I want to go home, but you’re already home: personal experience in treating depression

Spend at least an hour a week with a close friend

According to a British study, after 86 women with depression interacted with volunteer friends, 65 percent of them noted improvements in their condition. Regular social contacts work no less effectively than antidepressants or psychotherapy. Talking to a close friend can help boost your self-confidence and allow you to make other positive changes in your life, such as starting to exercise regularly. This further helps combat depression.

Traditional medicine

Traditional treatment effectively combats the symptoms of depression. The first signs of improvement appear within a few days, after sedatives accumulate in the body.

The most common ones are:

• Tea with mint or lemon balm. It will help with insomnia, which often accompanies depression. You can enhance the effect by taking a warm bath with a decoction of these herbs.
• Pour the collection of hop cones, kenaf, mint, and valerian root with water and let it brew for 6-8 hours. Take warm during an attack of anxiety.
• Fill a small pillow with dried lavender and St. John's wort. Place it near the head of the bed.
• Drink tea with strawberries, hawthorn, oregano, peony, valerian root, calendula and linden. You can use all the plants or several of them at once. Brew with boiling water, after the tea has steeped, take warm.

Herbal treatment is used as a complementary treatment for depression without antidepressants. Traditional medicine helps to relax with insomnia and will help relieve nervous tension caused by negative thoughts.

Play with your dog for a few minutes every day

When people play with their dog for even a few minutes, their blood levels of serotonin and oxytocin increase, which help lift their mood. Research has already proven that having pets is good for your health, but you don't even have to have a pet to treat depression. You can play with your neighbor's dog, volunteer at an animal shelter, or go to a pet store to look at a variety of pets.

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Psychodynamic therapy

The main goal of psychodynamic therapy is to change the personality and character of a person suffering from depression. The psychotherapist teaches him to trust other people, build close relationships with them, and not just relieve the symptoms of the disease. According to the theory, past experiences, subconscious desires and fears influence a person's feelings and behavior.

The theory states that the cause of depression may lie in conflicts between a person's conscious thoughts, beliefs and desires. Conflicts that concern a person can be suppressed and move from consciousness to the subconscious. The goal of psychodynamic therapy is to pull unresolved conflicts out of the subconscious. After they come into consciousness, the doctor helps to overcome them.

Treatment of depression using psychodynamic therapy requires a long course of treatment. It can drag on for 3-5 years, which is a significant drawback. Also, treatment for depression may affect painful experiences, which will cause the patient to feel anxious and restless. To consolidate a positive result, it is necessary to use the acquired views in communication with other people, thus rooting them into a habit.

Get a massage three times a week

You can pay for a professional, but you can also just have your spouse or close friend rub your back. The result will be the same: your mood will naturally lift. In studies of depressed patients, those who received a twelve-minute massage three times a week were found to be less depressed than those who did not receive a massage. Other studies have shown that pregnant women benefited from massage from their partner. No loved one nearby? You can do the massage yourself. This process increases serotonin levels and reduces the stress hormone cortisol, which helps overcome depression.

Cognitive behavioral psychotherapy

It is important to consider how to overcome depression using cognitive behavioral therapy. First, you need to understand why this method has a highly effective therapeutic effect:

1. Neurotics are patients who suffer from persistent faulty strategies for processing stressful situations. Therefore, by influencing the patient’s consciousness, the psychologist promotes a deep analysis of problems. During therapy, a person’s thinking is changed and his habits are corrected.
2. Thanks to the right questions, the psychologist helps the patient better understand what the essence of the problem is.
3. The specialist helps eliminate emotional discomfort and overstrain.
4. Free expression of feelings is encouraged during therapy.
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5. The patient has new ideas or information about how to solve certain problems.
6. A person, together with a psychologist, tests new patterns of behavior outside the therapeutic situation.
7. The method of stopping negative thoughts is used. The psychologist instructs you to reproduce in your internal dialogue a series of frequently repeated irrational thoughts. And then the specialist loudly says: “Stop!” In this way, the process of negative judgments is interrupted. A person develops a conditioned reflex to depressive thoughts after several sessions.

