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BOOKS BY SYD BAUMEL

Dealing with Depression Naturally: Complementary and Alternative Therapies for Restoring Emotional Health

Serotonin: How to Naturally Harness the Power Behind Prozac and Phen/Fen
 

Natural Antidepressants: Tried and True Remedies from Nature's Pharmacy

I felt that there was a huge gap between the way depression is commonly treated - "if drug A doesn't work then we'll try drug B (or C or Y)" -- and the way it should be treated -- "maybe we'll need to use drugs, but there are a lot of other viable possibilities we can explore."

I wanted to create a comprehensive resource on these options for depressively-inclined people and their caregivers.

How did you overcome depression?

I believe that recovered/ing alcoholics are advised not to claim they've overcome their problem, and in the same way, depression is a reflex that can always come back to haunt us "recovered/ing depressives."
What I have accomplished is that I've found some natural antidepressants that work for me to the extent that depression, which had been an almost constant companion in my late teens and early twenties, has been a shadow of its former self ever since, i.e. for nearly twenty years.
 
 

As they say, 'your mileage may vary,' but for me an amino acid called L-phenylalanine, which is used by the brain to manufacture certain important mood-regulating biochemicals, was the first natural antidepressant I tried that had a really major impact.

Other things that have seemed to be helpful for me included a low junk and sugar diet, regular aerobic exercise, the B vitamin niacin, and the herb St. John's wort.

I also tried some antidepressant drugs in my time and found a few that worked, but with a load of side effects.

Since then, the Prozac generation -- which usually is better tolerated -- has come on the market, but I've done well enough without them to leave them on the shelf so far.

Why does one feel so stuck when depressed?

I have a theory that all or most depressions are inherently episodes of 'stuckness' -- specifically when there is something subjectively very problematic in our lives that we feel we can neither fix nor, alternatively, be reconciled with.

This is one of the reasons why I feel a certain number of depressive pit stops on the road of life are an inevitable occupational hazard of being human.

I believe this model of depression may even apply to primarily biological/endogenous depressions.

The biology may produce certain somatic (body-rooted) symptoms, like chronic fatigue, impaired mental performance, reduced responsiveness to pleasurable stimuli, heightened sensitivity to pain, and/or disturbed sleep.

We may then find it very hard not to react to these symptoms and to the negative impact on our lives by becoming "depressed about being depressed," as some psychologists would put it. What began as a kind of depression of the body becomes -- via a kind of 'osmotic transfer of negative energy' -- a depression of the whole person.

Why do certain attitudes like defeatism and perfectionism make us easy prey for depression?

For good or for ill, we are slaves of any ingrained attitudes we may (and almost certainly do) have.

The downside of some attitudes, such as perfectionism, idealism, and defeatism (if an attitude of high demands/expectations comes with it), is an increased vulnerability to depression whenever our high hopes/demands/expectations are, or seem, hopelessly out of reach.

To put it another way, if there are lots of "musts" in our philosophy -- if we are compulsive "musturbatory" thinkers, as psychologist Albert Ellis would say -- we will feel the tug of depression any time a pet "must" of ours looks like a "no way."
What can a person do who simply can't shake their depression, who perhaps has suffered something so awful they can't seem to get beyond feeling depressed?

This is the classic situation in which professional help, or knowledgeable self-help, is called for.

When the depression seems to be a reaction to an overwhelming circumstance, it makes sense to start by approaching it on that level, through formal or informal counseling, support, self-examination, and/or problem-solving.

But sooner or later, the body may also have to be considered, whether as a contributing cause (perhaps some undiagnosed condition has drastically lowered the person's ability to cope with these circumstances) or as a contributing cure (any number of natural approaches can nourish the biological roots of our personal coping skills).

Is depression often a symptom of underlying physical disorders?

The research -- and there have been many dozens of studies involving many thousands of patients - leaves no doubt that depression and physical illness are two very common forms of misery that just love each other's company.

Cause and effect is not so easy to establish conclusively, but the clinical evidence is compelling that a wide variety of physical illnesses and disorders can at least lower a person's resistance to becoming depressed, while quite a few conditions can more or less compel a depressive response from many people.

Certainly, in practice this connection is increasingly well-accepted, especially in the depressed elderly for whom screening for physical causes seems finally to be becoming routine.

Yet the screen isn't always as fine as some research suggests it should be. Mild forms of hypothyroidism, for instance, appear to cause or contribute to as many as 10-15 percent of all clinical depressions, yet doctors, typically use too coarse a laboratory screen to detect more than 25-50 percent of these cases.

What foods make us vulnerable to depression?

There is a small minority of allergists, psychiatrists and other physicians -- along with many alternative practitioners -- who firmly believe that allergies/intolerance/sensitivities to foods and chemicals are a common cause of depression and other neuropsychiatric conditions.

Although the medical community as a whole rejects this idea, research published in respectable medical journals, including some controlled clinical trials, has tended to support it more than refute it.

When it comes to particular foods, the rule of thumb is that any food a person eats regularly -- and in particular any food s/he eats "addictively" -- is suspect. Thus, the usual suspects and convicts include such popular favorites as milk, wheat, eggs, chicken, chocolate, coffee, and black tea. In Japan, rice is said to be a major culprit.

