Depression is the mind killer. I have written this site in hope that it can help you learn to cope with your situation and that you can learn how to treat depression, either through professionally assisted help or by some of the alternatives to treat depression naturally.

Depression saps you for energy, hope and motivation and can be hard to manage on ones own.

But even if overcoming depression is neither easy nor quickly done, it is far from impossible.
You can not do it using only pure will power, but still you do have some degree of control over your own mental situation, even if it feels as if the depression is persistent.
Depression comes in a range of types and severity and can be anything from a nuisance to a life debilitating disease that takes over your whole life and those around you.

Having a depressed mood can be a natural response to some life events, as a symptom of certain medical conditions or treatments.

A depression is often a natural response to circumstances in one’s life, and may have its origin in everything from disappointments and relationships, stress, serious illness, loss of someone close, divorce, and economic worries.
A depression that occurs as a reaction to these types of challenges that are objectively possible to “explain” as the cause, is called a reactive depression.

Depression is sometimes an indication of underlying problems, often alcoholism. Older people, especially those suffering from dementia, are often depressed when it dawns on them that your health and your memory fails.
Up against 20 percent of all women who have undergone childbirth are affected by depression.
Depression in adolescents can be caused by schizophrenia, a disease characterized by a confused perception of reality.

In modern society there has been an explosion in depressive disorders and a 2010 US CDC survey concluded that 3,4% met the criteria for major depression while estimates for current depression varied from 4,8% in North Dakota to 14,8% in Mississippi.

If you are unsure if you are depressed, you could try a depression test online.

To recover from a depression requires action, but to act when you’re depressed is hard.
The very thought of doing the things that used to make you feel better, such as training or doing something with friends, can be exhausting in itself.
That is the ironic circle of depression. The things that help the most are those who are hardest to do.
But there is a difference between difficult and impossible, and believing that you can change is the first step on the road to recovery.

To recover from depression requires that you start with a few achievable goals and that you slowly but surely build on that.
Start with the resources you feel you possess at the moment. If it is difficult to think of any resources you have, it may be helpful to ask a friend you trust or a helper to help get them down on paper.

 

When treating depression, one must consider both the depression that is ongoing right now, and preventing future depressions.

Antidepressant medications (also known as antidepressants, anti-depressants, SSRIs and TCAs) used for severe depression that does not go by itself, and the MADRS score of over 20.

These drugs mainly work in three different ways. They make people more active, and helps decrease fatigue and apathy.
They are also, naturally enough, antidepressant, but this effect does not need to strike until after some time, ie one to two weeks.
At first, the drugs also seem a little sedative and sleep inducing.
This is part of the reason that patients with panic attacks may also use such drugs. If a patient experience difficulty getting to sleep under such treatment, sleeping pills may be neccessary.

Going the antidepressant route is not always the right choice, many can get better from just changing their lifestyle, start exercising, get a job or change their diet. However there are also ways of treating depression naturally.

There are quite a few herbs for depression available and some of them can do wonders for people with mild symptoms of depression.