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| Depression Part 1 by Ross Bishop Living with depression is like living at the bottom of a sea of mud. The environment pushes against you from every direction and getting out is almost impossible |
| Heal your Heart - Love your Body - Live your Joy! Simply Stunning! A beautiful and profound experience 3 guided meditations on one CD. Access higher wisdom, intuition and insights. Change habits, release fears and activate healing energies. Buy Now Full description. Read what others say Sound samples and instant downloads |
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| Heal your Heart, Love your Body and Claim your Joy! Reinventing Myself by Sonya Green is now available in paperback. Click the book cover to find out more. |
| EBook also available. Instant download for only $8 |
If you feel this website has inspired you or resonated with you or if you found yourself thinking about
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donation, purchasing a product or visiting the links to our sponsors.
someone who would benefit from visiting these pages - Trust Your Intuition and send them the link.
If you would like to copy an article to your site or blog, you are welcome to do so, but must note copyright
Sonya Green and refer to www.reinventingmyself.com
If you would like to support this site you might consider emailing in suggestions or comments, a small
donation, purchasing a product or visiting the links to our sponsors.
Depression is the most prominent psychological disorder in the western
world. It is a socially driven condition, which is growing in all age groups,
especially amongst teenagers. People born since 1945 are 10 times more
likely to suffer from depression than their parents, and women run nearly
twice the risk of depression as men.
By 2020, depression will be the second most disabling condition on the
planet, ranking just behind heart disease. In the U.S. alone, about 10
million people suffer from significant depression each year, and we annually
lose about $50 billion in human productivity as a direct result of it. In
addition, a significantly high number of depressed people (15%), commit
suicide. The losses through these secondary effects, especially teen suicide,
are difficult to calculate, but they are considerable.
Living with depression is like living at the bottom of a sea of mud. The
environment pushes against you from every direction and getting out is
almost impossible. Even the simplest of life functions can be difficult. It is a
living hell. Complicating the problem is that depression is a secondary
condition - it overlays an originating set of troubling negative beliefs.
Let's look at the way depression develops. The initial emotional challenge
facing the person is difficult, and so the inner child starts out facing a painful
circumstance. Adding significantly to this condition, and essential to the
creation of depression, is the rejection of the inner child by the adult. In 25
years of private practice, every case of depression I have ever seen has
hinged upon a reluctance by the adult to accept and address the pain that
his or her inner child carried.
Other conditions like family history or exposure to certain chemicals or
heavy metals (mercury in dental filings, for example) or the long-term use of
certain drugs can create a predisposition to depression, but the direct cause
comes, in my belief, from a failure between the adult and the inner child.
Having been rebuffed by the world, and now by the adult, the defeated
inner child retreats into a cave of isolation for protection. The despair and
desperation that result from a seemingly impossible situation creates the
condition that we know as depression.
Depression is a socially driven condition, unknown in many tribal societies.
The theory is that the integrated nature of these communities brings
personal concerns to the surface and does not allow them to get lost in the
private hell of individual isolation. It is commonly believed that this is why
the Amish in our own society do not suffer from depression. Unfortunately,
modern Western culture puts up significant barriers to personal interaction
and in many other ways creates a perfect environment for the creation of
individual depression.
From the psychological perspective, dealing with depression is not all that
different from dealing with a host of other psychological issues. It means
going into the personal pain that a person has avoided all of their life. No
sane person wants to hang out in his or her inner pain. It's messy, it's
disruptive and it can hurt like the devil. With depression, the pain was
totally overwhelming to the child and he or she will hold strong prohibitions
against going back there. The unexpressed fear is, "If I go there I will die,"
because that is how it once felt. So there is substantial negative pressure on
the adult to not address the inner core of hurt and anguish that he or she
carries. Because of this separation, the inner child is also often angry,
frustrated and untrusting, adding further obstacles to addressing depression.
Another complicating factor is that most depressed people are so
accustomed to living under the dark cloak of depression that they have no
idea what it feels like to be happy. They have no standard against which to
judge the pain that has accompanied them their entire lives.
