what types of things can people use to self medicate depression minus drugs and alcohol.....actually i think alcohol makes depression worse but anyways, thats the question.

the idea is that i self medicate for a period of a month document my progress and see if theres any improvement, the reason i say a month is because hopefully that will rule out any placebo effects and also documenting will give the results more clarity.

if theres no improvement then i'll putter along as always, if there is then i'll consider going in for a diagnosis, i'll probably do the same for adhd as well with omega 3's and see the results for that, obviously i can only do one at a time otherwise there wouldn't be much point in doing the test.

one of the problems in doing this is that i probably am extremely lazy so doing something and continuously doing it would provide both mental stimulation and finish in a result be it either way it would give motivation......sooooooooo.....unless theres quite a significant improvement it could just be put down as me being a waste of space so to speak. Also depending on what it is that would provide self medication I might just be nutrient deprived.......well i'm sure theres point to this test somewhere lol.

anyways, thanks for reading :)

looking forward to replies.

Lets see, all the things I used to do helped, that said they weren not good.

Items were not necessarily in the order.

new girl friend to pay attention to. (wife did not like that)
shopping and buying stuff (costs money)
traveling getting away from home and work (costs money and when out of vacation no money)

probably a few more, but can't think of them and they were not really helpful in the long run, however at the time I felt good.

Exercise in LARGE amounts. At at minimum, walk for an hour. Walk until your mind goes on holiday. Walk, walk, walk.

Omega 3s.

You could try St. John's Wort, up to 900 mg (or whatever the measure is). Start at 300 and work up. Watch your blood pressure. Don't take if you take any other meds that would raise serotonin. Worked reasonably well for me, actually, for a while. (I ain't no doc., but it did help me.)

Eat well, not junk.

Don't drink, or drink very little.

Cut out caffeine and if you smoke, stop smoking or cut way back.

Pets. A fuzzy kitty or doggie or horsey is a good thing.

Just a few thoughts. Exercise is key. Some studies show that exercise will improve depression more than medications. The new Ratey book, Spark, talks about that. Ratey describes exercise as a little shot of Ritalin.

this is for both of us..
....frommy favorite book.


LIFE 101
Everything We Wish We Had Learned About Life In School -- But Didn't
PART THREE
MASTER TEACHERS IN DISGUISE

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Depression

Perhaps the most valuable result of all education is the ability to make yourself do the thing you have to do when it ought to be done, whether you like it or not; it is the first lesson that ought to be learned; and however early a man's training begins, it is probably the last lesson that he learns thoroughly.
THOMAS HUXLEY

The word depression is used to describe two distinct maladies. One use is to express disappointment: "They didn't return my phone calls. I'm depressed." "How depressing--the coffee machine is out of cafe ol." We also feel this mild kind of depression in the normal cycle of life's ups and downs.

The other use of the word depression is medical--it describes a physical illness caused by a biological (yes, usually genetic) imbalance in the body.

The simple solution for disappointment depression: Get up and get moving. Physically move. Do. Act. Get going.

Depression is often caused by a sense of not having accomplished enough.

We question the usefulness of what we've achieved in the past, and doubt our ability to achieve anything useful in the future. Self-doubt robs us of our energy. We feel depressed.

We look at all we want to do. It seems overwhelming. We tell ourselves, "I can't do all this," and instantly fulfill our own prophecy by not even trying. The energy drops even more, and the depression deepens.

When we eventually feel we must do something, there seems to be so much left undone from our previous inertia that we become confused. The confusion leads to indecision. The indecision leads to, "Oh, what's the use," and more inaction, which leads to you guessed it.

At some point, the cycle must be broken by action. Do something -- anything --physical. If the house is a mess, pick up one thing -- any one thing -- and do something with it: put it away, throw it out, send it to your brother, donate it to charity, something, anything. Pick up one more thing. Continue. Eventually, you will have a clean house. Before "eventually," however, the depression will begin to lift.

Yes, disappointment depression is a Master Teacher. Its message is, "Get moving. The energy is here. Use it." When you start to move, the energy will meet your movement. But first, you must move.

Medical ("clinical") depression is not caused by disappointment or lack of action, but by a biological imbalance in the chemistry of the brain. This form of depression takes a bit more explaining--there are so many misconceptions about it. Here's my story.

Over an almost-thirty-year period, I had attended more personal growth workshops, visited more healers, meditated more hours, taken more vitamins, and not only read but written more self-help books than almost anyone I knew. Nevertheless, I was not happy. I wasn't even satisfied. I wasn't even simply bored.

I was miserable.

