People are Not Depressed Because of their Problems. They're Depressed Because of Their Depression

Dear A. B. Curtiss
Just happened to read your review of 'This Is Not the Life I Ordered' . This phrase leaped out at me:

People mistakenly think they are depressed because of their problems but, in fact, they are always depressed because of their depression.

A light bulb went off when I read it. I've been collecting helpful quotes, such as this by Milton: "The mind is its own place, and in itself/Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n." Your quote will be added to the list! C. B.

Dear C. B.

Thanks so much for your note. Have you read either of my two depression books? The first one, Depression is a Choice is the philosophy of how to get out of the mind habits that set you up for depression and other dependencies. The second one ,Brainswitch out of Depression , tells you exactly how your brain works, and how you get from one thought to another, so you can be the responsible driver rather than the unwitting passenger of your brain. A. B. Curtiss


Dear A. B.

Although my current depressed state is caused by illness -- mine and my husband's -- and I usually do not suffer from depression, now that I know about your books I will add them to my Amazon shopping list. One or both may well prove very useful in the future.

Dear C. B.

If you have any questions as you read the books, I will be glad to answer them for you. I am a board-certified cognitive behavioral therapist and although I do not take private patients any longer, I answer anyone's questions via email. I do not charge for this. A. B. Curtiss

3 minute Technique for Depression

Hello A. B. Curtiss

You probably are aware of Mike Freeman's "3-minutes depression cure" ? (see http://www.neverdepressedagain.com/index.php?sid=1353403&en=DS6AR14&sd=2008-02-21)

When I read his sales-letter and then I read the information on your site about your two books it seems almost as if he took what you are teaching (openly, honestly and for a reasonable price) and made it into a sales-product !?

Do you think this too ? Did he ever contact you ?

Many greetings,

I.T.

(Belgium)


Dear I. T.

I don't know what his "cure" is. He has not contacted me and I don't want to pay the price to find out. A. B. Curtiss

Hello Mrs. Curtis,

Thank you for answering me so promptly !

Mike Freeman speaks about the different centers in the brain that when they are activated produce certain chemicals and that by his "cure" or "3-minute technique" one can turn a kind of switch in the brain that stops the "depression mode" and activates the "joy mode" again.

He also calls the "depression mode" a kind of unhealthy prolonged "repair mode".

All this made me think about what you write on your website and because you are open with it (and not coaxing someone to pay $$$ first) I tend to trust you more.

So this morning I ordered your book "Depression is a choice" and if I like it as much as I expect I will then I will also order your "BrainSwitch" book.

Thank you for all your efforts to help people who suffer this terrible dis-ease !

Many greetings,

I. T.

Dear I. T.

You are welcome. You may email me with any questions you have while reading my books. I don't charge for this. Also, you might be interested in the essay I wrote about joy a while ago. Here is the essay:

ESSAY ON JOY

I didn't see myself as a negative person until I heard a talk by science fiction author David Brin. He asked his audience, "why do we worry about terrorist attacks, the stock market, and healthcare when we live in the most advanced civilization the world has ever known. No other human beings have ever been safer, better fed, or freer. Why don't we just take joy in that?"

Kind of weird. Joy seems to be humanity's lost secret. Nobody talks about joy, do they? "Why don't we take joy in that" didn't seem all that profound a statement. So I was surprised that my mind kept coming back to it. Until that moment I didn't think of joy as something you take anyway! I thought joy happens to you on special occasions, or when you least expect it. I didn't know I was getting ready to discover the lost secret about joy.

I started out to study joy in all innocence, not expecting anything earthshaking. And yet, I thought, why wouldn't it be as true for joy as it is for honesty and courage? That you personally have to do them? You don't wait around for honesty and courage to appear. You return the money when you get too much change. When confronted by your accusers, you don't lie, you stand there with nothing but your small pitiful truth in your hand.

We take courage, we take satisfaction as an act of will. Why don't we take joy? Is it because we're not grateful? I didn't think so. Anyway, being grateful for things is not exactly the same as being joyful, is it? Being grateful for liberty is not the same thing as the lump in your throat when you hear the Star Spangled Banner. Perhaps at that moment, we are taking joy in our country, without realizing we are doing it. I felt a strange excitement. Like I was getting close to something really important.

Could we learn, I asked myself, to take joy on purpose, whenever we want to, instead of just letting it happen by accident? I felt like an entomologist with my pin poised over an elusive butterfly. For starters, who better to study than myself?

Next morning, my husband asked me to get something out on the patio. I stopped myself midway in my task, and asked myself, why wasn't I, right this second, (if we are going to study ourselves, it's best to go second by second) taking joy in the scent of jasmine, the soft breeze blowing the leaves about on this beautiful Southern California day.

My immediate excuse was that I was in a hurry to get something for my husband. And I was still in my bathrobe, wasn't dressed yet, hadn't fed the dogs, or the cats, so it wasn't the right time. That was an eye-opener. Do I put off joy until the "right time," until I'm "all finished?" Am I ever "all finished?

Wow! It all started to make sense. If we don't take charge, leadership doesn't happen. If we don't take care, safety isn't there. If we don't take courage, courage doesn't appear. But, if we can exercise leadership, safety, and courage. Why can't we exercise joy? Because joy is a feeling? But we take disappointment all the time. We take offense.

After dressing, I cut some roses. I like flowers in the house. But liking flowers in the house, I suddenly realized, is not real joy, is it? Even being grateful for flowers is not joy. Even taking satisfaction in the fact that you picked the roses, and brought them in the house, and they looked real nice is not the same thing as joy. I was getting closer and closer to the truth, even though I didn't know it.

Why don't I take joy in these flowers, I thought? So I made a decision, then and there, with rose basket in hand, to take joy in these flowers, in this day, in this room I stood in.

Of course I didn't know if it would work. But I determined to stand there, and allow it somehow, to give a pure act of attention to the roses, not knowing at all how to do it. I took a deep breath, let my shoulders fall, put myself on pause, stood still and offered up my whole self to the roses. I just went belly up to the roses. It was at that moment the great secret revealed itself.

There was complete silence. Time seemed to stop as well. Something had changed. I felt something definitely more essential about the flowers than just liking them. It was more connected. Something rose up inside me. I would describe it as a kind of expansive sun-rise of the heart. It was like love, even though it wasn't exactly head-over-heels exciting love. But then this was my first attempt. I was surprised it worked at all.

I was amazed, actually, that one could take joy instead of waiting for joy to make it's one-way-communication, and haphazard appearance. I am convinced that taking joy is a lost secret. That taking joy is a latent human capacity. We don't have joy whenever we want it because we are moving too fast, and have forgotten how to take it.

I succeeded in exercising joy the very first time I tried. It won't get me a Nobel Prize. But I have tried it since, again, and again. The really strange thing is that I found I could do it anytime, even when I was depressed. That shocked me more than anything else--that you can take joy even when you're depressed. And you can experience what I can only describe as a momentary bliss. It also makes you doubt the reality of depression that can be so easily interrupted by another choice. Interesting.

I can take joy anytime I want. Who knew? If I slow down, just stop my whole life for a minute, and focused completely on some small thing outside of myself, just went belly-up, and surrendered my whole self to it, I could actually take joy in it. And if I can do it, anybody can do it. You can do it. Joy is humanity's lost secret, but anyone can reclaim it.