In this impersonal, stressful, non-spiritual culture of ours, I think most
people suffer from some form of depression. And, there are a thousand
shades of grey ranging from simply feeling blue to being hunched over in the
corner of a darkened room, unable to move. So, one question to ask
yourself is, ãAm I depressed?ä Take this test: During the past month, have
you often been bothered by feeling, down, depressed, or hopeless? During
the past month, have you often been bothered by having little interest or
pleasure in doing things? Everyone exhibits some of these symptoms from
time to time. The question is how strong and persistent are these symptoms
in your life? The rule of thumb used by the psychological community is that
if you have five or more of the following symptoms, lasting most of the day
for at least two weeks, you can be said to be experiencing a major
depressive disorder:
· sadness or a depressed mood
· loss of pleasure in normal activities
· a change in appetite or weight
. insomnia or excessive sleep
· agitation or drop in activity
· fatigue and loss of energy
· feeling of worthlessness or excessive guilt
· difficulty in concentrating, thinking or making decisions
· recurring thoughts of death or suicide
Whether or not your disorder can be categorized as ãmajorä is of less
importance than whether or not you are suffering from depression. Here is
a similar list of depressive symptoms developed by Joan Larson that may
be more helpful:
· Withdrawal from activity; isolating yourself
· Continual fatigue, lethargy
· Indecisiveness
· Lack of motivation, boredom, loss of interest in life
· Feeling helpless, immobilized
· Sleeping too much; using sleep to escape reality
· Insomnia, particularly early morning insomnia (waking very early and
being unable to get back to sleep)
· unresponsive to good news
· Loss of appetite or binge eating
· Ongoing anxiety
· Silent and unresponsive around people
· An "I don't care" attitude
· Easily upset or angered, lashing out at others
· Inability to concentrate
· Listening to mood music persistently
· Self-destructive behavior
· Suicidal thoughts or plans
One problem with any list of psychological symptoms is that you can
always see yourself reflected in it. But if you fit into a significant number of
the symptoms listed above, it is something you want to pay serious
attention to. Depression can wreak havoc on your psyche and your
physical body. Men with heart conditions who are depressed are almost 5
times more likely to have heart attacks.
Further complicating many psychological problems, not just depression, is
that the adult is often caught between the pain of their struggle and the
benefit they derive from their inner wounding. Their hurt gets used as an
excuse to not fully engage in life. These people withhold from partners and
friends, pull back from life and do not fully engage with their own children.
The false sense of security created through emotional distance is very
unsatisfying, but some people live their whole lives that way. However,
when their relationships fail or become stressful as they must, the failure
reinforces the personâs existing feelings of unworthiness. They then spiral
further downward, moving towards or into depression. Adding depression
to the situation is like throwing a heavy, wet wool blanket over everything.
If the depression is substantial, it can be almost impossible to get to the
underlying causes. In that regard, (unfortunately) the depression is doing
exactly what it was designed to do.
If depression were like other emotional conditions, I would suggest ways
for you to work out your problems. And I will address those in Part III of
this series, but depression is one of several emotional difficulties that have a
substantial bio-chemical component. Although I am generally opposed to
the use of treatment drugs, I have found that the neurochemical barrier
presented by depression is so formidable that it is necessary to address the
chemical imbalance directly in order to then get to the depressive structure
and then eventually address the underlying, originating condition that is
driving the personâs difficulties. Fortunately there are ways to do this
without resorting to the severe drugs known as antidepressants, so heavily
relied on by the psychological community. In Part II, I will present a safe
program that uses dietary supplements to address the biochemical aspects
of depression. If you struggle with depression, assuming that you will have
begun a program to rebalance your neural chemistry from Part II, we will
then address the emotional aspects of depression in Part III. You can begin
with Part III if you wish, but I must tell you that in my experience itâs a
difficult uphill fight if you do not deal with the neurochemistry first. In this
first installment I will address some basic issues regarding depression and a
bit about neural chemistry so that you can understand what is happening in
the depressive state.
OK, so letâs talk about neural physiology. The bodyâs nerve
communication process is complex, utilizing a number of amino acids,
enzymes, cofactors and other substances to achieve optimum function.
Although your neural system runs all throughout your body, the chemical
aspects of depression primarily take place in the brain.
Nerve cells do not link directly with one another. Chemicals must carry
impulses from one cell to another across the ãsynaptic gapä between them.
