Posted on 28 Mar, 2008 -
Degrees of depression
Often feel low or ‘depressed’? Actually clinically depressed?
Then I offer these humble words as some food for curative thought…
From a few truths about the human mind - to a quick intro to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy...
I remember that the day when I handed in my long dissertation about counselling people with depression, I somehow felt that I knew less about it than I did before I started. It is perhaps, in a way, as much a mystery and part of life as the human mind is itself.
While ‘depression’ can be an incredibly severe ‘condition’ that can be totally paralysing and devastating, I am also tempted to say that in some ways it is part of the ‘human condition’ from which we all suffer. While the majority of us will not suffer from depression as a classified illness, how many of us have not felt that it does not reside so far away, that the potential for it always lingers inside us, somewhere in the background?
And then of course there are degrees. For how many of us have never said the words, “I’m feeling depressed today”?
So whatever your relationship to the D word is, I hope that these thoughts of borrowed wisdom may be of some use - in your day-to-day life, or in dealing with depressed thoughts.
A thought from psychotherapy:
Changing your long-held opinion that life is rubbish and so are you (but others are even worse)
Up until the fifteenth Century or something (names and dates have never been my strong point), the human race believed that the earth was flat. Although they did not even know this was just a ‘belief’ because they thought it was just true.
Equally, it is very likely that you yourself hold beliefs about yourself, your life or life in general that you have never thought to challenge because you didn’t know you had them but just thought they were true.
There are many such beliefs about life that can lead us to feel depressed but the ones listed in Dorothy Rowe’s excellent book, Depression: The Way Out of Your Prison, are particularly interesting, thought-provoking and even entertaining!
She says that after decades of working with patients suffering from depression, she has found that the following list of absolute, unquestionable truths very often form a part of the depression-prone person’s belief system:
No matter how good and nice I appear to be, I am really bad, evil, valueless, unacceptable to myself and other people.
Other people are such that I must fear, hate and envy them.
Life is terrible and death is worse.
Only bad things happened to me in the past and only bad things will happen to me in the future.
It is wrong to get angry.
I must never forgive anyone, least of all myself.
Fundamental beliefs like these can constitute the basis of a propensity for depression. By realising that you can switch them off or change them, it is perfectly possible to rewrite the blueprint of your life - and especially your future. By changing the message or the software if you like, you can switch your entire life and mind onto a brand new track. But it of course, takes some effort…
A thought from the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy:
You feel the way you think
Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (or CBT) has been proven to be an effective method for treating depression. Perhaps the most important idea in CBT is that we all feel the way we think.
It is the thoughts that you have in your head about things - and the things that you tell yourself - that can lead you to feel bad.
It is not your boss’s offhand manner that makes you feel depressed but that voice in your head that says “She’s always hated me. She wants to get rid of me.”
It’s not the fact that life is meaningless that makes you depressed but the fact that you tell yourself it is so.
And it is not your failure to perform certain things better than everyone else in the world that makes you feel down - but rather the train of thoughts that you beat yourself up with about it in your head.
In a few weeks I plan to do a whole article on using CBT methods, but in the meantime, try listening in on the voices in your head. What are the mean ones or hard judges saying to you? What are the depressed ones going on about? And are there perhaps more positive but less bullying voices in their that these bullying voices are too successfully lording it over?
A thought from the psychology of the human mind:
Going through the motions of being happy
Part or one of the problems of depression is that when you’re feeling depressed, you tend to stop doing the kind of activities that might offer you fun or enjoyment and therefore relief from your negative feelings and a shoehorn out of them. One of the main reasons for this is that when you are feeling low, it is very difficult to project yourself into any proposed situation and imagine yourself enjoying it.
“Depression” said Rollo May, “ is the inability to construct a future.”
The psychology of the human mind means that when you’re feeling a certain feeling or sensation, that feeling takes up all your being and there’s no room for allowing another feeling or sensation in - not even an imagined one. The feeling of the moment takes up all the space.
Take how you feel after an enormous meal, for example. It’s very difficult then to imagine wanting to eat another meal. Likewise, when you’re feeling unhappy, it’s very difficult to get any kind of picture of yourself feeling good. When you’re feeling down you can only imagine that you will always feel like that. That life will always be terrible. And that nothing is worth bothering with.
The key here is not to wait for the desire to do things to come but rather to schedule activities in even if you don’t want to do them. Whether it’s going into the garden to spend time with the crocuses or birds… or signing up for an adult learning course in water colour painting… if you go through the motions of being happy, you may just find that slowly it becomes reality…
