Causes of depression

Without going into details, interesting only to specialists, all causes of depression can be divided into two groups: reactive and endogenous. I must say that this is a very simplified classification, which can be supplemented by depression of the elderly, alcohol and drug depression and some others. But nevertheless, basically it is true and for the purposes of our discussion is sufficient.

Reactive depressions are caused by some external traumatic situation, such as the death of a loved one, loss of a workplace, parting with a loved one(s). Endogenous depressions are based on genetic predisposition and are caused by metabolic disorders of special substances of the brain-neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters are responsible for the transmission of nerve impulses, for the correct formation and coordinated work of the processes of inhibition and excitation in the brain.

In fact, both of these reasons are interrelated, it is obvious that different people can react differently to the same traumatic situation. A person with initially low levels of neurotransmitters is more likely to get depression than a more fortunate individual. At the same time, if you create a hypothetical situation with the absence of all external traumatic stimuli, there is a high probability that a person even with a very burdened heredity will never know what depression is.

So, regardless of the cause that caused the depression, its biochemical basis is a violation of the exchange of brain mediators, namely serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.

Why is it important to know?

Because the drug therapy of depression is based on the alignment of this imbalance, and it should be understood exactly how the lack of a mediator to choose the right drug for treatment. It is quite rare to find a disease in which the exchange of all three mediators is disturbed equally, as there is no ideal antidepressant, equally affecting the exchange of all these conductors of the nerve impulse.

With a lack of serotonin, anxiety depression can develop, in which a low mood is mixed with causeless anxiety, anxiety for insignificant reasons. A deficit of norepinephrine manifests itself by lack of energy, lack of energy, fatigue, and dopamine is responsible for a person receiving pleasure from something, and, accordingly, in violation of his exchange occurs hedonia (loss of sense of pleasure), the food seems tasteless, unfunny jokes, uninteresting reading.

What kind of drugs affect the balance of these neurotransmitters, will be described in the Chapter “Antidepressants“, now it is enough to just remember this information and listen to your feelings, try to understand what symptoms you have expressed to a greater extent.

It is also important to understand the following. External causes of depression do not always lie on the surface, can not always be realized by man. In this respect, the sometimes used term “causeless depression” is not quite correct, it would be more correct to say”depression, the causes of which are not understood”. In practice, this means the existence of mental material, forced into the subconscious of a person, traumatic situation from the distant past, perhaps from early childhood. The psyche of a person at this age is not completely formed and sufficiently stable, that an adult is a trifle, for a child can have the scale of a universal catastrophe. The child is simply unable to exist in the presence of such a situation, and then the protective mechanism of the psyche triggers, causing displacement and external forgetting of the traumatic episode.

I deliberately write “external”, because in fact the situation has not gone away, it has remained unresolved, suppressed psychic energy continues to exist in the subconscious and bombard from there the psyche of an adult, to influence his actions, beliefs, perception of certain life situations.

To understand this, it is easiest to imagine a psychoanalytic model of the human psyche, consisting of three parts: consciousness, the pre-conscious and the unconscious. Consciousness is a set of thoughts, feelings, experiences of a person that are in his perception here and now. The area of the pre-conscious is the experience, which, although not realized at this moment, but can recover, go into consciousness either spontaneously or under the influence of external influence. The unconscious is a receptacle of instincts that exist on the principle of pleasure and are a source of mental strength and energy of man. Such a division of the psyche is not present in the child initially, and appears as his socialization, education, training standards of behavior adopted in society.

That is, the child is explained that some of his desires are unacceptable and even shameful, as a result, over time, he develops an internal censor, a kind of conscience that monitors the prevention and rejection of such aspirations. But the instinctive impulses are very strong, and so easy to give them up does not work, as a result in the human psyche is a constant struggle between the requirements of society and their own desires. Every mental act and human act, according to Freud, is the result of this struggle.