Bipolar Husband is Verbally Abusive

Dear A. B. Curtiss

“We met briefly after the panel discussion at BookExpo in Chicago in June sponsored by a publisher for whom I am a staff writer. As I mentioned to you after the discussion, my husband struggles with manic-depression. He does not use medication, and I would describe his condition as more “hypo” than “hyper”--more a sleep disorder than anything extreme. But after almost 10 years of marriage, it has become a real strain because we have a young child.

I really need some new strategies for dealing with his outbursts of intense rage and intimidation, which are so disturbing and inexplicable to our little one, especially when my husband is so wonderful and loving otherwise. He is increasingly unhappy and continuously blames every single problem he has on me.

Others might see the outbursts (a few times a year of verbal abuse and throwing things) as me staying in an "abusive relationship"; but it is slowly dawning on me that this is really NOT necessarily the case, but that these episodes are cyclical. We have a strong marriage with a deep abiding love otherwise, but I'm struggling with the fear that with our child in the mix of these temper incidents , our marriage will be torn apart.

He won't let me speak to him about this, so I need to get help on my own first. Can you point me in the right direction for finding a support network for spouses of manic-depressives? I know this can all be solved somehow through prayer. But I also know I need to have more information and support right now to figure out new strategies and simply understand better what I'm dealing with--especially for my dear daughter---whatever the future may bring.” J.J.

Dear JJ

That your husband is still raging at you means you are still afraid of his rage. To avoid seeing your own fear you blame your husband, and thus do nothing, yourself, to help the situation. Blaming never helps any situation. In blaming him, you are putting all your energy into analyzing him and how to get him to stop instead of figuring out how to protect your family (positive action) from his assault. (Read my chapter on Blame in Depression is a Choice) .

This situation is due to a basically weak woman--not in other areas of your life just in your primary relationship with a man-- don't argue with me I had the same problem as a young woman and no one could tell me in a way that I would have believed at the time. If you were not weak, you would not have this situation. He wouldn't have married you if you were stronger, this was the hidden “contract.” You need not be bound by this contract. It obviously doesn't work anymore for you.

My own marriage magically changed once I realized that I was afraid because, then, I thus could decide to be courageous instead. If you don’t know you are afraid, you won’t access your courage. The first thing to do is address your own fear. If you can't identify it, you can't handle it properly. What goes unidentified goes uncorrected. The answer to fear is courage. When you decide that you will feel and accept your fear, and take care of yourself, your behavior will be appropriate.

There is no specific behavior that you can figure out ahead of time in this situation. If you handle your fear first, your behavior has the most possibilitity of being appropriate. Only you will know at the exact moment whether appropriate means you will throw cold water on him ,or dial 911, so that he is put in touch with his bizarre behavior.

Every time he rages, it is like a knife into the heart's wellbeing of your child. Your child should be protected. It is not normal to rage at your loved ones. Your husband is only doing so because it works for him. He can control you by his rage, which makes him feel comfortable because obviously he believes, at some deep level, that he can't control himself. People only attempt to control others when they are emotionally dependent, and do not know how to access their rational brain when their emotional brain is raging. You husband is also afraid and doesn’t know it.

When rage no longer works for him he will stop doing it. If you have any more questions, please write again. As always, you are the only answer to your problem, stop trying to get your husband to fix it for you. Hope this helps. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Thanks beyond measure for your answers to my questions about my husband's rage (a month or so ago). Your email came just at the right time, ON THE VERY DAY I had left home with my young daughter (and we stayed away for five days.

Your words were THE perfect response which I couldn't have come up with in a million years! You hit the nail on the head exactly and didn't pull any punches. We are in marriage counseling now and your insight has helped to guide us in the right direction. Things are going much better than I could have imagined, and although things certainly aren't easy, I'm more optimistic now than I've been in years. Thanks again for taking the time and attention to answer me so succinctly. JJ


Dear J. J. You are welcome, I’m glad things are going well for you.


Dear A.B.

I'm sorry to trouble you, but I need some help again. I am looking for some advice, support. I am looking for some perspective, clarification, validation--anything that might help me go in the right direction.

I do not have the support I need to cope with my marriage to a man who suffers with bipolar disorder and refuses to take medication or, in lieu of that, even to try any other remedies of any sort (such as an anger management class, psychotherapy, reading Depression is a Choice, or ANY other ideas). He has however been going to marriage counseling with me for a couple of months--and this is a big step for him. But in therapy he has said that manic-depression is NOT an issue in our marriage, and that he does NOT have a problem with rage either.

Today I found out about a support group for families of bipolar sufferers, and I told him I intended to go tonight, mentioning the time. Big mistake. I thought he'd be happy for me. Instead, he chose to lecture me for over 4 hours, telling me that's NOT the problem in our marriage, and that I'd be wasting my time. He made it impossible for me to arrange child care so that I could go to the meeting (He teaches a class at the same time) and then he left for his class in despair and anger.

I feel I am in an abusive relationship, where he rages at me on a regular basis. It has improved some, because he doesn't threaten me with bodily harm, break down doors, etc., or keep me trapped in the house like he used to. But he does still make it impossible for me to speak, and he goes on and on, telling me I have to listen. The cops came over recently just because he was so loud. Funny that they came over then, but didn't come a year and a half ago, when I actually feared for our safety and my child and I had to run away.

He has been saying for 10 years that I am selfish, uncaring, uncompassionate, and that he is a nonentity, that I don't respect him or care about his feelings. He has been frustrated with his job and it only gets worse over the years. Our financial situation is getting worse and worse. He says he has given up everything in his life for me until he has no identity and nothing left to live for. He says he only stays with me because of our daughter .

I feel I am doomed to be his human alarm clock, and I can't count on him to help with child care, etc. etc. because I never know if he's going to be asleep or awake. He can't get to meetings, to work, etc. unless I wake him up. (Alarm clocks don't work.) And I never know when I try to wake him up whether he is going to rage at me when he awakens. I sleep alone at night because he stays up all night most of the time “working" in his office.” He self-medicates with cigarettes and pot.

There are times when he is absolutely convinced of things that didn't happen. I don't know how to deal with this “gaslight” experience that happens every once in a while. It is very disconcerting, and I wish I knew how to diffuse it without an argument.

About a year and a half ago, when I left for 5 days with my daughter--we ran from the house in desperation due to a manic outburst in which he ripped my shirt to shreds trying to keep me from leaving. It was horrible then, and we went to therapy together. I thought things were getting better. I read your book and it truly saved me. My husband refused to read it. Every time I try to be optimistic, then another incident happens where again he tells me he's so unhappy, and that I'm not living up to my responsibilities in the marriage--that he gives and gives and gives and gets nothing back.

This is all a great tragedy -- because he is a loving, highly gifted, fun-loving, generous man yet I have watched become hollow and bitter and distant. I just don't know when, or if, I'm supposed to give up. I want to do the right thing for our daughter. I so often think about living apart, I think this is the only option, just because I long and yearn for peace and stability in my life.

I hate to blame bipolar disorder and make this "all his fault." It isn't. But I don't deserve this, nor does our daughter.. I actually remember those 5 days away as peaceful and tranquil. I'm so tired of being yelled at and accused of things I am not. Over and over I have tried everything I can think of to show him I love him, I have tried for years to be more loving and compassionate and caring. According to him, I'm making no effort and I don't care.