Depression is not always treated with medications. After all, there are often cases when a person suffers from an incorrect understanding of the events taking place in his life. Life is seen in dark colors. It seems that no one understands or hears you, that there is no way out of a dead-end life situation. And a psychologist helps you understand that sometimes there are circumstances when victory is impossible, and despite desperate efforts, you will not achieve your goal, but will only waste your energy.

Guilt

Depressed people experience an overwhelming feeling of guilt. You should consider how to deal with this phenomenon:

1. Guilt is an unjustified attempt to go back to the past and change it. It is important to understand that it could not have been otherwise, otherwise you would have acted differently. The decision made depended on a number of factors for which you are not responsible. Therefore, psychologists urge not to allow feelings of guilt, because it deprives you of the opportunity to act and realize your dreams.
2. Guilt is the flip side of megalomania. Depression occurs because you simply cannot forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made. After all, a great and wise person, as you should be, never makes mistakes. For this reason, the patient refuses to accept the fact of non-compliance with high requirements. Self-flagellation saves you from admitting that a person is far from ideal. In non-drug treatment, the psychologist draws the patient’s attention to his own imperfections, which are normal and natural.

Drink one or two cups of coffee in the morning

Moderate consumption of caffeine reduces the likelihood of developing depression by more than fifty percent. This is confirmed by scientific research.

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Can depression go away on its own?

Experts say that sometimes depression can go away on its own without treatment, but this requires two conditions:

1. Mild course and short duration of the disease (up to six months).
2. Eliminating the causes that caused the disorder.

Depression after a breakup is treated by new acquaintances, seasonal blues disappear after moving to another climate zone, worsening mood due to stress goes away after it ends.

Severe and moderate depression are not prone to self-healing; a transition to a chronic form is more often observed. The persistence of unfavorable life circumstances contributes to chronicity even in cases of mild disorders.

Choose foods that improve your mood

Walnuts, kiwis, bananas, cherries, pineapples, tomatoes and plums naturally provide the body with serotonin. They are perfect for feeding a person who is trying to cope with depression. You can also eat foods rich in tryptophan. This is an important amino acid that the body converts into serotonin, which lifts your mood. There is a lot of tryptophan in protein foods such as turkey, fish, chicken, cottage cheese, nuts, cheese, eggs and beans. Eating carbohydrate-rich foods also stimulates the amino acid to enter the brain and increases serotonin levels. Eat a piece of whole grain bread with honey or some popcorn to pop on the griddle. This will help you achieve the desired effect.

When is it time to get off antidepressants?

Coming off antidepressants begins long before the dose is reduced. Look how it went for you:

• "I do not feel good".
• “I won’t go to any doctor.”
• I went to the doctor.
• Long diagnostics.
• Long selection of the right drug.
• The drug started working after a few weeks and I can feel the difference.
• And here are the side effects.
• YOU ARE HERE.

I have been in this business for a long time and I understand that the article will also be read by those who have not yet gone to the doctor. Go see him. Do not make any decisions until you go to the doctor and have at least five meetings with him, including correctional ones.

Let me tell you how I got to the point “YOU ARE HERE.”

I think I explained the first three points (“not good,” “I won’t go,” “I went”) in sufficient detail. In my case, there was a constant decrease in mood, but I didn’t even think about any psychiatrist. I simply complained to my epileptologist and received a referral to a psychiatrist.

Each case is unique. My uniqueness consisted of three points at once:

• the habit and need to work hard and productively;
• increased likelihood of depression due to diabetes;
• a drug prescribed by an epileptologist is also prescribed by psychiatrists as a mood stabilizer (I didn’t know about this at the beginning of my journey). Accordingly, it mitigated any symptoms and should not have conflicted with what the psychiatrist prescribed additionally.

Therefore, the psychiatrist and epileptologist knew each other and were in touch.

