Depression Is a Choice

Book excerpt: In this revolutionary and provocative work, a psychotherapist with a family history of depression takes a hard look at the syndrome and how to overcome it naturally -- without medication.What if anti-depressants were not the best answer to depression? What if you could learn to think your depression away? What if you could "pull the plug" on depression any time you wanted? What if depression is a choice? Many who suffer from depression will turn to psychotropic drugs for relief. Psychotherapist A. B. Curtiss raises powerful questions about this trend -- pointing out that for most of us depression is not a disease to be cured by medication, which only offers temporary relief, but the accidental escalation of a necessary defense mechanism-the flight or fight response. She advocates a process called brainswitching to permanently manage depression, and mind exercises to practice new thinking techniques. Using these exercises to bring about new ways of thinking will form new get-out-depression neural patterns that can be used in place of the old depressive neural patterns. "Practice makes perfect?" Yes, Curtiss says, but in the case of depression, practice makes neurons. To illustrate this, she draws from her own experiences with depression, anecdotes from her therapy practice, and from her own personal journey from bipolar to sanity without drugs. This immensely readable, eye-opening, and extremely helpful book encourages people to take responsibility for their symptoms, and gives them the steps they need to fight and win the battle against depression without medication. "The moment I felt depressed, it never occurred to me to do anything else but be depressed. The progression from a feeling of depression to being a depressed person was a foregone conclusion that I never questioned. Not anymore. Depression always ends. Not because of Prozac. Not because of psychotherapy. Not because of psychoanalysis or shock treatments. Depression always ends because it is in the very nature of depression to end. It is cyclical. The only question is, how can we get it to end sooner, the way we want it to, instead of later, which we hate? The answer is that we have to learn to think about depression in a different way. But it is not going to be enough to simply consider new ideas from a safe distance. We have to get down on our hands and knees with a magnifying glass and crawl around inside of the beliefs we have for so long relied on. It is not going to be enough to consider what we think. We have to consider how we think because the problem of depression lies in the very gears of our thinking process which we can manage as an act of will. All depression is caused by chemical imbalances in the brain but there is a chemical consequence in the brain for every thought we think. Prescription drugs coupled with "psychologized thinking" will only mask, not help depression. "Heredity is not destiny. Biology is not destiny. Will is destiny."