I know you can't tell me what to do. But any sympathy, anecdote, or support you could muster would be FOREVER appreciated. I know I can only change myself and not him. What am I doing wrong. JJ


Dear JJ.

ALL I can go on is your letter so let me answer you as best I can within the context of your letter.

YOU SAID “He has however indeed been going to marriage counseling with me for a couple of months--and this is a big step for him--but in therapy he has said that manic-depression is not an issue in our marriage, and that he does not have a problem with rage either.

MY RESPONSE: What does your marriage counselor say? If you have been going to a counselor for some time they must have some idea, or diagnosis of the problem. Ask them for their diagnosis of the problem. I wouldn’t bother labeling his behavior bipolar. I would agree with him that his bipolar is not the problem.

What difference does it make what you call the behavior he is doing? Just deal with the symptoms one by one. You are entitled to a diagnosis of what is the problem with your relationship, and what is the counselor’s assessment of possible outcome and treatment suggestions. If they are counseling the public, they must be able to make a diagnosis of the problem for which they are counseling, and suggest a course of treatment, or else what good are they?

If you counselor says your husband has problems and refuses to handle them, then you will not have a normal relationship, or have one that might prove dangerous to you, then obviously you must make your decision accordingly. You must take care of yourself rather than trusting your safety to the whim of your husband. Does your counselor diagnose the situation the way you do? If so your course is clear. If not, then you need to ask the counselor where you are wrong. They should be able to give you this diagnosis and advise you of a course of action in order for you to see the situation in a different way from your letter.

YOU SAID:

Instead, he chose to lecture me for over 4 hrs. He made it impossible for me to arrange child care so that I could go to the meeting (he teaches a class at the same time) and then he left for his class in despair and anger.)

MY RESPONSE: You chose to listen to a lecture for 4 hours. You did not choose to take care of yourself or your child. You chose, instead , to succumb to helplessness, and blame it on your husband. Would you have allowed him to shoot you, or stab your child? Would you have said your husband made it impossible for you to protect yourself or your child from him stabbing ?

No, you would have saved yourself and your child somehow because your consciousness has been raised to understand that you are not supposed to let someone stab you.. But your consciousness of what is reasonable treatment does not rise to the proper level to include what your husband is doing to you by lecturing, raging, and preventing your doing what is in your best interest etc.

YOU SAID: He has been saying for 10 years that I am selfish, uncaring, uncompassionate, and that he is a nonentity, that I don't respect him or care about his feelings. He has been frustrated with his job and it only gets worse over the years. Our financial situation is getting worse and worse. He says he has given up everything in his life for me until he has no identity and nothing left to live for. He only stays with me because of our daughter.

MY RESPONSE: Ask your counselor if you have some doubt that your husband is wrong. It sounds like hateful, fearful raging to me--raging which is designed to control you, in lieu of his controlling his own life. Obviously, he is succeeding in controlling you since you believe that you have to listen to him..

There is no need for an adult to choose to listen to someone abusing them. Well, you might agree to listen to someone rage at you for five minutes to let them get it off their chest, but 4 hours is clearly excessive. If he’s going to rage that long, he ought to do it in some emotional release group. Obviously you are not the proper facilitator for your husband’s emotional release at this point. Do you believe that you have to listen to someone who is berating you? Why do you have to listen? Because they are forcing you to listen? You are choosing not to take care of yourself so that you can blame your failure to be happy on your husband.

YOU SAID: I feel I am in an abusive relationship, where he rages at me on a regular basis.

MY ANSWER: Why would you allow someone to rage at you? It is not your husband’s fault that you stay around to be raged at. It is your fault. It is your husband’s fault that he rages. But it is only abusive because you stay around to listen to it. You are self-abusing by choosing to listen to it.

YOU SAID: I feel I am doomed to be his human alarm clock, and I can't count on him to help with child care, etc. etc. because I never know if he's going to be asleep or awake. He can't get to meetings, to work, etc. unless I wake him up. (alarm clocks don't work for him.) I never know when I try to wake him up whether he is going to rage at me when he awakens. I sleep alone at night because he stays up all night most of the time “working” in his office. He self-medicates with cigarettes and pot.

MY RESPONSE: His problem is that he can’t wake up on time, that he rages and self-medicates. Your problem is that you think you have to be somebody's alarm clock, and that you have to allow him to rage at you. Why? You are enabling your husband to get improper relief from controlling your life, and thus you are preventing him from seeing his inability to control his own life.

Ask your counselor about this. It seems to me that you can’t handle your husband’s raging, depression, poor work habits, ingratitude and hostility without becoming upset and unhappy. So clearly you must either be able to do that, or (and especially if your counselor feels that your unemotional equanimity and cheerfulness in the face of his problems might cause him to escalate his behavior to physical abuse) then you should get out of there.

If you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem. It doesn't matter how nice a guy he is when he's rational. He clearly isn't rational much of the time. You can't have a relationship with an irrational person. Some people might be able to do it but you evidently are not that person at the moment.

As for your daughter. Are you, by role-modeling your own behavior, teaching her how to take care of herself? Are you teaching her how to be brave, honorable and happy? Are you showing her how to separate her problems from other people's problems? These things are essential to the spirit. She can have a relationship with her father whenever he chooses to be rational. Hope this helps. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B. Curtiss

Thank you for your very pithy answer to my concerns. You are a lifesaver, and so compassionate and generous to take the time to give me so much information. Once again you are right on target and pull no punches.

As of Friday, I have left my husband for a safe haven, and I am taking one day at a time. I have a place to stay until next Friday. Then I hope somewhere else will materialize, hopefully a house-sitting arrangement since I can't afford rent with my minimal income. My daughter is staying in her own bed each night, and somehow my husband and I have been able to negotiate each day what to do for her with our one car. He’s incredibly angry. The more peaceful and centered I get, the angrier he gets.

I don't know if we can ever reconcile. If so, it will be a long way away. In the meantime I focus on the good, and what is best for our daughter. The therapy session today was painful but good. JJ

Dear JJ

It is good to remember is that great fear is exhibited in two ways, great anger and great denial of great anger. There is no other way. You would do well to get in touch with your own anger and act it out harmlessly by some emotional release work. Then you will not be so traumatized by your husband's anger, which you unconsciously identify with because your own is hidden from you. I'm not preaching here. I went through it myself, figuring it all out in hindsight, and am just pointing to the path out of the maze.

To confess here, I still have a problem periodically with being angry at my husband for all those years that his bad temper frightened men and our children, and it takes a lot of effort to reflect back upon my own cowardice and ignorance and accept that as well. Then, when I have confessed to my own sins, it is easier to accept the historical past of my husband’s anger and his ignorance and his sins. Sometimes, in my arrogance, I forget that we are all on the same path. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Thanks once again for your answers and ideas. Your generosity and compassion are appreciated. and I'm honored and amazed. I am trying to remain as quiet as possible, and now I need to find another place to go to stay quiet. I’m committed to separation. I don't know if we can stay together or if it's worth it. But I want to do what's best for my daughter. I won't act rashly, no matter how alarmist are the others around me.

