The journalist asked four experts (i.e. a psychologist, a psychiatrist, the Minister of Health and an adviser for mental health) in the area of depression about their thoughts as for the reasons why there is a growing degree of depression in Norway. The answers given were varied and focused on different areas of society. The subject of depression is something that can not be fully addressed in a newspaper article, or for that fact, a series of articles. What it does though, is start a dialogue about an illness that plagues society at many different levels.
I feel the question posed by the article is a fundamental query that needs to be addressed. There are people who believe that the accumulation of wealth and success brings happiness. There are others that try to find happiness in mass religion, cults or esoteric gurus. Then there are other who believe that getting married, having kids and settling down leads to the road to happiness. There are millions of other ways people chase after happiness. Some find it, but many more don't.
When a person fails to achieve some sense of happiness or when they do reach a level where they expect to find happiness, they often ask questions such as the following. "Is this it? This is what I've been struggling towards? There has got to be more?"
I work as a communication and executive coach in a broad range of industries and across different levels of management. Depression rears it's ugly head amongst these ranks of working professionals, as it does anywhere else in society. The severity and the cause of depression, are of course, as varied as are the people affected by it.
If a person's expectations of what life is suppose to be like does not match with what their life actually is, it leads people to feel unhappy. If these same people feel that there is nothing they can do to change their life or situation, this leads them to feel a sense of powerless or lack of control. The feeling of depression soon follows.
Realistically, a person has either two choices. He can either change his life situation (i.e. job, significant other, residence, way of life etc.) or he has to change his expectations of what he believes life is suppose to be (i.e. his map of the world).
One of the best ways I have found to help people deal with their depression is through dialogue. They begin by finding words to describe abstract thoughts and feelings. A majority of the time, people find it hard to articulate what is specifically on their mind. They tend to start off using very general terms. It is through the effort of asking certain types of questions that I help the client to paint a more vivid and vibrant painting of how they see the world. It not only becomes clearer for me, but becomes, more importantly, clearer for them.
This process of verbally painting a picture reveals, maybe for the first time, the clients' underlying beliefs. It is his beliefs that determine and define his expectations of how life is suppose to be. As you know, a belief is simply a person's certainty about someone or something. For example, I am certain that the weather will be nice tomorrow; I am certain that martians are bad; I am certain that I can trust her etc.
By getting a person to operationally define his beliefs, you discover his rule book. That is, when someone specifically outlines what has to happen or not happen in order for his rules to be met.
When a person who is depressed clarifies his rules, you generally find his life situation does not come very close to meeting those rules. Quite often I discover that the chance of meeting those rules is highly unlikely. It is like setting a goal that you can never achieve. You are setting yourself up for failure.
The key is to get the the client to redefine the rules or part of the rules by which he defines and lives his life. The rules need to be realistic, flexible and tailored to his life and situation. Only then will a person feel that they can affect change.
I've super-simplified the process in this short blog entry as to what I do to help people overcome their depression. For most cases of depression (excluding those due to imbalanced brain chemistry) if you can help a person redefine their rules and expand their constructive vocabulary, you can get them to climb out of their hole of depression and to start moving forward again.
Here are some further sources:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depression_%28mood%29
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/depression.html
http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/depression/complete-index.shtml
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