Such a struggle can wear down the psyche, and to deprive people of the opportunity to exist in society, to prevent this mentality produced a number of protective mechanisms to protect the mind from the ravages of primitive impulses. These include suppression, rejection, displacement, sublimation, projection, rationalization. The presence of these protective mechanisms ensures the preservation of the psyche in a stable state, maintaining the integrity and identity of the individual, in a constant conflict of psychological attitudes.

We are interested in the mechanism of suppression in this case. He is in enforced exile from consciousness of disturbing a person’s memories, causing anxiety, fear, tension. This memory is sent to the storeroom of the unconscious and ideally, if it is not very emotionally charged, should no longer cause a person significant anxiety, finding a way out through any harmless habits, patterns of behavior, mental attitudes.

But in some cases, the traumatic situation has such a strong emotional impact on the child that it continues to manifest itself in the form of externally unmotivated anxiety and sadness. It is in such cases that the patient cannot identify the source of his suffering and speaks of “causeless” depression.

But there is another situation. The cause of depression seems to lie on the surface and is associated with some specific episode from the recent past or present. Over time, the traumatic situation is resolved, it would seem, with it should go away and depression, but very often this does not happen.

The reason is that the realized situation from the present serves as a kind of associative trigger and touches the spiritual strings associated with a similar past negative experience, forced into the unconscious. For example, having received at work a scolding from the chief, a person suffers not only from this fact, but also from the painful unconscious anguish, which can be caused by a simple resemblance of the color of the tie of the head and the father of the patient, who hit him in childhood for some fault.

As a result, a person can change his place of work, completely change his current circumstances, but he does not get better. This small conflict episode served only as a push, the trigger which lifted the muddy Deposit from the bottom of his unconscious. Over time, perhaps, this precipitate will calm down, but with a high degree of probability it is possible to predict the repetition of a depressive episode, if a person once again finds himself in a similar situation in the future. And now imagine how much repressed pain we have accumulated in our entire lives, and you will realize that in fact we all walk on a minefield, risking their daily peace of mind.

How to deal with this? There are several fundamental approaches: you can suppress the painful memories of taking psychotropic drugs, cutting off part of yourself and continuing to pressurize the boiling pot of your unconscious, you can work out your current problems with a psychotherapist and learn to live with these problems, and you can try to throw out the accumulated pain and find true liberation, and with it the integrity of your personality.

Needless to say, the latter is the only way.

What is mental health

How many times have you dreamed about going back to your "pre-depressive" emotional state? Return not at the cost of daily intake of a handful of pills, constant drowsiness, the feeling of a metal helmet, worn on the head, killed at the root of sexual desire, but really, so that without the help of medicines you can laugh when watching comedies, do not poison the life of others with your downcast, perform elementary work for an hour, not for a week. But if you think that's mental health, you're wrong.

Of course, against the background of your current state and what was before the depression, it seems a pipe dream and something completely unattainable, but remember, before the illness, you did not have to experience unmotivated anxiety, emotionally react to some little things and then regret your behavior, be afraid of public speaking and avoid noisy parties? Depression is a very unpleasant disease, but it gives you a chance to reconsider your life, beliefs and values, to uproot the emotional anchors that have settled somewhere very deep in the subconscious, to remove the blocks and restrictions imposed by someone, to get rid of bodily and mental clamps, to regain the ability to feel as you felt in childhood, when the colors were brighter, and the food tastier, and each new day brought a lot of new positive impressions.

Don’t stop at what doctors call “remission,” don’t agree to spend the rest of your life on a “maintenance dose” of antidepressants, it’s not real life, you have the right to demand more.

So what is mental health?

I would like to remind you once again that I do not pretend to be scientific and admit that my vision of some aspects of the problem may differ from the currently accepted medical paradigm. But I have a moral right to my point of view, after all, all these volumes of medical research, mountains of pills, and dozens of hours spent in the therapist's chair didn't give me the result I was able to come to on my own.

