Depression - Some Good News

As rated by American doctors, the most frequent medical problem is depression. It seems patients make appointments because of other symptoms (stomach trouble, sleep problems, allergies), and then the reason for the symptoms turns out to be depression. Typically, doctors then will prescribe anti-depressants - even though the patients come in about other symptoms - and after a few weeks, the symptoms fade and the patient feels more or less okay. Because the doctor is usually a General practice or Internal Medicine physician, he or she will have neither time nor training for much else. As a consequence, drugs are by far the most frequent method for dealing with depression.

What's fascinating is that, while more drugs are now available (at greater costs) the quality of medical treatment hasn't improved in more than fifty years. That's the conclusion of a 1999 US government study on depression. Further, they concluded that typical psychotherapy, drugs (including SSRIs such as Prozac and Paxil), and no treatment at all seemed to provide similar results after about six months.

What does seem to work is changing one's thinking. That"s great advice, but left unaddressed is the question, "How do I do that?" In studies, one psychotherapy model stands as being more useful for depression, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Using CBT the therapist works with the client to change negative, destructive thought patterns.

In fact, changing old habits of thinking (and feeling and beliefs and reactions) is an easily learned skill, but if you are already depressed, you will have to go to the trouble of learning. The good news is that you can do it with a very few hours of work.

Elements of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy are in the recipe for NeuroLinguistic Programming and other, newer, alternative therapies that have all shown great success with depression. And, of course, the only side effects from managing your thinking is that you feel better, which cannot be said for any of the currently used drugs.

It"s probably true that some forms of depression of some patients may be best helped with drugs. But for most of us who are just "beat up" by grief, loss, or the pace and intensity of modern living, there are, fortunately, some wonderfully effective new ways of dealing with the most common medical problem in our country. Try finding practitioners who do NeuroLinguistic Reprogramming, (NLP), Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) or the rather newer "Energy Therapies" which have exploded into the world in the last few years. The clear leader in this last group is Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), which is being used with perhaps unprecedented success in a huge number of problems.

Perhaps the toughest part of depression is admitting that it might be what is going on in one"s own life. Somehow, it carries an unwarranted stigma. But the stigma is unwarranted and there are many new resources that can help. If you think you or a loved one even might be depressed, it would be worth the small investment of time it takes to find out more about these new approaches. Because medical (drug) treatment of depression hasn"t improved in more than fifty years, and you don't have to settle for feeling bad.

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