Beat Your Depression

Symptoms are the things that a person feels. For example a person may feel pain from a burn or may feel dejected because of a bad experience.

Signs are what others observe. Examples of these are when one person observes another person exhibiting the signs of apparently being in pain for some reason, or when they notice that somebody is not being their usually bright self with a positive outlook on life.

If you feel that you may be suffering from depression then you will need to check out your feelings as well as your actions.

If you are concerned that a loved one may be depressed, you will need to observe their behavior and make judgments about how they may be feeling. It may even be advisable to ask the person how they are feeling. However, you may get a vague response and even a sharp retort. Your ability to use tact may be put to the test.

Before we proceed, we need to realize that short term feelings of “the blues” are quite common and do not necessarily constitute a state of depression. Things such as, the death of a loved one, a failed relationship, the loss of a job, or the disappointment of missing out on a promotion, etc., can make us feel sad for quite a while. However, time tends to heal most wounds and we generally pick ourselves up and get on with life again. It is when a reasonable amount of time has passed, and the condition has not improved, that we need to consider the possibility of depression.

Let us look at the symptoms of depression:-

• Low self esteem.
• Inability to sleep well at night. Managing to get to sleep well but often waking in the early hours and unable to return to sleep.
• Oversleeping or wanting to sleep during the day.
• Constant feelings of fatigue.
• Being unable to enjoy life as well as you used to. [Chronic low grade depression].
• Not being able to function to the best of your capabilities.

The symptoms mentioned above are typical of the depression condition known as dysthymia, or as the ancient Greeks called it, ill humor. It usually has a slow onset and persists for two years or more.

With more severe cases of depression [clinical, or major, depression] some of the following symptoms will also be noted:-

• Change of mood from being ill humored at the beginning of the day to being much better at the end of the day.
• A change in appetite. Appetite may decrease and result in weight loss in many cases, especially in older people. In other cases binge eating may occur and weight may increase.
• A lack of interest in hobbies and other interests. You just cannot be bothered doing what you used to enjoy in the past.
• A loss of libido. Sexual activities diminish or cease.
• Feeling sad or crying for no apparent reason.
• Having feelings of shame, guilt and/or worthlessness.
• Feeling vulnerable or anxious.
• Feeling overwhelmed, or that you are lost in a fog or in a deep chasm.
• Inability to make decisions or to concentrate on a subject.
• Becoming withdrawn from society, including family and friends. Wanting to be alone and then often feeling rejected when you are left alone.
• Being easily agitated and angry.
• Failing to look after yourself [appearances, hygiene, well being etc.].
• Considering, or causing, self harm. This can culminate in suicide in severe cases. Statistics suggest that 80% of suicides relate to people who were suffering from depression.

The above sets of conditions are known as unipolar conditions.

When a person experiences extreme mood swings from being “on top of the world” to being “down in the dumps” this is known as bipolar condition and was previously called “manic depression”.

Depression can be cured, and because suicide is a real possibility you need to seek help very soon if you are suffering from it. Talk to somebody about your feelings because a problem shared is a problem halved. I am sure that you will find a sympathetic ear without too much trouble.

Make sure that one such person is a doctor. One factor associated with depression is often an imbalance of chemicals within the body. Doctors can provide quick relief with the modern medications that are available nowadays. More on this, and causes of the imbalance, will be in future articles.

If you have a loved one whom you consider to be in need of help, you will have to use a lot of tact and discretion when broaching the subject. Perhaps drawing their attention to this article may be useful.

The first step to recovery is to acknowledge that help is needed and that it is readily available. Remember that when a person has reached the bottom of a pit the only direction left to go is up.

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Check out the Recommended Resources section for more detailed information.

This is a question that was asked on Yahoo Answers. [The name of the person asking the question has been omitted.] My answer to this question appears below.

Question:

i’m a firm believer in prayer. i pray to God that he heals my wounds of all the pain and abuse i’ve been thru this past 7 years.
there are times when i get into a zone about my pass and i feel stuck in that moment. any ideas on how to stop thinking of my ex striking me?

Answer:

Johnny
Best Answer – Chosen By Voters

There are several ways of overcoming depression. The first is to take medication prescribed by doctors to counter a shortfall in a substance called seratonin that occurs naturally within our bodies and helps to maintain good moods.

Another way is to use a naturally occuring substance found in a herb called St Johns Wort. However, there are some concerns that using this may result in some unpleasant side effects and also that it may not work as well as some people say.

