Depression has increased dramatically in the United States. A person is 10 times more likely to have severe depression today than his/her grandparents were. The first step to overcoming depression is to understand what it is.
The symptoms include feeling down in the mornings, fatigue, feeling guilty, feeling worthless, poor concentration, inability to make decisions, sleep problems (either excessive sleep or difficulty sleeping), gaining or losing weight (5% of body weight or more), loss of interest or enjoyment in activities, thoughts about death or suicide, and restlessness. If you have 5 of these for a period of 2 weeks or more, you may be clinically depressed.
The first step to overcoming depression should be to get counseling. Most people benefit from counseling, and it is the safest treatment option. Anti-depressant medications are indicated in some cases, but those medications can have negative side effects. The most common anti-depressant medications are called SSRI (selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors). About two-thirds of the people who take these report an inability to experience orgasm. There are other types of anti-depressant medications which do not have that side effect. Research has shown that people who get both counseling and medication have the greatest improvement. They improve significantly more that people who only take medication.
If you injured your shoulder, you would get the rest and physical therapy that the doctor prescribed. You would take medication too, because you want immediate pain relief. But without the therapy, healing would be slower, and the shoulder might even freeze up and lose range of motion. Medication can help ease pain, but it is the therapy that promotes healing. Getting counseling for depression is like getting physical therapy for an injured shoulder.
Epictetus was a Greek philosopher who lived about 2,500 years ago. He observed that people are not affected as much by things that happen to them as they are by what they think about the things that happen. This is one of the foundations of cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). Martin Seligman, Ph.D., is a counseling psychologist who wrote a book called Learned Optimism. He points out that we all explain to ourselves why things happen. There are three crucial dimensions to our explanatory styles. They are permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization. People who believe that things are permanent (not temporary or reversible), and pervasive (not occasional) tend to develop depression. Depressed, pessimistic people also tend to believe that bad events are their personal fault. They take blame for bad things, but refuse to take credit for good things.
In counseling, I teach people to correct the negative thinking patterns of assuming things are permanent, pervasive, and personal failures. With depressed and angry children, I often teach them that when a parent tells them “No,” it can mean “not right now.” Angry and depressed children mistakenly believe that the word “No” is permanent. If a parent says the child can’t have a toy at a store, it is still possible that the child might get the toy next week or for a birthday present. When a child understands that “No” is not necessarily a permanent answer, he is less likely to throw tantrums and then give up in depression.
The thinking patterns which produce most people’s depression often begin in childhood. In therapy with you, I might ask if you believe you always fail at things. If you do, I would ask how that feels. Then I would ask you to focus on that feeling and recall childhood memories in which you had that feeling. Then we would explore your beliefs and emotions during each of those childhood memories. Changing the beliefs and thoughts during the childhood memories will help you make a more permanent change in your thought patterns. For example, if you started believing “I always mess things up” when you were a child and spilled milk and got yelled at, then that must be corrected and changed in the memory when you started that belief. Having that belief as a child would have made you continue to believe that when good things happened it couldn’t have been because of you, because you believed that you “always mess things up.” It would also have made you believe that whenever bad things happened it was always your fault, since “you always mess things up.” A lifetime of thinking that way can cause depression.
It is important to understand that our thoughts produce chemicals in our brains and also produce emotions. If you think about a time when you were almost in a car wreck and had to slam on your breaks, your heart rate and blood pressure go up. Just thinking about the incident causes the physiological changes that were triggered by the event. Adrenaline was released and you felt anxiety or fear. Since our thoughts trigger our biochemistry and our emotions, we can change our biochemistry and our emotions by changing our thinking patterns.
Hopelessness and helplessness are two thinking patterns which are often associated with depression. Calling for a counseling appointment is taking a step toward getting better. You are not the helpless victim of other people and circumstances unless you chose to accept that viewpoint. Taking the action of scheduling an appointment affirms that you can and will do something to help yourself, giving you hope. Call (361)937-8711 to schedule your first appointment.
