Cognitive Therapy of Depression

Teen depression is very common these days. The reason is that teenagers need to face a lot of problems such as difficulty in studies, abusive relationships, problem in relationships, tiff with parents and family due to generation gap and much more.

Most of these problem results in to teen depression in an individual.

There are also many misconceptions about the subject of teen depression. Teen years are really tough and one needs to balance out the problems in order to enjoy this golden period.

Occasional blues and mood swing are common among teenagers. However, when it comes to depression, it is quite different from mood swing and occasional period of feeling blue.

Depression can be really serious and even destroy the essence of a teenager’s overall personality. This ultimately results in a sense of despair, sadness and anger. Early treatment and expert professional advice will help you in combating this problem.

In order to detect signs of teen depression at early stages, it is important to keep tabs on the symptoms of this disorder. You need to learn all the significant symptoms, a teenager may have to face when going through the stage of teen depression. This would also let you provide some assistance to the patient.

First, you need to understand that as a teenager, one has to face a lot of pressures such as changes of puberty, questions related to who they are and where they fit in. The sudden transition from being a child to an adult also brings along a lot of conflicts from the parental side as the teen starts demanding more amount of freedom.

With so much changes going on inside the body and external environments, a teenager tends to face a lot of problems and this sometimes lead in to sudden moodiness or depression. It is very important to be able to differentiate between moodiness and depression in order to save the individual from facing any further problems.

Here are certain symptoms you need to watch for in order to identify depression in a teenager.

a) Sadness; Hopelessness; Frequent crying

b) Irritability; Anger

c) Hostility; Agitation

d) Withdrawal from friends and family; Efforts to run away from home

e) Sudden changes in eating and sleeping habits

f) Restlessness; Loss of interest in enjoyable activities

g) Feeling of guilt; Feeling of worthlessness

h) Fatigue; Lack of energy; Difficulty in concentrating; Persistent boredom

i) Thoughts of death; Thoughts of committing Suicide

j) Self injury; Self abuse; Self destructive behavior; Frequent fearfulness

k) Poor communication; Difficulty in maintaining relationships; Criticizing others

l) Low self-esteem; Extremely self critical; Extreme sensitivity to failure

m) Frequent absence from school; Poor performance in school

n) Alcohol or drug abuse

Medical experts have found that early diagnosis and medical treatment will help in curing this disorder.

Hence, you need to watch out for the symptoms mentioned above.

Medications to curb, treat and cure depression are widely available on the market, these days. These medications are known as antidepressant medications.

Depression does not occur to a specific type of individual. It can strike anyone, anytime and anywhere. However, the treatment for depression is very effective and in almost 80 per cent of identified cases the disease is cured when the treatment is given.

There are two main approaches when it comes to providing treatment to the patient of depression; psychotherapy and medications. Antidepressants medications are often used to make the psychotherapy treatment more effective for certain people.

If a person is depressed to a great extent and unable to talk, it is impossible for that person to get benefit from counseling or even psychotherapy. The right kind of medication can always improve symptoms and help the person respond in a great way.

Here are some of the most prevalent medications available for depression. Most of the treatment options mentioned below are widely available. You will not have any problems finding any of these medications or treatments through your doctor.

A) Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors or SSRIs

B) Tricyclics

C) Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors or MAOIs

The SSRIs are said to affect neurotransmitters such as norephinephrine or dopamine. These medicines do not give out much side effects.

Mostly the doctor will try out a huge variety of antidepressants prior to finding the medications or even combination of certain medications most effective for the patient. There are times when the doctor feels that a particular dosage must be increased in order to be really effective. You should focus on taking antidepressant medications on a regular basis for as many as about eight weeks prior to the effect starts on your body.

Very often, patients are tempted in order to step the medication. They are really keen on stopping the medications as soon as possible.

There are several reasons for this. Most of the time, they think that the medication is not working at all. The other is that they believe it has already worked a lot to exterminate the problem totally.

As soon as the individual starts feeling better, it is vital to continue the medication for about four to nine months in order to prevent recurrence of the condition.