How did you stay together with your husband after all you went through? Didn't all your friends say you were nuts for staying in a verbally abusive situation? I am grateful for our separation so far. I can see it's already helping each of us to cease blaming the other, and look within to do what we must. I'm not sure my husband has the maturity to do it. But I know I'm ready. I'm centered, peaceful, resolute. I am exploring my own anger and weakness too. It's a new beginning. Thanks again.
j.j.

Dear JJ,

In the beginning of my marriage, and for a full twenty years, I was very ignorant. Although some small changes worked for the better, it was a struggle. I grew up in an alcoholic culture so my husband handled his pain with alcohol, and I handled my pain through depression, and manic activity when the depression lifted.
We never had money problems because it was my husband’s goal to be financially secure, and he was very responsible about this. My husband was gone most of the time at work, and the children were in bed by the time he came home at night for the first ten years. So we struggled through the week-ends by the distraction of friends over for parties.

I protected the children from our fights. But I finally did get divorced after twenty years, three children were already grown and gone, two were in their teens. I moved back after about 8 months, so the divorce wasn’t really legal because you are supposed to be separated for a year.

Why did I move back? Because I realized I wanted my family back. I wanted my husband back. I always was a sucker for a handsome man. He has a wonderful sense of humor, he is the most honest and loyal person I have ever known (except for when his temper was leveled against me). I have found him, after all the years I have know him, to be absolutely incorruptible. In short, I thought if I couldn't make it with this man, who could I make it with. I figured I could handle the situation unilaterally. I figured I could just handle my own pain, and give my husband what he wanted regardless of how I felt hurt about something, or that the situation might be unfair.

That worked for a while. By handling my own pain, I found that much of my problem was my own pain anyway. But sooner or later, my husband's pain was too much for him, and as good as he had it, he erupted on me from time to time. And, to be fair, I was probably doing unloving mean, and aggressive things without realizing it.

Over time this built up. Finally I realized that nothing was going to work until I became aware enough to see that my feelings of being hurt by my husband's rage meant that I was still controlled by it. Little by little I had to separate out my hurt and see that my hurt was my projection upon my husband. I couldn't handle the reality of what was. I still wanted to change reality, and didn't want my the reality of my husband being angry at me, from time to time, for no reason. That seems reasonable, but that was not the reality of my life.

The reality was that, from time to time, my husband was going to be angry with me for no reason. As I became able to accept the reality of what was happening, and that it had nothing to do with me, and that I could take care of myself without getting my husband to change, I handled his anger in appropriate ways.

Once he was faced with the reality that I was no longer impacted by his anger, and it had little or no effect on me, his relationship to his own anger changed. He was stuck with acting like a fool on occasion, and I took no part in it. As long as I was okay myself, and didn't need anything from my husband to feel okay, my relationship to his anger was always appropriate. Sometimes I screamed back at him, but not in anger or fear. It just seemed appropriate to match his behavior like a game, but I was not seriously in the game, and could just walk off with a disgusted look. Sometimes I laughed and said “Whoa, somebody's out of control here.

“There is no way to have a right answer or appropriate behavior response ready because reality is always a surprise. Little by little my husband realized that he couldn't control me to get what he wanted from me. He was left with having to control himself to get what he wanted from me. So long as your response is not coming from anger or fear, it will be appropriate. Still, my last child was terribly impacted from my husband's anger, and my abandonment via depression and mania, and I am dreadfully sorry for that.

At the same time I came back into the marriage, I went back to graduate school ultimately became a psychotherapist. But the whole time my children were young, my only tools were crying, begging my husband to change, or depression followed by mania. We muddled through the best we could.

You are ten years ahead of me in taking the bull by the horns. Good for you. Don't plan too far in the future. Take the days, even the minutes, as they come. Insist upon the truth of any situation and the truth will reveal itself to you. Call upon your courage, ask for understanding and humility. We don't have to win all the time, we can often prosper by learning to take defeat well. We don't always get what we want even when it is reasonable. But we ALWAYS get what we need--reality. Reality never hurts. A.B. Curtiss

Hello A. B.

Perhaps you recall that we met at the Book expo in Chicago a few years ago, and that we've corresponded by email several times over the years--including the spring when you were extremely helpful to me when I was separated from my husband. I followed your advice. I am indebted to you. We have weathered a very difficult time. We'll happily celebrate our 10th wedding anniversary in a few weeks! Trusting all's well with you. Blessings in this new year, J. J.

Interview about Depression and Neuroplasticity

The following is my interview with encognitive.com

Questions and Answers

by Trung Nguyen

YOU WERE THE THIRD PERSON IN YOUR FAMILY, AFTER YOUR FATHER AND BROTHER, TO BE DIAGNOSED WITH BIPOLAR. AT WHAT AGE WERE YOU DIAGNOSED WITH BIPOLAR AND HOW DID YOU REACT?

I was in my mid thirties although I had suffered chronic depression since the age of 12. How did I react to the diagnosis? I simply ignored it and denied it. For some reason I was more afraid of taking drugs than suffering depression. I did not accept the manic depressive diagnosis because although I knew I was depressed, it was inconceivable to me that I might be also be manic at times. In hindsight, of course I can see it. But early on, when I was manic I thought that was my “good days.” It wasn’t until I was no longer troubled by depression that I was able to see my mania as well.

DURING THE 30 YEARS THAT YOU SUFFERED FROM BIPOLAR (MANIC DEPRESSION) AND DEPRESSION, WHAT WAS YOUR LIFE LIKE?

I was depressed a lot but it was “my secret” that I hid from everybody. I would generally be in a good mood for any social events my husband and I attended. We hosted or went to small social gatherings and holiday parties at least once a week. If I got a sudden attack of depression at a party, I went home immediately. I seemed successful to others although I suspect they also saw me as driven, compulsive and competitive. I kept the house clean and got my children off to school. Then I could sometimes spend the whole day, until the children came home, in a lassitude of utter and agonizing despair. I did housework in a kind of mute zombie trance.

Often after everybody left in the morning I would either crawl back into bed and pull the covers over my head, or lie face down and flat on the floor under my bed as if I somehow could just sink into the floor and disappear.

Sometimes I would curl up behind the clothes hanging in my closet and cry for hours. Only my husband and children knew. Though even they didn’t know the full extent of it because I generally felt less panicky and desperate in the evening when they were home. I did not believe that I did anything to cause my situation, and I did not believe I could do anything to help it.

YOU “WENT FROM ONE PSYCHIATRIST TO ANOTHER LOOKING FOR AN ANSWER” TO YOUR PAIN. WHAT ADVICE DID SOME OF THESE PSYCHIATRISTS DISPENSE THAT DID NOT AGREE WITH YOUR BELIEFS?

They all told me I was depressed and anxious but didn’t say exactly what they thought caused it. Mainly the doctors’ advice was that I would feel better and be better able to cope with my life if I took drugs. First they offered Valium, then, over the years, a succession of anti-depressants. It seemed wrong to me that drugs were any answer to my problem because nobody could tell me exactly what was my problem. They could only point to the symptoms. I already knew about the symptoms. I was trying to find the cause of my pain.

