We established in our article about depression treatment now that there are many different forms of depression and that there are many different ways to go about the treatment of depression. This brings us to a sticky situation for patients and clinicians alike: what if the treatments don’t work?

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.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Depression treatment is one of the single most sought-after mental health services. There are many different styles and approaches that clinicians can use, from pure medication management to brief therapy to family interventions to psychoanalysis. Often multiple approaches to treating depression are combined, and there is some empirical evidence that multiple concurrent treatment modalities tend to be more effective than single ones.

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.

» Read the rest of this entry «

In my opinion, the idea of dog depression is a byproduct of the outdated biogenic amine theory of depression. It is the idea that depression is caused by a lack of certain neurotransmitters. It would follow that if this were true for humans, and animals use the same neurochemicals, then animals could also suffer from chemical depression.

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.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Anxiety and depression are two of the most basic psychological diagnoses. They also represent components of many other psychiatric and medical illnesses. When dealing with either anxiety or depression, it is extremely important that a clinician rule out any medical causes of these sensations prior to beginning psychotherapeutic treatment.

Even if medical causes are found, this does not necessarily mean that the client will not be able to benefit from psychotherapy. In some cases medical conditions can coincide with mental ones, such that an adjustment of each is in order. After all, the mind is a part of the body and the body is a part of the mind. There simply is no separation; each is a part of the total organism and each is fully connected to the other.

» Read the rest of this entry «

There are many effective types of psychological depression treatment. However there is little understanding in the lay community about the causes and treatments for depression. Many individuals have fallen under the impression that the best treatment for depression is pharmacological. However, the medications that are available for depressed individuals are less than ideal. They have a number of side effects, and recent meta-analyses show that they may not be as effective as previously thought. In fact, in most cases they are no more effective than placebo.

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.

» Read the rest of this entry «

My take on depression treatment is this: there are a number of different forms of depression that individuals can suffer from. And this is not merely to make the distinction between traditional depression and manic depression, which is the antiquated term for bipolar disorder.

Many people like to talk about their theories of depression, saying that depression is anger turned inward, or that depression is a biochemical disorder, a shortage of neurotransmitters, or a way of coping with hopeless situations. It seems like everyone has a pet theory of depression, but my opinion is that treatments for depression have to match the symptoms of depression. Because depression itself is too broad a category to simply assign one treatment for or to even say it’s just one disorder. Diagnostically you can break it down into specifiers and similar disorders such as dysthymia. There used to even be a depressive personality disorder but this disorder is no longer acknowledged in the current diagnostic manual.

» Read the rest of this entry «