How to deal with depression: Dealing with depression is a life long process that consists of two stages.
The first stage is overcoming your depression and the second one is maintaining your life depression free.
Ways To Overcome Depression
• Change your life style: Alcohol, cigarettes, coffee, junk food, not getting enough sleep all can prolong and deepen your depression. You need to stop poisoning yourself and start feeding yourself with vitamins rich foods (fruits and salads). In other words you need to cleanse your body from toxins and free radicals.
• Psychotherapy: Find the best help you can get because overcoming depression by yourself is extremely difficult and close to impossible, especially in cases of moderate and severe depression.
There are many types of psychotherapy that you can choose from, so there is no reason for not finding the right one for you. Interpersonal therapy focuses on interpersonal relationships, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy focuses on the way you think and behave, Psychoanalysis is studying your past as well as encourages you to look deep inside of yourself etc.
• Antidepressants: Antidepressants are used in cases of severe depression. They are given to patients to reduce his or her symptoms so that he or she is able to participate in psychotherapy where the real healing is taking place.
Antidepressants are overused and misused around the world. Many people believe that depression medication is the only answer to their depressive disorder. However, they could not be more wrong. There is no quick fix for depression or any magic pills.
When taking antidepressants, you should always be in psychotherapy under the supervision of your therapist. Antidepressants need to be taken for at least six months regularly. The worst thing you can do to yourself is take depression medications off and on or to mix them with alcohol.
• Natural supplements: Natural supplements can be taken as an alternative to antidepressants. They can reduce your symptoms of depression or even in some cases relieve you from them. Because there are many natural supplements, you should always first seek a professional for advice about them.
Some of natural supplements can be harmful if they are misused, so it is always good to be taking them under supervision of your therapist and not on your own.
• Reduce stress: Depression as well as anxiety is nothing but a reaction to stress and trauma. Unfortunately, stress is all around us and thus inside of us. Symptoms of anxiety and depression are telling us that our defense mechanisms against stress do not work as good as they used to and that changes need to be made.
Therefore, it is time to make some changes in your life. This you should do together with your therapist. You should also get your family members involved as well as your close friends so that they can give you the support you need. Family and friends can play an important role in depression treatment. Therefore, this is why it is always recommended that they are part of it.
Maintaining Your Life Depression Free
After you are healed from your depressive disorder, you should make a plan for how to stop depression from reoccurring. You need to do with your therapist because he or she is, in your case, a person with the most credibility for advising you what steps you need to be making as well as what you should be doing in order to stay healthy.
Depression is an illness that has the tendency to reoccur. This is why healing depression is not enough and mental hygiene is mandatory. The overall answer to your question: “How to deal with depression?” is this: First, you need to beat your depression and than you need to make sure that it does not reoccur.