By mid-1993, I was ready to try anything--even psychiatry. his office. We spoke for an hour. Finally, he said, "Peter, you've been suffering!"

Yeah. That's what I was doing--although I had never applied the word suffering to myself. His official diagnosis: depression.

Like many people, I had some serious misconceptions about depression. I didn't like depression. I didn't want depression. But then, I guess you don't get to pick your disease.


To my surprise, I learned that depression was a physical illness, a biochemical imbalance in the brain most likely caused by certain neurotransmitters (the fluid the brain uses to communicate with itself) being pumped away too soon. When there are too few of certain neurotransmitters, brain function becomes inharmonious, and the complex mental, emotional, and physical manifestations of depression result.

These manifestations can include a "down" feeling, fatigue, sleep disorders, physical aches and pains, eating irregularities, listening to Julio Iglesias, irritability, difficulty concentrating, feeling worthless, guilt, addictions (attempts to self-medicate the pain away), suicidal thoughts, and my favorite, anhedonia.

Anhedonia means "the inability to experience pleasure." The original title for Woody Allen's movie Annie Hall was Anne Hedonia--the perfect description of Woody Allen's character. It was also the description of my life. Although I had spikes of happiness, nothing gave me pleasure for any length of time. The concept of "just being" was entirely foreign to me. My intensive self-help seeking since 1965 had been my attempt to obtain the simple enjoyment of living that many people seemed to have naturally.

All my attempts had been unsuccessful--I had a physical illness that prevented even the best-built self-esteem structure from standing very long. In the book Harold and I later wrote, How to Heal Depression, the chapter explaining this phenomenon is entitled, "The Power of Positive Thinking Crashes and Burns in the Face of Depression." You can plant all the personal growth seeds you want, but they become like the seeds that fell on the rock in Jesus' parable (Matthew 13:5-6):

Some [seed] fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root.

That's what depression had wrought inside me: one, vast, barren rock garden--without the garden.


There is surely a piece of divinity in us, something that was before the elements, and owes no homage unto the sun.
SIR THOMAS BROWNE
1642

I also learned that most depression is inherited. I realized that if I looked around my family tree and saw a lot of nuts, there was a very good chance I was not a passion fruit (which is just what I thought I was). Since depression is a genetic biological illness, like diabetes or low thyroid, it wasn't lack of character, laziness, or something I could "snap out of"--it would be like trying to snap out of a toothache.

I was ready to consider what the good Doctor Bloomfield recommended I do about my depression.

He explained several options, which included two short-term "talk" therapies (Cognitive Therapy and Interpersonal Therapy) and antidepressants--as in Prozac. I, who had been programmed by John-Roger to think drugs were the devil's own tool, thought--as many people did--that Prozac was the devil itself.

The Church of Scientology had done a brilliant job programming the media and, hence, the general public, into believing that not only was Prozac unsafe, but astonishingly unsafe. They accomplished this (for whatever reason) by finding a handful of people who had done some aberrant things. Scientology then presented the aberrant behavior of these people as typical side effects of Prozac. It was a thoroughly imbalanced and unscientific presentation. More than five million people take Prozac in this country every day--ten million worldwide. Millions more have used Prozac since its introduction in 1987. It is among the safest of all prescribed medications. (No one has ever died from taking Prozac--although hundreds die each year from allergic reactions to penicillin, or from internal bleeding caused by aspirin.)

Still, I didn't like the idea of taking a pill that would--as Newsweek pointed out on its cover--give me a different personality. I didn't necessarily like the personality I had, but I also didn't want to become a Stepford writer.


Harold explained that antidepressant medications do not give one a new personality. There is no "high" connected to them. They're not tranquilizers, pep pills, or mood elevators. All antidepressants do is keep the brain from pumping away certain neurotransmitters too quickly. This allows the neurotransmitters to rise to appropriate levels, which lets the brain function harmoniously again.

An analogy might be that antidepressants plug a hole in a rain barrel so the barrel can fill. The depression lifts because the brain's naturally produced neurotransmitters are allowed to rise to natural levels. Antidepressant medications, then, don't add a synthetic chemical to the brain that alters the brain's function; they merely keep the brain from pumping away its own naturally produced neurotransmitters too quickly.

Further, if you take antidepressants and feel better, it's because you are depressed. If you take an antidepressant and are not depressed, you won't feel much of anything. In this, antidepressants are like aspirin: if you have a headache and take an aspirin, your headache goes away and you feel better. If you don't have a headache and take an aspirin, you won't feel much different. The good feelings touted so enthusiastically by people taking antidepressants are not caused by the antidepressant medication, but by the lifting of the depression--when a pain you've grown accustomed to goes away, the feeling of just plain "ordinary" can seem like euphoria.