The chemicals that carry these messages are a group of monoamines
known as neurotransmitters or biogenic amines. The neurotransmitters
primarily associated with the depressive process are serotonin,
noradrenaline, and dopamine. People who suffer from depression have
diminished levels of these chemicals in their brains. We know that the more
negative or condemning self-messages a person creates and the fewer
pleasure-giving activities they participate in, the lower their brain levels of
neurotransmitters become. This would indicate that the brain is responsive
to emotion, but there is much debate regarding causality. There are clear
connections between hypothyroidism, hypoglycemia, candida and
depression, and these raise many questions about brain chemistry theories.
Click the next button to part 2
world. It is a socially driven condition, which is growing in all age groups,
especially amongst teenagers. People born since 1945 are 10 times more
likely to suffer from depression than their parents, and women run nearly
twice the risk of depression as men.
By 2020, depression will be the second most disabling condition on the
planet, ranking just behind heart disease. In the U.S. alone, about 10
million people suffer from significant depression each year, and we annually
lose about $50 billion in human productivity as a direct result of it. In
addition, a significantly high number of depressed people (15%), commit
suicide. The losses through these secondary effects, especially teen suicide,
are difficult to calculate, but they are considerable.
Living with depression is like living at the bottom of a sea of mud. The
environment pushes against you from every direction and getting out is
almost impossible. Even the simplest of life functions can be difficult. It is a
living hell. Complicating the problem is that depression is a secondary
condition - it overlays an originating set of troubling negative beliefs.
Let's look at the way depression develops. The initial emotional challenge
facing the person is difficult, and so the inner child starts out facing a painful
circumstance. Adding significantly to this condition, and essential to the
creation of depression, is the rejection of the inner child by the adult. In 25
years of private practice, every case of depression I have ever seen has
hinged upon a reluctance by the adult to accept and address the pain that
his or her inner child carried.
Other conditions like family history or exposure to certain chemicals or
heavy metals (mercury in dental filings, for example) or the long-term use of
certain drugs can create a predisposition to depression, but the direct cause
comes, in my belief, from a failure between the adult and the inner child.
Having been rebuffed by the world, and now by the adult, the defeated
inner child retreats into a cave of isolation for protection. The despair and
desperation that result from a seemingly impossible situation creates the
condition that we know as depression.
Depression is a socially driven condition, unknown in many tribal societies.
The theory is that the integrated nature of these communities brings
personal concerns to the surface and does not allow them to get lost in the
private hell of individual isolation. It is commonly believed that this is why
the Amish in our own society do not suffer from depression. Unfortunately,
modern Western culture puts up significant barriers to personal interaction
and in many other ways creates a perfect environment for the creation of
individual depression.
From the psychological perspective, dealing with depression is not all that
different from dealing with a host of other psychological issues. It means
going into the personal pain that a person has avoided all of their life. No
sane person wants to hang out in his or her inner pain. It's messy, it's
disruptive and it can hurt like the devil. With depression, the pain was
totally overwhelming to the child and he or she will hold strong prohibitions
against going back there. The unexpressed fear is, "If I go there I will die,"
because that is how it once felt. So there is substantial negative pressure on
the adult to not address the inner core of hurt and anguish that he or she
carries. Because of this separation, the inner child is also often angry,
frustrated and untrusting, adding further obstacles to addressing depression.
Another complicating factor is that most depressed people are so
accustomed to living under the dark cloak of depression that they have no
idea what it feels like to be happy. They have no standard against which to
judge the pain that has accompanied them their entire lives.