THIS IS A QUOTE FROM YOUR WEBSITE, “IT [DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE] DELINEATES THE PHILOSOPHY MY EARLY THINKING—HOW I THOUGHT AS A BIPOLAR, HOW I BEHAVED AS A BIPOLAR. THEN, AS MY UNDERSTANDING OF THE WORKINGS OF THE BRAIN EXPANDED, AND MY STUDY OF ANCIENT WISDOM ADVANCED, THE BOOK FOLLOWS THE SUBSEQUENT CHANGES IN MY THINKING AND BEHAVIOR.” --CAN YOU SHARE WITH US SOME OF YOUR THOUGHT PROCESSES AND BEHAVIORS AS A BIPOLAR?

It never occurred to me in all those years that I could pro-actively get rid of the depression when it attacked me and just get back to where I was before the depression hit. My life would be fine and then wham! Depression would strike and my life was instantly terrible. I completely identified with my depression as if it were my life. For instance, at the same time I suffered depression I also periodically suffered migraine headaches. I never “became” my headaches.

I could always see my headaches were some temporary pain happening to me and that they would soon be over so I tried to get about my day and distract myself from the pain. In my mid forties I took a Silva Mind Control Course and learned I could, through visualization, mentally constrict the blood vessels in my brain, and send the extra blood supply to my hands and get rid of migraine headaches. But it never occurred to me that depression might be a similar thing, that there would be something I myself could do about getting rid of it when it occurred.

I believed my depression to be present reality when it happened. What could be realer than depression? So my life periodically became terrible. It did not occur to me then, as it did later, that when I was depressed I was never in present reality, that when I was depressed that meant I was stuck in some instant-replay neural pattern in my brain and that the answer was to immediately get myself out of that neural pattern and into some other neural pattern that didn’t contain depression.

I believed that it was depression that caused me to act sad, to isolate myself, to spend days in bed, to sleep in the same clothes for days, to speak in a weak, sad voice. I did not see these symptoms as chosen behaviors over which I had complete control, to do them or not to do them. Now I know that no matter how bad the depression is when it strikes, I can nevertheless be cheerful to others around me. Rather than “becoming my depression,” I turn away from it and ignore it, while I do exercises to get my mind back out of the neural pattern my brain had followed into depression.

The minute depression hits I start using a brainswitching exercise and refuse to think the depression. I immediately start to concentrate on objective things and turn away from any subjective thughts about how I feel. Sometimes I will actually look around for something, like a flower in the yard, to enjoy. I used to think I couldn’t enjoy something until I felt good. It never occurred to me that the very behavior of enjoying something, as an overt, on-purpose act, would bring on good feelings.

When depression hit I used to believe that my life was terrible. Now, when depression hits, I realize that my life is not terrible no matter what my brain is telling me. I know the reality is that I just feel terrible and I can change my thinking and then my feelings will change.

When depression hit I used to think “nothing was worth anything” including my unworthy self. Now, there is another neural pattern that sparks up at the same time depression hits. Through the natural process of learned association, when one little neural pattern goes “I am depressed,” another one pops up that says “time to do an exercise.” And I do. And the depression always goes away in a few minutes. Sometimes after the serious, painful depression goes I may still feel rather blah and stale on life for an hour or so unless I can get into something productive. So I generally make an extra effort to get myself involved in a project right away. Then I am not just okay, I am feeling really good again.

YOU DEVELOPED A NEW WAY AT LOOKING AT BIPOLAR AND DEPRESSION. DURING WHAT POINT IN YOUR CAREER OR PERSONAL LIFE, AND WHAT KNOWLEDGE DID YOU ACQUIRE THAT MADE YOU CHANGE YOUR THINKING?

The most important thing that ever happened to me, psychologically speaking, was the day I think I “hit bottom” with depression. I was 48. My psychiatrist couldn’t or wouldn’t fit me in, my husband was not able to leave his meeting and come home which he normally would have done, my two youngest children were in school (the other three children were grown up and gone off on their own). I was literally rolling on the floor with pain. I decided, for the very first time in my life, to be pro-active since it was obvious that, on this particular day, nobody else was going to “save me.”

I decided “do something.” For the first time in my life I decided to do something to fight depression instead of just going along with it. I decided to think a positive thought since I had been reading all these self-help books about positive thinking curing everything. The only thought I could come up with in my extremity was “green frog” and I clung to that thought for dear life as I went in and out of waves of depression. After about 20 minutes of concentrating on the thought “green frog,” the terrible agony of my depression actually faded. I was astounded. I wasn’t sure that “green frog” really did anything to do with the cessation of the pain, but I used it the next time depression hit, and the next time and the next time. Gradually it dawned on me that I could get myself out of depression whenever it came, so depression ceased to have the same power over me.

HAVE YOU PERSONALLY BEEN INVOLVED IN STUDIES WHERE PLACEBOS, SUGAR PILLS, WERE FOUND TO BE MORE EFFECTIVE IN TREATING DEPRESSION THAN THE ACTUAL DRUGS? IF STUDY AFTER STUDY HAVE CONFIRMED THE PLACEBO EFFECT, WOULD THAT NOT INDICATE THAT DEPRESSION AND OTHER “MENTAL ILLNESSES” ARE SIMPLY A STATE OF MIND AND DRUGS ARE NOT REQUIRED IN THE TREATMENT PROCESS?

I have not personally been involved in any such studies although I have read the research. I don’t think anyone disputes that mental illness is a state of mind. How does one get stuck in that state of mind is the question. All our thinking and behavior is determined by particular neural patterns that are sparking up in our brain at that moment. When we change our thinking, we change our behavior and feelings. Why don’t mentally ill people change their thinking? Not because they are unable to do it. They are unwilling to do it. Why are they unwilling? That’s the question.

Very few mental illnesses are caused by actual tissue damage of the brain. Every single thought we think has a chemical consequence in the brain. We are a bio-chemical entity. I see depression is a thinking disorder. We think our way into it and we can think our way out of it.

THIS IS A QUOTE FROM YOU BOOK, “DEPRESSION ALWAYS ENDS. NOT BECAUSE OF PROZAC. NOT BECAUSE OF PSYCHOTHERAPY. NOT BECAUSE OF PSYCHOANALYSIS OR SHOCK TREATMENTS. DEPRESSION ALWAYS ENDS BECAUSE IT IS IN THE VERY NATURE OF DEPRESSION TO END. THE ONLY QUESTION IS, HOW CAN WE GET IT TO END SOONER, THE WAY WE WANT IT TO, INSTEAD OF LATER, WHICH WE HATE?”

LET’S LOOK AT THE OTHER END: HOW DOES DEPRESSION BEGIN?

Learned association is the way we get from one thought to the other, from one train of thought to the other. If you think “salt,” the thought “pepper” is going to spark up in your brain. If you have practiced a piece on the piano, the first note you play will put you in touch with all the other notes to that piece which you have imprinted in your memory bank as a result of practicing that piece. The neurotransmitters, such as serotonin, are merely the boats that carry the learned associations from one neuron to another. A whole bunch of similar neurons sparking each other up make a thought pattern, or a mind set.

A negative thought is just a thought. Thinking is behavior. If one chooses to think a negative thought again and again, it is learned association that will spark up similar negative and downer thoughts in your memory banks. Too much negative thinking causes anxiety, the fight-or-flight response will be triggered and stress chemicals will be dumped into the brain to bio-chemically prepare your body for immediate action. Those chemicals are extremely hard on the metabolic processes of the body and very shortly you will feel the weak and helpless feeling known as depression.