Antidepressants and psychotherapy were able to bring me to a relatively stable state, that is, I could go to work, with some very small degree of efficiency to perform their duties, to maintain some minimum necessary social relations with friends and colleagues. At the maximum for me therapeutic dosage of drugs I had panic attacks, which was already a great relief, increased mood, passed insomnia. But at what cost!

I wanted to sleep all day, about any productive work and the speech couldn’t be, I added 10 kilograms in weight, ceased to go in for sports, didn’t test any sexual attraction. For a long time I was sure that I was doomed to such existence until the end of my days, and internally already reconciled with it.

After I started meditative practices, which I will write about in detail below, my optimism increased, I was able to reduce the dose of antidepressants twice the maximum level, at some point I even completely refused to take them. But, unfortunately, this state lasted only a couple of months, the first stress at work drove me back into a deep depression.

But even at the peak of my emotional recovery, I realized that it was difficult to call it recovery. My mood was extremely volatile, I overreacted to the slightest stressful situation, slept badly.

And only now I understand what real emotional health is. This does not mean a constant good mood and the absence of any anxiety and excitement. This condition also refers to the pathological in psychiatry called “germanically”. You may have met such people in your life, I knew two of them, and both of them were scientists for some reason. They could talk and work for hours, almost days, never tired and never listened to anyone, always stayed in some elated euphoric state. At the same time, the lives of others they turned into hell, to communicate, and even more so to live with such people is absolutely unbearable, and they themselves are rarely happy and successful. I don’t think that’s something to aspire to.

By mental health, I mean something completely different. A person is healthy, if in the absence of any external influence his emotional state is stable, he feels balanced, with a slight deviation towards the positive, he is calm, but energetic and collected, able to concentrate on the task and at the same time get satisfaction from his work.

A person should get satisfaction from the process itself, whatever he was doing, to regain the taste of life, the ability to feel, to feel the world as it was possible in childhood. We all understand that the children’s brightness and freshness of sensations lost, and put up with it. But it shouldn’t be like this. To correct this state of Affairs, we first need to understand why this is happening, to discover the causes of this phenomenon of loss of a part of ourselves. About them we will talk in the next Chapter.

How to break out of a black hole Part 2

First, some statistics:

The world health organization (who) compares depression with an epidemic that has engulfed all of humanity: depression has already come to the first place in the world among the causes of absenteeism, the second – among the diseases that lead to disability.

Every year about 150 million people in the world lose their ability to work due to depression. Only the us economy, it causes annual damage of more than 50 billion dollars. This amount includes the cost of 290 million lost working days, psychotherapy and disability.

According to who forecasts, by 2020 depression will come out on the first place in the world among all diseases, having overtaken today’s leaders – infectious and cardiovascular diseases. Already today it is the most common disease that affects women.

According to studies conducted in the United States, people prone to depression are twice as likely to die from other diseases.

50 % of those suffering from depression do not seek medical care, and of the remaining only 25-30% get an appointment with a psychiatrist.

Unipolar depression is the leading cause of disability in the United States among children over 5 years.

Special studies have shown that 60 % of patients applying to clinics, detect depressive disorders of varying severity. Meanwhile, as a result of diagnosis by traditional medical methods, which are used in clinics, depression is determined only in 5% of all patients applying there depressive.

Depression is diagnosed in 22-33 % of hospitalized patients, 38 % of cancer patients, 47% of stroke patients, 45 % – myocardial infarction, 39 % – parkinsonism.

Not so long ago, the peak of depression was between the ages of 30 and 40 years, but today depression is sharply “younger”, and it often affects people under 25 years. Among those who were born before 1940, the number of people with depression before the age of 25 is 2.5%. Among those born in 1940-1959, this figure is already 10%. There is no accurate data for later years, but this trend continues to grow.

From 45 to 60% of all suicides on the planet are committed by patients with depression. According to forecasts, in 2020, depression will be the killer number 1.

A depressed person is 35 times more likely to commit suicide than someone outside of it. 50 % of people with endogenous depression and 20% with psychogenic commit suicide attempt. Every sixth it is possible.

