Depression - new therapeutic approaches

This is the last part of a three part set of articles highlighting depression. In the earlier articles we saw how depression can start its gradual effect on people and we looked at a set of 'human needs' that were possibly missing in sufferers. Next we looked at why sufferers are exhausted and unmotivated during their day and how this only serves to prolong the depression. In this artcile I would like to examine the most effective treatments for depression, or at least the most effective non-drug treatments as we are just finding out through the media recently that anti-depressants aren't quite as efficacious as the pharmaceutical companies would want us to believe.

Now traditonal psychological treatment for depression would be something like cognitive -behavioural therapy. Now CBT, as its known for short, mainly challenges depressed patients negative thinking styles but does not do anyhting about meeting their unmet needs. Therefore we will only be working on a small part of the picture if we do only this. The other main type of therapy that depression sufferes can be on the receiving end of is what is known as psychodynamic therapy which tends to dwell on how the problem materialized in the first place Such types of therapy tend to dwell even more on the depression and can act to reinforce the already pronounced negativity that goes with the illness.

A good general way to start therapy with depressed patients is to first locate the resources that they already possess. Of course many clients will deny that they have any at all but this is the counselora job to identify and accentuate the positive. This is important to raise self-esteem levels and thus imporve motivation which in turn will help the client to work even more effectively with you. Injecting laughter into the sessions can also work well if it is appropriate to do so. This has the added benefit of creating pleasent associations to the therapist and his or her office the next time a client comes for an appointment.

Next we must deal with the unmet needs of the paitent/client and we can do this by going through what we call an 'emotional needs' audit which is based on the lsit of human needs in the last article. We will ask questions based on those needs and determine if any are missing or found wanting. After that and depending on the findings of this audit we will start to create goals that move the client towards getting these needs obtained for themselves. For this we would use what is known as solution-focued counseling which doesn't dwell on the problem that clients have but starts to immediately work towards solutions in the future. Our main aim in therapy with depressed clients is to direct their attention outward and away from the depression.

The research from the last fifteen years with solution-focused counseling and depression is that from study bases of clients that varied in number form seventy five to over eight hundred in one study (in Finland) there is on average a seventy six percent improvement rate with this problem (mild to moderate depression) This means that 76% of clients achieved the goals that they went into therapy for. This is an impressive outcome if you consider that traditional cognitive - behavioural therapy achieves rates below 50% in hospital out-patienent settings.

So I conclude that traditonal therapeutic methods are continueing to fall short of the mark and are not addressing all the issues that are present in depressed patients and it is my hope that we will begin to move towards a therapeutic framework that allows us to take all facets of depression into consideration and therefore increase our results in ridding people of this terrible scourge of modern life.