In this impersonal, stressful, non-spiritual culture of ours, I think most
people suffer from some form of depression. And, there are a thousand
shades of grey ranging from simply feeling blue to being hunched over in the
corner of a darkened room, unable to move. So, one question to ask
yourself is, ãAm I depressed?ä Take this test: During the past month, have
you often been bothered by feeling, down, depressed, or hopeless? During
the past month, have you often been bothered by having little interest or
pleasure in doing things? Everyone exhibits some of these symptoms from
time to time. The question is how strong and persistent are these symptoms
in your life? The rule of thumb used by the psychological community is that
if you have five or more of the following symptoms, lasting most of the day
for at least two weeks, you can be said to be experiencing a major
depressive disorder:
· sadness or a depressed mood
· loss of pleasure in normal activities
· a change in appetite or weight
. insomnia or excessive sleep
· agitation or drop in activity
· fatigue and loss of energy
· feeling of worthlessness or excessive guilt
· difficulty in concentrating, thinking or making decisions
· recurring thoughts of death or suicide
Whether or not your disorder can be categorized as ãmajorä is of less
importance than whether or not you are suffering from depression. Here is
a similar list of depressive symptoms developed by Joan Larson that may
be more helpful:
· Withdrawal from activity; isolating yourself
· Continual fatigue, lethargy
· Indecisiveness
· Lack of motivation, boredom, loss of interest in life
· Feeling helpless, immobilized
· Sleeping too much; using sleep to escape reality
· Insomnia, particularly early morning insomnia (waking very early and
being unable to get back to sleep)
· unresponsive to good news
· Loss of appetite or binge eating
· Ongoing anxiety
· Silent and unresponsive around people
· An "I don't care" attitude
· Easily upset or angered, lashing out at others
· Inability to concentrate
· Listening to mood music persistently
· Self-destructive behavior
· Suicidal thoughts or plans
One problem with any list of psychological symptoms is that you can
always see yourself reflected in it. But if you fit into a significant number of
the symptoms listed above, it is something you want to pay serious
attention to. Depression can wreak havoc on your psyche and your
physical body. Men with heart conditions who are depressed are almost 5
times more likely to have heart attacks.
Further complicating many psychological problems, not just depression, is
that the adult is often caught between the pain of their struggle and the
benefit they derive from their inner wounding. Their hurt gets used as an
excuse to not fully engage in life. These people withhold from partners and
friends, pull back from life and do not fully engage with their own children.
The false sense of security created through emotional distance is very
unsatisfying, but some people live their whole lives that way. However,
when their relationships fail or become stressful as they must, the failure
reinforces the personâs existing feelings of unworthiness. They then spiral
further downward, moving towards or into depression. Adding depression
to the situation is like throwing a heavy, wet wool blanket over everything.
If the depression is substantial, it can be almost impossible to get to the
underlying causes. In that regard, (unfortunately) the depression is doing
exactly what it was designed to do.
If depression were like other emotional conditions, I would suggest ways
for you to work out your problems. And I will address those in Part III of
this series, but depression is one of several emotional difficulties that have a
substantial bio-chemical component. Although I am generally opposed to
the use of treatment drugs, I have found that the neurochemical barrier
presented by depression is so formidable that it is necessary to address the
chemical imbalance directly in order to then get to the depressive structure
and then eventually address the underlying, originating condition that is
driving the personâs difficulties. Fortunately there are ways to do this
without resorting to the severe drugs known as antidepressants, so heavily
relied on by the psychological community. In Part II, I will present a safe
program that uses dietary supplements to address the biochemical aspects
of depression. If you struggle with depression, assuming that you will have
begun a program to rebalance your neural chemistry from Part II, we will
then address the emotional aspects of depression in Part III. You can begin
with Part III if you wish, but I must tell you that in my experience itâs a
difficult uphill fight if you do not deal with the neurochemistry first. In this
first installment I will address some basic issues regarding depression and a
bit about neural chemistry so that you can understand what is happening in
the depressive state.
OK, so letâs talk about neural physiology. The bodyâs nerve
communication process is complex, utilizing a number of amino acids,
enzymes, cofactors and other substances to achieve optimum function.
Although your neural system runs all throughout your body, the chemical
aspects of depression primarily take place in the brain.
Nerve cells do not link directly with one another. Chemicals must carry
impulses from one cell to another across the ãsynaptic gapä between them.
The chemicals that carry these messages are a group of monoamines
known as neurotransmitters or biogenic amines. The neurotransmitters
primarily associated with the depressive process are serotonin,
noradrenaline, and dopamine. People who suffer from depression have
diminished levels of these chemicals in their brains. We know that the more
negative or condemning self-messages a person creates and the fewer
pleasure-giving activities they participate in, the lower their brain levels of
neurotransmitters become. This would indicate that the brain is responsive
to emotion, but there is much debate regarding causality. There are clear
connections between hypothyroidism, hypoglycemia, candida and
depression, and these raise many questions about brain chemistry theories.
Click the next button to part 2