However, there are also certain medications that should be discontinued gradually. This is usually done to allow the body time to adjust.

People with condition such as biopolar disorder or chronic major depression, medicines need to be maintained for an indefinite period of time.

Most people are under a notion that antidepressant drugs are habit forming. However, this is not the condition. It is extremely necessary for the person to monitor the exact dosage of these medications to be taken in order to benefit in a good manner. It is the duty of doctor to keep tabs on the dosage and the effectiveness on a regular basis.

Some people are quite benefited from MAO inhibitors. These people need to keep themselves away from certain foods with high levels of tyramine including a variety of cheeses, pickles and wines. People taking MAO inhibitors are also not allowed to take certain medications such as decongestants.

Overall, taking antidepressant medications is going to benefit you a lot. Important is to follow the subscription and advice from your medical expert.

Depression Help: Tips on Assisting the Depressed

Depression is not something to be taken lightly. It is a serious disorder and needs serious professional and personal care. If not treated or attended on time, depression can turn in to a serious mental and emotional disorder, thereby affecting the physical status of the individual.

There are several types of assistance option one can look forward to when it comes to getting relief from depression. You can think of self help, help from near and dear ones, professional assistance, various therapies counseling and even medications.

Unfortunately, with so many options available for treating the depressed, a large number of people are still left untreated. This is because these people do not want to seek professional help or feel embarrassed to express their condition to the near and dear ones.

However, one must remember that not getting proper and timely treatment is not going to take you anywhere. The problem is surely going to get worse with time. Most people even find it really difficult to cop up with their daily activities or even a little amount of stress when under depression.

Here are some of the great options you can easily opt for, in order to treat yourself for depression:

a) Self help

1. Never ever set goals that are too difficult.

2. Try to break up large tasks in to smaller ones and then set certain priorities. Try to give your best.

3. Never expect too much from yourself and that too in a small amount of time. This will increases the chances of failure and make you feel more depressed.

4. Don’t keep yourself scheduled from the rest of the world. Try to be with others.

5. You need to force yourself to take part in to certain activities that make you feel better.

6. Do some mild exercises. This will help you to get a lot of relief.

7. Never ever take major decisions of life without consulting others.

8. Do not accept negative thinking.

b) Helping the depressed

1. Offer emotional help. You need to understand the person, exercises patience, show affection and exhibit encouragement.

2. Never disparage feelings expressed. Point out the realities instead and provide hope.

3. Keep a check on the medication prescribed to the person.

4. Do not accuse the depressed.

5. Give him sometime to get out of the situation.

6. Take the person out for walks, regular outing, movies and other activities. Try to be insistent, but gently if your invitation is refused.

7. Encourage participation in activities that the person enjoys.

c) Professional help

1. This is really important for those who are depressed. You may take the person for a compute psychological diagnostic evaluation.

2. You can even consult the National Directory of the Psychologists on the World Wide Web and locate a psychologist near your area.

3. Reducing the risk of depression is not difficult if you have the willpower. All you require to do is to trust someone, believe in professional help and follow the tips mentioned in this article.

Exterminate depression from your life and lead a happy and healthy life. Life is beautiful. Enjoy it.

Everyone knows what depression feels like. Everyone feels the blues at times. Sadness, disappointment, and fatigue are natural parts of life. There is a correlation between the blues and clinical depression, but the difference is like the difference between the sniffles and pneumonia.

Depressive disorders are whole person illnesses; they concern the body, feelings, thoughts, and behavior. The depression itself can make us feel as if it’s hopeless to try to find help. The excellent news is that 80 to 90 percent of people with depression can be treated successfully, but the bad news is that only one sufferer in three seeks treatment. More bad news is that almost half the American public see depression as a character defect, rather than an illness or emotional disorder. In addition, only half of all cases of depression are correctly diagnosed, and only half of those get satisfactory treatment.

We tend to confuse depression, sadness, and grief. But the opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality – the ability to experience a full range of emotion, including happiness, excitement, sadness, and grief. Depression is not an emotion itself. It’s not sadness or grief, it’s an illness. When we feel at our worst, sad, self-absorbed, and helpless, we are experiencing what people with depression experience, but they don’t recover from those moods without help.

