Everyone feels the sting of depression from time to time. Depending on the kind of person you are, you may or may not wish to consider alternative types of treatment other than traditional therapy and medication. As long as you are not having thoughts of harming yourself, perhaps you’d benefit from taking some time to research the different types of treatment, or to relax and take a step back from daily life in order to let resolution manifest of its own accord.
Everyone is different. Some people need to talk with someone, and this is the only way that he or she is likely to come to a solution or a plateau from which recuperative work can be carried out. If you consider yourself to be this type of person perhaps you’d do best seeking a psychotherapist with whom you can discuss your feelings.
Depression can be an opportunity for growth in disguise, it can be short lived or progressively intense for longer periods of time, but one thing we should try to avoid is medicating it without first trying to discover what it symbolizes.
In much of today’s modern and Westernized culture we look for solutions. We isolate and classify every bit of information we encounter rather than looking at things in terms of a larger perspective. When it comes to physical, emotional or mental discomfort this has come to mean looking for simple solutions to whatever ails us. If you get a headache, take some aspirin. If you get depressed, go to the doctor and he/she will give you some ‘anti-depressants’.
Treating symptoms rather than looking deeper to root causes or at the image of whole mind-body health tends toÖ treat symptoms and little else.
The most popular and sought after depression treatment can be broken into three main types: prescription medications, natural and so-called alternative medicine, as well as cognitive behavior therapy type programs. Typically one or more of these different types of depression treatment are utilized to help find relief for depression symptoms and causes.
Many people are reluctant to take prescription anti-depressants and other pharmaceutical drugs often prescribed for the treatment of depression. Most of these drugs have not undergone long term testing and so the long term effects are really not known. Many studies and cases have further indicated the potential harm of using pharmaceutical drugs to treat depression, as some types of anti-depressants have known side effects including depression, of all symptoms!
During the 1990s it is estimated that the use of alternative medicine for treating depression increased by more than 300%.
Have you been feeling particularly down in the dumps for such an uncharacteristically long amount of time that you’ve considered taking anti-depressant drugs? Uncomfortable symptoms are the body’s way of telling us that something isn’t right physically, uncomfortable emotions (as well as physical ones) are the psyche’s way of trying to tell us what we’re lacking mentally, emotionally or more collectively, spiritually.
Let’s say you become violently sick and keep throwing up. You happen to have some anti-nausea pills so you pop a few of those. Then you remember that codeine prescription left over from a broken arm a couple of years ago so you decide a couple of those couldn’t hurt. The codeine numbs the pain to such a degree that you’re not aware of the localized pain in the right side of your abdomen.
Bipolar disorder is a psychiatric diagnostic classification of so-called ‘mood disorders’ where a person experiences depression and/or a manic state, hypomania or a mixture of these states, whereas major depression or unipolar disoder is a single short or long bout of depression without the countering manic attributes.
In my humble opinion depression is just a sign that we need to rediscover what it is that inspires us and makes us feel satisfied with living life. It’s like a deeper layer of self is saying I’m not happy. I’m not happy. Until we finally listen and find something that makes us feel happy.
Postpartum depression should not be confused with regular baby blues or maternity blues which are a transitory and mild form of moodiness that is suffered by as many as 80% of all postpartum women. With this more run of the mill postpartum moodiness, symptoms typically include irritability, tearfulness, sleeplessness, lack of concentration and headache, and usually lasts somewhere between a few hours to several days. This more common type of postpartum sadness or moodiness is not considered to be the same ailment as a major postpartum depressive disorder.
Not all causes of postpartum depression are known, and in the search for better understanding of the known contributors, the following thirteen factors have been examined and found to be significant predictors of postpartum depression. Relative effect amount is listed in parentheses next to the contributing feature.
Unplanned/unwanted pregnancy (.14 to .17)
Low socioeconomic status (.
Though depression is thought of as a low energy type of state, it is very often accompanied by symptoms of anxiety. Depending on the individual case, sometimes it is depression that eventually leads to additional problems such as anxiety, perhaps from a feeling of helplessness about being able to change one’s life to avoid being depressed. In other cases it is anxiety that begins to show up. After a period of time the anxiety develops into depression because the person feels as though he or shoe is trapped into anxious feelings.
Generally though, depression and anxiety disorders are quite different issues. One of the reasons that they are so often confused by the layperson is that they are often treated in similar ways. Many of the same anti-depressant and anti-anxiety medications are prescribed to those suffering from either disorder or even a combination of the two.
Many people are reluctant to begin taking pharmaceutical antidepressant medications or other medications typically prescribed for the treatment of depression :and with good reason. None of the popular antidepressant drugs have been studied long enough to really know what it is we are taking into our bodies, nor what we can expect from them in the long run.
On the other hand, there are many natural medicines that have been taken for thousands of years by peoples of many different cultures for the treatment of depression and depression related symptoms, such as anxiety and low energy.
Below is a brief list of the most well known natural depression medications as well as a description of their uses and effects.
Valerian Root
This natural herbaceous medicine is given primarily for is sedative effects upon the central nervous system.
Sadness is a difficult thing to define when it comes to perhaps relating the term to others you might know, and especially the factor of defining what the cause and effective cure for depression might be, clinical depression can be a problematic issue when coming to understand yourself or others along with any symptoms that might be descriptive of the issue. Clinical depression is by no means a thoroughly understood subject of discussion, but one that the medical societies the world over are trying to come to terms with, this means taking more cases into consideration to help individuals understand their own depression.
Rather than look at the causes of depression as though depression were a fully understood condition, let’s look at it in manageable packets. Exploring and understanding risk factors related to depression can go a long way toward making decisions about treatment and acceptance of a bout of major depression.
Also, as everyone is different, so to are the factors or causes of any one case of depression. For one person depression may have a side effect of increased sleep and fatigue, while another person may respond to depression with opposite symptoms of excess energy or overdrive modes of behavior.
Risk factors related to depression:
Age
Though major depression typically occurs in people between the ages of 25 and 50, those over the age of 65 are particularly vulnerable for various reasons.
Gender
Women are about as twice as likely as men in the United States to be diagnosed and treated for depression.