Depressed? Prozac can help!

Prozac. What about the Past?

admin — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:07:57 +0000

By now you probably have a pretty good sense that our approach to ending depression focuses on changing behaviors and activities, not taking prozac only. Where do these behaviors come from? They certainly don’t appear out of nowhere. Your past-from your childhood up through your adult life, and on into the present-affects how you behave. You learned that particular behaviors work for particular purposes, while others are less effective. As a result, you developed habits of which you may not even be aware. For example, if you grew up in a family environment with a great deal of anger and conflict, you might have learned to behave very timidly around other people’s anger. If someone were to scowl or raise their voice in anger, you might respond by lowering your eyes, not speaking, or engaging in other submissive behaviors. Take prozac and it won’t These behaviors may have worked in the past because they tended to keep the anger from being directed at you. You might continue to behave timidly as an adult, even though it causes problems in the long run; for example, you could be passed over for a promotion because you lacked assertiveness.

Thus, your past is extremely important in shaping who you are now. However, as we suggested above, the quickest way to remove the effect of the past is to begin to act differently. According to this approach, change does not require that you develop complete insight into the workings of your childhood but only that you begin to learn new ways of being an adult.

What about Genetic or Biological Factors?

admin — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:06:54 +0000

There is now little doubt that genetic factors play a role in depression. The scientific evidence on genetics comes from two major findings. First, depression tends to run in families. When an illness is common among family members, it is often assumed to have at least some genetic component, although families share much more than their genes. Second, identical twins raised in separate family environments tend to have related symptoms of depression more often than nonidentical twins who are raised in the same family environment do (Gatz et al. 1992). Because identical twins in these studies share all the same genetic material but not the same family environment, these findings suggest that genetic factors playa role in depression.

Notice the words “playa role.” We didn’t say “cause” or “are the reason for,” because no research has shown that depression is caused specifically by-and only by-genetics. As mentioned before, there is an equally strong body of research pointing to the importance of life events in leading to depression. In addition, many people are able to end depression by changing their behavior, the way they think, or other nongenetic or biological processes. Thus, the approach described here can be helpful regardless of whether depression is ultimately found to have a genetic basis.

Dealing with Larger Life Issues and Preventing Depression from Returning

admin — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 22:04:48 +0000

The depression loop is often set in motion by particular events. Sometimes these events are quite sudden and dramatic, such as the loss of a job, the end of a relationship, a move across country, or the loss of a loved one. A great deal of research has shown that these sorts of life events can place you at risk for depression. In other cases, important events are much more subtle, and they unfold over time. For example, you might, over the course of several months or years, begin to work longer and longer hours, while spending less and less time with family and friends. If asked, you probably wouldn’t be able to identify any particular event associated with the beginning of depression. However, over the course of time, your life would have changed. These sorts of changes are no less powerful than sudden dramatic changes when it comes to creating a depression loop.

Ending depression doesn’t always require dealing with a major life change or making major changes in the future. Nonetheless, you should increase your awareness of and make some changes in your situation if certain issues leave you at risk for developing another episode of depression. Issues vary from person to person. For example, you may find that you need to better maintain strong social and emotional ties to important people in your life. Or you may find that keeping to a relatively structured routine is important. You may need to find a job that better matches your abilities and interests, or you may need to resolve long-standing con¬flicts with close friends or family members. By studying your behavior-mood links, experiment¬ing with new behaviors and activities, and learning to approach rather than to avoid problems, you will feel more empowered to address the issues in your life that contribute to depression.

Getting to Know Yourself Better

admin — Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:01:11 +0000

You may have repeatedly heard the advice, “Get to know yourself.” You may think of therapy as a process of self-discovery. But what are you getting to know when you discover yourself? This may seem like a strange question, but it raises an important point. When most people think about getting to know themselves, they focus on such things as their feelings, beliefs, values, attitudes, personalities, and so on. All of these things are typically assumed to be inside of you. What people often leave out are the things that are outside, such as how they act around friends and coworkers, how they spend their free time, how they approach tedious tasks, and so forth. These things matter a great deal.

