How Does Therapy Help Depression? Can You Feel Better on Your Own?

Different Forms of Therapy 🤹🏼‍♀️

1. 🗣️ Talk therapy: You sit across from a licensed mental health professional who asks you introspective questions to guide your thinking process. Imagine it like a rant session with someone who has more than just 2 cents on it.

2. 🎨 Art therapy: This is where you draw and use colors to express your state of mind. This type allows self-expression of complex, difficult emotions to put into words. A trained professional then interprets these art pieces to give you insight and ask more trailing questions to dive deeper into your mind.

3. 💃🏻 Dance therapy: This therapy helps you connect your body and mind. Emotions tend to be locked up in our non-physical selves, but this form of therapy enables you to express through body movements. When our physical body is stimulated, it helps regulate our emotions better, relieve stress, and think more creatively.

4. 🎼 Music Therapy: this form of therapy uses the therapeutic effect of music to help you decode your feelings and give words to them through existing or new songs. You may be asked to listen to a genre, write your own songs, rewrite an existing song, or play an instrument by a licensed music therapist. Music taps into our emotional center, helps us feel deeply, understand our pain points and navigate discussions to heal them.

5. 💆🏻‍♀️ Massage Therapy: as the name suggests, this form of therapy involves body and head massages to relieve stress and help the production of friendly hormones.

What is Depression, though? 🤔

Identifying the signs of depression helps us pick the right therapy:

1. Feeling hopeless

2. Being irritable, anxious, or agitated

3. Oversleeping or insomnia

4. Overeating or lack of appetite

5. Social withdrawal

More on Talk Therapy 🗣️

🗝️ The key features of talk therapy are:

1. 🌌 It is a safe and non-judgemental space with a trained professional, which means that anything said in that space will be kept confidential and empathized with. This allows us to truly open up and be as vulnerable as we need to be, to make sense of our whirlwind of emotions.

2. 🧑🏼‍⚕️ The counselor will only guide the conversations by asking reflective questions because one of the foundations of therapy states that the answer lies within us, the client. The role of mental health professionals is to use their expertise in this field to help us find solutions to our problems. A common misconception is that therapists give advice and tell us what to do.

3. 📄 Therapy will include in-session or homework exercises to make the most of the conversations with the mental health professional. We may be asked to write a letter to someone, speak of ourselves in the third person, speak to a mirror, journal on specific prompts or practice a coping mechanism in real-life situations.

4. ⌛ A session will generally be between 45 mins to an hour and will happen once a week. The logic behind this is that we can use and apply the insights we gain in therapy in our lives too. Imagine therapy like a class, we learn within the four walls to use and practice the knowledge outside of them. This builds the habit of using healthier coping mechanisms when we're confronted with an uncomfortable situation.

💭 Most Common Schools of Thought

1. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): This therapy focuses on identifying our negative thoughts and behavioral patterns. Our thoughts, emotions, and actions tend to be the tip of the iceberg. CBT helps us dive deeper as it believes that awareness is the first step to healing. With awareness, we can figure out ways to break the pattern to become happier and more fulfilled.

2. Interpersonal Therapy (IPT): This therapy focuses on building and maintaining healthy relationships. We are social beings who tend to derive a lot of meaning and purpose from our loved ones and other social contacts - which is why IPT believes that once we are comfortable and healthy in our relationships, our mental health also improves. Imagine healthy relationships as a cushion to our mental health - we might have bad days, but these connections help us from spiraling into a worse day.

⚠️ Some issues with conventional talk therapy

1. 📱 Accessibility: It can sometimes be difficult to get an appointment for therapy when you need it. Also, the availability of top professionals in your own region may below.

2. ⌚ Convenience: To fit therapy into our hectic and busy schedule can be challenging.

3. 💰 Affordability: Therapy can be expensive (the average cost of a therapy session is $100) and can be difficult to afford on a weekly basis.

4. 🤝 Finding the right fit: Even if everything else works out, it can take some time to find a therapist who works for us. There are so many schools of thought, specializations, and experience levels to filter from.

How we can support ourselves 🦾

1. 🤳🏻 Mini Therapy: These are bite-sized therapy sessions designed and curated by mental health professionals to help us process our uncomfortable emotions in a healthy way as and when we are experiencing them. Ever think, 'I feel watched and judged by others'?

2. 🏃🏼‍♂️ Exercise and Outdoors: It is a cliche but it works! If we're not feeling too great and having negative thoughts, exercising (which does not have to be intense and drenched in sweat) releases some feel-good hormones that can help us cope with such moods and emotions better. And getting outdoors - fresh air, Vitamin D from the sunlight, surrounded by greenery - also has similar effects. Did you know? Walking barefoot on grass is called 'earthing' which can act as a natural anti-depressant as certain microbes present on Earth have been studied to control our stress levels and boost happiness.

3. 🧰 Building a self-help armor: This is could be a playlist of your favorite feel-good songs, stand-up specials you cannot not laugh with, reading through Instagram accounts of verified mental health professionals, or developing a self-care routine to take care of your skin/nails/hair/body.

4. 📝 Journaling: You can practice free-writing, which is when you put everything you're thinking and feeling on paper. This can help in understanding our own patterns and can also help us feel lighter after burdening our minds.

Please Note 🚩