Fixing Depression, Therapy for All
I suffer depression. From where it comes I am clueless. Can I myself help?
The world is growing and depression is growing within it. A survey carried out by Statistics Canada in 2004 found that 6% of Canadian children are suffering from depression. A 2002 Harvard study found that depressive disorders in children are increasing at a rate of 23% per year. About 15% of the populations of most developed countries are enduring depression.
As someone who has suffered his share of depression, I know that statistics like these do not necessarily encourage depressed people – they may discourage them. One might say, “Look, there are lots of others who feel the same way, there is depression support for you!” If someone had said this to me ten years ago, it certainly wouldn’t have made any impact.
Many people are seeking depression therapy for themselves, but the question of how to treat anxiety and depression remains open for debate.
I can’t pinpoint the first time I felt overwhelmingly alone and ignored, but certainly I felt this way in both elementary and high school. Depressive episodes vary to some degree, but all are united by general feelings of extreme guilt or sadness, worthlessness, hopelessness, and helplessness.
What an incredible arsenal of monsters. Not only are victims sapped of their worth, in the past and present, but often they have a strong conviction that they cannot be helped, and thus the future is dark too. These surreal and invisible minions of depression are ruthless – they attack the potential for happiness and the ability to fight back – one’s will and one’s hope.
At sixteen, I shocked myself when I took a dull knife to my wrist. In retrospect, I was not really contemplating suicide, but was clearly seeking some help. A couple years later, I turned to my doctor for advice. She prescribed me Amitriptyline, an anti-depressant which I took for a number of months with notable effect. However, I stopped taking the pills because I felt that only my symptoms were being treated, not the problem’s source. I wanted to really fix the problem, something I believe involves more of a personal undertaking than a balancing of chemicals.
I struggled with myself through college and university, at every turn of depression asking what was really happening, trying to be honest with myself.
One obstacle for me was the method by which I defined cause and effect. I think most young people see the world as external to themselves, and look for causes to their own reactions in that external world. If a softball hit you in the nose, you might think that the softball, or the force it exerted on you, or the pain you felt made you feel angry or embarrassed. You might feel that something outside of your control caused you to have the emotional response you did.
But what if your response was a learned one and changeable? I never once considered my own perception to be a possible contributor to my depression – after all, not many children are taught that what they feel is something they have any control over. Most adults too view their feelings and thoughts as naturally uncontrollable phenomena.
In university, I took two philosophy courses on human existence (existentialism), which helped me to explore my being from a number of fresh angles. I had never before considered, for instance, that the things I believed to be real or true were real or true because I let them be, or because I made them to be. My self-image specifically became potentially controllable. Around this time I entered into my first intimate relationship in about seven years. Classically, love-interests bring about the tightest depression in me.
The real beginning of the end of depression occurred when I picked up a book titled Feeling Good. I read this book a number of times and was captured by how well it described my personal weaknesses. Furthermore, it introduced to me to cognitive therapy, which I now use a great deal. I have never been one to see a therapist, in large part due to a faith in fixing things myself, but if I ever reconsidered, I would see a cognitive therapist.
Cognitive therapy focuses on errors in the way one thinks, behaves, or responds emotionally. This type of therapy hinges heavily on the belief that one’s “natural response” to external stimuli can be modified. This makes it a well-suited depression therapy for anyone who has a sense of the wide changeability of the human being.
If I reach way back into memory, I can remember retraining myself to write the lowercase letter ‘a’ differently than I had been taught. This happened somewhere in the first few years of elementary school. When it became automatic to write the ‘a’ in the reformed way, I was amazed that I could change my habits so easily.
The point I want to make is this: A brain is organized in certain ways, the result of our teachers, our environments, our friends. Some of these organizations can be detrimental to good mental health, and may cause one to draw convincing conclusions about one’s own worthlessness. These ‘errors’ in logic are kinks that many brains share, and should not be blamed on the person. The brain can be reorganized and retrained by a worthy teacher – and the best teachers are ourselves.
The best depression therapy for anyone who suffers from depression is to change his or her unhealthy responses to external events, in both the mind (thoughts) and in the heart (feelings). It becomes more difficult when we believe (tell ourselves) that we can’t change, so we must be careful and pay attention to what we believe is impossible. Feelings of sadness and suffering don’t just flip off like a switch, we have to be patient and work with our reactions when we can.
When we begin to explore ourselves under the umbrella of this plasticity, this ability to help our personality, then our potential to transcend obstacles – transcend ourselves – becomes very tangible.
***
Featured at Carnival of Positive Thinking on July 5th, 2009 and Brain Blogging on July 11th, 2009