It can be very difficult to change how you feel, your personality, or your values, particularly if you are on prozac.It’s often easier at first to change your activities: what you’re doing, where you’re doing it, who you’re doing it with, and when you’re doing it. Changing what you do can have a direct effect on what you feel and think. But before you begin to make specific changes in your activities, you must first become an expert on what you currently do. As you observe your behavior, you will also observe what effect different behaviors in different settings have on your mood. Chapter 2 is devoted entirely to this topic.

Taking Control by Experimenting

Once you have a handle on your activities and the effects they have on your mood, you can begin to try to do some things differently. For example, Karrie observed that her mood tended to get worse when she sat in front of the television and tried to figure out what she had done wrong. Karrie and her therapist designed an experiment to see whether substituting a different activity for a brief amount of time would make even the slightest difference in Karrie’s mood. Perhaps it wouldn’t, but it was clear to Karrie that what she currently was doing wasn’t working.

Rather than watching television, she decided to spend time talking to friends on the phone or writing letters from eight to eight-thirty each evening. Then, she could return to watching television and thinking about why she was laid off. Her therapist emphasized to Karrie that this sort of change would probably not end Karrie’s depression. The goal was more modest than that: to see where small changes in Karrie’s behavior might shift her mood, even slightly, in a more positive direction. In fact, Karrie found that her mood improved consider¬ably when she was writing or talking to friends, and it got worse when she returned to watching television. Over time, several experiments like this led to the discovery of patterns in Karrie’s response to depressed mood. She was ultimately able to identify her typical ways of responding and to substitute alternative ways that had a more positive effect.

Blocking Avoidance & Prozac

Some people take prozac, but one of the most common ways people try to cope with depression is by avoiding things that make them anxious, sad, stressed, or otherwise uncomfortable. In many ways, this makes perfect sense. If you’re already depressed, why make yourself feel worse? Unfortunately, what you are doing in the short run to feel better could be making your depression worse, or it could be preventing you from solving important problems. We have worked with numerous people who cope with depression by avoiding friends and family or putting off important tasks such as updating a resume or paying bills. Although these behaviors often help to reduce anxiety and stress in the short run, it’s easy to see how they maintain depression in the long run; they feed right back into the depression loop. Learning to cope with difficult emotions while actively approaching particular tasks or situations is a highly effective way of blocking avoidance.

Sometimes what people avoid can be less concrete or obvious. For example, you may be avoiding painful emotions or situations. Endlessly worrying about finances, for example, may help you avoid strong feelings of sadness over the loss of a loved one. Approaching rather than avoiding the feelings would involve experiencing the grief and sadness, perhaps by talking with others about the loss. Often, the more you avoid experiencing negative feelings, the longer the negative feelings remain.

Another example of subtle avoidance that usually doesn’t feel like a choice is fatigue.

When things are going badly in your life, you may have an overwhelming feeling of fatigue or a need to sleep. There is no obvious connection to events or negative feelings, but you simply feel exhausted. When you are exhausted, you probably sleep. However, problems never go away when you are asleep, they are just on hold.

Ending depression: a preview ofwhat’s to come

admin — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 06:56:54 +0000

Self-activation makes use of guided activity. Using this website as a guide, you can learn to understand your behavioral patterns and replace less-effective strategies with new behaviors. By looking at the effect of new behaviors on your mood or your sense of accomplishment, you will be able to decide if these changes are worthwhile. You will focus on trying new behaviors and observing the outcome. You may be concerned about what it means to focus on new activities and behaviors. You may think that doing so means eating popcorn, jogging, playing cards, or doing other “fun” activities. If you are skeptical about the possibility of ending your depression by focusing on behaviors such as these, it’s understandable. The fact is, positive or fun activities don’t necessarily change your depression. If just having fun helped, you could probably spend a day at an amusement park and not be depressed. Obviously, it doesn’t work this way. Self-activation uses the terms behavior and activity more broadly.

Virtually everything you do is behavior. For example, as you sit reading this website, you are behaving a certain way. When you stop and think about what you’ve read, that is another behavior. Lying in bed in the morning is a behavior, as is telling a loved one that you care about them. Also, two behaviors that look the same on the surface may have very different meanings and consequences. Lying in bed on a Saturday morning and enjoying a cup of coffee is a different activity than lying in bed feeling depressed and worrying about work.