The annual catalogue of new antidepressants reaches a thickness of 3 cm.

With a single episode of depression, the probability of relapse is 50 %, with the second – 70 %, with the third – already 90 %.

With depressive disorder, at least one of the spouses divorces occur 10 times more often than in ordinary families.

This book does not claim the status of scientific research, I will not describe in detail the causes and biochemical reactions behind the development of depression, complex mechanisms of action of psychotropic drugs used for its treatment. This is a look at depression from the inside, an attempt to tell about what a person feels, being in such a state, and, most importantly, that you can get out of depression, I did it, and therefore, you should get it.

This is not an easy way, there is no universal method or pill, drinking which could regain mental health. But, if you are among the people described by the soulless statistics in the above quote, the fight against depression should be your most important task, the meaning of life here and now, a goal without which you can hardly expect to achieve all the others.

Believe me, I know what I’m writing. I studied medicine for seven years at the Institute and had to spend another six years studying the problem of depression and methods of its treatment. You will not read this information in medical textbooks and drug instructions, your doctor will not tell you about it either. I am not bound by any shop obligations and am not going to defend my point of view before the ossified medical establishment. I recognize only one criterion-the result and ready for this criterion to withstand any tests and checks. Everything that is written here, I tried on myself, except psychedelics and electroshock, the first – in view of their illegality and absence of the psychotherapists having experience with them, the electric shock simply wasn’t necessary to me, I managed to jump off the train before arrival to this station.

Most of the therapeutic methods used for the treatment of depression, has a varying degree of effectiveness, and to achieve the optimal result requires a combination of them. Any psychiatrist will tell you that taking antidepressants should be combined with psychotherapy sessions. Unfortunately, this knowledge and recommendations of most specialists and limited. Rarely any psychiatrist will advise you to engage in meditation or gymnastics qigong. Even fewer specialists are familiar with the techniques of neurolinguistic programming, and almost no one in Russia knows about the primary therapy of Dr. Arthur Yanov.

There is no need to be afraid of the number of practices offered by me, there is no point in practicing them all. Some of them are described in order to avoid them and not to repeat my mistakes. The basis of my technique is the Primary therapy (primal therapy), developed by Arthur Yanov. I am convinced that without serious study of unconscious material it is very difficult to get rid of the true causes of depression, and I believe that Dr. Yanov’s methods are the most effective at the moment to achieve this goal.

This book describes my personal experience of getting out of depression, and I really hope that it will be useful for someone else. I know that you find it hard to believe that deliverance might know how tired you advice others to “pull themselves together”, the replica “you’re the man!”or “you’re a mother!”, “think about the children/parents/colleagues/interests of the company”, believe me, I went through all this nightmare.

But I would like to warn you. If you suffer from depression, you in any case should not engage in self-medication and perceive this book as an alternative to drug therapy and psychotherapy, on the contrary, the earlier you start treatment prescribed by a specialist, the more chances you will have to get rid of your problem forever. Another thing is that the book can help you in choosing a doctor, to understand the cause of your suffering, to save time and money that you could spend on all sorts of near-medical charlatans and, I very much hope to make the final step, to make a breakthrough to the final recovery.

I give practical advice and exercises that helped me get out of the black hole of depression.

If you, as well as I, unsuccessfully motalis from one specialist to another, if you are treated for all possible diseases in the world, until the present diagnosis, if you go to the pharmacy more often than the supermarket, if the number and color of the tablets already dazzled – this book is for you.

Remember-there is a way out.

Depression. How to break out of a black hole PART I

Depression is like a lady in black. If she came, do not drive her away, and invite to the table as a guest, and listen to what she intends to say.

Carl Gustav Jung

Best day of my life

Probably, it would be easier to throw out at once these two huge plastic bags stuffed to the eyeballs with all kinds of psychotropic drugs available in the post-Soviet space. But it was a special pleasure for me to get one multi-colored boxes, each of which meant a certain milestone, a stage in my six-year struggle with depression, to carefully consider them, to cause associated memories and ruthlessly send them to the trash, along with all the pain, fear, suffering that they meant to me.

