PDF | Living With Chronic Depression – Download

All three psychotherapeutic approaches have their uses. All of them are helpful with the right patient at the right time. None of them “cure” chronic depression, although they may make it more tolerable. I believe that regardless of “school” or “technique,” the most important predictor of therapeutic success is the relationship. I advise you to be in therapy; it helps, even if it doesn’t cure. So don’t give up. There is some professional out there who can be a force for good in your life and that is worth having. Depression is a bio-social-psychological phenomenon.

Biological vulnerability, inborn or acquired through traumatization, including the traumatization of major depression itself, interacts with the social surround that often contributes depressive forces, perhaps in response to the depressed one’s behavior, such as rejection, unrealistic expectations and demands, and lacerating criticism, which in turn interact with internal saboteurs, self-hating self-concepts, and overidentification with now gone and/or malignant people in the sufferer’s present or past life. All of these continually reinforce each other, resulting in either continuing plunging into the darkness or keeping you stuck there.