Understanding depression – 10 key facts

In a strange way, recognising “I am depressed” is good news, because depression isn’t something you have to just put with. Before knowing you were depressed you thought “things are hopeless.” Afterwards you know, “there’s a reason I feel things are hopeless, and I can do a lot to change that feeling.”  Here are some key facts about depression.

• Depression may come on:
  >>> for no apparent reason at all, or
  >>> it may result from life-events such as: bereavement, adversity, trauma or stress including problems in relationships, career, money, redundancy, health or relocation to a new town or country or
  >>> it may arise from long-buried unconscious emotions or from childhood circumstances
• Depression comes in different types and flavours. It can be mild, with breaks in the clouds during which you are happy, or it may be a terrible darkness which crushes life: “I just can’t go on”. It can be unipolar depression (always down), or bipolar manic-depression (wildly up and down.) It can be associated with events such as winter (SAD) or giving birth (post-natal depression.)
• People with mild depression often don’t realise that the continual grey lack of enjoyment is, in fact, depression. Recognising that it is is excellent news, because depression is something with an excellent prospect of cure.
• Most depression is psychological. Only a small percentage is an organic brain dysfunction. The word depression covers a spectrum from feeling sometimes down but sometime OK (purely psychological), through feeling permanently down (mixed, very often psychological), to, at the very far extreme end, profound depression which is entirely medical. It is not easy to cleanly divide medical from emotional depression, and nor is it needed to. See also next item.
• Most depression is related to life events or life history, perhaps from long ago, maybe even in childhood. The best way to help such “reactive depression” is the right kind of talking therapy. Depression which is not caused by such life events is best dealt with by anti-depressants. In between is an area where both anti-depressants and psychotherapy have value. Post-natal depression could be of either type.
• Depression may be severe and crushing, or a mild greyness which comes and goes.
• It may be long or short term. Depression can vanish quickly.
• Stressed and depressed go together. Stress is a key cause and many of the symptoms overlap with those of stress.
• An existing very pessimistic or negative mindset can contribute to depression, as can genetic factors. Buried childhood emotions are commonly found to be the source of negative mindset, and healing of these is possible.
• For many, depression carries a stigma. As a result, some people are unwilling to tell their friends they are depressed, or seek help. Actually, recognising “I am depressed” is good news, because you don’t just have to cope with depression, it very possible to ovecome it. A combination of emotional and action-oriented therapy has enormous potential to get back your energy, motivation, joy and aliveness. My combination of solution-focussed counselling, hypno-psychotherapy and CBT-style self help is very effective. That is so even if the depression is of long standing.

To take the first step to beat depression and get your life back, give me a call today and find out how I can help. Please don’t be shy, I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour initial meeting. Please click here for contact information.

Tablets or talking for depression?

Many people who discover they are depressed wonder “Should I take anti-depressants or go to a therapist?” It’s good to talk to your GP. But unless depression is severe, talking like likely to be very effective; and sometimes, at least for a short period, medication is definitely the right choice.

(See below for a link to a checklist for when when you should for sure go to the doctor.)

Most depression is not a disease, but is caused by life-events, how we think about things, whether we are getting our needs met, and by unconscious feelings and emotions.  In this case, the right type of talking therapy is an excellent way to help you get back your aliveness and motivation.

Sometimes medication is a life-saver

At the same time, in some situations, medication is the life-saver. I’m not suggesting “Prozac in the drinking water.” But doctors now have some subtle and helpful medicines available. In correctly targeted cases of depression, well-chosen antidepressants can relieve the acute pain sufficiently for therapy to help the sufferer change their life. In some cases the anti-depressants are all that is needed. See here for one set of symptoms which can indicate that medication is the right way to treat your depression.

But depression generally isn’t a disease

Here’s one proof that depression is generally not a disease: it is ten times more likely in those born after 1945 than those born earlier. That’s even after factors such as more access to doctors and higher recognition by doctors are rigorously excluded. This has been attributed by researchers to the breakdown of communities and of religious, social and economic certainties, unbridled consumerism, and massive exposure to news media filled with bad news.

Despite that, it is a fact that depression does go hand in hand with altered brain chemicals, in particular, low serotonin levels. And from that fact, the drug companies are keen to argue that being depressed is caused by altered brain chemicals. So, they imply, profitable anti-depressant drugs such as Prozac are the treatment of choice.

However, the facts behind the hype are that Prozac-like antidepressants targeting serotonin levels work in around one third of patients, do some good for another third, and fail completely for the final third. Side effects can be severe and relapse rates are high. Antidepressants are by no means the happy-pill which the pharmaceutical companies claim. [Other, non-serotonin medications exist and have real value for severe, clinical, depression.]