If one has spent a long time in depression, that depressive neural pattern gets very strong in the memory banks and can be immediately triggered off by a sound, a color, anything. One can immediately be dumped into excruciating pain when the well-used depressive neural pattern is triggered off. In this respect, depression is very much like a post-traumatic stress syndrome.

YOU TEND TO AGREE THAT THERE IS A BIOLOGICAL COMPONENT TO BIPOLAR AND DEPRESSION. DO ANY OF YOUR CHILDREN OR GRAND-CHILDREN HAVE SYMPTOMS OF EITHER?

The biological component to bipolar is that creative people have more highly developed their imagination than non-creative people. The biological component to depression is that we all have a psychological defense mechanism called the fight-or-flight response that causes a chemical imbalance in the brain when it is triggered off.

I have five children and 13 grandchildren. Not one of them suffers from depression. They might get the blahs now and then, like everybody else, but no one suffers from bipolar or has taken any medication to get out of depression. Personally I don’t put much stock in the diagnosis of bipolar or ADHD/ADD as diseases. They are simply symptoms that come from lack of coping skills. But people can learn these skills. People either have developed coping mechanisms to live in the modern-day stressful world or they haven’t. People have either developed their capacity to focus on something and avoid getting distracted from their work, or they haven’t.

WHAT MADE YOU DECIDE TO BECOME A COGNITIVE BEHAVIORAL THERAPIST RATHER THAN, SAY, A FREUDIAN PSYCHOANALYST OR GESTALT THERAPIST OR PSYCHIATRIST?

There is no scientific or medical evidence that supports the existence of an unconscious mind that can control your behavior against your will because an on-purpose thought always trumps a passive thought.
There is no scientific evidence that supports present-day mental health diagnoses as diseases. The diagnoses are all theoretical not medical. Even gestalt therapy depends upon the existence of an unconscious mind that can force behavior.
Cognitive behavior simply relies on developing better thinking and behavior strategies to help you cope with daily life. When these coping strategies are developed, the symptoms of “disorders” like depression and ADHD disappear.

FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH CBT (COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY), CAN YOU BRIEFLY EXPLAIN ITS METHODS AND HOW IT CAN BE EFFECTIVE AGAINST BIPOLAR AND DEPRESSION?

Most cognitive therapy trains people to change habitual thinking and reasoning strategies that don’t work; to question emotionally reactive, negative, and irrational thoughts, and to restructure them to be more pro-active, positive and self-affirming.

‘Brainswitching’ is a cognitive behavior therapy that uses mind exercises to manipulate neural activity in the brain during a depressive episode. Simple techniques power down the heightened neural activity in the ‘emotional brain’ (the subcortex) and enhance it in the ‘logical’ or ‘rational’ part of the brain (the neocortex).

How do you brainswitch? You choose a nonsense or neutral thought in advance, to have ‘at the ready’ whenever depression hits. It could be a mantra, a repetitive word like yes, yes, yes, or a song like ‘Row, row, row your boat.’ Anything works. When depression attacks, when you feel yourself sliding into some gloom or anxious thinking, you immediately start saying your chosen exercise repetitively, over and over to yourself. You insist on your on-purpose thought. You continually substitute it for the thought ‘I am depressed.’

Brainswitching differs in principle from other cognitive therapy techniques. Helpful though it is, regular cognitive therapy is not as ideally suited as brainswitching to full-blown episodes of depression. During full-blown depression, ongoing neural activity in the ‘rational’ brain (the neocortex) is too temporarily overwhelmed for cognitive judgment. Brainswitching can be effective at any point in a depressive cycle, even when the emotional brain is fully agitated and the rational brain, has in effect, gone ‘off line’ because brainswitching uses just simple rote exercises that might consist of a single word. There’s no complex thinking or judgment involved with brainswitching as there is in other CBT.

Brainswitching is similar to the technique of doing simple math problems to stimulate neuronal activity and thus the blood flow in the thinking part of the brain in order to operate communication machinery by the brain alone, without the use of hands. This increased blood flow immediately lessens the pain of depression.
Brainswitching continually interrupts the thinking that you are depressed. If you break up or eliminate the thought “I am depressed,” you interrupt a negative feedback loop to the emotional areas that are running in high gear, taking away some of the fuel for the depressed feelings.

In that it focuses attention on internal experiences, brainswitching is similar to the cognitive behavior techniques of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT). But while ACT emphasizes accepting these experiences as opposed to avoiding them, brainswitching can also quickly improve one’s internal experiences.

IT’S BEEN SAID THAT CBT (COGNITIVE BEHAVIOR THERAPY) IS A MIXING OF PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHOLOGY. DO YOU FIND THIS TO BE THE CASE? IF YES, IN WHAT WAYS ARE THEY SIMILAR?

They are similar in the respect that they both advise you to recognize when your thinking is rational, based on objective feedback and evidence, and when your thinking is emotional, based upon subjective fears, habits, and cultural prejudices; and that the proper use of emotion is to assist reason, not overthrow it. Emotion alerts you to danger. Reason decides whether the danger is real or imagined.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE PHILOSOPHY?

I think it is the philosophy of earnestness: Earnestness is the devotion of all the faculties,” said American author C. N. Bovee, “it is the cause of patience; gives endurance; overcomes pain; strengthens weakness; braves dangers; sustains hope; makes light of difficulties, and lessens the sense of weariness in overcoming them.” “Without earnestness,” said Scottish author Peter Bayne, “no man is ever great or does really great things. He may be the cleverest of men; he may be brilliant, entertaining, popular; but he will want weight.” Physics says it this way: “The degree to which a particle is likely to wander in an indeterminate way from the straight and narrow is determined by its lack of mass.”

IN YOUR BOOK, “DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE”, THERE IS THIS THEME THAT THE MIND—YOUR THINKING PROCESS, YOUR PERCEPTION OF EVENTS, YOUR INTERPRETATION OF YOUR LIFE AND SURROUNDINGS—IS ONE OF THE MOST IMPORTANT TOOLS IN BEATING DEPRESSION. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT SOME PEOPLE DON’T SEE IT THIS WAY AND THEY FEEL THE NEED TO USE MEDICATION TO SOLVE THEIR PROBLEMS?

They have been convinced by Parade Magazine, Oprah, Dear Abby and their own doctors that they cannot get rid of depression as an act of will and that are in danger of suicide if they don’t use drugs. However these same doctors are trusting the pharmaceutical salesmen who sell them the latest antidepressants. The doctors themselves do not study the research and they have no idea of the long-term effects of these drugs on their patients’ brains, emotions, intelligence or personality. And neither do the drug companies!

Let me tell you of one small incident of many that illustrate this. I was giving a workshop on brainswitching for the California Council on Family Relations at the University of California at San Marcos, California. One of the listeners came up after my lecture and said that she wanted to thank me for writing my book, Depression is a Choice.

The woman said she periodically went to a support group of women who had survived the loss of their homes after the wildfires in Southern California several years ago. She said that several months after the fire she went to a doctor to get something for her headaches. The doctor told her that she was suffering from depression and post-traumatic stress syndrome due to losing everything in the fire and the trauma of herself and her husband almost losing their lives, and he prescribed anti-depressants. The woman said, “I left his office with an armful of free samples, but I never took any. The doctor performed no tests on me whatsoever to make his diagnosis. How could he do that?” How indeed!

