Demystifying Depression

Hi!

I am Dr Jimmy Mody practicing in Bombay for the last 17 or more years as a psychotherapist. My training is in psychoanalysis, clinical hypnotherapy, transpersonal regression therapy, CBT and a few other.

Today we are going to talk about demystifying depression, it is a serious condition it's not just in mood swing, it's not a temporary thing, it's not just feeling low down in the dumps so when you start feeling depressed and starts affecting your life in many-many ways your eating, your sleeping, your relationship, even your work then it's about time that you start something about it. It affects about more than 10 to 15% of the entire population and of that only as much as one third of these people actually come for help and why could that be and of the one third that come for help as many as 80 to 90% get help and able to get some relief, within 2 month itself. So this is a lot about depression we need to know.

The causes of depression are not entirely known, but are vary then many typically they could be genetic, they could be biological, they could be a brain chemical, brain function problem, it could be due to a medical illness, it could be psychological or environmental and there are many-many other causes as well. For one thing it is not, it is not due to a personal weakness or personal flaw in your character, we assured of that. Now we need to look at what are the kinds of treatments that you need to go for and I would say that there are three prong approach towards helping you with your depression. You must go for all three of them and not miss anyone of them out. First is you need to consult a psychiatrist, psychiatrist who is a person, who is medically qualified and licenced to give you the medicines necessary to deal with the biological brain function aspects or causes of your depression or the medical illness causes of your depression. Then you need to go to a psychotherapist, he is not licensed to give medicine, so don't talk to him about your medications he may not know much about them. But he is trained in a number of different therapies such as I am, many of which a very good for working on your depression, particularly CBT. CBT has been found to be the best therapy for depression, it's evidence-based and it is empirical proven to have a high success rate higher than the any other therapies. The other thing that you need to do is self help, this is the third prong attack on your depression, is through self help. This cannot be under mind or under stated and self help you have to understand comes first with exercise, yes exercise, your brain has certain chemical called Endorphins and other hormones which get activated when you do a lot of aerobic kind of exercise. So even if you do half an hour walking or vigorous walking or running a day that would be good, that would be important and this is proven and in fact I can explain it to right now, in Prehistoric days when prehistory men and women existed there were no TV’s, no convenience of cars, mobile phones, computers we have to go out into the field and work as farmers or hunter, gatherers. We were much more exposed to exercise then we are today and so it's not surprising that in those days the problem of depression was hardly ever heard or nobody was committing suicide.

So please, I urge you don't take it easy too simple and easy go out and commit yourself half an hour of exercise a day, ok. The next thing that you need to work on is yourself awareness- watching yourself, becoming aware of yourself, witnessing yourself, your thoughts and specially you find it easiest to witness watch and observe those thoughts that constantly, obsessively, persistently repeat. Take some of those thoughts that particularly repeat because they occupy a lot of your minds space don't allow you to think anything else or do anything else, take some others thoughts and just write down a few those thoughts. Look at what you written down, Its either a very general statement which most probably is, sometimes it might be specific. So general statement could be I am a failure, I am not good enough, nobody loves me, from these general statements we need to get little bit more specific.

Why do you feel this way? I am a failure because every time I work really study really hard for exams for school and college I just about manage to escape through, other friends who didn't study as hard as I did, got top marks, I am a failure or you might say I am a failure because I tried one starter Idea and didn't succeeded or I am a failure because every relationship I have been in, my girlfriend my boyfriend whatever has walked out on me, well we need to get more specific and you also need to challenge all of these assumptions that you just made about yourself. Human beings love the act and practice of self evaluation but nobody in school or college ever teaches us how to self evaluate. You must self evaluate not optimistically, you must self evaluate not pessimistically, you must self evaluate realistically. It means take each of these thoughts specially the repeated ones and challenge them challenge the ability, ask them to prove themselves, where is the evidence, is there more to the story or view then not doing well in your college exams, start looking at a larger picture of yourself, start evaluating yourself more realistic leave based on evidence and last but not the least become aware of your cynical thoughts. Nothing is good, nothing is worthwhile, its not good getting up and making an effort to do something for myself, people are like this. People and the government are all corrupt, all industrialist are corrupt, all police man are corrupt, we have a very cynical ideas, all men have only one thing on their mind very cynical idea. Cynicism seeks to destroy any good in you, so we don't want cynicism either. So now these fronts you need to become aware watch and challenge them, challenge them with possible alternative thoughts not positive thoughts, not positive thinking but possible alternative thoughts. What could be the other ways of thinking about yourself, what could be the other ways of evaluating yourself, let's get realistic, let's look for the truth, let’s not jump to assumption and conclusions.

You do decide you need help contact me through lybrate.com.