Depression Treatment
Depression is a mood state that affects people at different levels of intensity. You may feel depressed for a few hours one day and feel better for the rest of the week. Or a depressed mood can last for weeks or months on end, taking up most of your days – in which case you might qualify as clinically depressed. Whether you are experiencing intermittent symptoms, or chronic and long-lasting depression, talk therapy can be beneficial.
What does depressed mood feel like?
Depression is characterized by numbness, inertia, and a lack of motivation towards any kind of pursuit. If you’re experiencing depression, you may feel like no activity or goal is worthwhile or interesting. You very much desire a sense of purpose, but purpose feels painfully out of reach.
While people who are depressed feel sad, they may also feel empty. A depressive disorder will be much harder to shake than common sadness, and remedies that may work well when you’re feeling sad (e.g., taking a run, spending time with loved ones) will likely do little to ease your suffering if you’re depressed. If you’re suffering from a depressive disorder, it’s impossible to just “suck it up.”
In depression, your usual feeling of being needed and useful to others around you is replaced by a strong conviction that you are insignificant. Depression affects individuals in different ways, but you may also feel very irritable, have trouble concentrating, have slowed thinking and movement, experience sleep disturbances and unexplainable pain in the body. The mental struggle with depression can even be accompanied by medical problems, as depression causes increases in cortisol, blood sugar, and inflammation, all of which can have physical ramifications.
Depressive disorders can be incapacitating, ranging in severity from a general sense of malaise to complete despair. The onset of depressive symptoms can occur at any time during the lifecycle, and may be precipitated by stressful life events such as death of a loved one, illness, job loss, breakup/divorce, or new motherhood. Some people may even feel depressed solely during the fall/winter months or during their menstrual cycle.
What causes depression?
Depression is complex and known to be caused by a variety of factors such as genetic predisposition, stressful life events (such as loss), and early interpersonal experiences. Research has shown that the experience of a major loss can trigger depression in insidious ways. This loss may be a of a person, a relationship, but depression might also follow the loss of an ideal or hope for the future, a job or career path that is experienced as irreplaceable. If you are prone to depression, you might lack a natural capacity to find worthy substitutes for the inevitable losses that are part of life. Perhaps you’ve suffered extreme losses and absences in your past or present that have made the process of meaning-making and the recovery from disappointment more difficult. This means that when you experience loss in the present, you struggle to believe that you will ever be able to bring anything good into your life again. If you’re struggling with depression, a loss of something wanted can feel like an indictment, a validation of your worst fears that you are worthless without the thing you lost or didn’t achieve.
How can therapy help?
Through therapy you will begin to better understand the root causes of your depression so that you can live from a place of greater awareness and intention. A skilled therapist can help you remember, honor, and validate the desires and dreams that have been frustrated or denied, so that you can regain a sense of vitality and passion for life and self-belief. Psychodynamic therapy looks at dynamics in your early life that made it difficult to believe you were worthy in the face of loss. It is often the case that people with depression had early life experiences in which absences from primary caregivers or emotional dismissal led to feelings of unbearable loneliness and self-recrimination. A therapist can help you differentiate the past from the present so you can see you are not as helpless as you were in the past – that you now have the agency and power to take control and finding meaning after loss and disappointment.
Cognitive behavioral approaches can help you examine how depression is warping your thought processes and interpretations of events. A therapist using this treatment modality can help you look closely at thought patterns that convince you of your weakness and insufficiency. These negative thoughts can sometimes lead to behaviors, such as withdrawal or procrastination, that in turn compound your depression.
If you feel that you’re struggling with feeling lost, empty, and hopeless, depression treatment at Vienna Praxis can help you bring a sense of curiosity, reflection and energy back into your life. Feel free to contact us for a free 15 minute consultation session with one of our therapists.