In many cases, people will come out of depression over time without medication of any sort. The old adage that “Time heals all wounds,” appears to hold true. I believe that this is often very true but also feel that it is best to beat depression as soon as practical so that we can enjoy life to the fullest as it is meant to be.

What I have found personally, is that taking active steps, just as you are by praying, to program my mind to look for positives, certainly helps a lot in beating depression.

I also put on soothing, pleasant, music and watch comedy TV shows or DVDs to encourage my body to produce another hormone called endorphin. Endorphins produce good moods and natural “highs”.

Depression can be the result of a poor self image and so I look in the mirror in the mornings when doing my ablutions and tell myself, with a smile on my face, that I love myself. I then sing a small, 2 verse, ditty that brightens up my day and gets me off to a good start.

I would like to make a short comment on the manner in which you indulge in self talk. Always ensure that, even when you pray, you do so by focusing on positive outcomes rather than avoiding negative outcomes. I am a great believer in the Law of Attraction and that what you put out into the universe, either good or bad, manifests itself just as you think or talk about.

The easiest way to stop thinking about your ex striking you is EXACTLY that. Do not think about it! Think about more pleasant thoughts instead whenever the unpleasant thoughts start to creep in, as they will from time to time, until you become so adept at blocking them out that they will seldom bother you.

I cannot go on much longer here and so I suggest that you look at the post on “choices“.

You can learn how to overcome negative self-talk, as I did, together with many positive tips, from the package entitled Total Success Library

It is interesting that some sufferers of depression do respond favorably to placebos. This suggests that with many sufferers the problem is associated with emotions and low self esteem rather than a chemical imbalance. See the article below:-

By Megan Rauscher

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) – It cannot be assumed that an antidepressant has lost its effectiveness if a patient relapses while continuing on the medication, because the medication may never have been effective in the first place, according to study findings reported in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.

In the study, the majority of relapses occurred in patients who had never been true responders, Dr. Mark Zimmerman, director of outpatient psychiatry at Rhode Island Hospital, told Reuters Health.

Some patients with major depressive disorder, similar to other medical disorders, respond to placebo, Zimmerman explained. In clinical practice, everyone is given an active drug, so it’s not clear if a patient who responds has improve because of the drug or because of “nonspecific” effects, such as the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is a sort of “power of suggestion” response in which a patient begins to feel better because he thinks he has received treatment (and doesn’t know he has been given a placebo). These responses are usually short-term.

Similarly, relapses that occur during a continuation phase of treatment could be because of a true loss of response or they could be because an initial placebo response has worn off.

To investigate, Zimmerman collaborated with Dr. Tavi Thongy on a review of four studies involving 750 patients. These were continuation studies of new generation antidepressants.

Using two different methods of estimating relapse, the researchers found that the majority of relapses occurred because the patients were never true responders to the drugs.

This suggests, Zimmerman told Reuters Health, “that a message can be conveyed to patients who have repeatedly improved on medication and then lost its benefit that perhaps they are more capable than they think in bringing their own resources to bear to improve their depression.”

SOURCE: Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, August 2007.

I firmly believe that the information and guidance that I gleaned from the package entitled Total Success Library helped me far more than the medication that was prescribed for me. It also helped me in other areas of my life.

   I have been suffering from depression since my early teens although I didn’t discover it until I was almost 50.  Also around this time, my marriage was falling apart. Its hard to know if one caused or affected the other but they were both “happening” at the same time. Treatment between then ( approx 2000) and last year was sporadic and only partially effective. Last fall, I hit bottom and ended up in the hospital and luckily the doctors were able to stabilize me and find the right combination of medicines for me. Seem to be doing very well now!

    You asked about my ideas on depression. First, I am not a medical person. I am a Linux/Unix Systems Administrator (or a geek as my daughters say). I am a science junkie and try to understand the world as best I can.  That being said, here’s my take on depression.

     Our brain sits in and regulates a soup of chemicals and electric energy For the brain to function properly, its environment must be kept within a certain range. This environment is in reality a self-organizing chaotic system. Like most “systems” in the natural world, they appear to be organized but are inherently chaotic at lower levels. Hurricanes are a very good example of this type of system. If you are inside a hurricane, all you can see is chaos. Yet, at a macro level, you can see the organization of the storm. The energy flows from the sun, water and atmosphere are the feedback loops that keep the hurricane stable. There is a wide range in which this will all work but outside those bounds, the storm begins to collapse.

