Treatment:
According to the World Health Organization, less than 50 percent of those suffering depression receive treatment. This is an especially disturbing statistic considering that untreated depression often leads to other conditions that severely impact a person’s life, including alcohol or drug use, headaches and other chronic aches and pains, phobias, panic disorders and anxiety attacks, poor school or work performance, disturbed family and intimate partner relationships, social isolation, excess weight, weight loss, increased risk of heart disease and type 2 diabetes, self-mutilation and attempted suicide or suicide.The most common treatments are antidepressant medications and psychological counseling. Psychotherapy has a lower rate of relapse than medications (26. 5 percent versus 56.6 percent). According to the American Psychiatric Association, a combination of antidepressants and psychologically counseling is more effective.
Other therapies include: repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation and light therapy (especially for Seasonal Depression) and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) which is
used to treat intractable depression that hasn’t responded to medications.
Little Known Causes of Depression
From the start of my professional career 36 years ago, I bucked the Western practice of masking mental health and physical ailments with medications. In the early 80’s, my first professional position was at a private inpatient psychiatric hospital. There I began researching the underlying causes of every mental and physical health condition, including depression.
I was appalled to see how many patients kept returning to the hospital year-after-year. Clearly the medications and therapy were missing the mark for many people.
For example, I’ll never forget one of my first patients, a man named Chester. For decades, four times a year, he was hospitalized and administered ECT for his intractable depression. Clearly, even the ECT wasn’t doing it.
I sensed that something he was consuming on a daily basis was disturbing his brain chemistry. I already knew that allergies could impact any organ in the body. I began to wonder if allergies could trigger brain chemistry imbalances and mood disturbances such as depression. Something told me that Chester’s brain was negatively reacting to wheat. So, I asked Chester to run an experiment and eliminate wheat. Low and behold his depression cleared in a week, and he never returned to the hospital again!
Another patient, a 250-pound veteran, was depressed and suffering a porn addiction. He admitted to masturbating multiples times a day. It was clear to me that he was masturbating in an attempt to raise his endorphin levels, which temporarily shifted his brain chemistry and lifted his depression for a brief time. In our sessions, I uncovered buried anger toward his mother. When he was a child, his mother told him that if he was angry with her, she would drop dead of a heart attack. Her emotional blackmail resulted in his “sitting” on his anger. Buried anger often morphs into depression for several reasons.
The anger has to go somewhere and if it can’t go outward toward the object of the anger, it gets misdirected and turned back on the self. Depression can be a form of mental self-attack. Also, the energy needed to push down or suppress anger literally depresses the psyche.
I’ll never forget the day that I helped this man to unearth his anger toward his mother. He began to shake and looked like a volcano about to erupt. Suddenly, this huge, ex-soldier, began to weep like a baby. The next thing I knew, he landed in my lap, crying profusely as the rage poured out of him. Low and behold, his depression lifted!