In any case, many people know in their bones that the way to happiness is not a pill. They know that they need to change their lives. And they are right. Brain chemicals change how we think, but happily, how we think changes our brain chemicals. Serotonin levels are only a symptom. Drugs target effects, not causes.

There is excellent evidence that if you are depressed, what really works is the right type of talking therapy. Such therapy:-

• is more effective than anti-depressants,
• has no noxious side effects,
• is much more effective long-term,
• and above all puts control of your life into your hands.

The more feeling depressed comes from your life situation or life history, the more it is talking therapy which can help you get back your vitality, drive, motivation and joy. To take the first step today, give me a ring.  I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour initial meeting. Please click here for contact information.

Treatment for depression (2) Emotional healing

The depressive spiral is what happens when a person turns away from life. That can be inner life as well as outer life. For example, one common cause of depression is stuck grief.

Let’s say that a woman’s husband dies. And she loved him very much, and she’s just so very sad to be without him. If she surrenders to her grief, a paroxysm of bitter pain will seize her. It will feel like her heart is being torn apart. But it is only short-lived: the peak of grief only lasts for a few minutes. And she might feel that peak on a finite number of occasions. And then, while still keeping a place for him in her heart, she can get on with her life.

But maybe she can’t or won’t feel that grief. Then she is turning away from an essential part of her aliveness – her grief. The grief is painful, but it is also a nourishment. Only feeling the grief can give her the gift of a fresh start and a bright future. Without feeling it, she is likely to become depressed. [Stuck grief can manifest in other ways too. Also, stuck grief has an opposite: endless grief, unending tears. This means that there is some other underlying emotion, perhaps guilt or anger, which the person does not acknowledge to themselves.]

Authentic pain is part of aliveness

A key step in her healing process will be, at the right time, to face the fact that her husband is dead. She may weep bitterly, and it may look for a moment as if the depression is worse. But it is not. Authentic pain is part of our aliveness; when you feel it you are alive, not depressed. These are not tears of misery and hopelessness, these are healing tears. This is not understanding, insight, rumination or analysis. It is a courageous step to face reality. It looks as if it is focused on the past, but it is not. It is a strong action, overdue but entirely in the present: the action of saying good-bye so that life can move on.

The un-acknowledged emotion doesn’t have to be grief. It could be anything at all. Depression is also commonly caused by anger which can’t be expressed outwards and then gets turned inwards towards the person’s own self.

These wounds often originate in childhood. Inner child healing (ie hypno-psychotherapy) can be a key tool in therapy for depression.

Fighting depression and winning is entirely possible. The right type of talking therapy works. My combination of life-dynamic counselling, hypno-psychotherapy and action-oriented CBT-style self help can help you to effectively restore your energy, motivation and enjoyment. To make an appointment and take the first step to get your life life back, give me a ring.  Please don’t be shy, I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour initial meeting. My approach is friendly, respectful, and effective. Please click here for contact information.

What helps with depression: (1) Action

Depression is in a way a kind of turning away from life.

The thing that really gives help with depression is action. Action is the enemy which depression fears above all others. Depression is a slumped, collapsed, inward state in which the person lives in their heads instead of in their bodies, and lives in their toxic imaginings rather than engaging the real world head-on. Action breaks free of that. That is why the depression monster always says “nothing will work.” Action is what the monster fears most. The key remedy is to start to do even tiny things which are enjoyable.

To put the same thing differently, a depressed person is in many ways addicted to saying to themselves things like “Nothing will ever go right,” “I know I won’t enjoy it,” “There’s no point in anything.” The person thinks these things are true, and feels that as a consequence of these “truths,” is it inevitable to feel depressed. Actually, it’s the other way round: these are very depressing things to say you oneself. Repeating them in your head over and over is a toxic negative self-hypnosis: if you say over and over “there is no hope,” then of course you will feel hopeless. And it is wierdly addictive to say things like this to yourself. As you break the addiction to saying them, the depression starts to clear.

Typically, depression zeros in on people who either have very negative core beliefs (“I’m no good”) or who attribute very negative meanings to situations (“If I lose this job I’ll never work again.”) . Again, these thoughts and meaning typically carry a strong sense of unquestionable truth: “this is how things are and I can’t change it.” Hypnotherapy allows the person to step right past these beliefs and meanings and discover their own intrinsic treasury of positive and life-affirming beliefs and understanding, and to re-programme the mind positively.

Types of actions that help treat depression

The action-oriented side of coming alive again involves the following.

