How to Help Someone with Depression and Suicidal Thoughts

It can be very scary to have a friend or a family member who has expressed suicidal thoughts in words or actions.  In my brief comments here, I want to offer a simple starting point for how to help someone with depression when suicidal thoughts are part of the picture.  At the same time, I [...]

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How to Deal with Depression: Take the Reigns

How to Deal with Depression by Seeing it as Something Separate From You One of most agonizing aspects of clinical depression is the feeling that such a dark mood has taken over.   Many people begin to feel empowered when they realize that the depression cloud is a thing separate from who they are as a [...]

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Coping with Depression Requires Pacing Yourself

Coping with depression involves adjusting your expectation to the reality of where you are at, rather than the “reality” of where you think you should be.   If a man is depressed but doesn’t know it, he may become increasingly frustrated with himself as makes different vain attempts to feel better.  His old bag of trick [...]

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How to Cope with Depression When it is Slow to Leave You

Here are a few tips for how to cope with depression when it doesn’t go away as fast as you would like.  The first tip is to adjust your expectations to be more realistic.  Clinical depression is a medical condition of one of your internal organs:  the brain.  The condition took time to form and [...]

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How to Beat Depression by Creating a Team

Before looking at how to beat depression, it’s important to understand why creating a support network around you is so significant.  One of the most universal symptoms of depression is social withdrawal.   When we are depressed we do not want people to see us in our present condition.  When we are depressed the thought of [...]

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Helping Someone with Depression: Two Easy Tips

Helping someone with depression is usually not as difficult as it seems if you start with two quick tips.  First, don’t give advice.  It will almost always come across as minimizing the gnawing pain that people feel when they are depressed.  Too often, we don’t know what to say to someone who is depressed and [...]

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Fight Depression At Its Roots

To fight depression effectively one must not only reduce the symptoms of depression but also any conditions or syndromes causing these symptoms.  Addressing only the symptoms is to try to fight depression with one hand tied behind your back.  Depression can be caused by chronic stress, a recent loss, a genetic predisposition, a brain injury, [...]

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“Do I Have Depression?” Your Sleep Patterns May Offer a Tentative Answer

Of course, the best way to answer question, “Do I have depression?” is to schedule one session with a mental health professional who is skilled in diagnosing depression.  Short of that, a good depression checklist can suggest how many of the symptoms of depression you may currently be experiencing. Having said that, it is true [...]

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Depression Self Help: Avoid This Trap if You Take the Road of Depression Self Help

Depression self help is often realistic if the depression is not severe enough to be a clinical depression.  Depression self help can also work well for some people, in certain situations, if it is a mild, clinical depression, they have lots of support, and the self help materials are of high quality. However, there is [...]

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Depression Forum Travels: Tips for the Road

The concept of depression forums is a good one on many levels.  Depression makes us miserable in a way that people can’t understand unless they have been through it.  If I am miserable and I post it on a forum there can be at least a little relief even if no one responds to my [...]

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