The Depression Cure
I just read about a fascinating study done on depression. This study had a number of really interesting insights that I had never considered but seem to make perfect logical sense to me (which is always what I strive for!). Here are the links…
To begin with, many studies of depression have shown that it is most often caused by an important and complex problem that can only be solved with intense thinking. The more important the problem, the more focused the person needs to be on solving it, which causes the person to minimize other distractions and become “withdrawn from life”. Think of times when you, or somebody you know has been depressed – have you noticed how they seem to be “in their own world” a lot and are just not interested in doing anything interesting? This could be because they need to focus all their energy on finding the solution to their problem.
Now, another interesting thought here is whether or not it is beneficial to help a depressive person by forcing them to do interesting things again to get them out of their depression. The studies here have shown that people can “escape” from their depression by keeping active and doing many interesting things, thus ignoring the “big problem”. The downside here is that unless the “big problem” is inadvertently solved by all these activities, it will eventually be brought back to the forefront and the depression will begin again. In fact, these distractions actually cause the depression to last longer by delaying the problem solving.
So, for me, the advice here is that whenever I feel any type of depressive type feelings, I should work hard at identifying the “big problem” and spend as much time and effort as possible on dealing with that problem, instead of trying to avoid it. Of course, if the “big problem” can’t be solved (I hope that’s not a possibility!), I suppose that depression will be hanging on for a while, and maybe it would be better to ignore it and get on with life as much as I can.
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