First, lets be clear about what clinical depression really is.

In my view, many of the people who are diagnosed by their GP as having depression are not, in fact, clinically depressed at all. Instead, they could be sad, fed up with life, or unhappy. This is one reason why anti-depressants don't work for the majority. Anti-depressant drugssuch as the SSRIs - which increase the amount of serotonin in circulation in the brain - will only work, obviously, if the patient has serotonin depletion, which will only be the case if they actually have clinical depression.

Whether you are depressed, sad, fed up, or unhappy, this article will still apply to you.

Here are the four main causes:

1. Prolonged anxiety caused by negative Headmind thinking.

I have covered this problem extensively in previous articles on this blog such as this one here. If you are a habitual worrier, perfectionist, or guilt-tripper then, on a daily basis, your body will become accustomed to very high anxiety levels. Since Bodymind cannot tolerate over-arousal for too long, it will seek to reduce the problem by damping down the system. Typically, this means reducing serotonin (which elevates mood), which leads to the symptoms of clinical depression. In this respect it has been estimated that over 70% of depressed people also have high anxiety levels.

The solution is to change the way Headmind works.

    You can find out how to eliminate worry here.

    You can find out how to eliminate perfectionism here.

    You can find out how to eliminate guilt here.

    You can also find out how to reduce anxiety, without drugs, here.

 2. The person has developed a 'hopeless' mind-set

This problem is typically developed by over-conscientious people who have not learnt how to say 'No' or recognise their limitations. The result is that they take on far too many burdens, obligations and responsibilities. Or else they forget to take time out for themselves and keep that crucial work-life balance. One result is burnout (see here for advice on what to do about burnout). 

Depression occurs when personal Headmind reacts to overload by just giving up (a slightly weird response, given that it was faulty thinking that gave rise to the problem in the first place). A common outcome is that the person turns into a victim of some kind.

The most common Headmind defect here is 'Failure thinking', which ignores realistic solutions on what to do about overload and, instead, magnifies problems, concludes that there is nothing that can be done about them, and triggers anxiety with the thought that disaster is inevitable. This leads to first anxiety and then to the 'damping down' response I described in the previous item.

The solution is to develop a solution-focused, or problem-solving approach to problems. I am in the middle of writing a series on this so please check back for articles on 'success thinking'.

3. The person has lost her passion for life.

People who have become disillusioned do so as a result of trauma of some kind: the death of someone close, break-up, or departure. Or betrayal, or rejection, by someone they once trusted. Or the usual disasters which befall all of us from time to time but which setbacks the ego will not accept.

In other cases, the depressed person has simply got confused and lost his way. This could be because he has become addicted to trivialities - newspapers, games, television,  the social round, internet-surfing, etc. Or is stuck in routine in which one day is more or less like the next, and which becomes a kind of living death. Once Bodymind sees what is happening here it starts to release copious amounts of the emotions known as boredom and frustration. But here is what is strange: when some people notice they are bored they don't do anything about it. Instead, they read boredom as another sign that life is hopeless. So they stagnate, more and more.

The solution is to reconnect to Bodymind and your passion. 

You can find out how to do that here by reading some of my previous articles on personal genius.

4. Headmind is blocking the release of strong emotions, such as anger and sadness.

I have touched on this problem in a previous article: Depression, the Brain, and Letting the Monster Out. A  build-up of unexpressed or unresolved emotion leads to a similar effect as chronic anxiety: a dangerous level of over-arousal. Once again, Bodymind tends to counter-act this problem by reducing serotonin. 

The solution is to find a way to release those emotions. 

You can find out more about developing emotional honesty here.

If you are not depressed right now but you think you might be going that way, then you can find out more about how to stay out of depression here.

Contrary to common belief many people do find a way to improve their mental health without needing to consult a psychotherapist and many of the articles on here show you how to do just that. But if you do need assistance then you can contact us over on the Reverse Therapy website.

Image by pinksherbet 

That book is: Teach Us To Sit Still by Tim Parks.

Not only is this book written with great power and emotion (I came close to tears at some points; it also echoes most of the work we are doing in Reverse Therapy.

Tim Parks is an award-winning English novelist who lives in Verona. But this book is not a novel. It is a personal story with the subtitle: 'A sceptic's search for health and healing'.

Tim Parks suffered excruciating pain in the pelvis, as well as a urinary disorder, for twenty years, for a problem which none of his doctors were able to diagnose accurately, or to provide a cure. Sometimes his problem was called Prostatitis; at other times Pelvic Floor Pain Syndrome. Whatever it was, Tim Parks spent years in pain and embarrassment, slowly getting more and more frustrated and demoralised by the failure of medical science to solve the problem. At one point he was offered drastic surgery for removal of the prostate gland: an option he wisely refused since, as it turned out, this would have achieved absolutely nothing except mutilation and the loss of his sex drive.

Tim Parks is funny, sad, highly intelligent, and ruthlessly honest. He describes himself as something of a Headmind-dominated person: 'a worrisome, dissatisfied individual': intellectual, sceptical and a control-freak, living most of his life spinning around words in his head.