• Looking at the future you’d love to have, and working to create it in even tiny steps
• Starting to get your needs met despite every inner voice which tells you you are worthless, don’t matter, a failure, not good enough and so on.
• If necessary, learning how to get your needs met..
• Learning new ways for dealing with people and emotions.
• Doing things which are fun and nourish you.
• PHYSICAL ACTIVITY which your body enjoys is hugely important. Exercise is a great natural cure for depression.
• Pulling free from the depressive suction by focusing on the positive no matter how small at first.
• Looking at how you think about things and the meaning you give to events. (If you don’t get a certain promotion, or if someone rejects you, is that really the end of the world?)
• Recognising that negative thinking is an addiction, not a truth, and breaking that addiction.
• Stop waiting to feel happy and energised before taking action. Waiting and waiting to feel good before you can act, is a trap. Instead, discover that actions, even small ones, bring happiness and energy.
• Coming eventually to a point where you tackle life head-on, and deal with difficult issues and situations: either taking external action to change them, or internal action to accept and let go of them. Some of these may be known about, others may be unconscious.

No matter how long you have been depressed, if you would like to take the first step with the potential of reclaiming your vitality, energy and enjoyment of life, then give me a ring.  Please don’t be shy, I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free, no-obligation half-hour initial meeting. Please click here for contact information.

What causes psychological depression?

Some depression is “reactive” ie it arises from evident causes, such as life difficulty of any type – career problems, relationship difficulties, money troubles, bereavement, stress, redundancy, and losses of many kinds including loss of health or relocation to an unfamiliar town.

Depression can also just turn up without apparent reason in someone’s life. This might when there is past unhappiness or tension or lack of love, most likely in childhood, which has never been addressed. The person has grown up feeling somewhere negative or unconfident about themselves, but in every way taking that for granted and never thinking “something is wrong.” But underneath, the negativity erodes their life and turns into depression.

One simple way that everyday life might develop into depression is something like this. First, a person has some difficulty, maybe stress at work. They feel down, and don’t much feel like enjoying themselves. So they start to drop fun things. Maybe they are anyway prone to think “I’m no good.” The work situation is difficult and they keep on telling themselves “this is hopeless.” Maybe they bring work home and have no time for physical activity. Maybe they find it hard to talk to others about themselves, and so draw back from other people; or maybe they’re just not in the mood for socialising. As a result, they get less and less nourishment and reward from life, and start to feel worse and worse. This spirals down and down. Probably, they don’t even realise “I am depressed,” so they don’t reaise there is a problem they can solve. Instead, they take feeling flat and lifeless for granted.

Eventually, the bad feelings latch into place. The person comes to live more and more in their negative fantasies, less and less in their bodies, more and more in a catastrophically imagined future, less and less in the present. The person can no longer even imagine meeting life in any way that will make them feel better. Even if they could take some action, they feel too down to take it: why bother?   All the life energy that should flow out and connect with the world goes round and round in their head, a storm of thoughts about how bad and hopeless things are. Instead of planning action, the person endlessly rehashes the past, chewing the cud over why things went wrong and why they can’t do anything about it all.

This can happen to anyone at all. But it will happen more to people who have unconscious feelings of self-doubt or low worth. Unconscious factors are very important and are often left over from childhood.

Emotional causes of psychological depression

Whatever the life-situation, here are a few of the emotional patterns, typically completely unconscious, which turn up again and again as deep underlying causes of depression of psychological origin. There are many others.

Anger turned inwards. A depressed person is often unconsciously angry, but can’t let themselves feel the anger, let alone express it. Anger is always an outward-directed emotion; you never see a wild animal attacking itself. But if human beings don’t feel safe to direct the anger outwards then they can turn it in and be angry with themselves. The dark hopelessness of depression, with all the beating yourself up – “I’m awful, I’m useless, I’m no good” – is often just this anger, that should go out to someone (maybe a parent or sibling in childhood), turned inwards instead or held in place by a crippling tension.

Sometimes it can be terrifying for someone to begin to acknowledge such forbidden, walled-off anger. It needs to be approached very gently; hypnotherapy is the perfect approach for this.

A variant on this is being in love with anger. Some depressed people have a constant boiling anger which they are in love with. Only when they drop the anger, they get their life back.

Frozen grief. Another way a person can get depressed is a loss which they can’t grieve over. Say that as a child, someone’s mother was present but was too busy to be loving. If mum had been a loving mother and then died, there would have been an obvious loss and the chance to grieve. But if mum is present but just too busy, the loss of mum’s love is gradual and hard to notice. There is no obvious loss – mum is there after all – and no chance for grief. Unless uncovered by hypnotherapy, this sadness can continue a person’s whole life, a depressing gray sadness always in the background which is very deeply depressing.

