Depression is a powerful emotion that fogs your thinking and takes away your energy. However, this does not need to be the case. Contact us today for Fast Effective treatment and learn how to quickly and safely break the cycle and restore your sense of calm.
We work with the fundamental truth that people do not develop mental illness when their innate emotional needs are being met in balance. Working with this organising idea we employ techniques from various therapies that have proven effective (interpersonal, cognitive behavioural, solution focused) while using new knowledge that shows the importance of vividly creating new expectations in the mind to get you kick started again.
Because depression, like any strong emotion, fogs our thinking, emotional arousal is reduced to start with. We have a range of ways to do this so you can begin to think more clearly about the situation that is causing you to worry. This in itself is hugely therapeutic for most people since no one else is likely to have explained how and why the feelings arose.
If it emerges that there is trauma behind the depression, then we can resolve this quickly and effectively using a visualisation technique during relaxation and guided imagery.
The Rise and Rise of Depression.
Depression is the number one mental health problem. Rates of depression are continually rising and increasingly striking younger people. Changing environmental conditions have led to a dramatic rise in people's expectations from life. At the very same time, change is undermining the traditional buffers and social skills that once enabled people to negotiate stressful changes in their lives. It is not hard to see that the rapid rate of technological change , and the increase in material wealth which this has brought about, has raised everyone's expectations whilst creating job insecurity, increasing stresses on family life and breaking down traditional communities.
The good news is that massive research, some 100,000 studies, has been carried out into the causes and effectiveness of various treatments for depression. The results are unambiguous. We now know what causes depression, how to treat it and, more importantly, how to prevent its recurrence.
Drug companies are spending over 3 billion pounds worldwide promoting the view that depression is a biological illness that can only be treated effectively with drugs. Today, contrary to overwhelming evidence, this view is still widely accepted in this country. It happens to be wrong. There are still people operating under the mistaken assumption that depression is an event-driven phenomenon. We now know that depression is not caused by specific events per se because the majority of people exposed to adverse life circumstances do not develop depression as a result. Yet a significant percentage of people will. That there is a biological component to depression is undisputed since all our emotions are expressed in the language of biochemistry.
The important point is that depression is not caused by adverse life experiences. It is caused by the way we have learned to respond to adverse life experiences. This should lead us to begin to recognise that, if we encourage depressed people to look for the bad things that happened to them, and to explore and open up their hurt feelings, we are doing them a disservice. They may, of course, temporarily feel some emotional relief, but research shows that they are much more likely to stay depressed, and to have repeated bouts of depression, than if they are given a therapy that addresses the underlying psychological process.
In 1995 the American Psychological Association published a meta review of hundreds of efficacy studies in the treatment of depression. The evidence was unambiguous - psychotherapy was at least as effective as medicine on all counts and more effective on some. But it has to be the right kind of psychotherapy. The therapy has to be able to teach clients a way of relating to the world that challenges their depressive world view. They have to be helped to discover how to step out of the way they see things, to literally step out of their negative trance.
Why Depression is Essentially a REM Sleep Disorder.
We have known for some time that depressed people have a very high level of physiological arousal. We also know they do a lot of negative thinking. We know too that depressed people suffer from insomnia and other sleep disorders, have disturbed REM sleep and wake up exhausted, unable to activate or motivate themselves. It is also known that both anti-depressants and certain forms of psychotherapy are often effective in lifting clinical depression. But there has never been a clear understanding that links all these facts. With the discovery of why we evolved to dream, however we have the missing piece of the jigsaw puzzle that brings all this information together in one clear picture: a complete psycho-biological explanation for clinical depression.
Dreaming is the means of discharging emotionally arousing introspection's from the previous day that haven't been expressed. Depressed people are excessively negatively introspecting because of a failure to get their essential emotional needs met. Emotional arousal automatically forces the brain into a r eactive, black-and-white mode of thinking, reducing its ability to think in more subtle, objective ways. So, after a setback, someone with an essentially pessimistic outlook will inevitably catastrophise their interpretations of life events and excessively introspect about these interpretations, which puts excessive pressure on the dreaming process and distorts the REM sleep system causing excessive autonomic arousal discharge, leading in turn to physical exhaustion and subsequent clinical depression.
We can now see that all therapies that are effective at lifting depression break this cycle. All antidepressant's reduce or normalise REM sleep. All effective psychotherapies break the negative introspection cycle and focus the client on solving problems and engaging with life again.
How Depression may Present.
In young children depression may manifest as apathy and severe separation anxiety, in which the child clings frantically to parent, refuses to leave them long enough to go to school and is haunted by fears of death (or parents' death).
In adolescents the most prominent symptoms may be sulkiness, negativity, irritability, withdrawal, complaints of not being understood and some times antisocial behavior.
In the elderly - apathy and difficulties in thinking (e.g. memory loss, mild disorientation) may be the most obvious signs. Patients may present to the doctor with physical symptoms such as lower back pain, insomnia or migraine.
Doctors must ask about other symptoms to rule out depression.
Gender Differences.
Three revealing questions -
Why do women take longer (on average, 50% longer) to recover from a depressive episode?
Why do women suffer from depression twice as frequently as men?
Why are male suicide rates three times higher?
The single most important answer to these questions is the difference in style of communication between man and women. Men have been socialised for problem solving and action. Women have been socialised to build empathy through exploring feelings. Women therefore ruminate more about depression.
Effective Techniques to Help with Depression
|
|
Written without jargon and full of practical advice, this best-selling book is easy-to-read and ideal for anyone who either suffers from depression, or who would like to help others who do.
How to Lift Depression - Fast
|
|
|
Human Givens College SeminarUnderstanding The Cycle of Depression.
Human Givens College WorkshopHow to Lift Depression - A practical skills-based day.
Human Givens InstituteWeb page on Depression.
