– By Celine Healy
Having read many articles on depression, the definitions and how to overcome this dis-ease, it has become obvious that not many people truly understand the definition, why a person has it and why it has been so hard to get rid of.
When you look at the word “depression” it comes from the word “depressed” which means to “press down”. So, a person who is depressed is one who has, for many years, been pressing down how they feel, not being able to express what they feel and in effect, suppressing their feelings. When you keep doing this over and over for many years the depressed person will eventually not know their true feelings or indeed, be able to express them meaningfully.
The other thing with depression is the language used and the negative or downcast attitude of such sufferers. People who have depression are constantly living in the past, going over and over what should, could have been, done or said…” if only I had done” …. meaning that if this occurrence had happened then the outcome generated would have been different. They are stuck in a time-warp and have no motivation to be able to move forward. They are operating out of the negative side of their personalities and this was due initially, to how they responded in very stressful situations.
Depression is a “learned” coping mechanism which has been ingrained since their early formative years. The primary care-giver would not allow the child to speak their mind and so they bottled this up. Or, the child copied this behaviour pattern of response from the primary care-giver, or the parent was a depressive, so the child has copied this behaviour.
All behaviours have been ingrained since we were young. During the formative years the child is downloading as many programs as possible so that it can learn how to survive the environment in which they find themselves. These behaviours and responses have become habits. A habit needs a trigger to activate it. The triggers that children have, have been laid down during this time period. These triggers can be: feelings, attitudes, beliefs about themselves and so on. If something has been repeated continually throughout childhood then the child comes to believe that information about themselves to be true. These triggers ae then carried through life and if they have not been dealt with along the way then this is how the person will behave in adult life. If the child has learned depression as a way of responding and especially in order to keep themselves safe, then they will continue to use that pattern because it was, at one time, useful. However, over the long-term depression as a response pattern, may not be useful in their present lives.
It has been suggested by Dr Bruce Lipton, The Biology of Belief, that pretty much 95% of everything we do is a habit. We go about our daily routines and never actually make a real decision. We are therefore suppressing our creativity. Many jobs today have become boring for a lot of workers. They are not required to use their brains at all. They merely follow a procedure. They have no real control over the outcomes of their work and hence, are reduced to being autonomans.
Depression is the result of stress in a person’s life. In order to survive stressful situations people, adopt coping strategies. The majority of people are unaware that depression is a coping strategy, and for this reason, people do not know how to get rid of this habit of response to stress.
Because a person has been responding in a depressed way for many years, they have forgotten what they have been doing and can no longer see a way forward. As well as psychological and mental response patterns in the body, depression can cause a physiological effect in the body/mind. Since stress causes cortisol to flood the body/mind to alert it to danger, this cortisol can cause damage to various organs, tissues and muscles and body systems. These physiological effects are what cause the physical symptoms and for which health practitioners use medication to treat.
Depression by itself is a behaviour formed out of stressful situations, but also results in many other symptoms. The conglomeration of symptoms can include adrenal fatigue. So that often, fatigue is one of the most noticeable symptoms of depression.
One of the most useful things a person with depression can do is to move more. If they are continually being pressed down then naturally they would tend to be less active than other people. The other thing they could do is have the adrenals treated by a health practitioner.
Depression is so hard to get rid of because it has been ingrained: physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. To move forward the person will need to adopt new ways of responding to stress and to instigate new patterns of behaviour which definitely would include movement and the appropriate vitamins and minerals for the fatigue cause by adrenal failure.