Long diagnostics

It took us several weeks, if not months, to realize that what we thought was an orgasm turned out to be asthma. Or rather, the specialist needed to understand whether I was always like this or whether my mood was changing. And if it changes, then how. What about frequency? What about seasonality? Lots of other questions. Remember the drug that normalizes your mood? Trying to catch mood swings against its background is not an easy task.

Long selection of the right drug

You are lucky if the prescribed medicine works the first time. It is much more likely that along the way you will encounter crazy dreams, nausea, or the desire to do strange things. You may also find that even in the midst of chemical happiness, it is difficult to enjoy the things that we simply must love, such as food or sex.

Taking almost any antidepressant is accompanied by side effects

It is the side effects that often force us to try to reduce the dose. Ironically, the withdrawal period comes with its own charms (not covered in this article, but the withdrawal itself can lead to a reluctance to ever return to antidepressants).

The moment when everything seems to be working out for you, but there are nuances is key in order to figure out how to continue living.

Eat More Omega-3s

Dutch researchers have found that a diet rich in omega-3 fatty acids, such as those found in salmon or cod, may be less likely to cause depression than in people whose diets are low in this important source of fat. According to other studies, pregnant women who do not eat fish twice a week are fifty percent more likely to experience depression compared to those who eat fish. If you don't like fish, you can eat flaxseeds, walnuts, and legumes instead - they also contain a lot of essential fatty acids.

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What is the risk of side effects from medications?

Below we provide a list of typical side effects that are caused by taking antidepressants. So that you understand how often this or that unpleasant symptom occurs, we also provide data on the likelihood of its occurrence.

In addition to the negative effects on the body, antidepressants have another extremely unpleasant side effect. The fact is that one of the factors provoking depression is the subconscious attitude: “I cannot control how I feel.” It is noteworthy, but relying on external factors, for example, pills, and not on one’s own hidden resources, only reinforces this attitude.

This is a very, very bad setup. The doctor should not nurture her. Perhaps this is why, after stopping drug treatment, in the vast majority of cases, symptoms of depression return with renewed vigor. After all, the person did not have the confidence that he had solved all his problems with his mood and in life.

In general, we described these and other nuances in some detail in one of our very important articles on so-called “endogenous” depression (read).

Take your vitamins

Talk to your doctor about taking chromium picolinate. According to research, people with depression, which is accompanied by mood swings, carbohydrate cravings, weight gain and depression, improve their health with chromium. Folic acid levels should also be monitored. Finnish researchers have found that low levels of folic acid in the body are associated with a high risk of depression. In addition, this substance increases the effectiveness of antidepressants.

Interpersonal therapy

The essence of interpersonal therapy implies that the problematic aspect of depression is the person's relationships with other people, which can lead to low self-esteem and social isolation. This therapy is best suited for patients whose cause of depression is related to the loss of a loved one, relationship problems and conflicts with significant others. According to the theory, depression may be caused by difficulties associated with changing social roles. This could be job loss, retirement, or disability.

Interpersonal therapy helps:

• Identify personal needs that remain unsatisfied.
• Find a way out of interpersonal problems.
• Acquire the social skills needed to create and maintain relationships.

The goal of therapy is to improve the patient's self-image and his ability to communicate with other people. Interpersonal therapy is commonly used in the form of group or family counseling. On average, the course of therapy takes 12-16 weeks.

Lie in the morning with your head hanging off the bed

Lying on your back, grab a small dumbbell with both hands and extend them behind your head, allowing your arms to lower towards the floor. Take ten deep breaths, trying to expand your chest as much as possible. Then raise your arms, sit on the bed so that your head is supported, and take ten more deep breaths. Repeating this exercise three times will help you warm up and breathe deeper. Sometimes depression is directly related to limited body mobility. If a person breathes too shallowly, his condition only worsens.

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Treatment of depression with hypnosis

Hypnosis is used primarily as an adjunct to psychotherapy. Immersion in a trance allows the psychotherapist to understand the true cause of depression. Perhaps it is hidden in the depths of the subconscious, and the patient cannot remember it on his own. Next, the doctor works directly on the cause itself, using psychotherapy or counseling.

