Are you depressed? Bravo!

While many depressed people are ashamed of their State and envy the "courage" of the others, my vision is exactly inverse.

Instead, I consider to be proud to be depressed, despite the terrible pain that it causes. And before you talk about solutions to the depression, we will proceed to a distribution of medals :

(1) Medal of generosity

If you are depressed, you deserve the first Medal of the generosity.

Indeed, a Cambridge study published in 2007 showed a correlation between the tendency to epression and the ability to experience the penalty for any person. (1)

More you are sensitive to the plight of others, more you care of your entourage, more you worry the woes of the world, more you risk to a depression.

This discovery radically questioned the vision of the depressed as person being a selfish centered on its small problems.

It explains the higher incidence of depression in women.

(2) The resistance Medal
 
He drags in the brain of our contemporaries another idea ridiculous and outdated: is that only the physical pain, caused by injuries for example, is really hard to bear, moral pain being more or less "imaginary" or "in the head".

We now know that it is false:

When you have an intense misery, your sense of despair, your desire to escape, to end this sentence makes you really bad, are not imaginary. You have really as if you had an injury on the body. A study conducted in the United States showed that, when you are morally, it is the same areas of your brain that are activated when you are (physically) tortured.

In addition, many depressions accompanied by intense physical pain in the belly, skull, chest, throat, or joints.

In other words, a depressive has as much merit to its position as a supplicie. If he shouts or cries, it is normal.

You can legitimately be proud to live with this pain, even if it prevents you from your usual life, for who would dare ask a person doing torture to continue to do his work and his family as if obligations of nothing was?

For this reason, you deserve, as well as the Medal of the generosity, the Medal of the Resistance.

(3) The intelligence Medal

This is something that it is not enough but, if you are depressed, it is that you are intelligent.

Indeed, your state proves that, unlike many others, you use your brain to analyze the situation.

It depresses you? But it is the evidence of your lucidity! People believe that life in our society is easy because our society is rich. But rich does not mean happy! And objectively, the situation is difficult for many people.

Not only grief and illness are always also difficult to bear today it once, but GDP growth seems have not made great thing to reduce daily aggression (behind the wheel, in the street...), loneliness (a home on two is a single person in major cities), unemployment, divorce, all major causes of depression.

Your depression thus proves that you are able to look reality in the face, to analyse lucidly, and you deserve also the Medal of the intelligence.

(4) The Medal of courage

If you are depressed, and you can still survive (which should be your case, since you are reading this letter), is that you also deserve the Medal of courage.

I say this without irony: you are a hero, a kind of Indiana Jones, but more courageous as you face much tougher perils.

Indeed, once discovered the Lost Ark Indiana Jones could return to its comfortable American University, beautiful student and young people well high. Our grandparents, who have been "hell trenches" survived dreaming in this little paradise that was farm or the family village, green prairies, water clear sources, the warm summer evenings, the crackling of the fireplace, orchards, balls, "young girls in flower". Are you still say that this "paradise" was not a: it does nothing, the important thing was the image that the stir the poilus, the prisoners were. Which was "keep" and therefore what account.

Many of our contemporaries, today, do have this perspective. The hardships they face are less violent, but more insidious and above all, no real outcome. They do not expect the end of the war so that life can become peaceful as before. Many are deprived of this perspective of "return to the country" which, although it was often illusory, kept the flame of hope lit in millions of souls.

On the contrary: gloomy economic predictions, the prospect of the nuclear apocalypse, the spectrum of the disappearance of our civilization under the effect of a total war puts us in this perspective say us that as hard that is the world in which we are absolutely atrocious, it is better to cling because tomorrow could be worse!

All ingredients are therefore here to that, any accident of course (grief, illness, separation, dispute,
unemployment...), thespirit is disrupts and falls "in depression".

But once again, if this happens, it is normal! You are not of the "ill"! As boxer that has been ground by a direct that he had not seen coming, you have the right to fall to the ground. The important is not to remain there permanently.

We will therefore discuss original ways to get away, without drugs.

Out of the great depression without drugs

I said "original means" because I will save you all the "stuff" classic that you find everywhere on the Internet: sport, take the Sun, have a social activity, follow a psychotherapy (group or not), do yoga, to be massaged or even take St. John's wort.

See less frequently described approaches, but could make service:

THE EMDR

The EMDR, or eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, promoted by the late Dr. David Servan-Schreiber, who has left us here a year.

It is a technique which is essentially to move the eyes, according to a precise sequence, to change your emotional state.

The phenomenon was discovered by chance, by psychologist American Francine Shapiro, during a walk in May 1987. She realized that her "haunting small negative thoughts" disappeared when she was quickly come his eyes from left to right and go. It does him took no further to propose the exercise to his colleagues, him experiment with his patients and create the EMDR with eye-popping results - especially for the States of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) suffered by the victims of conflicts, attacks, sexual violence or natural disasters.