     Our brain operates much like this. There is NO normal operating mode. Just a range of stable environments. When the environment exceeds those boundaries, mental illness sets in. Now,destabilization can be caused by many factors from illness, physical injury, chemical imbalances and “maybe” even BAD thinking, but I believe they eventually affect the chemical or electrical feedback loops in the brain. I like to think of it as brain arrhythmia.

     Although I am not a huge fan of talk therapy, I do recognize that we can create new connections in our brains by thinking/talking about things and that this may help in re stabilizing the system. However, and this is an opinion only, this will only really work if the system is only slightly out of whack.  Also (personal biases ahead!), I feel that talk therapy is too vulnerable to incompetents, unscrupulous people, quack therapies and cures and charlatans. I hope I wasn’t too subtle there?

    Ok, enough rantings. The RedSox just won!  🙂

This is another golden oldie that found its way into my email inbox on a couple of occasions.

I have included it here as I feel that it is good for us all to have a reality checkup from time to time. Reading this certainly makes me sit up and take notice of some of the negative self-talk that I bombard myself with occasionally and encourages me to eliminate such negativity from my thought processes.

Ten Rules for Being Human

By Cherie Carter-Scott

1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. “There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.

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When I was overcoming a bout of severe depression, I found that, in addition to learning as much as I could from books such as Understanding and Curing Depression, I also gained extremely valuable insights into my outlook on life, and how my attitude plays such an important role, from the package entitled Total Success Library.

Most of us suffer from being depressed from time to time. However, there is a difference between being depressed and having depression. Being depressed is normal just like being happy or angry or sad etc. No one is “happy” all the time. The problem comes when one of these emotions or states of mind tend to dominate our lives to an extreme.

Being depressed can be any low mood, which may be relatively short-lived and perhaps due to something of even a minor nature, even though it may seem to be much greater at the time.

With the exception of bereavement, which can last for quite some time, many of the causal factors such as being overlooked for promotion, a relationship break up, a loss of money, or an unfair slight on your character, will often soon fade away. Even a rainy day can promote depression in some individuals. An illness, such as a bout of influenza, often brings about a state of depression, especially during its onset. The old adage that “Time cures all ills” is often very true.

This differs from Clinical Depression which is a “state of mind” disease that manifests itself in a condition of intense sadness, or despair that impinges on an individual’s activities and daily living. Clinical Depression is generally more serious than normal depressed feelings and can be the result of many factors; either individual factors, or a conglomeration of factors that can have a tendency to snowball.

Some of these factors are low self-esteem, constant negative thinking, pessimistic views of life, and sometimes substance abuse. In many cases an imbalance of certain hormones and vitamins in the body is linked to the condition. The medical profession tends to treat the problem in most cases by rectifying the imbalance.

Some diseases such as Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Schizophrenia tend to be accompanied by clinical depression.

Extreme depression can result in sufferers inflicting self-harm, or attempting or committing suicide.
Find out how to distinguish between “the blues” and a real episode of depression – to overcome depression it is vital that you be able to identify it as soon as possible when it strikes!

According to Australian Government statistics, “Everyone will, at some time in their life, be affected by depression; either their own, or someone else in their family.”

Statistics for depression in Australia are comparable with those of the United States of America and the United Kingdom.

15% of the population of most developed countries suffers from severe depression.

Depression disorders affect 9.5% of the population aged 18 and older in any given year. This includes major disorder, dysthymic disorder, and bipolar disorder.

Pre-schoolers are the fastest growing market for anti-depressants. At least 4% of pre-schoolers are clinically depressed.

The rate of increase of depression among children is an outstanding 23% per year.

30% of women are depressed. Men’s figures were thought to be half of that of women but new estimates are higher.

54% of people believe that depression is a sign of weakness. This is despite the fact that many famous people, including Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill, were known to suffer from depression. [Sign up for the free mini-course about famous people and their depression.]

41% of women are too embarrassed to seek help.

80% of depressed people are currently not having any treatment.

15% of depressed people commit suicide.

Depression will be the second largest killer, after heart disease, by 2020.

Studies show that depression is a contributory factor to fatal coronary disease.

What effect does this disorder have upon our productivity as well as our working, social, and family environment?  It must be HUGE!