After years of pain and useless advice (two doctors advised him to masturbate twice a day in order to relieve congestion in the prostate gland) Tim Parks turned to alternative medicine. He consulted an Ayurvedic practitioner in Delhi who shocked him:

    'This is a problem you will never get over, Mr Parks, until you confront the profound contradictions in your character.'

This is the clue which leads him to seek a non-medical solution. Interestingly, he describes how he resisted what he saw as a 'psychosomatic' explanation for his pain before coming to realise that the term 'psychosomatic' is nonsensical; the mind is not separate from the body and people can suffer from real, painful, symptoms (as in Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, M.E, andFibromyalgia) simply because the connection between the conscious mind and Bodymind has broken down. Or, to use my terminology, because Bodymind is at war with Headmind.

Incidentally, it is high time that we replaced the term 'psychosomatic' with the phrase 'HPA Disorder' (or something similar), as I have written before in other articles and in some of my books.

The solution Tim Parks discovered came from reading A Headache in your Pelvis, by David Wise and Rodney Anderson, in which he learnt how to use Paradoxical Relaxation. In this technique he learned not to resist the pain but to exercise Awareness on it. Simply, to let the pain be, without trying to interfere with it. Doing this twice a day he discovered that the pain simply disappeared. As Bodymind noticed that he was paying attention the pain switched off. Within months he was 'cured'. 

I have written about Awareness elsewhere on this blog and in Reverse Therapy we have long noticed the effect of exercising awareness, not resisting them, just letting them be, and simply 'listening to them'. It is surprising, in this respect, how many of my clients have told me that just doing this can banish fatigue, pain, tension, and many other symptoms besides.

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Please let me hasten to add that I and my colleagues have, over the last 8 years, worked with thousands of people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome who a) were seriously ill; b) were open-minded; c) got well by adopting a different approach to the one that many people have been spoon-fed by the medical establishment.

The reason I bring up this subject again is because I have just caught sight of an excellent video which summarises the current state of play on this very difficult subject. It is by Dr Anthony Komaroff, who is also Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 

You can catch that video here: CFIDS Talk 

What I like about this item is that Professor Komaroff:

a) sympathises with people who suffer from this terrible illness

b) is extremely learned about the subject

c) is open-minded about the potential causes of the problem

d) makes a number of important points which support Reverse Therapy (which I summarise below):

1. Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is not 'all in the mind'; it is a neurological illness

2. In CFS the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal Axis is compromised

3. The Sympathetic Nervous System swings from over to under activity

4. Serotonin release (a mood hormone) in the brain changes

5. Yet CFS has little in common with either Depression or Anxiety

6. The Immune system becomes inefficient following continual over-activity

Dr Komaroff also says that although many cases of CFS begin with a viral infection no single virus has ever been identified as the cause of the illness. He also says (as we do in Reverse Therapy) that it may be that prolonged viral problems in CFS are prompted by a breakdown in the Immune system. The same applies to the XMRV retrovirus.

It is clear, also, that there is a genetic component in CFS. Identical twins are far more likely to get this illness than the average and researchers have identified 22 genes that behave differently in CFS (this means they are turned on or off in a different way from the rest of us). But let's be clear on this: genes don't cause illness on their own. If that were true ALL identical twins would contract the same illnesses in the same way at the same time.

Indeed, the picture I can see emerging from Dr Komaroff's presentation is something like this:

Some people are more at risk of getting CFS than others, in the same way that other people are at risk for heart disease, allergies or breast cancer,

The majority of people with CFS (but not all) suffer from viral problems early on in the illness, although here, I am arguing that this is because the immune system is compromised by the brain disorder known as CFS. It is, however, possible that certain viruses complicate and compound the disorder.

There is now extremely strong evidence that both the emotional and thinking centres in the brain demonstrate abnormal activity, exactly as Reverse Therapy suggests.

The illness is maintained, as I have argued in my books, through interactions between the limbic system, the hypothalamus, the adrenal glands, the sympathetic nervous system, and the immune system.

Dr Komaroff has also stated elsewhere that he believes that therapy - cognitive-behavioural therapy - can be of help in that it teaches sufferers how to change thinking patterns and behaviours that maintain the problem. My only dispute with Dr Komaroff here is that therapy - Reverse Therapy - can go on to teach people how to control the symptoms themselves.

My last-but-one article Are you a cynic? attracted the largest post-bag I have ever received for a single article.

Several of you praised my honesty in writing about my weaknesses. (Since my second-largest post-bag followed after I wrote about my writer's block in December it seems many of you get off on a little soul-searching from me.... ;-) )

Two readers who wrote in recalling times when I got angry with them seem to have missed the point. Anger is a positive Bodymind state which occurs when we are affronted. But we are talking about cynicism here - which is a negative thinking state.

Three of you, rather amusingly, thought I was probably right on the button when satirizing 'A' in the article as a self-indulgent drama-queen!

Finally, my friend Mark McGuinness left a comment below the post, in which he wondered whether my new friend had mistaken my dark, ironic sense of humour for something worse.....

Anyways, I have been doing a little more research on this topic and will be publishing some thoughts on why people might become cynical later on this week.

In the meantime, I found this handy little self-test called 'How Cynical Are You?'

Interestingly, I scored quite low on this test (36%), indicating that I am perhaps not quite so cynical after all......

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