“But,” she went on, “I want to tell you that I am the only one in my group who didn’t take anti-depressants and after 5 years I’m doing so much better than everybody else. I’m fine and feeling great. All the other women in my group are still on anti-depressants and not doing well at all. I would love to give them your book, but they would just be offended.”

CAN YOU EXPLAIN WHAT DIRECTED THINKING IS FOR THOSE WHO ARE NOT FAMILIAR WITH IT?

Directed thinking is on-purpose thinking as opposed to passive thinking. Since your brain works by learned association, you can manipulate your own thinking and therefore your own moods by imposing thoughts on your brain that lead to the sparking up of productive neural patterns which you can use rather than the negative and anxious ones that pop up on their own. Since the brain is essentially a defense mechanism, if left to its own passive thinking, it will generally turn defensive, negative and anxious.

Although it is true that we create art, music, mathematics, and literature with the mind, this is not its bottom-line, fail-safe, core function. Our mind is naturally inclined to revert back to the precedence of its core primal instinctive defense mechanism (the subcortex) when we are not actively engaging the neocortex in some on-going, goal-driven activity like baking a cake or writing a paper.

If we are not using our mind on purpose, this instinctive defensive mindset emerges on its own, stealthily and seamlessly. If we are not aware of this latent, default-mode defensive capacity, we will not understand how we sometimes become anxious and paranoid for “no reason.” This evolutionary, negative and paranoid bent of our mind is not all a bad thing. We need a strong psychological defense mechanism. A tough guardian is supposed to be paranoid. You don’t see the secret service men who guard the president of the United States all laid back, joyful, and positive. No. When they are working, they are in a constant state of uneasy vigilance. They are frowning, squinting their eyes looking for trouble, looking for problems, looking for that one-in-a-million something that might go wrong.

To our own mind we are the president that must be protected at all cost. To protect us, our mind is always looking for trouble, chasing down the negative, peering into every dusty, dark neuronal corner. That is its job. And it is always on duty, even when we are asleep, or not paying any attention to what we are thinking. So what does this have to do with depression? When our mind gets too paranoid and anxious, the fight-or-flight response is triggered and stress chemicals flood the brain,
causing a chemical imbalance.

The antidote to this is to switch from passive thinking to on-purpose directed thinking and do some brainswitching exercises—the best first aid for a depression hit.

AT WHAT POINT DID YOU DECIDE THAT MEDICATION WAS UNNECESSARY FOR BEATING DEPRESSION AND BIPOLAR?

I always thought that medicating your brain to change your thoughts made no sense since you can always think any thought you want. Medicating your brain to change your moods which are caused by your thinking makes no sense either. I never even considered it for myself. Now that I have heard from thousands of people who have been able to use my methods to get out of depression without drugs, and heard from those who have gotten off their anti-depressants with the help of their doctor, I am convinced that drugs are not necessary for anyone

HAVE YOU BEEN PERSONALLY ATTACKED BY THE MEDICAL COMMUNITY FOR YOUR VIEWS OF DEPRESSION?

No, I haven’t been personally attacked by any doctors. I’ve received some negative reviews of my books and perhaps some of them are from the medical community. I have gotten some negative reviews by some PhD’s, but there are many doctors who have bought my book and use it in their practice.

THERE IS A SAYING, THE TWO PS, IN THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY THAT, “IF IT CAN’T BE PATENTED OR YOU CAN’T MAKE A PROFIT FROM IT, IT’S NOT MEDICINE.” DO YOU THINK THAT THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY IS MAINLY CONCERNED WITH ONLY PROFIT?

In the movie “A Beautiful Mind” the brilliant mathematician John Nash cures his own schizophrenia. At the very end of the move there is the smallest tag line in his answer to the question, “How did you do it?” He responds that the medicines have greatly improved over the years.” This was a flat-out lie put in for the pharmaceutical companies who showcased the movie in New York for the HMO’s. The truth is that John Nash was forced to take drugs in the beginning and was not able to cure himself until he was able to completely give them up. He learned to focus his mind on his objective thoughts about the people and things around him, and taught himself to ignore any subjective thoughts about “voices,” or “the government,” or “saving the world,” which he said, “never came to anything.”

Only at the end of his life did John Nash decide to treat his mind as a tool for his own use, and thus take responsibility for it; thus discipline it instead of remaining the dupe of his own mind by giving it undue reverence as the final authority on objective reality.

As he got more and more in the habit of directing his mind instead of listening to it, John Nash became sane. Not that he no longer has irrational thoughts. But as he says, the “noise level is turned way down.” It seemed the noise level was down because he didn’t pay attention to random thoughts and let them procreate themselves into socially-alienating self-hypnosis. He didn’t just let thinking go on by itself and then collapse into his private dream as if it is the real world.

The point is not that we are a mind. The point is that we have a mind. Further, we are the link between our mind and the objective reality of the physical world we share with our fellow man. Depression is not objective reality, it is a panic room of the mind and the key to getting out of it is brainswitching.

WHAT WOULD YOU SAY ARE THE MAJOR CONCERNS AND SIDE EFFECTS OF PRESCRIPTION PILLS?

All I know personally about drugs is that shortly after my father and my brother, both in their forties, both writers, started taking them, they lost their jobs and were never able to work again in their field. Pills give you no wisdom, no life skills, no coping mechanisms. Whenever you stop taking them, you are right back where you were when you started. They are an escape from life, not an answer to it.

WHEN YOU WERE DIAGNOSED WITH BIPOLAR, WERE YOU ADVISED TO TAKE MEDICATION? IF YES, HOW DID MEDICATION CHANGE YOUR THOUGHTS AND BEHAVIORS?

I refused to take any medication.

AT WHAT POINT DID YOU TAKE A STANCE AGAINST MEDICATION? WAS IT A DRAMATIC EVENT OR A GRADUAL LEARNING PROCESS THROUGH PERSONAL EXPERIENCE OR THE EXPERIENCE OF THOSE THAT YOU TREATED IN YOUR PRACTICE?

From the first time, when I was offered Valium I refused to take it. The thought of taking something to make me feel okay when I wasn’t okay did not make sense to me. I wanted to be okay, not just feel okay.

FOR ANYONE WHO WANTS TO GET OFF MEDICATION, HOW WOULD YOU RECOMMEND THEY DO IT?

There are many people who get off medication after reading my book. I always suggest that they do so with the help of their doctor. There are withdrawal symptoms that can be dangerous.

DO YOU FEEL THAT THERE ARE SOME SITUATIONS WHERE MEDICATION IS NECESSARY FOR THOSE WITH DEPRESSION? OR IS IT YOUR VIEW THAT MEDICATION IS NEVER NECESSARY?

People need education and loving support when they are depressed and lacking the coping skills to get out of it. If psychiatrists and doctors no longer have the time to provide this, and if the person is to be left alone with no other reasonable help or support available, I would not refuse any kind of rescue to a drowning person just because they had not yet learned how to swim. But I think anti-depressants are extremely harmful. They may prevent suicide, or they may even cause it.

I was shocked to read the headlines a few months ago that read “Kids’ Antidepressants Called Safe.” I was further shocked to notice that everybody simply accepted this and parroted the news to each other. Didn’t they notice who paid for the research? The name was at the bottom of the article but I guess most people didn’t know that when research is funded by The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that the name Johnson refers to Johsnon & Johnson. Most people don’t know that much of the research done by scientists at the National Institutes of Health is funded by pharmaceutical companies.