Okay. I was ready. Lay on the Prozac.

Within a week of beginning the medication, I felt not exactly better, but as though the bottom of my emotional pit had been raised. In the past, small setbacks had caused a toboggan ride all the way down to an emotional state best described as "What's the point of living?" In the choice between life and death, I would reluctantly choose life (with about the same enthusiasm as Michelangelo's Adam on the Sistine Chapel receiving the spark of life from God), and crawl back up to "normal" again.

Normal for me, however, was depression. As it turns out, I've had a long-term, low-grade depression since I was three. This depressed state was my benchmark for "normal." On top of this, I would have, from time to time, major depressive episodes--lasting from six months to more than a year. When the two of these played together (that is, played havoc together on me), I had what is known in psychiatric circles as a double depression (a fate I would not wish upon my worst enemy).


After I'd taken Prozac for two weeks, I felt the floor of my dungeon had risen even higher. By the third week, I felt I had--for the first time--some level ground on which to build my life. I still was concerned how firm it was, so I walked across it lightly, as one does across a piece of land that was once quicksand.

That was the image I had: any good deed, any positive project, any accomplishment, I placed on the quicksand where--like Janet Leigh's car in Psycho--it would slowly, painfully, inexorably sink.

Now I inched a little farther toward the center of my land, seeing how firma the terra really was. It was a great victory when I could jump up and down in what was once my pool of emotional quicksand and know it was finally safe to build there.

What I built, of course, was up to me: if I built depressing things, my life would still be depressing. But now I had a chance to build something stable, something reliable, something good.

I also began feeling spiritual for the first time. I felt connected to God in a solid, unpretentious way. The discovery of this connection was no great "hooray, hooray, I found God," but a slow clarification--like watching a Polaroid picture develop. It all seemed so natural--and simple. It had nothing to do with John-Roger's intricate cosmology I had so carefully memorized.

And--just as so many other great teachers had said--the kingdom of God was within.

I also found myself simply enjoying things: ordinary, everyday, no-big-deal activities were pleasurable. I remember sitting in a chair, waiting for a table at a restaurant, and I was enjoying just sitting there. I felt so contented, all alone, sitting there, it was almost like being in love.

In fact, it seemed that I was falling in love--with myself.

thats a long post, thanks for the replies.

I never really thought i have depression it's more something others have suggested, to be honest I really don't think I have it, s'more just so I know for definite, I'm not talking about depressed as in feeling down which a large percentage of the population use to express sadness (which drives me crazy since it seems like an insult to those who suffer from it).

ADD inattentive type is another thing I've been 'diagnosed' with by friends and teachers, obviously I don't believe that they're opinions hold water otherwise I would have gone in for a diagnosis ages ago, I'm more trying to eliminate possibilities.

I never really feel down, nor would I say content, more......a feeling that can't be measured by such terms.......more neutral, like it doesn't really matter either way.

I seem to choose to deprive myself of sleep, even as a kid I used to stay up reading books and pretend to be asleep when my parents checked in on me, the idea of going to sleep seems like such a waste of time, the thought of going to the bedroom laying down and going to sleep seems like a tedious task but staying up rarely is fruitful, and I know the importance of sleep, I know the reasons to sleep it just seems like a chore, yet when I am asleep and it comes time to wake up and get up I just want to lay there, to make my body feel like a weight, just skin and bones, muscles and neurons, during the middle of the night, usually around 3am I have a need to eat 'crap' at university I would eat a load of past, to top up my energy, I drink alot of tea, though thats not really by choice, I'm english, so it is expected for every english man to uphold the stereotype (minus the teeth thing).

every blood test I've taken.....total of 4 as far as I'm aware come back with the results of having low iron, though not low enough to qualify me as being anemic but enough to point it out.

I have extremely energetic moments that usually last for a period of 30 - 60 minutes when I'm jumping/skipping/running around the apartment after which I tend to crash, why I do this I don't know, I just feel happy when it happens and I get loads done.


I usually have a floaty feeling as well as a detached feeling in general, I can analyse anything and everything from words people speak to possibilities and the reasons behind why someone did something in a particular way.

though the detached and floaty feeling are most likely attributed to my tendency to sleep deprive myself so it shouldn't really count as a symptom the iron levels and the hyper moments (which don't just occur after digesting a load of sugar) are.

sorry, I was asking if there is anyway to self medicate depression without the use of drugs and alcohol, I was more thinking around the lines of food types.

thanks for the article btw :) and the suggestion for exercise.