I’m Dr Tom McDonough from Good Therapy SF. And a common question we get from our clients here at our clinic is, “Is depression curable?” Well, While, it’s a simple question, maybe a not so simple answer, but generally speaking upfront, I like to let people know that we can absolutely work with your depressive symptoms and you can find yourself in a better place when working with depression.
Sometimes depression is more difficult to work with, if someone has long standing or treatment resistant depression. But know that even in these situations, therapy and sometimes therapy, with a combination of medication, produces the best outcomes in these more kind of treatment resistant depression situations.
So sometimes depression occurs in an episodic fashion in which it just occurs for brief periods of time. And other times it occurs in a more chronic or continuous way. When it’s more episodic, it tends to occur in a two to eight week window. And in these situations, sometimes therapy is enough, but therapy with medication can provide the relief people are looking for, but often with more chronic depression where these episodes continue more frequently, you really want to have a combination of therapy and medication to get the best results.
What type of therapy is going to be used for both episodic and chronic depression? One of the most helpful therapy approaches is going to be cognitive behavioral therapy. That’s where we work with your thoughts and your behaviors to produce more desirable outcomes. For example, with cognitive behavioral therapy, we’re going to look at the triad that comes with depression, which is a negative outlook of yourself, a negative outlook of others and a negative outlook of your future.
So using the cognitive behavioral therapy approach, we can address those three aspects and help provide more relief when it comes to those thoughts and behaviors. Also, medication is often helpful when working with more longstanding or intense depression if it’s happening in an episodic way. Common medications are antidepressants or SSRIs, Selective Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitors. And again, a combination of therapy with medication often produces the best results for difficult, longstanding depression.
And then also, in addition to therapy and medication, we also encourage lifestyle changes. This includes exercise, nutrition and focusing on your sleep. So often a combination of therapy, medication and lifestyle changes helps with producing the type of treatment outcomes we’re looking for when working with depression.
What’s going to help as well more specifically with cognitive behavioral therapy when it comes to long term management strategies is really working on developing and recognizing the unhelpful thoughts and unhelpful behaviors that are more prevalent or maybe more of a bad habit somebody has in their life.
So learning to identify these habits and then help use new strategies and techniques to produce more desirable outcomes is going to help with those long term management strategies that we’re looking for to improve your mood and reduce depression symptoms.
So it’s just really important to remember that the path to recovery for depression is possible for everybody.
And if this is something that you are interested in or curious to learn more about, please feel free to reach out to us here at Good Therapy SF. Take care.
