On a most basic level, this involves being careful with the types of psychiatric medications that a mother uses while breastfeeding. Most medications on the market have not been tested and should not be presumed safe for infants.

There is also the issue of postpartum psychosis. Anyone suffering from depression has a small chance of experiencing a psychotic break, in which they lose control of their thoughts and actions. This is equally true during postpartum depression and should be very carefully monitored for.

Psychologists receive special training in psychological assessment and will be able to establish, within a reasonable degree of certainty, whether you may be at risk for this type of episode after childbirth. A psychologist or other licensed psychotherapist will also be able to assist you in managing that risk and making sure that both mother and child remain safe and well.

A second consideration for this delicate time in a mother's experience is the baby's early attachment experiences with her, which are critical for the baby's later emotional success. A therapist can help to coach a mother through these early experiences and help her to increase her bond with her new child. This will not only improve the child's experience, it will also help to aid the mother in overcoming her depression.

The third focus of therapy will need to be the meaning of childbirth and the meaning of the child. Postpartum depression, like most other types of depression, is usually caused by psychological conflict and ambivalence. As much as the symptoms of this depression may feel foreign or unprovoked, they are probably serving some purpose in your life. In order to overcome the depression, you will need to find a healthier way to accomplish these unconscious goals.

Psychotherapy is also very important for individuals experiencing mania and depression, because bipolar depression and bipolar mania often represent deep-seated beliefs about a person's self and world. Without changing these beliefs, it is unlikely that an individual suffering from bipolar will be able to comply with their medication regimen, because the medications will be taking away mental states that are deeply valued. Therapy can help bipolar individuals to understand the inner logic of their mood swings, and why they are attracted to express the extreme states of consciousness that they experience.

Psychotherapy for bipolar depression will usually be quite a bit different from other kinds of treatment for depression, because the therapist will have to take into account the difficulty that the patient is having balancing their mental states. In many cases a patient will look depressed, and so the therapist will help them to elevate their mood. The next thing you know, the client's mood is too elevated and they begin to behave irrationally!

This type of therapy is definitely a tightrope act. But, like any psychotherapy, it is a collaborative process. The therapist must walk the tightrope with the client only as long as it takes to help the client learn to walk it on their own. Ultimately the goal of therapy is always for the client to experience better control over his or her mental states. In the case of bipolar disorder treatment, part of this process is learning to select more nuanced mental states that express a better balance between positive and negative emotions.

In the case of bipolar depression, this often involves learning the value of the depressive state. In order to cure this type of depression, it must not be dismissed entirely but rather integrated with other mental states.

Treatment-resistant depression sometimes begins early on in life and continues from there. This used to be called depressive personality disorder, but this diagnosis was eliminated in the last update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Now there is dysthymia, which is long-term, low-grade depression, and major depressive disorder, chronic.

In reality, all of these diagnoses don't matter. What matters is the experience of the person going through these problems and what can be done to make things better for them. Often what is called "treatment-resistant depression" is simply not improving because the wrong treatments are being tried. I believe that everyone can get better, but that people are very complex organisms which need to be delicately examined and carefully understood in order to find the source of problems and their cures.

Medication is not the answer. Sometimes it can be helpful, for some patients, and for a certain period of time. But so can a sugar pill. Recent exposes have brought to light the fact that the anti-depressant medications on the market are no more effective than placebo when unpublished studies are taken into account. Since they have substantial side effects, their widespread use in psychiatry is highly questionable. Psychotherapy has a better potential for long-term success. If medications are being used, psychotherapy should at least be used as an adjunct.

And for patients whose symptoms do not respond to psychotherapy after a reasonable period of time, another psychotherapist should be consulted and/or another method of treatment should be used. There are those who will argue that a patient should stay the course with their therapist no matter what because the relationship between therapist and client is the most important thing. I strongly disagree. Results are everything. You shouldn't go to therapy to have a friend, you should go to therapy to solve your problems and make your life better. That's not to say that the treatment will always be pleasant; often it will feel terrible. So does chemotherapy. The results are everything.

This may be because "depression" is such a nebulous term. Like every psychological disorder, there are specific diagnostic criteria for depression. However, there has been some debate about the validity of these criteria, simply because th symptoms are so common, cover such a wide area, and are subsumed by so many other psychiatric conditions. So you could say that there are as many treatments for depression as there are types of depression.

Is this debate useful to the individual who is suffering from poor mood, troubled sleep, disturbed appetite and sexual functioning, low energy, decreased motivation, suicidal thoughts, etc? I would say that it is. I think that there is a basic trouble in the modern art of psychological diagnosis. Psychologists and psychiatrists have tried so hard to quantify and categorize mental illness, and mental illness has meanwhile stubbornly refused to fit into our categories.

At the time of this writing, the American Psychiatric Association is in the process of developing a new version of their Diagnostic And Statistical Manual of psycihatric disorders, which is used for clinical diagnosis and insurance reimbursement. This process has sparked fierce debate from all sides, because it is difficult to agree on what the functioning purpose of the diagnoses should be. Should it be to allow individual diagnoses to reflect the experience of the individual patient as accurately as possible? To enable treatment planning? To minimize hassle from managed care? There are many groups who would like their interests to be represented by the formulation of psychological diagnosis.

