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THE SEVEN MYTHS OF DEPRESSION:

MYTH ONE:

"DIFFICULT LIFE SITUATIONS CAUSE DEPRESSION"

Difficult life situations are not the cause of depression. What can cause depression is  how we cope with  
situations. One person can suffer from a tragic experience and not be depressed, while a relatively trivial problem can send someone else into a severe depression.

MYTH TWO:

"DEPRESSION IS AN ILLNESS YOU CAN GET AGAIN, AND AGAIN"

​It isn’t depression that is recurrent, but the difficulties that life throws at us. If you react to difficult circumstances in instead of overcoming the difficulty, depression will keep manifesting.

MYTH THREE:

"DEPRESSION IS PASSED DOWN TO CHILDREN GENETICALLY"

Despite extensive research, a ‘depression gene’ that makes more than a marginal contribution to depression has never been found. And it seems unlikely that it ever
will be. What may be picked up by children from their parents are inadequate ways of coping with difficult life situations, which makes them more prone to depression
themselves, should they go on to experience difficulties.

MYTH FOUR:

"DEPRESSION IS ALWAYS A SEPARATE ADDITIONAL PROBLEM"

Depression is a signal that something is wrong in a person's current situation and/or the way that they are dealing with it. It is not a separate condition, unrelated to anxiety or chronic pain, for instance, to be managed long term by therapy or anti-depressant drugs.

MYTH FIVE:

"DEPRESSION IS ANGER TURNED INWARDS"

The myth that depression is ‘anger turned
inwards’ has no biological basis. The expectation fulfillment theory of dreaming, for example, has shown that every night we dream to de-arouse unexpressed emotions from the day before, so anger cannot be ‘turned inwards’ in the long-term.

MYTH SIX:

"DEPRESSION IS A BIOLOGICAL ILLNESS"

Depression is NOT a biological illness. Of course there is a biological element to depression – every thought and
emotion we have affects the levels of the feel-good brain chemical serotonin. If we are depressed, we have low levels of serotonin, whereas when we are positive and acting positively, levels of serotonin are high. It is the depressed mood that causes changes in brain chemistry, not the other way around. Two facts that show that the chemical imbalance idea is wrong: the vast majority of depressions lift quickly when treated with effective psychological therapy. And even without therapy, in
75 per cent of cases, depression gets better on its own within six months without chemical intervention.

MYTH SEVEN:

​"WHEN YOU HAVE THERAPY FOR DEPRESSION, YOU FEEL WORSE BEFORE YOU FEEL BETTER"

Some forms of therapy do make
you feel worse. However, effective therapies help a person experience positive changes in the very first session.

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