Severe Depression

Help for Anxiety, Phobias, OCD and Depression

Severe Depression

Unremitting Feelings of Helplessness and Hopelessness

Depression

It's important to realise that, like anxiety, depression in itself is not an illness. Depression is an integral part of being human; everybody gets depressed to some degree at certain times in his or her life.

Life throws many things at us that give us a good right to become depressed. Such things as the death of a loved one, prolonged illness or incapacity, relationship and work problems bring home to us our lack of control. This lack of control makes us feel helpless and hopeless and that there's nothing we can do to change things. This is normal depression.

Depress:

"to press or push down"
"to lower in spirits: make gloomy"
"to lower the force, or energy of"

Depression:

"a sunken place"
"an abnormal lowering of the rate of any physiological activity or function"
"a mental disorder characterised by feelings of gloom and inadequacy"

(The Collins English Dictionary)

Anxiety
Nervousness, Anxiety, Panic
Anxiety Symptoms
Exercise and Depression

Books:
Help for Anxiety Books

Free Anxiety eBooks

More Resources:
Samaritans (UK)
HealthCommunities (US)

.	However, there is a situation where depression goes much deeper and becomes associated with something more than just those awful life events that are uncontrollable and happen to everyone. Yes the same bad things happen, but they become related to our very self, our 'weakness' and the belief that there is nothing we can do about it. With severe depression, nothing sounds good and nothing feels good. Thinking processes slow down and are replaced by a lack of concentration, indecisiveness, and rumination. Dullness descends over us and even colours can appear faded. Depress means 'to press down' and deep depression results from a 'pushing down' of emotions and feelings, particularly anger. Our mind and body symbolise this dullness and 'pressing down' and make it real to us through physical sensations such as 'a weight on our shoulders' or 'a thick fog surrounding us'. Depression involves tiredness and body aches, lethargy and procrastination, and our depressed immune system often results in constant colds, flus and viruses. In chronic depression the only real things we do feel include anxiety and fear, worthlessness, helplessness, hopelessness and guilt. The current worldview of depression is based on the medical model, which views it as a mental illness caused by something going wrong in the brain and the answer lies in 'fixing' the thing that has gone wrong – often with medication. However... Take the middle-aged woman, (emotionally fragile from early life stress and conflict), who suffers emotional abuse at the hands of her partner – abuse that not only scares her but also makes her feel that she cannot do anything right, and that everything she does fails miserably or is totally worthless. Is her severe depression simply the result of something going wrong in her brain that can be fixed by medication? Or is there a better explanation? And a better solution?	.
.	Freedom From Depression	.
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