Quotes

"That's the thing about depression, a human being can survive almost anything, as long as she sees an end in sight.  But depression is so insidious and it compounds daily, that it's impossible to ever see the end."

Elizabeth Wurtzel, Prozac Nation .

"I didn't want to wake up.  I was having a much better time asleep.  And that's really sad".

Anonymous

As a Psychologist, I know it is very, very hard to live with depression.  It might feel hard to get out of bed in the morning, you would rather not wake up and have to face the day, like it takes more effort than you have energy, and "what's the point anyway".  Your depression might lead you to feel like you want to withdraw into a cocoon, hide from responsibilities and people who care about you, like nothing matters. Sometimes you might lose the ability to care about pieces of your life and you wish it were all just over.  The world might seem dreary, gray, faded or boring, you might feel like your brain is in a fog and you can't concentrate, you might feel defeated, beaten up, angry, bitter or guilty.  Or there might be a kind of reduction of feeling within you, maybe a lack of emotion, a numbness, a way you have forgotten how to laugh or feel excited or look forward to life.  You may have come to think that this is the state of your world, not because you are depressed, but because your depression has tricked you into thinking that this is who you are.

There are many ways that depression can show up in our lives.  The following links provide more comprehensive information about the symptoms and causes of depression, as well as research into treatment.

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health...

http://psychcentral.com/resour...

http://psychcentral.com/disord...

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/news/s...

Treatment of depression can take a variety of paths. I can help you with your depression and our direction in psychotherapy depends on what you find the most helpful.  We seek to understand how your depressed feelings have come about and how it is affecting your life, your relationships and your hopes and dreams. Is your depression long-standing or is it a recent development, has it intensified over a sequence of events but lurked underneath the surface for quite a while? How have you coped with your depression, are there things, people, activities, thoughts which make it better or worse?  Are the depressive moments hard to get through?  Or do you feel fluctuations in your depression so that sometimes you feel terribly sad, critical or hopeless, but other times your sadness lifts and you can feel almost okay? Are there upsetting or worrisome thoughts to which you return over and over and can't stop?  Do you feel despair about something which happened or you are afraid won't stop happening.  Do you blame and criticize yourself, hiding away from other people who care about you?

We can discover paths for recovery through many forms of psychotherapy in which I am trained such as Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), meditation, mindfulness, breathing, EFT, couple, family and relationship psychotherapy, object relations therapy, trauma work and psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy.