Depression

Are you in bed for hours? Do you feel like you don’t want to go outside? Do you feel like there’s no hope? Or do you feel numb? Absent of any ‘real’ emotion? Like life is pointless, because you don’t feel happiness, sadness, joy or anything at all? You may be suffering from depression. 

Depression is defined as a period of at least two weeks when a person experienced a depressed mood or loss of interest in daily activities and had a majority of specified symptoms, such as problems with sleep, eating, energy, concentration or self worth.  Most depression is caused by changes in people’s neurochemistry. Coping with depression involves figuring out what triggers it for you, reviewing what has helped in the past to prevent or cope with feelings of depression and finally identifying the function of the symptoms so that you can find alternative methods to address the function.  

Common symptoms usually include but are not limited to, a lack of pleasure in most things during most days for a period of at least 2 weeks, a sense of hopelessness, helplessness and/or despair, lack of concentration, increased agitation, low energy and/or disruption of sleeping patterns or eating behaviors.

While the nature of depression is such that one can feel completely alone and isolated, it is important to know that you are NOT alone. Depression is one of the most common mental health disorders in the United States. According to the National Institute of Mental Health about 17.3 million adults in the United States had at least one episode of depression in 2017. 

 It can feel like depression will never end. However, there are effective treatments that can help you move past your depression. With some work you will one day in the near future go outside, on a hike or out for a walk, take a deep breath and taste the fresh air, hear the leaves rustle, and feel the sun warm your face. 

One thing you can try at home is to keep a sleep and eating journal to monitor your patterns. When we are experiencing  a lot of stress we may forget to eat or overeat and the same goes for sleep, we either don’t get enough sleep or over sleep. These symptoms can sneak up on us without us consciously realizing what we are doing and they can have a direct impact on our mood and energy levels. Studies have found that more than half of adults with depression experience some kind of sleep problem and more research is being done on the link between diet and depression. 

If you feel like you would like more help, I have experience in helping people move past depression. I use a solutions focused approach to identify specific client goals and to collaboratively formulate a plan to help my client achieve their goals. 

In working with depression, we will first spend time gathering as much information about your symptoms that we can. We will explore how these symptoms of depression are affecting your ability to live your life. Based on your list symptoms we will decide which one you would like to tackle first, which one is causing the most immediate problems. Identifying the pattern of the symptoms, we will work on understanding the function of the symptom. Once we have identified the function, we will figure out an alternative way to meet that need/function.  It is important to know that it doesn’t matter where we start, as long as it works for you. Depression is like a knitted blanket, if we just start doing something, pulling at one of the strings in the blanket, the whole thing will eventually unravel. 

I also work with motivational interviewing to help my client’s figure out their motivations so that in moving past depression they can come to a place where they are living a life that feels more authentic to them. 

Remember, you are not alone, there is help and you CAN move past this.

If you are interested in talking more please fill out the form on the contact page and I will get back to you within 24 hours.