How to overcome Depression?.

How to overcome Depression?
The horrible state of mind called depression has become one of the commonest and most stubborn of illnesses today. This disease for a disease it certainly is cripples, unnerves, and so feeds on itself that it tends to become a vicious circles. How much hope is there for those who are utterly convinced that there is no hope? How can friends and relatives help a depressed person who sees no use in trying to help himself?
This is a big and urgent problem. I cannot hope to give all the answers. But if you will read the suggestions offered seriously. And put them into constant paretic, you may be surprised at the results that can be achieved in a few months.
Bear three in mind in dealing with your depressed friend or relative. Kindness but firmness is the right attitude to adopt. Don’t lecture the patient on “pulling himself”. At the same time, don’t let him have more responsibility than he can take.
Keep the control of events in your own hands. Constantly assure the depressed person of your love and affection and interest, but be firm in your decisions about any course of your action. Secondly, if the victim of depression is constantly rude, hurtful and aggressive towards you inspite of everything you do, refuse to take it seriously. See this aggressive attitude as something the panicked patient is using to try to save himself from a too cruel awareness of his utter worthlessness.
If he can blame you for everything, it tends to relive of him of a little of his heavy burden of guilt. Don’t waste your time trying to defend yourself. It will only lead to further recriminations and hopeless, endless arguments. Let these cruel charges run off your mind like water of that back of the proverbial duck.
In the third place, give plenty of love and affection, but avoid sentimentality and spoiling. Now let us look at the important question. “Why do its victims act in the hopeless way they do? Why do they live in their vicious circle of negation and hopelessness? Let me answer these questions in three stages. Depression does not mean there is a deterioration or illness of the brain cells. Depression is rather a malady of the emotion. It is duplication emotional battles way backing the formative years of infancy.
Here, for instance, is a little girl who had a time of terrible emptiness, panic and torture as baby because she was an unwanted child, with a mother both not well and emotionally unstable. Because the baby was starved of love (and, therefore, starved of life) she lost self-esteem and desperately sought for a substitute to fill her life and to give her the appearance of having what in fact, she was deprived of. This substitute she found in stubborn willfulness. She ruled the universe of her brother and sisters screaming, lying, giggling, deceiving and persuading. But she did it once too often. There was show-down. Her universe toppled leaving nothing but the emptiness she could not live with. Rather than collapse into this complete emptiness, she turned the universe of this hate and self-will inwards and suffered.
The suffering and depression she endured served two purposes. It took the place of the feared and it was a kind of revenge on the brothers and sisters that that had so cruelly humiliated her and put her out of countenance. So a pattern of life developed through childhood years and produced a became full of mental suffering and torture. The tragedy of such a depressive pattern in getting a kind of pseudo-satisfaction in the suffering.
What satisfaction? A secret satisfaction, of watching the ruin and devastation and frustration that results, and of saying deep down inside: “See what you have done to me. This havoc will go on for suffering.
Or, alternately: “See how I am suffering. If keep on for ever, I may expiate my crimes and so come to some sort of peace.”
The very anger of the victim brings a vicious satisfaction. It is a kind of “cocking a snook” at life, people, and the world bed heaven. If these satisfaction are drawn on foe a long enough period of time, the victim of the depression become an addict. It then become difficult to persuade him to accept any other kind.
One of the most disturbing features of depression is that the victim too often say, “I fell like finishing it all,” or even threats to commit suicide. Nearly all threats of such action mean, “If I do that, then they’ll be sorry.”
It is a form of revenge. What can the depressed person do to lift himself out of this bottomless pit? Undoubtedly, if things of such action mean, if things are getting beyond his power of self-management, he should see his doctor.
If he can afford it, he may seek treatment from a professionally trained clinical psychologist. Whether he is able to do it or not, there are four things that the depressed person can do to help himself. He should study them very carefully indeed and take appropriate action now and on every single day for the next three months. He maybe surprised at the differences these simple measures make to his future. Begin accepting love into every minute of your day. “Love is what I need.” You may say. “Other people have it, but somehow, there is none for me.”
