In this week’s Time: Real Men Get The Blues: Depression is twice as common among women as men, but it may be the guys who suffer most.
Often just as effective as any drug is cognitive therapy, a form of the talking cure that teaches depressives to reframe their view of the world, questioning the catastrophic or fatalistic spin they put on otherwise innocuous events. The two approaches — medication and therapy — work especially well together.
The Time piece doesn’t explain why the two approaches are often equally effective, but here’s a site with an explanation:
“… our brains are physically altered by what we experience and thus learn. It is as if the chips in your computer were actually rewired somewhat every time you ran a program. In brains, the software is the hardware is the software. (Computer geek-speak for brains: “squishware.”) This helps explain, for instance, how both drugs and cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) can not only relieve depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) — they both have been shown in PET scans to have very similar effects on patients’ brains! (Trivial point: CBT for depression and OCD usually produces more lasting results than drug treatment, i.e., it carries lower risk of relapse.)”
I’ve never been depressed that I know of, but being aware of my mistaken ideas/dumb-fuck thinking and then reframing them has made (and continues to make) a huge difference in my daily life. So cognitive therapy ain’t just for big problems, IMHO.