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Discover Hypnotherapy as a Safe, Effective, Non-invasive, All-natural, Drug-Free Alternative Treatment For Depression and live a happy, fulfilling life.

If you’ve ever been diagnosed with Depression, you’ve probably been told it’s a medical condition caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain and if you Google it, you’ll most likely read that it’s a mental illness that can be caused by anything from genetics, brain biology, trauma, grief, difficult relationships, adverse childhood experience or extreme stress.  So while Depression is one of the most common conditions with over 300 million sufferers worldwide – it is also quite possibly one of the most misunderstood disorders of the mind.

History of Depression Treatments

Still known as “melancholy” right up to the Victorian era, it wasn’t until 1856 that depression was considered a medical condition.  Ever since then the treatment for depression has been predominantly drug therapy with anti-depressant medication. More recently talk therapy including Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) has been paired with the drugs as the most popular treatment – HOWEVER – there are people who have been on anti-depressant medication for decades which has many people questioning the validity of their use.

Why have I been on Anti-depressants for twenty years and still don’t feel any better?

It’s one of the questions Johann Hari, best selling author and social scientist from the UK wrote about in his book Lost Connections – Uncovering the Real Cause of Depression.  He, himself suffered with depression for years and wasn’t getting any better with ever increasing doses of anti-depressant medication.  Whilst no-one is dismissing the use of anti-depressants as a  treatment option, there’s an ever-increasing number of people who challenge their effectiveness in actually alleviating the problem.  Many, including the World Health Organisation have concluded that depression is in fact, not caused by lower levels of  serotonin in the brain but is an indicator of the state of our mental health as a society.

Professor Andrew Skull of Princeton University is quoted saying that – the story about depression being caused by low serotonin levels [in other words a chemical imbalance] is “deeply misleading and unscientific”  while UK Professor of Psychiatry David Healy says “that the story can’t be discredited because there was never a time when it was credited!”

Don’t settle for outdated treatments…ask more questions. 

If you’ve been diagnosed with depression and have been living with the condition for years and don’t feel like you’re getting any better, start asking more questions. Look for alternative therapies, like Hypnotherapy.  To put some perspective on this, the Hamilton Scale measures depression based on a number of questions and gives a rating between 0 (no depression) and 56 (severely symptomatic, suicidal).  Regular meditation could lower the score by up to 8 points whereas anti-depressant medication lowers the score by around 1-2 points.

“I believe that depression is an emotional disorder more so than a mental disorder, but because they’re so closely related it gets categorised as a mental health problem – it’s often unclear which comes first since our thoughts trigger our feelings which then add meaning to our thoughts.  It’s almost a never-ending cycle.  I would absolutely love for people to consider this – depression is caused by not having one or more of our inherent needs met,” says Roberta. 

We have inherent physical needs for air, food, water & warmth to survive, but we also have inherent emotional and psychological needs for love, belonging, senses of significance, certainty and variety as well as a need to contribute to others in order to thrive.  If any one of these inherent needs are not met, we can’t thrive and in the case of our physical needs not being met, our survival is under threat.  UK Professor Michael Marmont (educated here in Sydney) said, “our culture is not meeting our needs” as we become more and more isolated, by the way we live.  We’re no longer tribal, we each go home to our own little box, with less and less interaction with other people, we don’t chat with the cashier at the grocery store check-out anymore, drones are delivering our pizza. You can see how this is happening and why it is getting worse as time goes on and technology improves.

In addition to not having one or more of our inherent needs met is the presence of harsh, critical words we hear in life, which in times of stress, we repeat to ourselves.  For example, if our inherent need for a sense of significance is not being met, our subconscious mind will often look for an explanation for that and actually create a notion that we are not “good enough”.  We then look for, (or create) evidence to back that up; not finding a suitable partner, being overlooked for a raise, etcetera.   It plays over and over in our mind as a looping thought that we come to believe, which ultimately leads to depression, its very difficult to break out of that cycle without knowing how it started; that’s how hypnotherapy helps. 

In Part II of this discussion, we discover how Hypnotherapy is a safe, drug-free, all natural and very effective alternative treatment for Depression.   In hypnosis, you can uncover the root cause of those looping thoughts and break the cycle without the harmful side effects of drug therapy. You will also discover ways to meet your inherent needs to live a happy and fulfilling life. Alternatively, you can book a Free Discovery Call by clicking on the link below. 

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