This is a long way of letting you know that treatment for depression can involve pretty much any psychological treatment modality, because when we say you "have depression" it doesn't really mean very much. It is not the same thing as when you go to a physician for a throat culture and they can tell you definitvely that you have been infected by a specific type of bacteria. There is no blood test for depression, no specific set of physiological correlates. In fact, if we look at what is happening in the body there could be said to be a number of different types of depression that have so far been inadequately distinguished from each other.

This is not to say that depression treatments don't work--they do. They simply need to be formulated based on your individual experience as someone who is suffering something we are tenatively calling depression. In other words, we know many effective ways to treat these problem, we just haven't figured out the most effective way to catalog them yet. And as we get that figured out, we will probably develop even more effective treatments.

Depression Treatment Centers

All of this sounds like it could bode well for the idea of a specialty depression treatment center. Some type of clinic that would have advanced knowledge of the types of depression, the way they present themselves clinically, and what can be done about them. I am not aware that this type of facility does or even could exist. Depression symptoms overlap with so many other psychological maladies that you could just as well say "feeling bad" as "depressed."

Depression, along with anxiety, represents probably the most common and indistinct set of psychological symptoms. People experience depression symptoms during grief (although you should not receive a diagnosis of depression during the 'normal' grieving period, which has arbitraily been set at six months.) People experience depression symptoms during drug detox, or when suffering from insomnia, or when feeling lonely. You can get depressed because of another mental health problem, or depression can bring about other problems. You can get depressed because of the troubles in your life, or you can create trouble in your life on account of being depressed. You see the diffficulty that comes along with a diagnosis of 'depression?' It represents so many basic human experiences.

Drug detoxification also sometimes refers to the process of breaking an addiction, or to the type of treatment that is receive during the course of this process. We will examine a number of concepts related to drug detox in depth.

Drug Detox Centers

Drug detox centers are typically equipped with medical doctors, psychiatrists, psychologists, drug counselors, and other mental health professionals. It is not uncommon to receive additional addiction treatment while staying at a detoxification center, such as 12-step meetings, support groups, and traditional psychotherapy.

This is a good thing because multiple treatment modalities seem to be roughly correlated with treatment success. It is likely that this is due to the receptiveness of certain patients to certain treatments, for reasons that are not as yet fully understood. It could also be that the skill of treatment providers plays a role in patient recovery.

Drug Addiction Detox

Drug addiction detox refers to the second type of drug detox program that we mentioned. It is somewhat more complicated than simply detoxifying the system from one or more pollutants, because the system in question has an added element of nervous system dependency and/or psychological addiction. This means that extra psychological elements will affect the patient’s ability to successfully complete detox and then continue on without the substance.

It is in this case that psychological treatments will be the most necessary in order for a full recovery to be realized. In many cases people will consider themselves to be in “drug detox rehab” for the duration of their treatment, even after their system has technically been detoxified. It is the remaining psychological element that has not yet been cleansed.

Prescription Drug Detox

Prescription drug addiction has become an increasingly prevalent problem. Many people struggling with this type of addiction have not ever purchased their medications illegally, but have simply been prescribed habit-forming medications by their physicians or psychiatrists. This is often the case for chronic pain patients or people struggling to manage anxiety or insomnia.

In this case the psychological aspects of the addiction may be very different than is typical for patients addicted to illicit drugs. There may be a feeling of distress as the patient struggles to come to terms with giving up a medication that has been, in many cases, the only thing that has proved effective in alleviating a chronic condition. Psychotherapy for prescription drug addiction requires a special sensitivity to this, because such a patient may be feeling understandably frustrated.

Drug Detox Programs

There are a number of different types of drug detox programs, ranging from the basic medical detox all the way to the involved recovery program. The appropriateness of one type of treatment over another will depend on the nature of your addiction to the substance you are detoxing from.

If you are simply being medically supervised, you are not likely to receive much psychological support aside from the pleasant bedside manner of your nurses. However, certain specialized units who work with patients often afflicted by unintentional medication addiction will offer psychological services to patients undergoing this type of medical drug detox.

If you are staying at a full-blow drug detox center, then this is the type of treatment facility where you are most likely to receive plenty of psychological support, which can be immensely helpful in the drug and alcohol detox process.

One of the main problems with describing the level of psychological services that you may be likely to receive is that it is difficult for patients to adequately assess their need for this type of service. In many cases psychological care can be very helpful to patients who, for a variety of reasons, may be most resistant to it.

It is good practice for anyone seeking alcohol, drug detox, or any other type of addiction treatment to talk with their doctor about the potential benefit of psychological services. If you do not have a close relationship with your doctor or are uncertain about having this type of discussion, either a drug detox facility, psychiatric hospital, or a psychologist will be able to perform an addiction assessment for you to help you determine whether you would be likely to benefit from mental health care during your recovery.