The trademark of depression is a unrelenting sad or empty mood, sometimes experienced as tension or anxiety. Life shortage of pleasure. People with minor depressions may go through the motions of eating, sex, work, or play, but the activities appear shallow; people with more severe depression withdraw from these activities, feeling too drained, tense, or hostile to contribute. There is often a nagging fatigue, a sense of being powerless to focus, a feeling of being ineffective.

People with depression usually experience a lowered self-esteem. In a depression, you may feel that you are a helpless victim of fate, but also feel that you don’t deserve any better. Feelings of guilt, dishonor, and misery are common.

There are often a host of physical symptoms, of which sleep disturbances are key. People may have difficulty falling asleep or may get up early without feeling refreshed. Others may sleep excessively, again without feeling rested. Appetite may increase or decrease. There may be difficulty in sexual functioning. There may be harassing aches and pains that don’t respond to medical treatment. But there are physical illnesses that cause symptoms like depression – Lyme depression, diabetes, thyroid conditions, anemia – and depressions can cause physical symptoms like other diseases.

If you are feeling depressed, it is important to be sure that an underlying health problem does not exist, and you should see your physician for a checkup. At the same time, if you know you have a health problem and are feeling depressed, don’t imagine you will feel better once the health problem is under control.

There is a sequential process in the recognition of depression. First is a stage of confused pain in which the sufferer knows he suffers, but doesn’t know why. People often blame circumstances. Adolescents blame their home lives, married people blame their spouses, and employees blame their bosses. But there is acknowledgment that the pain is not ordinary.

The second stage is recognition that something is definatley amiss. It may be that external circumstances have changed but the pain keeps on going, or it may be a gradual recognition that the suffering is so dangerous that circumstances can’t be blamed. This is a painful recognition that often takes years. It is an acknowledgment of a damaged self. But because of the nature of depression, the self-blame and guilt that are manifestations of the disease, this acceptance does not always lead to searching for help.

People then may move to the third stage, a crisis that habitually leads to professional intervention and diagnosis. It is often a suicide attempt or psychiatric hospitalization. The diagnosis often supplies hope, that treatment or a cure is possible, and explanation, a way to understand what has only been confusion before. The fact is that this is a diagnosis of a mental illness, with all the shame and stigma that that entails.

The fourth stage involves acceptance of an illness identity. Depression comes to be seen as an outside agent invading the self, rather than as a manifestation of the self.

It is essential that anyone suffering from depression gets good help from a competent, qualified professional. If the warning signs are obvious, always seek a professional diagnosis. Going to a health professional with your troubles could prove, at worse, embarrassing, if the problem is really just a seasonal case of the blues that can be dealt with without medical intervention, but the potential cost of failing to diagnose a serious case of depression should far outweigh any concern about potential embarrassment.

Lots of people undergo from depression, and it’s not something that anyone need be embarrassed of. This is an essential starting point for those who are in need of treatment. Depression should be treated like any other physical illness, and like other physical illnesses it can often be fixed with prescription drugs. Having said that, it can also often be dealt with without drugs, through psychotherapy.

Psychotherapy unfortunately also has a stigma surrounding to it in the minds of various people, but it is nothing more than a method of counselling where the depressed person is given an occasion to discuss about life and the way they feel. The very procedure of being able to talk about pain and unhappiness in a non-judgemental atmosphere can have an extremely healing effect, especially for those who are suffering mild or moderate cases of depression. Severely depressed persons do not typically benefit from psychotherapy and counselling to the same extent. Severe depression generally requires supplementing counselling with other depression treatments. Even so, counselling is not only a good starting point in the process, but a professional counsellor will generally be the best person to provide advice as to the need for further treatment.

Severe depression needs medication and sometimes hospitalisation. Even then, it can frequently take some time to get treatment right, as there are a collection of antidepressant drugs available on the market and some of them can have risky side-effects.

