Enough about Happiness, let's talk about Depression

by Carmen de Jesus

When a person is depressed, the last they they want to hear about is how happy someone else is. I used to be depressed. I was medicated with Paxil, with Celexa and Lexapro. I failed an entire quarter of college due to severe depression. In retrospect, in spite of psychiatrist's diagnoses, I don't think I was actually chemically imbalanced or clinically depressed - I just needed to talk, to release myself from all the "victim" stories I was attached to from my childhood of abuse. However, my psychiatrist was of the type who just wrote a prescription and said "we'd talk in 2 weeks after the medication started taking effect. Of course, by that time, when I'd got into the routine of taking the anti-depressants, I felt so numb and distracted by them that I couldn't even access any feelings at all. I weaned myself off of my anti-depressant medications, even through a year where my father, my boyfriend and both my paternal grandparents died. I needed a change of focus, to reprogram the so-often travelled neural grooves of all the thoughtpatterns that led me to depression.

After about a year of intense hypnotherapy, I can't even "think" in those old patterns. After all my training and certification in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, I don't even use the phrase "I'm depressed" anymore because I've learned to discipline my internal dialogue, and even the ways I recognize and describe my feelings. It's too easy to answer someone question "What's wrong?" with "I'm depressed," even if you're just kinda bummed out or having a blah day. It's important to make the distinction between clinical depression, which is severely debilitating and diagnosed by a psychiatric professional, and the kind of melancholy blue that you CAN control - but since people today throw around phrases like "I'm depressed" as often as they say "I'm ADD" without actually being diagnosed, its a really slippery linguistic slope.

At the site SecretGeek, they list steps and strategies to making yourself "depressed". It's easy. The article is intended to show you that there are strategies to creating your internal state - and a way to reverse-engineer happiness.

If you're feeling kind of blue, you might want to take a trip with some fun guys.
If you want to know a little more about clinical depression, click here. But when someone you know is showing symptoms, take caution because platitudes don't cure depression.

| 04/30/07 | Commentary