What can we do to help ourselves and our love ones to overcome the misery of depression and lead a happy and contented life?  There are some very useful resources that have helped me, listed in the sidebar.  Plus we could start off with some “healthy hugs”.

HEALTHY HUGS

Did you know that some people consider hugs to be the ultimate anti-depressant? The good thing is that it is hard to give a hug without getting one back. 🙂

Learn how to overcome and cure depression here.

By Francie Baltazar-Schwartz

[I have had this article sent to me as an email attachment on several occasions. It has a very strong and pertinent message that compliments the article below entitled, “Choices”. I hope that you enjoy it and appreciate the message that it conveys.]

Jerry was the kind of guy you love to hate. He was always in a good mood and always had something positive to say. When someone would ask him how he was doing, he would reply, “If I were any better, I would be twins!”

He was a unique manager because he had several waiters who had followed him around from restaurant to restaurant. The reason the waiters followed Jerry was because of his attitude. He was a natural motivator. If an employee was having a bad day, Jerry was there telling the employee how to look on the positive side of the situation.

Seeing this style really made me curious and so one day I went up to Jerry and asked him, “I don’t get it! You can’t be a positive person all of the time. How do you do it?”

Jerry replied, “Each morning I wake up and say to myself, Jerry, you have two choices today. You can choose to be in a good mood or you can choose to be in a bad mood.’ I choose to be in a good mood. Each time something bad happens, I can choose to be a victim or I can choose to learn from it. I choose to learn from it. Every time someone comes to me complaining, I can choose to accept their complaining or I can point out the positive side of life. I choose the positive side of life.”

“Yeah, right, it’s not that easy,” I protested.

“Yes it is,” Jerry said. “Life is all about choices. When you cut away all the junk, every situation is a choice. You choose how you react to situations. You choose how people will affect your mood. You choose to be in a good mood or bad mood. The bottom line: It’s your choice how you live life.” I reflected on what Jerry said.

Soon thereafter, I left the restaurant industry to start my own business. We lost touch, but I often thought about him when I made a choice about life instead of reacting to it.

Several years later, I heard that Jerry did something you are never supposed to do in a restaurant business: he left the back door open one morning and was held up at gunpoint by three armed robbers. While trying to open the safe, his hand, shaking from nervousness, slipped off the combination. The robbers panicked and shot him. Luckily, Jerry was found relatively quickly and rushed to the local trauma center. After 18 hours of surgery and weeks of intensive care, Jerry was released from the hospital with fragments of the bullets still in his body.

I saw Jerry about six months after the accident. When I asked him how he was, he replied, “If I were any better, I’d be twins. Wanna see my scars?” I declined to see his wounds, but did ask him what had gone through his mind as the robbery took place.

“The first thing that went through my mind was that I should have locked the back door,” Jerry replied. “Then, as I lay on the floor, I remembered that I had two choices: I could choose to live, or I could choose to die. I chose to live.

“Weren’t you scared? Did you lose consciousness?” I asked. Jerry continued, “The paramedics were great. They kept telling me I was going to be fine. But when they wheeled me into the emergency room and I saw the expressions on the faces of the doctors and nurses, I got really scared. In their eyes, I read, ‘He’s a dead man. “I knew I needed to take action.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“Well, there was a big, burly nurse shouting questions at me,” said Jerry. “She asked if I was allergic to anything.’Yes,’ I replied. The doctors and nurses stopped working as they waited for my reply. I took a deep breath and yelled, ‘Bullets!’ Over their laughter, I told them, ‘I am choosing to live. Operate on me as if I am alive, not dead.”

Jerry lived thanks to the skill of his doctors, but also because of his amazing attitude. I learned from him that every day we have the choice to live fully. Attitude, after all, is everything.

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When I was overcoming a bout of severe depression, I found that, in addition to learning as much as I could from books such as Understanding and Curing Depression, I also gained extremely valuable insights into my outlook on life, and how my attitude plays such an important role, from the package entitled Total Success Library. In fact, I firmly believe the Total Success Library to be exceptional value for money.

This is a response that I wrote to a young woman who disliked her appearance. Actually, she hated it.

The reason that I have posted it is because it tells my thoughts on how a person should speak to oneself and the dangers associated with negative self talk.

I should have told the young woman to go to a hospital and see people who really have cause to complain. There are so many people in the world who would LOVE to swap places with a healthy person, even if they did not look as good as they would like.

This reminds me of the quote, “I was upset because I had no shoes until I met a man with no feet.”

