Treatments for Depression

Treatments for depression are generally divided into physical, which is pharmacotherapy and variations of electric shock, and talk therapy, which is psychological. Both general divisions can be further divided. Pharmacological is medication, which is thought of as antidepressant therapy, but includes anti-psychotic medications too.

Talk Therapy

You may be surprised to find out that Talk Therapy can be divided into many, many categories. and sub categories such as Psychoanalytical Therapy, Behavior Therapy, Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Dialectic Behavior Therapy.

Physical Treatments for Depression

Medication for depression is as old as recorded history. In the book The Odyssey by Homer, Penelope takes a drug to relieve her pain for missing for her long absent husband.

I'm no pharmacist or health professional and I easily get lost in the various drug classes: Tricyclic, MAO Inhibitors, SSRI's. Much less the actual drugs: Zoloft, Prozac, Effexor to name a few. What my reading and personal experience tells me is that any of them only work on about 50% of patients. Often times they must be switched or combined with other drugs to show significant results. Actually older drugs appear to be more effective than newer drugs, but they have worse side effects. That's the trade off.

Talk Therapy Treatments for Depression

Psychoanalysts believe that the core of personality disorders are unconscious and not noticeable by the patient. They view their role as digging into the patients subconscious to find these dysfunctional structures and bring them to the light where they can be discredited.

Interpersonal Therapy - The therapist takes a special history of the patient and tries to connect a negative incident as the cause of the depressed feelings or the depressed feelings as a cause of increasingly negative incidents. The therapist seeks to break the cycle by pointing out the cycle and offering alternative responses. This doesn't work too well for chronic depression.

Behavior Therapy - Here the therapist works to have the patient perform activities that are designed to break their habit that has them depressed. This is based on Pavlov's dogs. An action repeated often enough becomes an automatic habit. An example of this therapy would be having a person who is afraid of elevators, ride elevators while being give support and having the success pointed out and emphasized.

Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) - Practitioners believe their role is to uncover and discredit dysfunctional automatic thoughts that the patient may not be aware of as being dysfunctional.

This must seem to be almost the same thing as psychoanalytic therapy. They both look at dysfunctional thought structures. Their difference is, of course, where they focus their attention. Close to the surface or deep in the unconscious.

We are all familiar with changing the focus of our eyes. If you focus far into the distance, the things close by are blurry and if you focus close, the things in the distance are blurry. Similarly, if you focus only on the possible hidden, unconscious thoughts as a source, you may miss important clues that are right on the surface. If you look ONLY at the surface and not the underlying structures, any gains may only be temporary. At least that's my opinion.

Dialectic Behavior Therapy - DBT is a subset of CBT developed as a treatment for Borderline Personality Disorder, of which depression is just one of many symptoms. It involves the acceptance of emotions before moving to discredit the automatic thoughts that create the depression.

Which treatment for depression is best depends on the particular disorder the depression is associated with: bi-polar, General Affective Depression, Neurotic Anxiety (phobias), schizophrenia. Cognitive behavior therapy in combination with medication has been shown to be most successful in all cases, probably because it really encompasses all the others except ECT. IF you our someone you know suffers from depression, seek help. The treatments for depression do work.

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