Depressed? Prozac can help!

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.