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Overcoming depression
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Depression is a state of mind: A powerfully negative mood
that interferes with your daily life. Depression is more than
sadness. When you are depressed, you are sad, despondent,
disinterested, lethargic. You feel hopeless or helpless. You
may cry all the time or feel as if you cannot get out of bed
in the morning. Depression affects your body as well as your
mind. In a severe depression, you may feel as if nothing is
pleasant and no one is loveable, least of all you. You may
eat less or you may eat more, but less often. You may feel
at night as if you are starting to snap out of it, only to
awaken in the morning feeling worse. This state may have been
brought on by an adversity in your life or it may seem to
have settled in on its own, due to a change of seasons or
a change of lifestyle or for no apparent reason at all.
Over coming depression.
All of us are sad at times, and most people are depressed
at one time or another. The difference is that sadness is
a normal response to a loss or non-preferable change of circumstance,
while depression is an extreme response that makes it difficult
for you to move beyond the difficulty with which you are confronted.
For most people, depression lifts eventually. But sometimes
it does not lift soon enough, and you need help to overcome
it. There is research that helps to point you in the direction
of effective help.
There are those who would call depression a disease. A mood
is a mood, not a disease. There are more useful and comfortable
and less useful and comfortable moods, but neither a terribly
bad one nor a terribly good one is a disease, though it is
certainly a serious problem to be dealt with. In fact, depression
can be a life-threatening problem if the despondency leads
one to feel suicidal. However serious it is, it is still a
state of mind and body that can be altered with some hard
work on your part.
Modern sources from physicians to television ads tend to
tell you that this disease of depression is caused by a chemical
imbalance. There are a few things wrong with that statement.
The first is that this implies that if your chemistry is out
of balance, you must have a disease and that if this is the
case, there is a pill to cure it and if that is the case,
you must take the pill as nothing else will do. There are
several misleading aspects to this sequence. First, as a biological
machine, you go into and out of balance of various sorts of
chemicals all the time. Your body works to restore and maintain
its equilibrium all day long. For example, when your body
is short of fluids, a chemical signal heads to the brain to
advise you that there is an imbalance, causing another signal
to make you aware of feeling thirsty—but this is only
after the imbalance has started the chain of chemical messengers
into motion. This is a natural process that occurs frequently
and is built in to your body’s natural mechanisms for
establishing and maintaining balance. Thus, every imbalance
is not a disease, though it is a need that should impel some
action to correct it.
Unlike thirst and fluid balance, depression is not a very
clear cut biological process. First, when it comes to your
mood, there is no one chemical responsible. Regardless of
what you see on television ads, there is no single neurotransmitter
system in charge of whether you are depressed or euphoric.
Second, even if there were only one, there is no evidence
that it can be simply restored by the addition of a pill,
as what a pill contains and how the mindbody system utilizes
it are only loosely related. Third, even if there were only
one neurotransmitter system implicated in clinical depression,
there are other ways to restore the equilibrium than pills.
Research indicates that both psychotherapy and regular exercise
are quite effective at lifting mood, in fact, with more long-lasting
results than medications and better resistance to relapse!
1,2,3
Overcoming depression.
Depression, from a biological standpoint, is a low energy
state. The organism moves little, does little, and generally
consumes little. It is much akin to an animal in hibernation—all
the systems slow down, and responses are sluggish. SAD—Seasonal
Affective Disorder, is a logical extrapolation of a pretty
normal seasonal energy change—in times gone by there
was less to do in winter, less light, less food, and less
heat, so economizing on energy expenditure was sensible. In
modern times, we have light and food and heat, so we technically
could expend the same amount of energy in winter as in summer,
but indeed, some folks’ systems do not see it that way
and begin to hibernate, storing food, moving little, and doing
little. It has long been known that exposure to full spectrum
light in winter helps counteract SAD. So does increasing your
activity levels. So does psychotherapy geared at changing
the thought pattern that affirms that it indeed is too hard
to activate your system in the cold, dark winter months. Thus,
while SAD is essentially an extreme expression of a normal
state of being, there are many ways to alter the negative
mood that results.
In other types of depression that are not seasonal, a variety
of causes from having endured a personal tragedy, to an abnormal
hormonal reaction to childbirth, to brain damage caused by
stroke can be responsible. The great news is that regardless
of the cause of your depression, psychotherapy is a very effective
method of overcoming it. In particular, the cognitive therapies
that teach you to pinpoint your depressive thoughts and replace
them with accurate thoughts are highly effective tools for
altering a debilitating mood, regardless of cause.
However it begins, depression is kept in place with negative
thinking. Depression can almost always be successfully alleviated
by a single method or a combination of methods, notably some
form of cognitive therapy and some imagery or relaxation work
and an increase in activity levels. The various schools of
cognitive therapy depend upon specific techniques directed
at changing your inaccurate thoughts to create a lasting change
in mood. Since, regardless of the cause of the depressed mood,
it is always sustained and worsened by negative and unrealistic
thoughts, the key to achieving a positive mood, or euphoria,
lies in changing the thinking. The errors or distortions are
identified, disputed rationally, and replaced with accurate
assessments of your life situation. Not only does this technique
effect mood enhancement, but it also helps you to become relapse-proof,
having learned new ways of thinking and new coping skills
that can provide lifelong protection against relapse. Unlike
cognitive therapy, which has been shown repeatedly to have
long-term effects at altering depressed mood, there is significant
evidence that much of the relief obtained from antidepressant
medications is due to placebo effect and the natural healing
that takes place over time.4 Treatment enhancement is often
obtained by teaching relaxation techniques or the use of clinical
hypnosis or therapeutic imagery, with the goal of quieting
the nervous system and healing past inner wounds.
Dr. Carol Low, the psychologist at the Center for Conscious
Living has been trained in Rational-Emotive Behavior Therapy
and Cognitive Behavior Therapy, as well as clinical hypnosis,
which form an effective combination of methods to rapidly
alleviate even severe depressive symptoms, counteract biological
factors that intervene in mood stability, and help you to
learn how to avoid depression in the future. You can elevate
your mood, discover and develop your inner strengths, build
new coping skills, alter stuck thought patterns, and enhance
your feelings of self-acceptance, self-efficacy, and self-confidence.
References
1) Butler, A. C., & Beck, J. S. (2000). Cognitive therapy
outcomes: A review of meta-analyses. Journal of the Norwegian
Psychological Association, 37, 1-9.
2) Springen, K, (2004) The Serenity Workout: Regular exercise
can strengthen the mind as well as the muscles, and studies
show it improves mood, too. Newsweek, 9/27/04.
3) Blumenthal et al. (1999), "Effects of Exercise Training
on Older Patients With Major Depression." Archives of
Internal Medicine 159, 2349-56.) “Effects of Exercise
Training on Older Patients With Major Depression.” Archives
of Internal Medicine 159, pp2349-56.)
4) Kirsch & Sapirstein, (1998) Listening to Prozac but
Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication,
Prevention & Treatment, 1998.
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