Also, hypnosis sessions are very good at helping the patient remember bright moments in life in which he was happy. These can be memories associated with childhood or adulthood. Perhaps long-forgotten dreams and fantasies will emerge that may feel like real events. Periodically immersing the patient in a state of euphoria with the help of positive memories from the past gradually leads to the fact that he remembers this state. After several sessions, depression begins to recede, and the person begins to think positively.

Treatment of depression without antidepressants at home is possible provided that the person is at the initial stage. Using the listed techniques, you can achieve a lasting effect by using several methods simultaneously or alternating them.

Drum

Researchers have found that practicing drums helps people feel more energized and have fewer symptoms of depression as early as six weeks after starting to learn to play the instruments. Researchers suggest that this process helps relax the body. You can simply drum on a table if you are unable to join an instrument group. Even this will help relieve depression.

How to help someone get out of depression

During depression, the support of others is important. Effective care is based on empathy and participation in the patient's life. The following recommendations are useful:

1. Understand the issue. Verified information about depression makes it possible to learn to recognize symptoms, better understand the behavior of a loved one, and not take their negative reactions personally.
2. See the person, not the disease. Depressed patients are sometimes difficult to communicate with. It is easier to maintain relationships when you know that irritation, tears or aggression are not manifestations of character, but symptoms of a disease.
3. Show genuine concern. When depressed, a person is left alone with himself. Talking about the manifestations of the disorder gives the patient a feeling of support and gives the loved one information about what to pay attention to.
4. Don't force yourself to have fun. Depression is not a bad mood; it cannot be eliminated by a party or a change of environment. You need to find out what helps your relative or friend feel better and create conditions for spending time accordingly.
5. Help in choosing a doctor. Depression makes it difficult to learn new information and make decisions. If a person delays asking for help, you can find a specialist on your own, arrange a visit and take your loved one to the appointment.
6. Take charge of everyday life. Cleaning, cooking and other daily chores become an overwhelming burden when you are depressed. Redistributing household responsibilities helps to find resources to fight the disease.

Sleep in another room

Many people with depression also suffer from insomnia. Try changing where you sleep, this may help. You can also combat insomnia by getting up at the same time every day, not taking more than twenty minutes of naps during the day, avoiding caffeine in the afternoon, and doing something relaxing an hour before bed.

Reviews from clients who overcame depression with our help

Almost everyone who experiences symptoms of depression thinks that their case is hopeless and that help is useless. If you or your loved ones are in this number, we want to encourage you. Psychotherapy works! And it works well.

Here are some reviews from people who got rid of depression in our center. To expand a review, you need to hover your mouse over and click. Total business. Look here please. What if you find similarities with your symptoms?

Review from Natalia N.

I applied after the death of my son. Not only did I have no ground under my feet, I felt like I was rolled into asphalt. The pain and guilt were so strong and tearing me apart from the inside that there was no question of somehow pulling myself together and continuing to live. I tried in vain to get out - and all to no avail. At some point, my family began to seriously fear for my mental state. Seeing a psychologist was a step of despair and the last hope. Everything that is written here in the reviews is true from the first to the last word. After several sessions, I felt that I was standing on my feet, and with each meeting it became stronger, I saw the sun in the sky, I felt that I was breathing. I AM ALIVE!!! The pain, of course, has not gone away completely and will not go away, but I can live with it! ... I began to look at the world around me completely differently. Everything in me turned upside down - and it turned out great!!! Life has changed for the better! You can write a lot, a lot more. But words are still not enough to express my gratitude. By the way, all the reviews left here played a decisive role in choosing a specialist, maybe mine will help you make the right choice. I bow in great respect to your PROFESSIONALISM...!!! Thank you very much!!!

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Review from Vladimir.

