Health care practitioners can treat depressed people. A physician, for one, has also the proper training in treating psychiatric disorders. The same goes with the physician assistant and the nurse practitioner. If the patient is suffering from severe depression, these health care practitioners will automatically refer the patient to mental health specialists.
The following mental health specialists are psychiatrist, psychologist, a psychiatric nurse specialist and even a social worker.
The psychiatrist provides treatment and diagnosis to mental and psychiatric patients. A psychologist, on the other hand, is trained for counseling, psychological examination and psychotherapy. The social worker knows counseling to a certain degree, whereas a registered nurse who has taken masterals in psychiatric nursing can help out the patient.
Before the assessment can be made, the health care providers or mental health specialists will question the patient on the following: symptoms, overall health and medical and mental history of the family. A physical exam will be carried out plus some lab tests.
Depression, being an illness, requires huge emotional support from the family. A family member must accompany the patient on doctor visits to give the latter a boost.
During the course of the visit, the doctor will determine if the case is severe, mild or moderate. Depression is severe if the person experiences all the symptoms and if it keeps him from doing all his daily activities. Moderate, if the person has a lot of the symptoms that it hampers his daily movements. It can be classified mild if the person has some of the depression signs and needs more push to do all the things he desires to do.
No one must undervalue the seriousness of depression. It is a real sickness, and therefore the depressed needs all the help and attention he can get.
As said earlier, you are not alone in this problem. Fortunately, depression, of all psychiatric illnesses, proves to be most treatable. With proper care, more than 80 percent of those experiencing major depression make significant improvement. Even those suffering from severe depression can helped.
Here are some treatments for depression problems:
Psychotherapy There are many methods of therapeutic remedies used for treating depression. The most common are behavioral therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, rational emotive therapy, and interpersonal therapy. Remedies also include psychodynamic and family approaches. Both the individual and group modalities have been used commonly, but these depend on the severity of one's depression, the financial resources of the person, and resources that are available locally.
Arguably the most prominent therapy is the cognitive behavioral therapy that is commonly used for handling such condition. There are many extensive research and medical studies that are conducted to check or assess the safety as well as the effectiveness in treating depression using this form of therapy.
Considered the father of cognitive behavioral therapy, many written studies and books support this type of therapy. Cognitive behavioral therapy uses simple methods that focus primarily on the patient's negative thought patterns. These negative thought patterns are also known as cognitive distortions. A person suffering from depression may from time to time use these cognitive distortions, igniting the condition.
The therapy begins with the establishment of a warm supportive environment for one suffering from depression. Making the patient learn how his or her depression problem may be a result of thinking in cognitive distortions is generally the next step. The kinds of faulty logic and thinking are also addressed in this step (such as "everything or nothing logic," "blame mis-attribution," "overgeneralization," among others) and the person being treated is encouraged to start taking notes of the thoughts he or she has been having as they happen throughout his or her day. This is done for the person to know and realize how often and common this kind of thoughts are occuring.
Using this form of therapy, the main emphasis is placed on understanding the thoughts and behaviors that are connected to this depression problem rather than on the emotions themselves. The reason for this emphasis is that is strongly believed that by changing one's thoughts and subsequently, behaviors, his or her emotions will most likely change as well. Because of this kind of therapy, cognitive-behavioral therapy is often short-term (generally lasts up to a dozen sessions or two only) and suitable for folks that are experiencing some kind of distress that is related to the depression they are having. Individuals that are able to handle a problem using a technique that is unique and therefore are most likely cognitively-oriented could also do well under this approach.
Interpersonal therapy, on the other hand, is also a therapy on a short-term basis used for treating depression. In this kind of treatment, the focus is normally on the social relationships of the patient and discover ways in improving these relationships. It is strongly believed that in order to improve the overall well-being of a person (or the patient in the case); he or she needs to have a stable and good social support.
When a person's relationships become unhealthy, the person would experience this problem. This therapy approach then seeks to improve one's skills in social relationships, expression of one's emotions, assertiveness, and communication skills. This form of therapy is usually done individually but sometimes used in a group therapy setting.
Many individual place more importance on the patient's active personal involvement in recovering from depression. Folks treated under an individual approach are usually enticed and encouraged to finish homework assignments between sessions. If the person is not capable of joining a therapy sessions actively, then his or her therapist could be the one to first give the patient an environment that supports him or her until the medication starts to improve his or her state of feelings and mind.
There are no much researches done on Psycho-dynamic or psychoanalytic approaches to be used in treating depression that warrant their use. But there are some therapists that might adopt psycho-dynamic remedy to help to conceptualize a patient's personality, there are some points raised on how to prove this to be an effective and efficient depression treatment tool.
Couples or family therapy could also be applied if the patient's depression directly affects family relationships. These forms of therapy focus on the interpersonal relationships among family members. In addition, these methods seek to ensure good communication in the family. The roles of the family members in a patient's depression could be examined. Education regarding depression problem in general might also be used as part of the family therapy.
Medication The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has approved a number of drugs for treating depression. These medicines are sorted into classes; each medication has a unique chemical structure which acts on various chemicals present in the brain.
It is necessary to remember that all medications approved by the FDA to treat depression are effective and recommended but do not work the same effect for everybody.
You might want to work closely with the doctor to find which drug is the best for your condition. Sometimes, conditions may involve having more than just one medication; some work with a mixture of medications.
Warning: Do not change your medication or discontinue your dosage without asking your doctor.