Drug Detox Products

There are a number of products on the market which claim to assist individuals in detoxifying their systems from a variety of drugs and medications. While we cannot speak for the efficacy of these products, we can say that it is extremely inadvisable to attempt any form of detox from drugs without special medical care, if not also psychological care. Attempting a home drug detox could very easily result in adverse medical and psychological events. Depending on the drug you are attempting to clear out of your system and your level of dependency, this could result in death.

Rather than trying to learn and understand a drugs detox cycle from a layman’s perspective, we would urge you to contact a professional for a medical and psychological evaluation so that you can have help detoxing from drugs and alcohol. The added benefit of doing this is that your detoxification experience is likely to be much more comfortable than it otherwise would be. Detoxing without any medical assistance or pharmacological aid, aside from causing medical problems, also results in a lot of discomfort for you that may be avoidable.

However, when it appears to you that your dog is depressed and you are wondering, "What are the signs of dog depression?", you should instead wash the idea of depression from your mind and think about nutrition.

If you are in a position to ask yourself if your dog is depressed, then you are almost certainly a caring enough pet owner to not have a depressed dog. I will not rule out the idea that a dog can suffer from grief, despair, or sadness, but you must also consider that the canine psychology is far simpler than human psychology. To call a dog's state of mind "depressed" is even sloppier than the already-sloppy applications of the term "depression" in human beings. I feel this way about all types of pet psychology and most so-called "pet psychologists."

To put a dog on antidepressants is simply nonsensical. If you want to know the causes of dog depression, I will tell you the primary one: the kibble that you feed your dog is comprised primarily of grains. A dog's system has not evolved in the presence of large amounts of this type of food, and so your dog is probably suffering from chronic fatigue secondary to metabolic syndrome. In 9 out of 10 cases, you will be able to completely reverse this condition by finding a dog food that is lower in carbohydrate and higher in fat and protein. Replace a meal a day with heart, liver, or other organ meat from your butcher (usually very cheaply!) and your dog with most likely surge with energy.

The entire idea for modern antidepressant medications comes from the presumption that there are certain biological chemicals (neurotransmitters known as biogenic amines) that are missing in depressed people. This is what your psychiatrist means when he tells you that your depression is a brain disease caused by a lack of serotonin or norepinephrine. The problem with this idea is that it is incorrect, as has been disproven for quite some time. The medications based on this presumption seemed to work, though, and so they kept making them in spite of not knowing why they work. To this day many of the psychiatric medications that you will find are not based on any modern theory of neurochemistry.

For example, when you start taking a new antidepressant your psychiatrist will tell you not to expect any results for at least 4 to 6 weeks. However, immediately after you start taking that medication, literally within just a few hours, it will have already done what it was designed to do. It will have already increased your level of the target neurochemical. Now some of these drugs target serotonin, some target norepinephrine, some even target dopamine, but the fact is that within a few hours of taking that medication you will already have elevated levels of that target neurotransmitter. Nobody is exactly sure what's happening in the ensuing weeks after you begin taking medication that starts to alleviate the symptoms of your depression. But we suspect this is caused by another process in your body's adjustment to the medication.

All this is really fairly irrelevant, because we now know that the medications don't really work that well after all. Most of the reason why anyone thought they worked very well was because the pharmaceutical companies paid a very a lot of money to produce a very a lot of studies in order to find studies that have positive results. Any scientist can tell you that if you perform enough studies, sooner or later you'll get one with positive results. The odds are simply in your favor, the more studies you perform. The problem has been that only the studies with positive results were getting published. Now that the unpublished study results are starting to become available, we now understand that this has been the case all along.

So the bottom line is that there should really be very little trust for modern psychiatry in spite of its claims to evidence-based practice. Granted, there are certain medications that do seem to be effective. For example, medications for bipolar disorder. However, in my opinion, these medications are not any more effective than appropriate psychotherapeutic interventions and by appropriate I mean therapeutic interventions which specifically target the symptoms and causes of those symptoms of whichever psychiatric or psychological disorder you're talking about.

So in the case of depression treatment, we can say that we should not be trying to treat the depression. As I have mentioned in the previous article, we should instead be trying to treat the patient, to understand why it is that they are malfunctioning, why it is that they are not properly adapted to the present situation, and what meanings their maladaptation holds for them.

I actually believe in the idea that there are chemical differences in a depressed brain vs. a nondepressed brain, but I don't think that there is any specific nondepressed chemical profile. I think it is specific to the individual and I think that the chemicals that the brain is using are based on the needs of that individual and their specific internal and external environments. So in order to truly enact change at the chemical level. We must find the correct psychotherapy, which will enable the individual to naturally adapt to their circumstances. That is in fact the entire purpose of psychotherapy, whether it be treatment for depression, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, or any other diagnosable disorder.

In future articles I will discuss specific types and subtypes of depression, possible ways to classify them, as well as the diagnostic criteria for depression and the types of available treatments for depression.