Part of the reason for the popularity of antidepressants such as Prozac or Zoloft is that they usually have few and far between side-effects, apart from a regular decrease of libido, and hence are relatively safe to prescribe. However such drugs do not work at all for some people who may require ‘tricyclics’ such as Vivactil, Norpramin or Pamelor. The problem with tricyclics is that it can cause problems for those already suffering with heart disease, and getting the precise dosage right is far more complex than with Prozac or Zoloft. People certainly have been known to gravely overdose on tricyclics.

These issues highlight the need for antidepressant medication to be administered by a trained psychiatrist and not by a general practitioner. A good psychiatrist will also be the best person to decide if the subject requires hospilisation.

For those who need to be hospitalized, electric shock therapy (ECT) is another form of treatment that has proven very advantageous to some people. This is generally only used with people who have rare and acute symptoms of depression and who have become manic. ECT is normally only considered for those who have not been successful on antidepresasnt medication and when all other methods of treatment have failed to make the symptoms of the depression less serious.

ECT involves electrical stimulation that causes the brain to seizure in order to ease the depression. While this sounds awful, this treatment should not be connected with the torturous forms of shock therapy often portrayed in the cinema. Today, patients who are given ECT you are also given muscle relaxants so as to get rid of all discomfort and pain. ECT is generally used in conjunction with both antidepressant medication and counselling. Sometimes the ECT will allow a person to become free of a depressive episode after which they will be able to keep up their equilibrium through the use of normal antidepressants.

Dealing successfully with depression can evidently be very tough, and the cost (financially as well as physically) can be high, but these costs generally pale in comparison to the toll taken by depression that is left untreated.

Depression has become a very common disorder, these days. The condition is very common among people who have to deal with hectic schedule, severe competition and a lot of problems related to daily life. Some people are able to overcome depression easily but others take it to heart and get seriously ill.

Once, this disorder takes a serious form, it becomes really difficult to handle. Several treatments are available these days due to the frequent occurrence of this disorder among huge population size.

The best part is that almost all these treatments are effective and can help the patient to overcome the trauma. Here is a description on various types of treatments available across the globe to treat depression.

a) Psychotherapy

An individual suffering from depression usually faces a traumatic period. This tends to affect his work, social life and family life. It becomes really difficult for one to relate to the environment around him when under the influence of depression.

Psychotherapy is a treatment option that involves several techniques to treat depression. The whole treatment can actually vary from 2-3 weeks to about twenty weeks. The main technique of the therapy is counseling that has almost become a Xerox to psychotherapy.

The technique involves both the client as well as his family. The primary techniques involved in psychotherapy include cognitive behavioral therapy or CBT and interpersonal therapy or IPT. CBT is a type of treatment that involves anxiety, depression or any other type of mental disorder. The therapy is actually based on the mechanism of thought process.

It is a known fact that depressed people are attracted to negative thoughts and they are constantly surrounded by failure. The therapists work really hard to change the whole thought process towards positive side. It becomes really important for the therapist to practice patience when listening to the patients. The therapy is known to be extremely effective and people who actually take it do not face a relapse.

The other therapy known as Interpersonal therapy is a short term therapy and limited to only about 15-20 sessions. Each session is of one hour and the primary approach of this therapy is to find the root cause of the problem. The whole process is really helpful for the person when it comes to emerging out of a traumatic relationship or certain events.

b) Psychodynamic therapy

The therapy is also very effective to treat depression. This relates to trauma or certain type of conflicts one had faced in his or her childhood. It is a short term treatment.

c) Group therapy

This therapy involves people suffering from trauma at childhood. They get an opportunity to interact with each other and it is usually quite effective. The sharing of experience is a great way to combat depression. These people also learn different ways to handle it.

d) Medications used for treating depression

• Serotonin

• Tricyclics

• Nardil

• Parnate

• Buspar

• Cymbalta

• Desyrel

• Effexor

e) Electro conclusive therapy

The therapy is provided under severe conditions of depressions, insomnia, schizophrenia, suicide, compulsive behavior or homicide.