Is There A Depression Cure?

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Apr 21, 2022

✨POV✨: You've had enough of it. You're sick and tired of your depression symptoms. They took control over years of your life and now, you want that antidote to depression. You’re wondering, 'Is the antidote following a strict diet for 6 months?' or 'Is it meditating every day?'.

Either of them can help but they’re not cures for depression.

Depression is one of those mental disorders that neither has a singular cause nor a singular effect. In simple words, there is no one cause for depression (because it's never usually only family history, genetic predisposition, a life-altering event, or the loss of a loved one) and similarly, not everyone dealing with depression has the same symptoms (or the same severity). Depression is a subjective experience, which means that no two people's experiences of depression are identical. And to add to that complexity, there are also many types of clinical depression (moderate depression, severe depression, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, and so on). To read more about the different types of depression, click here.

Now, because depression is so layered, we have no one cure for depression, no one-size-fits-all treatment. But the good news is that there are many ways to treat depression. And they work!

Depression Cure vs. Treating Depression 🆚

If you think about it, cure and treatment are not very different. If a cure is the one go-to medicine, treatment can be a combination of different healing practices. And because mental health concerns don’t come up in garden variety, the treatment is tailored for the specific causes and symptoms of that person's depression. To read more about the different symptoms of depression, click here.

So, in essence, treatment can be understood as a long-term combination of cures.

Types of Long-Term Cures (aka Treatments) 💐

These are some of the treatments that a mental health professional recommends to relieve symptoms of depression.

🗣️ Therapy

Therapy is the most recommended route to healing mental health issues and depression. Since depression is a subjective experience that has been triggered by a subjective perspective of the world, therapy helps tap into that subjectivity to heal it.

A therapist asks (a lot of) introspective questions that help us understand how and why our minds work the way they do.

💭 What are the experiences that triggered us?

💭 What emotions are we experiencing? Are they helping us or hampering our growth?

💭 How are our thoughts affecting us?

💭 What are our coping mechanisms? Are they healthy?

The answers to these questions, which are explored over a series of one-on-one sessions, help us learn how to care for our mental health.

There are many types of therapy. One type is interpersonal therapy. This type of therapy focuses on building healthy relationships as a means to treat depression. Imagine being surrounded by all kinds of healthy relationships with friends, family, colleagues, neighbors, and even, acquaintances. Only good vibes. Healthy relationships encourage growth, they provide support and help us become the right kind of independent and interdependent.

Therapy not only increases the level of our self-awareness, it also teaches us how to face the challenges of our life and the world (of yesterday, today & all the tomorrows). It's like a how-to session(s) of creating and becoming our own security blanket and cushion.

🤳🏼 Mini-Therapy

Mini-therapies plug the gaps of conventional one-on-one therapy. If therapy sessions are available once a week for an hour, mini-therapies are available to us whenever (and wherever) we are feeling overwhelmed by discomfort. Imagine we've just woken up after a trigger-ridden nightmare and are thinking, 'I feel like everything is a mess'. Instead of having to wait until our next session of therapy, we can immediately do a mini-therapy to process our emotions and feel better.

Because that's how mental health is right? It doesn't wait for a time or place to peak or decline.

And if therapy is an hour-long session, which needs to be blocked on our calendars, mini-therapies need only 5-10 minutes of our time (what we anyway have to spare when we're not feeling alright).

These bite-sized therapies (modeled by practicing therapists aka mental health friends) are a great way to build healthy coping mechanisms for disarming thoughts and feelings. When we're feeling stressed or anxious, instead of reaching for that 5th mug of coffee, we can do a mini-therapy to calm our nerves. This way, we're not only helping ourselves feel better at that moment, but we're also taking a step towards building our self-awareness and capacity to manage these discomforts.

💊 Medication

Antidepressant medications go hand-in-hand with therapy when the depression is severe (like major depression aka major depressive disorder). This medication is generally made up of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (which make serotonin stay in our body for longer). They help because in major depression and any other severe form of depression, our serotonin levels dip (enough to make joy a distant dream). Serotonin is our happy hormone, one of the four feel-good hormones, which helps regulate our mood and be in a state of peace.

Any and every type of antidepressant medication must be prescribed by a mental health professional after diagnosis. This is because the diagnosis and our symptoms help the expert decide what medication we need and in what dosage. To read more about the importance of a diagnosis, click here.

🫁 Progressive Muscle Relaxation Techniques

These are therapeutic breathing and visualization exercises that help us relax our bodies when we're feeling overwhelmed. If you've noticed, our body also experiences depression in some form or the other - as body aches, feelings of tightness, fatigue, difficulty sleeping, or headaches.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation techniques ground us in a peaceful state of the here-and-now. It calms our thoughts, feels restful, and can fill us up with new energy.

There are many ways to practice these techniques. We can either do them guided (by our therapist, a mini-therapy, or a youtube video) or do it ourselves.

🧠 Electroconvulsive Therapy

This is a major depression treatment when no other treatment is working. The form of major depression that does not respond to therapy or medication is known as treatment-resistant depression (TRD).

When this is the case, electroconvulsive therapy uses electric currents to stimulate the brain. Another form of therapy that works for TRD is transcranial magnetic stimulation which uses magnetic waves to stimulate the brain. These brain stimulation therapies jump-start our brain processes and central nervous system, like they’re brand-new.

🖼️ Complementary and Integrative Health Treatments

This approach to treatment combines conventional therapies like talk therapy with unconventional therapeutic practices like yoga, meditation, aromatherapy, massage, acupuncture, and more.

This approach is gaining a lot of traction these days as we, as a world, are growing to appreciate how everything is connected. There’s a moment of realization that only medication or talk therapy might not be the holistic solutions we need to treat complex issues like depression. We need healing to happen in our body and our mind through a variety of sensory experiences.

Not everyone may prefer such treatments and there is no hard-and-fast rule to what works or should work for one.

Last Word on Mental Health 🤍

What's better than one cure for depression? Many!

Depression can feel like it is invincible. But guess what, we human beings have come a long way in the areas of healthcare, self-awareness, and mental health awareness to be defeated by something as pfft as depression.

Here's a quote for all of us who are battling depression and are looking for a way out:

Sometimes, life will kick you around, but sooner or later, you realize you’re not just a survivor. You’re a warrior, and you’re stronger than anything life throws your way.

Note on Mental Illness 🚩

If you have depressive symptoms or thoughts of self-harm, please use the NIHM (National Institute of Mental Health) national suicide prevention lifeline or contact a mental health professional to seek treatment options for treating depression.