Specialties
This brief article spells out my general thinking about treating depression and anxiety. Treating them is more than using medication. Much research information has become available in past decades, much of it sponsored by the pharmaceutical industry, and therefore, it is very open to bias. There’s lots of money to be made designing and marketing medication to fix the problems.
Depression and anxiety are not the same things, but more and more are considered to be in the same family of disorders, with some personalities tending more to one or the other. That’s why I’m talking about them here together.
I also consider each one to exist within a spectrum of intensity, ranging from clinical to situational.
The most severe level is clinical depression or anxiety – where the levels of suffering and disability run deep. This is where modern pharmaceuticals can be a godsend, often to keep a person alive and functioning. Here, we need more good psychiatrists/pharmacologists who can help guide a patient through the maze of available medication to find the right one or combination to relieve the suffering. A combination of this “chemotherapy” plus good “talk therapy” (my field) seems to yield the best results.
At the other end of the intensity spectrum is what I call the situational level of depression and anxiety – where they are more a reaction or result of life situations. These can include life disruptions such as loss, crisis, illness, aging, or boredom. My theory of operation is that in the middle and toward this end of the spectrum, anxiety and depression can have an actual purpose for the personality. This purpose seeks the maturing of the individual.
Some persons are more depressive and anxious than others by nature. There are many ‘born with’ aspects of our personalities – rendering the childhood perception of “fairness” a moot point. But our task in life is to take what we have and wrestle out an authentic life from it. Another way of saying this is that our primary task in life is to discern and live out our life purpose. This is why, when I have a realistic option, I prefer to diverge from medication use.
In the same vein, many marriage and sexual problems in relationships carry the purpose and promise of maturing the marriage. It is life itself (including experiences of depression and anxiety) that prepares us for life. This is why I don’t burn out in my work. I continually see a maturing process emerge from people working with me. And my work with clients’ depression and anxiety is a part of this greater process.