How can we become more active to become less depressed when we feel too depressed to become active in the first place?

Welcome to the vicious cycle relationship between depression and so many of the things that go with it: disturbed sleep, poor diet, self-defeating thoughts and attitudes, inactivity. . . I'm afraid that a certain amount of will-power is a necessary part of the solution, but not much more than is required to take some choice "baby steps" -- the kind that maximize satisfaction and minimize frustration.

The experts in baby steps and how to take them -- and keep taking them long enough to step out of depression -- are cognitive-behavorial clinical psychologists and the self-help books they write, such as Feeling Good by David Burns. 

Why is it so hard to do anything when we are depressed -- the time when perhaps we need to be doing the most?

Because, typically, our systems have more or less gone on strike. Working conditions have become so unacceptable that a depressive retreat from the front becomes our new default stance. Yet eventually, with or without therapy, circumstances -- or our "striking attitude" toward them -- are likely to relent, drawing us back into the swirl of life's activities once more as willing and eager participants.

Still, therapy will almost always resolve the strike sooner, and it can greatly improve future labour-management relations. 

How could cognitive therapy help someone who is depressed because they have lost a relationship?

How can a reasoned argument mend a broken heart? This is how people put off by cognitive therapy's (CT) cool-headed approach to life's hot problems are apt to see it. Yet broken hearts are among the many varieties of depressive injuries which research suggests often do succumb to CT's persistent line of patter.

We may be dealing here with another example of a depressive vicious cycle; in this case, depression and a negatively biased narrowing of our perspective on things and ourselves.

When we lose someone we feel is irreplaceable, we're apt to temporarily lose the inclination to say the kinds of potentially comforting -- yet truthful -- things to ourselves that we would tell a friend in a similar circumstance.

Instead, a host of exaggeratedly, one-sidedly discouraging and nihilistic thoughts may even pull us from the purgatory of grief into the abyss of depression.

Cognitive therapy helps us stand back a little from these powerful thoughts and worries -- as much as we may find ourselves wanting to cling to them -- and to actually challenge their validity and fairness, one by one.

It's a kind of thinking wo/man's approach to positive thinking -- no mindless repetition of positive aphorisms here, but a concerted program of examining the dark corners of our thinking machines in the light of day and revising our "self talk" accordingly. 

How can we become more critically aware of the thoughts and attitudes that depress us?

This again is cognitive therapy's territory, and the approach taken by cognitive therapists is simply to advise people to start paying attention to what thoughts or images go through their minds before and during depressive or other dysfunctional reactions.

It's these very individual and highly reflective or automatic thoughts that seem to steer one person into one reaction and another person into another in response to essentially the same circumstances.

Once you've collected and considered many such thoughts you can often begin to see some common themes, the outline of deeper attitudes or, as cognitive therapist call them, "maladaptive assumptions" that are the attitudinal basis for these automatic thoughts. Typically, we've acquired these attitudinal assumptions -- such as "only attractive people can be happy" or "a man's worth is directly proportional to the size of his paycheque" -- under less than optimal childhood learning conditions, and they've sat undisturbed, like rocks at the core of our personalities, ever since.

We have to ask ourselves, are these thoughts and attitudes making us better or worse as people, and are there kinder, gentler, more constructive alternatives?

How can we get in touch with our depressing automatic thoughts?

Apart from trying to nab these critters in "real time," we can also recollect or reconstruct them at a perhaps calmer, cooler, more collected time. They can be a subject for meditation: relax and close your eyes and think about a problem situation in your life. What was running through your head, or what runs through your head now, as you mentally recreate the provoking stimuli?

How can we figure out solutions to our problems?

I was hoping you could answer that question for me. Actually, there are psychologists who specialize in studying what it is that makes some people work, play and problem-solve much more efficiently, effectively, and creatively than others.

Recently, some of them have attempted to bring this knowledge into the clinic, where serious personal problems or hassle overloads cause or exacerbate their patients' depressions.

Basically, these psychologists teach people to tackle these kinds of problems with the same kinds of skills and tools a Picasso or an Einstein might instinctively apply to an aesthetic or scientific problem.

For example, the principle of "brainstorming," which prescribes giving your imagination free reign to explore any possibility that comes to mind, however "silly" or unrealistic it may seem, plays an important part during the stage where you attempt to come up with as rich a brew of potential solutions to your problems as possible.

Why do some people escape depression while others don't?

Apart from the obvious matter of the cards a person is dealt on the eve of a depressive reaction, there are the congenital cards s/he is dealt at birth, the environmental cards s/he is dealt from then on (biophysical and psychosocial), and, of course, how s/he plays these cards.

With so many cards and with so much opportunity to play at least some of them, we can begin to imagine how the whole range of human depressive experience -- from the person who has hardly known anything other than depression since as long as s/he can remember to the thick-skinned, hyper-resilient person who hardly understands what the word means -- can exist.

The important thing, I believe, is that there are very few, if any, "hands" that seal a person's fate, making them a hopelessly eternal slave of depression.

There is almost always enough play in the situation -- notwithstanding any dogged chemical imbalances, genetic flaws, unexamined maladaptive attitudes, chronic physical illnesses, etc. - to allow the fundamentally life-affirming human spirit to rise again.