In April-May 2014, my usual life was destroyed by events in eastern Ukraine. I came to see you for severe depression, nightmares, and unpleasant spontaneous thoughts about harming yourself and others. This was the first time I saw a therapist. Before this, it seemed to me that I should and could cope with everything on my own, but nothing worked for me, even the things that I loved to do - walks, the sea, music - seemed to worsen my condition even more. We had several meetings, I was able to talk freely about things that I had never told anyone before. In addition to talking and explaining the nature of depression, which in itself made me feel better, we conducted several psychotherapy sessions, including hypnotherapy. We worked through several things that really frightened me - dreams, obsessive thoughts, and after that they disappeared. At some point, changes began to occur in terms of depression, and I began to feel better. At the moment - January 2020 - thanks to our work and recommendations, I feel absolutely normal, there are no manifestations of depression, neither old nor new. I had the best impressions from my work. Thank you for your help, I wish you and the entire center professional success and many saved lives.

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Review from Oksana.

Astonishment. This was the first feeling I experienced after one or two first meetings. I was amazed by the breadth of possibilities of psychotherapy and the fact that I myself actually saw and believed in the possibility of getting rid of pain, that mental pain that so poisoned my life that sometimes I just wanted to give it up. Before meeting Alexey, I had already become disillusioned with psychotherapy; I worked with a psychotherapist for almost a year, but the results, frankly speaking, were zero. And so, having stumbled upon this site, I took it and wrote a letter. I won’t say that I went to the meeting without hope (since if there was none at all, I wouldn’t have come), but not believing in success, but simply out of despair. However, after the first meeting I felt trust in this person. I believed not in him, but in him, and I was not mistaken. Now, not even 20 sessions of classes with Alexey have passed, but the pain has already disappeared and I am enjoying life again. But I am grateful not for the healing, but for the fact that this Psychotherapist (with a capital P) taught me how to cope with my trouble and how to cope with it further. He just showed me, made me understand and accept a new world, new thinking, new feelings. He made me stronger, gave me a weapon against pain (and not only from the one in whose network I was caught, but also about many others, similar or simply close to it), he not only gave me wings, but taught me to fly. He taught me to be my own psychologist. And what would I like to tell him? Thank you? Did you cure me? No, absolutely not. He can easily read my gratitude in my eyes. But I would really like to say that, yes, I recognize the professionalism of this person! Here he is, a real psychotherapist, psychologist and personality. I am impressed by this man. He is a teacher, a companion, a friend, and a doctor. He opens up a new world for me, a world of knowledge where I can be happy. It is pleasant to communicate with him, as with a person who completely understands you and whom you respect, with whom it is even pleasant to argue, because it is a rational argument that brings peace to your soul and joy to your heart. This is a doctor who does not give medicine, he teaches you to get well and not get sick. And yet, I can safely confirm that everything that is written here on the site is indeed correct from “a” to “z”. I can only wish for more such specialists! Alexey - don’t stop there, give joy to people and teach others to do the same. You really do your job and it’s a pleasure to communicate with you not only as a psychologist, but simply as a person, as a friend, as a strong and intelligent person. And for people who need the help of a psychotherapist, I just want to meet Alexey. I am very glad that I met this person on my life’s path, and it doesn’t even matter whose status, I just learned a lot from him and received an impetus for further self-development. And most importantly, I believed in myself.

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Review from Dmitry.

A very highly qualified psychologist, I had long wanted to attend a session with a psychotherapist, but I never managed to, when I finally got there, it seemed that a series of unpleasant events had sucked me in and I would no longer be able to get out of the perceived disgust, but after 4-5 sessions I significantly it got better, my eyes opened, and I again began to notice those wonderful moments in life that I had forgotten about a long time ago, I am very, very GRATEFUL!

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Review from Natalia K.

Hello! How good it is that such a Center exists! Many thanks, in particular, to Veronica Shulga, for helping me overcome a severe creative crisis, complicated by autumn depression and personal problems. For several years now I have not felt pleasure from drawing, although this is my bread. I did everything as a routine. Finishing the work did not bring satisfaction, but only further worries that again it did not work out the way I wanted. It's been incredibly difficult lately. I didn't see a way out. And it was at the Center that they showed it to me. It turns out it's not all that scary! Joy returned, and with it confidence in one’s abilities. I can't express how happy I am about this!