Again, if someone moves to a new town and loses all their old friends, they may not realise they have suffered a loss and are in grief, and may come to feel depressed.

Turning away from life and action. Depressed people routinely don’t do things they might enjoy, let alone tackle the big issues of their life. The one single key factor in beating depression is taking action in the here and now to start to have fun and get your needs met, and – in time – meet life head-on. Of course, part of the horrible life-sucking quality of depression is loss of interest, loss of motivation, loss of enjoyment. People naturally assume that these feelings provide suffient reason to not take action. But in fact, the lack of action is cause, not effect – the origin of depression is often in not doing enjoyable or necessary things. Indeed, not feeling grief and anger is one form of turning away from life – grief and anger, though painful, are part of our aliveness and turning towards them is in a way an action to turn towards life.

Not getting your needs met. This follows from the previous ones. If you turn away from life, and don’t take action, you won’t get your needs met. Then life is nothing but a drag.

Believing the voice in the mind that tells you that things are hopeless, nothing will ever go well, you can’t cope, it’s all beyond you, you can’t be bothered, what’s the point, etc etc. This voice weaves together all the previous factors and is a destructive companion, yet curiously addictive.

If you have psychological depression then the right talking therapy WORKS. A combination of hypnoanalysis, emotional healing and action-oriented cognitive-behavioural self-help can restore your energy, motivation and enjoyment. To make an appointment and take the first step to get your life life back, give me a ring. I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol, a free half-hour introductory meeting. My approach is friendly, respectful, and very effective. Please click here for contact information.

Are you a teenager or young person looking at depression tests?

If so I would strongly encourage you to talk to someone in confidence. It’s easy to just assume that you have to solve it all on your own and to feel isolated even when you are surrounded by people.
Even when some people don’t understand, there are others who will.
Here are some sources in the UK of confidential support and information about face-to-face counselling:

• Your GP, who may be able to offer counselling and who can also offer medication. It’s always good to talk to your GP.
• The NSPCC website NSPCC website > Helpline with their excellent 24 hour helpline,
  Childline on 0800 1111 for 18’s and under
• The Mix, help and support for under-25’s on www.themix.org.uk
• https://www.selfharm.co.uk/home is a site to help young people with self-harm issues.
• If you are having suicidal thoughts, then there is a specialist helpline for young people and those concerned about them, Hopeline, on 0800 068 41 41. It’s not 24 hours. See http://www.papyrus-uk.org/ for opening hours.
• Here in Bristol, Off The Record, located on St Michael’s Hill, near the BRI, offer young people aged up to 25 free, confidential counselling and support. http://www.otrbristol.org.uk/
• And of course is anyone is feeling suicidal, there is always the Samaritans: 08457 90 90 90 (ROI: 1850 60 90 90) http://www.samaritans.org

If you are a teenager or young person,
looking at online depression tests,
TALK TO SOMEONE.

What are the symptoms of depression?

What does depression feel like? Typical feelings include the following.

• The person may look and feel sad, and move and talk slowly.
• Motivation is lost.
• Previously enjoyable things no longer give pleasure.
• Energy is low. The person may feel lethargic or always tired.
• He or she (depression is twice as common in women) may be very down on themselves, and draw into themselves, away from people and activity.
• They may be tearful and anxious.
• The person may feel down all the time, or have happy periods, or be up and down in mood.
• It may be hard to make decisions.
• There may be aches, pains and physical symptoms the doctor can find no cause for.
• It may feel more like stress than depression – the two overlap a lot.
• There may be feelings of guilt, shame and failure.
• Sex drive and appetite may be low, and there may be weight loss. At the same time, comfort eating when you are depressed is common and may lead to substantial weight gain.
• Sleep is commonly disturbed, often with early waking or perhaps no desire to get out of bed.
• Life seems meaningless.
• The person may feel like a failure.
• The very fact of being depressed may feel like a failure, as the person thinks “my life is fine, I have all these advantages, I ought to be OK”
• The person may feel unmotivated, empty, hopeless and despairing. They just know there’s no way out.
• A depressed person may have suicidal thoughts.

And all of this is way beyond the normal ups and downs of life.

If you come to recognise that “I am depressed,” then take heart – modern therapy can help depression enormously. I use a combination of some of the most effective forms of therapy, solution-oriented brief therapy, hypno-psychotherapy, cognitive-behavioural hypnosis and emotional healing. These have realistic potential to help you bring back the joy, energy and motivation into your life. They can even help you cure depression of long standing. To find out how I can help, give me a call today: 0845-3510604 / 0117-955-0490. I’m happy to answer questions or arrange, in Bristol only, a free, no-obligation half-hour initial meeting.