone you care about of happiness,” says Petrow-Cohen. “It is possible to embrace life.”
BMI Online. Industry analysis and forecasts on political, economic, and health risks in 55 countries. UCB does not subscribe to the BMO country analyses.
Center for Systemic Peace (Polity IV). Sponsor of the Integrated Network for Societal Conflict Research (INSCR) which has data on armed conflict and interventions, political regime characteristics, armed conflict, state fragility, and much more.
CIRI Human Rights Data Project. Data measuring national government respect for internationally recognized human rights instruments from 1981-2011.
Comparative Constitutions Data. Investigates the sources and consequences of constitutional choices by collecting and analyzing data on the formal characteristics of constitutions for most independent states since 1789.
Correlates of War. Data on wars, non-state wars, and interstate disputes dating back to the 19th century. Associated or correlated measures include membership in international organizations, religion, alliances, colonial dependencies, diplomatic exchanges, and more
Cross National Time Series. A single longitudinal nation-level data series spanning 200 years and over 200 countries covering a variety of demographic, social, political, and economic topics. This is a licensed resource that may only be used at UC Berkeley
CQ Moneyline. Tracking of the flow of money in politics at the federal level with some state information. Enables tracking of contributions from Political Action Committees (PACs), individual donors to politicians, elected officials, and party committees.
CQ Voting and Elections Collection. Documents and data, background information and definitions, and historical material on elections and the electoral process in America. A data set of voting/election statistics is available.
Database of Political Institutions (DPI). Data on the political institutions and regime characteristics of countries from 1975.
Data Planet. Access to data points from local, state and international governments and organizations. Allows for customization of the data by selecting subjects, variable of interest, and the ability to view your data in side-by-side tables, charts and maps.
Democracy Times Series Data. Contains data on the social, economic and political characteristics of 191 nations with over 600 variables from 1971.
Global Terrorism Databases. Open-source databases with information on terrorist events around the world from 1970. Includes data on domestic as well as international terrorist incidents with more than 140,000 cases.
International Military Intervention. Records events involving “the movement of regular troops or forces (airborne, seaborne, shelling, etc) of one country inside another, in the context of some political issue or dispute.”
International Studies Compendium Project. Selection of data sets of interest to international political economy: interstate and intrastate conflict data, peace-building, civil war, political repression and more.
Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR). Consortium of institutions working to acquire and preserve social science data. Maintained at University of Michigan.
The Macro Data Guide. Comprehensive guide to macro data broken down by country and topic. Includes the following subcategories.
OECD iLibrary. Publications and statistical data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), including country studies, reports, and datasets.
Political Terror Scale. Codes countries on human-rights and the rule of law, based on reports from Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department.
Proquest Statistical Insight. Provides access to indexing and statistical tables from three key sources with tables and links to many full text documents from 1994-present.
PRS Group Country Data. Political risk data for 140 countries from 1980, as well as macroeconomic data and Political Risk Services (PRS) forecasting on bureaucracy, corruption, civil disorders, ethnic tensions, poverty, inflation, terrorism, etc.
RAND State Statistics. Statistics from all 50 states on business & economics; population and demographics; education; community; health & socioeconomic; government finance; census; politics & public opinion.
RAND Database of Worldwide Terrorism Incidents. Records terrorist incidents that occurred from 1968-2009.
Statistical Abstract of the United States. Statistics on social and economic conditions in the United States as well as selected international data. Earlier versions of the Statistical Abstract from 1878 to 2012 are available on the U.S Census Bureau's web site.
State Fragility Index and Matrix, 1995-2014. Provides annual state fragility, effectiveness, and legitimacy indices and the 8 component indicators for the world's 167 countries with populations greater than 500,000 in 2014.
Votes in the UN General Assembly. UN General Assembly votes from 1946, via Eric Voeten, George Washington University.
​World Bank Open Data. Collection of free global data from the World Bank. See especially Worldwide Governance Data with indicators of corruption, rule of law, government accountability and effectiveness, regulatory environment, political stability, etc. ​
United Nations Peacekeeping Statistics. Troop and Police contributors by country, gender breakdowns, and fact sheets.
Field Poll. An independent, non-partisan, media-sponsored public opinion news service. Each year the poll covers a wide range of political and social topics examining California public opinion.
Odum Archive Dataverse. A repository for all Louis Harris public opinion data and Roper Center nonproprietary poll data. A catalog of more than 2800 studies and series in its data holdings arranged by title, principal investigator, and subject.
Polling the Nations. A compilation of public opinion polls and surveys from more than 6,500 national, state, local and special surveys in the U.S. and over 60 other countries. The surveys date from 1986 and contain information on over 3,000 social, political and economic issues
Roper Center for Public Opinion Research. Domestic and international survey data. The Center's Public Opinion Location Library (iPOLL) gives online access to a database including poll questions asked in US from 1936 to present.
World Database of Happiness. Research findings on subjective enjoyment of life that brings together findings scattered throughout many studies.
World Values Survey. National surveys conducted in almost 100 countries. Largest non-commercial, cross-national, time series investigation of human beliefs and values.
Articles, papers, books on biological and biomedical topics. Includes literature reviews. [1926 - present]
Locate single chemical toxicity data for aquatic life, terrestrial plants and wildlife. Contains 472,705 records of single chemical toxicity information for aquatic and terrestrial life. Data is extracted from primarily peer-reviewed sources. [1972 - present].
Worldwide technical literature pertaining to the marine and brackish-water environment. [1981 - present]
PubMed is an excellent resource for finding recent protocols. In addition, the following protocol databases contain the full text of current protocols in a variety of disciplines:
Current Protocols [Wiley] Access Current Protocols in Bioinformatics, Control Protocols in Field Analytical Chemistry, and others in the Current Protocols series
Start with the databases for articles, technical reports, conference papers, government documents and more. Zootaxa,