How to Heal Depression

Video Transcript

"I'm Dr. David Thomas. I'm a practicing psychotherapist with the Whitford-Thomas Group in Tampa, Florida here to discuss how to heal depression. In order to heal depression it is important for us to understand what creates depression. Most people believe that depression as well as all the other blocks to happiness be it anxiety, anger, guilt are created by external forces but the perpetrator really is ourselves and comes in the form of our thinking so it is our thinking about ourselves, thinking about others, thinking about life events that drive depression. So how do you heal depression, you in essence heal your thoughts so you determine what kind of thinking is driving those mood states and how you can change them in order to drive a different mood state. When we talk about thinking the drives and negative mood states in this case depression, we are looking in the form of thinking it has some helplessness and hopelessness components. Hopelessness is things is things are never going to get better, helplessness there is not anything i can do about that so if we look at those two pieces regarding our thinking as far as driving depression it is important for us to recognize quickly that hopelessness implies that somehow you know what's going to happen in the future. Well as far as you know the only thing you know is what has happened to you in the past and what you are experiencing right now. The future doesn't exist. There is a good probability that the future will exist but in this context it doesn't exist so as far as the hopelessness you have no way of knowing what will occur in the future. With the helplessness the sense that there is not anything you can do to affect change. Again we are looking into a future piece there is how do you know that? We have knowledge and practice and internet as far as gathering information, hard work, practice. You can always make change and so helplessness and hopelessness are really thinking components so if we want to heal depression we want to heal those thinking components. How to do that it is best to hook up to make an appointment with a cognitive behavior psychotherapist be it a psychologist, social worker, mental health counselor, practices cognitive behavior and psychotherapy. That's what we practice at the Whitford-Thomas Group and certainly it is the treatment of choice these days. Hopefully this information has been helpful to you regarding healing depression from sunny Tampa, Florida I'm Dr. David Thomas."