“Prozac”, Cromwell Hospital, London, obese doctor with unhealthy shortness of breath, first told me “you are depressed“; “Remeron”, ajibedam hospital, Istanbul, $ 800, spent on meaningless tests; “Lerivon”, Moscow, 10 kilograms of excess weight, gained over three months…

Six years. Erased from life, from the most active period of my life, six years of unrealized opportunities, rejected career proposals, ruined personal life, hopeless vegetations.

I deserve this day. Definitely deserved it.

Introduction

Hi.

My name is Anar, I am a doctor, I am 38 years old.

The last 6 of them were stolen by depression.

I have suffered from depressive disorder, generalized anxiety and panic attacks since August 2002. At the peak of the disease, I took three types of antidepressants at the same time, visited a psychotherapist, engaged in various practices from the field of alternative medicine. Despite this, most of every day I spent in a depressed state, panic attacks happened 3-4 times a day, I shuddered from every phone call and appeal to me by name.

At some point I decided to accept it. I decided that I was destined to spend the rest of my days on antidepressants, which though I did not feel good, but which at least gave me the strength to get up every morning from bed and go to work, somehow communicate with the people around me, to perform their social functions.

In the end, it stopped working. I lost my job, my personal life was ruined, I didn’t see any sense in my future existence.

But six months ago, the situation began to change. Now in my life everything is different, I do not take antidepressants, do not feel anxiety and panic attacks, most of the day I am in a calm and positive state. I have a new job that gives me satisfaction, and a girl with whom I plan to connect my life and which is better for me there is no one in this world.

Not so much, you say?

Well, really, a lot of people around you have the same thing and don’t write books about it.

But if you are reading this book, perhaps your life is not so rosy. As a doctor, I have encountered depressive patients in my practice, some of them reached such a stage that they saw no other way out for themselves than suicide.

Then I still did not suffer from depression myself and I can responsibly say: never a person who has not been in this skin, will not understand that he is experiencing a depressed patient, for whom there is no greater happiness, a greater dream than to return to his pre-painful state, to live a normal life, to love and be loved, to enjoy the little joys that healthy people are so familiar that they do not cause any emotions.

So what happened six months ago?

There was no miracle, I did not find a wonderful pill that cured me, did not read any book that recommends “change your attitude to depression” and “think positively“, after which all my problems were resolved.

There are no miracles. There will be no them and in your case-to get rid of depression, it is necessary to work. But my example shows that the reward for work can be huge if you know exactly what to do. It took me 6 years to figure it out, you can get this knowledge in a few hours spent reading this book.

As a doctor, I was well aware of the underlying mechanism of depression, but as a patient, I could not find an effective solution that would stop this ruthless mechanism.

Now I know how to do it. I spent 6 years and over $ 50,000 on medication, psychotherapy, and various spiritual practices. Everything I know, including the only effective way out of depression that I know, I have summarized in a book that I have the honor to offer to your attention.

Just remember that reading the book will not cure you, the technique will have to practice. It is not difficult, does not take much time, and the effect you will feel after the first successful session. Each time it will increase, and, I assure you, the classes will not only not burden you, but, on the contrary, once you feel the effect, you will strive for them with impatience.

The basis of my methodology is based on the theory of primal therapy, Dr. Arthur Janov and methods of neuro-linguistic programming, originally developed by John Grinder and Richard Bandler.

I underwent three weeks of intensive therapy at the primary center in Los Angeles in January 2009, and this experience changed my whole life. I finally figured out how to get to the forgotten childhood memories and the repressed pain they continue to cause us.

It remained to find a method to work with psychological trauma from the present and recent past. This proved to be easier, NLP methods in this regard have shown themselves to be very effective.

To understand why a combination of these methods has had the best effect, you need to be aware of the causes of depression. Any doctor will tell you that the basis of depression is a violation of the normal course of biochemical processes in the brain and the associated metabolic disorders of neurotransmitters – serotonin, norepinephrine and dopamine.