According to Dr. Servan-Schreiber:

« It is the most controversial treatment since the revolution of psychoanalysis and the newer antidepressants. In the 1980s, a student in Menlo Park, Francine Shapiro PhD, found that rapid eye movement allowed reduce traumatic memories by replacing images and new thoughts. Fifteen years of research later, results of the EMDR to treat severe post-traumatic proved superior to those of drugs and much faster than traditional or behavioral psychotherapies. War neuroses, consequences of rape, of an earthquake or an accident: 80% of the subjects themselves cured in three sessions. Then, a fifteen-month follow-up shows that the beneficial effects persist well beyond treatment. » (1)

Write what you feel

Sit right back, on the edge of a Chair, hands on thighs, in a comfortable and dignified position. Focus on the sensations of your body and try to find words to describe how you have:

What happens in you? Where are your negative emotions? What is the sequence of the "dark thoughts" succeeding in your head? At what time you awaken you at night and what are usually first degrading thoughts on yourself that come you to mind?

Where do you feel you poorly physically? Is the throat, belly, chest, the head?

Search not only the negative ideas or pain and also talk about neutral or positive things you feel, is it y in a. lay it on the paper. Little by little, you can learn how to tame your pain (which we have seen above that it is absolutely real), and live better with it. You'll find that depression is not you, but that these are ideas which, for a time, with you in life that you do also.

It is not necessary that your analysis to be read by someone else. For more information, a special website was created by the Department of Psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium: www.cps-emotions.be
Correct a nutritional imbalance

Whenever you suffer stress, this causes in the blood a discharge of adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol, hormones secreted by the adrenal glands.

This hormonal discharge raises the transfer of your supply of minerals and trace elements stored in the organs and muscles to your blood. Your body is to better cope with the stress, and the effects. This reaction is effective immediately, but should know that these minerals and trace elements will be largely eliminated by urine, the following days.

When you have an important emotional shock (mourning, accident, dismissal, separation...), the stress continues.
Hormonal discharges continue. But your reserves of minerals and trace elements are depleted. As and as the days pass, your adrenal glands continue to secrete their hormones under the effect of the stress, and deplete your reserves of minerals and trace elements.

Your ability to overcome your stress decreases. You feel fatigue, then nervous fatigue that occur by heart palpitations, gastric disorders, bowel disorders, headaches and dizziness that speed up your stress. An additional loss of minerals and trace elements continues, inevitably.

Little by little, your system is galloping and you go into the depression, by auto-amplification of the phenomenon!

The solution, you've guessed it, is to rebuild your capital in minerals and trace elements, that you cross the test, and therefore consume these nutrients. But, it is crucial also to consume vitamins that allow you to assimilate minerals (otherwise they are evacuated by urine and manure), acid and amino acids fatty that ensure the retention of minerals in your tissues and maintain hormone production so that it does not exhaust, they not more.
 •(1) The vitamins that the assimilation of these minerals are mainly the vitamins of the Group B (B3, B6, B9, B12), that you will find in the skin of cereals (wheat germ, oatmeal), legumes (beans, lentil, pea...), the yeast of beer, wholemeal bread, fish, meat (especially organic poultry)... Vitamin B6 is particularly important because it promotes the assimilation of magnesium and vitamin D is essential for calcium metabolism.
 •(2) Several amino acids play important roles: taurine promotes the assimilation of calcium and magnesium, glutamine is precursor of the gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), neurotransmitter which prevents the risk of neuronal over-stimulation of brain; tyrosine is essential to the production of dopamine, adrenaline and noradrenaline involved in the regulation of the neuromuscular performance, mental alertness, concentration and mood. regulator arginine of mediator of the stress hormone cortisol.
 •(3) To avoid your adrenal glands are depleted, you must also eat other hormonal precursors, that are the fatty acids omega-3 long-chain, that are EPA and DHA. When they are associated with all of the above items, there they potentiate each other and have a tranquilizer and anxiolytic effect.
 •(4) Not to forget the trace elements: manganese, copper, chromium and selenium involved as cofactors in many metabolic reactions, including the secretions of the endocrine glands. These secretions are essential to keep your brain to produce the hormone in a good mood (serotonin), and other neurotransmitters required for the proper management of your emotions (acetylcholine, dopamine, GABA...).

Warning

Beware, however, that I give you here is only a "spare wheel" nutrition to cope with the difficulties of life. The substance is not there, but in the choice and personal solutions that you will find to developing your comprehensive system of protection involving a balanced family life, a geographical basis for you rejuvenation for blow, savings, a passion, a project of life...

I can address these subjects here because everyone should subject itself to a full letter (not to mention that I am supposed to stick me to purely medical subjects...)

Nevertheless, I hope to have given you some useful things with this letter, and I promise you, I will return to the subject.

Sources:
(1) O'Connor the et al. Empathy and depression: the moral system on overdrive [archive] . Empathy in mental illness by Tom f. d. Farrow, Peter w. r. Woodruff
(2) David Servan-Schreiber, our body loves the truth, page 16.