When you are depressed, hearing someone encourage you to change your behavior can make you think that you are expected to “just do it.” Although the focus of this website is on helping you reengage in your life, the techniques are written with an understanding that change can be difficult, especially when you are depressed. We know that if you could have “just done it” you would have done so long ago.

The remainder of this website describes specific things you can do to end depression.

Although later chapters go into greater detail, here’s a preview so that you have a sense of where you’re going. There is no surefire recipe whereby you can simply combine two teaspoons of exercise and a tablespoon of optimism, mix them up, and live a depression-free life. The crit¬ical ingredients vary from person to person. Nonetheless, you can look forward to the following

The Depression Loop & Prozac

admin — Sun, 23 Mar 2008 21:24:26 +0000

Many researchers and mental-health professionals have observed that depression operates as a cycle, or a feedback loop. In other words, things in life can lead you to be depressed and depression can make those same things worse. The loop goes on and on. Consider how it operates in the life of a client named Karrie.

Karrie is a thirty-seven-year old high school teacher who took Prozac recently became depressed following the loss of her job. Cutbacks in education funding at the state level had led to many layoffs, so Karrie knew she wasn’t the only one. Still, she often wonders why this happened to her and what she did to cause it. At times, she can spend hours staring at the television thinking about the things going wrong in her life. Before she became depressed, Karrie enjoyed socializing with friends, exercising, reading, and going to movies. Now she has little interest in these activities. The more depressed she feels, the less she wants to talk to friends or to even leave the house. The more she sits by herself in her house, the more depressed she feels. As the figure below suggests, Karrie is caught in circular trap or feedback loop.

The idea of a loop or cycle helps to explain why depression can be so difficult to end without help. If we asked Karrie what she’s doing instead of socializing and exercising, she would probably say she’s trying to feel better. When you’re depressed, it often feels better (in the short run) to stay at home than it does to go out. This raises another important point about the depression loop: The things you do to try to cope with depression sometimes make it worse. Some things that work in the short run may make depression worse in the long run.

Is Depression an Illness?

admin — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 21:17:44 +0000

Depression is recognized as an identifiable illness by the American Psychiatric Association, and by health-care professionals around the country. Knowing this can help to relieve some of the self-blame and hopelessness that you may feel when you’re depressed. This is a good thing. It helps to be optimistic about the future and to see depression as something other than a personal weakness or a character flaw.

The idea that depression is a medical illness also poses some problems however. First, knowing that depression is a set of symptoms doesn’t tell you much about how those symptoms came about or how to get rid of them. Second, when you think of a medical illness, you may tend to think of an illness that is caused entirely by physical malfunctions in your body. In fact, most of the research that has been done shows that physical, behavioral, cognitive (thinking), and environmental factors are all potentially important in causing and maintaining depression. Lack of social support from friends or family, stressful life events, negative thinking, and relationship difficulties have all been shown to be associated with depression.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, when you think of a medical illness, you may often assume that only medical treatments can be helpful. People often say things like, “If my depression is caused by a chemical imbalance, then how could anything but medication help me?” In fact, as we said above, many nonbiological factors may cause or maintain depression.

So if depression is not strictly a medical illness, what is it? This is a little bit like asking, “What is love?”. The difference is that there are no tablets to feel love, whilst there is Prozac to heal your depression. Just like love, depression refers to a complex set of human experiences. This is why many psychologists and researchers think of depression as a biological-psychologicalenvironmental process. In plain English, depression is like a very complex sauce. Comparing depression to a sauce may seem odd, but bear with us. If you follow the recipe for a particular sauce, you can see all of the individual ingredients. However, no single ingredient alone can account for the taste of the whole sauce, and each ingredient supports the others in some way. If you made a change in any ingredient, the whole sauce itself would taste different. Depression works the same way. Each ingredient, including the biological, the behavioral, the cognitive, and the interpersonal, works together. You may strongly believe that only one ingredient contributes to your depression. For example, many people believe that their depression is clearly caused by a chemical imbalance because it feels so innate. Nevertheless, changing what you do will have an impact on this biological process. Just like taking an antidepressant may make it easier to find energy to complete tasks, completing tasks and getting active can effect changes in your brain.