Anyhow, here is the excerpt. I hope that you gleen something from it. I plan to discuss these matters in more depth later.

“You are so young and should make the most of your youth.

There is a saying that, “The problem with youth is that it is wasted on the young”. One day you will laugh at your present thoughts.

Beauty is more than good looks. It also has to do with your personality and attitude. If you look at beauty competitions you will notice that judges check these features out in addition to looks.

We cannot always help our physical features, unless we neglect to bathe and groom ourselves etc., but we can work on our personality.

I am sure that your friends are sincere with their comments and you should accept them in good faith. Rejecting their comments would be a “slap in the face” to your friends and you may eventually lose them. Be grateful that you have friends.

Life is a matter of choices. You can choose to be miserable or you can choose to be happy. It takes the same amount of effort. It appears that you have chosen the former SO FAR.

I am a GREAT believer in the power of the subconscious mind. It is like a computer and if you feed garbage in you will get garbage out. Therefore I suggest that you carefully consider what you say and think. You are the only person who has control over these two things. Even if somebody did make an adverse comment about you, you do not have to accept it. How do they know the real you?

Eleanor Roosevelt, the President’s wife, was quoted as saying, “Nobody can say anything to hurt me unless I give them permission to do so.”

Look at what you have written. There is so much self-directed negativity there. viz:-

My life sucks. i feel like im just crushing everything, i feel ugly, my friends are just saying that to make me feel better, i feel like no one completely understands me .

Do not dwell on this sort of speech or thoughts. Your subconscious mind does not want to let you down and will do all in its power to make these statements true. You will become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

It would be better for you to say and think things such as:-

I am grateful that I am so young and I am enjoying my youth whilst I still have it.

I am fortunate to be in good health and have an active, enquiring mind.

I love myself.

When “Mister Right” comes along, he will appreciate me for my intellect and attractive personality as well as my good looks.

I am pleased and fortunate to have so many true friends.

If you engage in this sort of self talk or affirmations, your subconscious mind will work on them equally as hard as they do on your negative self talk. I know, as I have been in a similar situation to you and suffered severe depression. Do not let this happen to you.

When you are in the bathroom look in the mirror, smile, and tell yourself out loud that you love yourself. You will be surprised how much of a “pick me up” this can be.

Be careful not to use any negatives such as you did when you wrote, “im not crazy”. The subconscious tends to over look the “not” and focuses on “im crazy”.

To demonstrate this, if you did not want to think about lions, say to yourself, ” I am not thinking about lions”. What happens? Immediately an image of a lion or lions appears on your mental screen. Doesn’t it?

It would be better to say, “I am thinking about cuddly kittens,” or similar.

Try saying, “The dog is not chasing the cat.” Immediately a picture of a dog chasing a cat comes to mind. Better to say, ” The dog and cat are sleeping peacefully on the mat.”

Do you get the picture? [Pun intended]

I hope that this will help you to brighten your outlook on life.

All the best for now!”

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You can learn much more about programming your mind and adjusting your outlook on life, as I did, from the Rapid Manifestation package.  Check out his truly value-for-money package here.

Hi.  A friend of mine, Maureen, has had past experiences with depression and she has allowed me to share what she wrote to me on this web site. So here it is.

Thankyou for your web page on depression. I could relate to most of what you said. My depression came later on in life and I feel it was because I was in a very controlling relationship for twenty-four years and had a life I did not want. I thought of everyone else and did not look after myself. I soon realised I had to look after me first and then think of everyone else.

When I got depression it was like a black cloud coming over me. I did not want to speak to anyone. I could not be happy about anything, everything was black. I cried a lot. The least thing set me off. My kids suffered through this terrible situation and stood by me, loved me and supported me. That is what kept me going when all seemed black.

 I finally  got help and found out that I am the type of person who finds it hard to make decisions in life if it will hurt someone else. So I stayed in a very unhealthy unhappy relationship because I could not make the decision to leave. I got very ill through this and I felt like I was trapped. I did finally make the decision to leave and when I did my whole life changed. My depression went away and I was happy again for the first time in years.

What I got from this is that you can suffer from depression if you are in a place in your life that you don’t want to be. I now see the light at the end of the tunnel and I have learnt to tell people how I feel and what I want.

I am very happy now and have no more depression. That’s why I say thankyou for your web page. Suffering depression is a hard thing to admit to and if it helps one person from depression I will be happy.