I want you to appreciate the fact that the devastating battles you have fought within you have distorted the reality of the situation. I have known depressed people who were surrounded by love but they could see none of it. Because their hunger for love had become so immense and disproportionate that they turned against normal love and accepted misery and suffering instead.
Then, when love came their way, it only irritated them, because, if they accepted the love, the bug part of them that demanded devastation and chaos would be unsatisfied. They would feel empty. Their staple diet of bitterness would be gone.
True, isn’t it? So when I ask to accept love every minute of the day I am asked a very big thing of you. I am asking you to give up your “bird in hand” (your bitterness, or loathing, or sense of destitution and hopelessness) in favour of nebulous “bird in the bush” called love. This may fail to satisfy the cravings of you inmost nature which, at present, are feeding on bitterness.
“I have good reason to be bitter,” you may say. And perhaps you have. But do you prefer bitterness to health? Would you rather remove yourself to complete inner isolation than learn to accept love and peace? These questions are important no matter how deep your sense of life, if you can receive the love that is about you, and refuse the bitterness that is always welling up in your mind you are on your victory.
Cultivate a sense of your value. One of the reason why you suffer from this agonizing depression is rejected. You could not get a satisfying relationship with your mother. This made you took the blame on yourself, because you could not bear to blame the one on whose care you were dependent for life itself. You blamed yourself for craving the very comfort you needed. You fell hopeless and without value, dirty and ashamed. As the humiliated boy in the corner of the classroom can get a sheepish secret gratification out of his plight, so you as a baby fed on this humiliating relationship with your mother. It became your pattern of reaction to many circumstances.
At the slightest hint of emotional rejection, you became depressed, and fed on this sense of utter worthlessness. Can you grasp this? Can you recognize yourself? If so, take trouble to understand the situation so that you can throw away your outworn sense of worthlessness, and assume the dignity of your real humanity. You have a great deal to contribute to the world’s happiness and progress.
Stop drawing your secret dividends from hopelessness and humiliation, and accept the fact that potentially, you are as good as the best of us. Learn the habit of giving love. Your illness has had the effect of enclosing you in your self. In a sense, you like a baby for whom love consists in other people love him not in the love he gives to people.
But actually, you are an adult now, and love does not work the baby way any longer. If you allow your thoughts free, they probably go straight to the kind of misery you are going thoughts, the suffering that people are causing you, the fears of the future, and the expedients you can employ for getting out of whatever problem confronts you.
Check these thoughts. Dot’s give them any room in you mind. Instead, insist on thinking about other people, how you can give them pleasure. Think of what they would really like, and the fun of it will be to give them a happy surprise. Keep on giving love. Employ your thought and energy in this way, and your depression will begin to lift.
Think and act positively. If you were to examine your thoughts during the 24 hours of one day, you would be surprised to find how negative they were. Something deep down inside you is making a secret meal of hopelessness, because you fell there is no other satisfaction to be had.
One parent, a women, describing the sense of utter dejection and misery in her home, confessed to me: And then something seemed to say inside me-‘You are enjoying this’. And she was. It was not happy enjoyment. It was a miserable neurotic gratification that was completely negative and destructive.
That is the depressive person’s danger. There is the red light. You can get so used to this kind of secret pact with misery that you want to stay there. You don’t want to leave it. But it is possible to leave it. Is possible for you to start today and climb to new life and to happiness.
Think positively. There is plenty of love for you, plenty of work for you, plenty of happiness and success for you, as think positively about it.
Give the live to every negative thought. Stop feeding on tragedy. Begin the day by breathing deeply of the good fresh air. Tell yourself that you are worthwhile, and there is, with the help of God, a grand future for you.
Tell yourself that life this day is going to be good. Accept your great value and potential as a human being, and know that you have a worthwhile contribution to make to the happiness and harmony of life. Put your energy as well as your prayer into it. Your dejection will then lift, and your grey depression will begin to melt away.
Author; Prof. Surya Gupta
Director: Psyche-Care;
Formerly: Prof of Clinical
Psychology, AIIMS
Phone: 9350550888,
0124-5144244