But that’s not what I mean.

Every depression has a reason. Sometimes it can lie on the surface and be realized by the individual, sometimes its causes are buried in childhood injuries and experiences. But most often, even almost always, there is a combination of these two factors, stress in the present causes pain from the past to life. You can read more about this in the Chapter “Causes of depression“.

Dr. Yanov had been in therapy at the time, many celebrities, including Elizabeth Taylor and Barbra Streisand. But his most famous patient was of course John Lennon. Below you can read the memoirs of Dr. Janov about John’s therapy, with which he shared in an interview with the magazine “Mojo”.

In my opinion, Dr. Yanov managed to get to the root of the problem. Primary therapy allows you to reach and throw out suppressed emotions that cause nervous disorders. This is very important, but not always enough. To get rid of depression, you also need to work through traumatic situations that are already in your mind, are recognized by you, but still continue to torment you.

I’m not going to teach you Primary therapy, you have to go to Los Angeles and get it at the Primary center. In this book I describe my experience, undoubtedly positive, and the method that I had to come up with to be able to continue to work with his subconscious to stop the three-week intensive at the Center.

Primary therapy, like any other, is long-term. It does not stop after the first three weeks, and it is quite justified: it is impossible to work out all the unconscious material in such a short time. But I had to interrupt my treatment at the Center, I could not continue to stay in Los Angeles, besides, having lost my job, I already in any case had nothing to pay for the continuation of therapy.

Fortunately, I now have the opportunity to practice my method at home, and I’m ready to share it with you. You will learn how to relive long-suppressed feelings, how to get rid of the pain that has accumulated in your mind for decades, how to get rid of daily stress and work out traumatic memories from the recent past.

I also described in detail my experience of medication and psychotherapy, as well as the experience of various spiritual practices. Some methods worked for me, some didn’t. After reading this book, you will learn how not to make my mistakes and not to waste time and money on useless techniques, learn about the side effects caused by various antidepressants, the exact, and not always harmless, the mechanism of their work.

Here's a partial list of what I've had to try in the last 6 years:

Antidepressants and other medications:

Prozac, Zoloft, Amitriptyline, Lerivon, Remeron, Venlafaxine, Desyrel, Wellbutrin, Paxil, Xanax, Diazepam.

Psychotherapy and body-oriented therapy:

Interpersonal therapy, psychoanalysis, cognitive-behavioral therapy, primary therapy, Rolfing.

Spiritual and meditative practices:

Self-hypnosis, qigong, Scientology, transcendental therapy, holotropic breathing, psychoanalysis, sleep deprivation.

I do not urge you to stop your current treatment, my method is compatible with medication and psychotherapy. There is a high risk of premature and abrupt discontinuation of antidepressants, and they should be taken only under supervision and in consultation with the attending physician. But, practicing my method, you will feel that over time you will no longer need for other types of treatment.

I wrote this book from two points of view – the doctor and the patient. As a doctor, I will tell you about the causes of depression, the mechanism of action and indications for the use of various types of therapy. From me, as a patient, you will learn about the effectiveness of a particular method, side effects of drugs and, finally, that eventually helped me cope with my long-term disease.

I feel better now than I did before my illness. Simultaneous work with suppressed and conscious material gave results that I could not even hope six months ago. But I’m not going to stop there, it’s not enough for me to be just a healthy person in the ordinary sense of the word. Now I have a powerful tool at my disposal, using which I am going to completely clear my mind of the mental debris that has been building up in it for decades. My goal is to return and comprehend my personality, my true self, free from artificially constructed by me or anyone who has ever had an influence on me, psychological barriers, old complexes and beliefs.

Change your life and you. Do not settle for vegetating and suffering for the rest of your life. I know, I know very well that it’s hard for you to believe this right now, but life can really be beautiful and amazing, filled with happiness and meaning. This goal is worth fighting for.

Don't give up, get your life back!