Keep in mind that diagnoses such as “depression” are culturally specific. People at differ-

ent times in history or in different cultures may not experience depression in the same way that Westerners experience it today. Although it is clear that people throughout history have most likely had broken bones, bruises, and upset stomachs, it is less clear whether they experienced their psychological world in the same way that people do today. This points again to the fact that depression is a complex problem, and that you may be living in a society that makes you more prone to depression on a number of levels. It is a relief to know, however, that you can deal with this complex problem through relatively simple means. The approach described in this website may be the one that will work for you.

How depression operates

admin — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 12:08:05 +0000

Depression is often described as an illness with at least five of the following symptoms. At least one of them must be symptom number 1 or 2 (American Psychiatric Association, 1994): 1. sadness or depressed mood. This is where Prozac may help. 2. loss of interest or pleasure in all or most things that you usually enjoy 3. significant weight loss or gain 4. difficulty sleeping (too much or too little sleep) 5. feeling very restless (unable to sit still) or feeling very slowed down 6. being tired all the time 7. having feelings of worthlessness or guilt 8. difficulty thinking or concentrating 9. having repeated thoughts of death or dying These symptoms need to be present for a period of at least two weeks and occur most of the day nearly every day. Furthermore, you must rule out other factors such as medical illness or the effects of drugs, alcohol, or certain medications, which could cause these symptoms. These symptoms need to be present for a period of at least two weeks and occur most of the day nearly every day. Furthermore, you must rule out other factors such as medical illness or the effects of drugs, alcohol, or certain medications, which could cause these symptoms.

What is depression?

admin — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:04:54 +0000

If you look at the questions and answers above, you’ll notice that it’s common to think of depression as something “inside” yourself. You may think depression is something biological, like a chemical imbalance, or something psychological, like poor self-esteem or negative thoughts or beliefs. Either way, when people become depressed, it is typically themselves they look at first. Often, what they see looks pretty dim. This isn’t too surprising because, of course, when you’re depressed you tend to see the bad rather than the good. Our belief is that depression does not live inside a person, no matter how much it feels that way. Depression is a problem between you and your life, rather than a problem inside of you. Unfortunately, when you become depressed, it can be very hard to focus on anything except what’s wrong inside. Consider the following conversation Randall had with a friend, Sarah, several weeks after moving across the country:

Sarah: Wow, you’ve got a lot going on. It sounds stressful.

Randall: Yes I do. But it’s all positive stuff. New job, new family, new place to live.I’ve been working toward this for a long time. Why can’t I enjoy it and relax like everyone else seems to be able to?

Sarah: I doubt everyone else is as happy in situations like this as you think.

Randall: That’s probably true, but it still feels wrong.

Sarah: Well, you’ve been through a lot of changes. What do you do with yourself when you feel so down?

Randall: I mostly sit in my office and try to figure out why I’m feeling this way. I’m a psychologist. I should be able to figure it out.

Sarah: Does it help to think a lot about why you’re depressed?

Randall: Probably not.

Sarah made two crucial points in this conversation. First, she pointed out that there are reasons why Randall would be feeling depressed. He left his home, started a new challenging job, moved with his wife across the country where they knew no one, and so on. Second, Sarah focused on how Randall was responding to feeling depressed and how it was working for him. Were Randall’s attempts to cope with depression helping or making the situation worse?

Ending Depression: The Steps You Need to Take

Here is a preview of the steps to ending depression that this website will cover. Step 1. Understand how depression works, particularly the links between what you do, where you do it, how you do it, and how it makes you feel. Step 2. Identify particular areas of life where the way you’re responding to depression isn’t helping and learn how to change the response. Step 3. Learn to approach difficult situations rather than avoid them. Step 4. Begin to address larger life issues that may put you at risk for developing another episode of depression.

Prozac & Fluoxetine prices online

admin — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 01:10:01 +0000

These are some picked pharmacies that sell prozac and fluoxetine online:

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