A friend of mine went to a psychiatrist with his complaint of years of depression to the point where he could no longer sleep. The doctor suggested that he start walking and keep on walking until he got tired. To my way of thinking that was much better than any pill. My friend did go for that walk. Then I gave him my book.

THERE SEEMS TO BE A TREND NOWADAYS TO MEDICALIZE BEHAVIORS AS MENTAL ILLNESSES AND DISEASES. FOR EXAMPLE, GAMBLING ADDICTION IS LABELED AS A DISEASE AND MENTAL ILLNESS AND THERE ARE NOW PILLS OUT THERE THAT ARE SUPPOSED TO HELP PEOPLE QUIT GAMBLING. AS A THERAPIST, DOES THIS CONCERN YOU?

This is symbolic of an addicted culture. We are the biggest drug users in the world today. Our traditional way of life is breaking down, we are looking for the easy fix, something to feel better, whether we are better or not.

LET’S LOOK AT THREE FACTORS THAT CONTRIBUTE TO THE DEVELOPMENT OF INDIVIDUALS: NATURE, NURTURE, AND FREEWILL. OF THE THREE, WHAT DO YOU THINK IS THE DECIDING FACTOR IN WHAT A PERSON BECOMES IN LIFE?

Nurture is often the deciding factor because people have a hard time succeeding when they are traumatized early in life. Their fear keeps them always on the defensive. If they knew they were afraid, they could access their courage. But not knowing they are afraid, they are too defensive to risk themselves and learn from their mistakes. They translate everything in terms of keeping safe by repressing their own fear, which would be very painful to acknowledge and feel directly. So their comfort zone is very narrow. Because they are so defended, it seems to them that they are not afraid, and that the other person is causing their problem. This results in inadequate social skills for work.

The deciding factor in a person’s success is if they can take full responsibility for their lives, blaming no one and no thing, and expecting no one or no thing to “save” them. To do this they have to get in touch with their repressed fear. Chapter 10 in my book Depression is a Choice describes how to get in touch with your fear. People can overcome both nature and nurture because of free will so I would say that is the overall deciding factor and humanity’s greatest gift.

THERE IS NOW A THEORY THAT MANY DISEASES/MENTAL ILLNESSES (EVEN DEPRESSION) ARE MAINLY CAUSED BY THE FOODS WE’RE PUTTING IN OUR BODIES. WHAT IS YOUR VIEW ON THIS?

Yes, this makes sense. Our bodies know when they are being fed toxins and the resulting anxiety can trigger the flight-or-fight response. Tissue could be damaged by what we eat. The use of Aspartame (sweetener) may be a huge danger to physical and psychological health if only half of what is claimed on the Internet is true. Our meat is full of hormones and antibiotics, our vegetables are doused with pesticides. I always buy organic food when I have the choice. I do not drink any kind of soda or diet soda, or any caffeine. I don’t drink any packaged juices. Since green tea is full of Vitamin K, a blood clotting agent, I don’t drink that either. I eat only fresh fruit.

WHAT ARE YOUR VIEWS ON OMEGA-3 FISH OIL, GINKGO BILOBA, ST. JOHN’S WORT, AND OTHER NATURAL SUPPLEMENTS?

I don’t know much about the food supplements other than fish oil and vitamins which I do take.

MEDITATION IS NOW A COMPONENT OF MANY THERAPY PROGRAMS. CAN YOU EXPLAIN HOW MEDITATION CHANGES THE CHEMISTRY OF THE BRAIN AND ITS EFFECTS? DO YOU PRACTICE TRANSCENDAL MEDITATION REGULARLY?

I don’t practice trancendental meditation regularly. Trancendental meditation is the concentration of the mind upon a single thought. It is just another word for hypnosis except there is no accompanying suggestion to effect a particular mind-set to accomplish a task as in medical hypnosis for surgery, or trying to heal some bodily ill which is often the purpose of hypnosis and guided imagery under trance.

In transcendental meditation, concentration upon a single thought is always a positive or neutral one and since a human being can only concentrate upon one thought at a time, the mind cannot therefore, think at the same time a busy or a stimulating or an anxious thought. Therefore the fight-or-flight response is no longer being triggered, and the stress chemicals cease to be produced. Since the emotional brain is not being stimulated, the neural activity in the subcortex slows down. The removal from the thinking of all stimulating or anxious thoughts causes the body to relax and the brain waves to slow down from beta level to alpha level. The body ceases to be in stress mode, or sympathetic mode and goes into para-sympathetic mode, the body’s resting and relaxed mode.

WHAT ARE YOU VIEWS ON THE FOLLOWING:

PSYCHIATRY: Lost in its own jargon, an example of methodized ignorance.

THE PHARMACEUTICAL INDUSTRY: Corrupted by profit motive.

MENTAL ILLNESSES IN GENERAL are behavioral problems: Ineffective strategies to avoid repressed fear.

WHAT DO YOU THINK ARE THE SYMPTOMS, CAUSES AND POSSIBLE CURES FOR THE FOLLOWING:

ADDICTIONS are self-medicating strategies to distract from the pain of repressed fears usually originating in childhood trauma. Cured by addressing fears directly and committing to quitting. The way the brain works, we can’t really quit doing something, we have to substitute one thing for another.

DEPRESSION: Caused by over-extension of the fight-or-flight response. One can’t really cure depression because it is part of the human psychological defense system. But you can get rid of depression whenever it attacks by brainswitching. Understanding how your brain works can give you an overview of depression which reduces the fear of it.

BIPOLAR: I do not think this “disease” is supported by scientific evidence since all the symptoms can be eliminated by practicing new thinking and behavior strategies.

ADD/ ADHD: I do not think this “disease” is supported by scientific evidence since all the symptoms can be eliminated by practicing new thinking and behavior strategies.

IN YOUR PRIVATE PRACTICE, HAVE YOU HAD TO TREAT ANYONE WITH A: DRUG ADDICTION, GAMBLING ADDICTION, ALCOHOLISM, PORN/SEX ADDICTION. IF YES, DO YOU THINK THAT THERE IS A COMMON CAUSE OR CURE FOR ADDICTIONS?

Except for depression, I do not treat addictions in my practice. I do think the common cause for addictions is to distract from repressed fear. It is a case of choosing to feel good about oneself without having to bother with the trouble and risk of accomplishing something good.

YOU HAVE YEARS OF PRIVATE PRACTICE. ARE THERE ANY MEMORABLE, GOOD OR BAD, EXPERIENCES THAT STICK TO MIND?

This one session illustrates what I mean by repressed fear. I wrote about it in my book Depression is a Choice.

A couple came into my office for psychotherapy because the wife complained that her husband didn’t seem to care about anything one way or the other. He seemed to have no feelings about what they did or didn’t do. She felt disconnected from him, and unloved. The husband was a young man of 26. He said that he had been sexually abused by his father from the age of 8 to 14. In his first session Joe said that he was a person that didn’t have strong feelings, good or bad, except for when he was depressed, and then he tried to commit suicide three times. In answer to my question, he said he certainly didn’t feel any fear of any kind. He wasn’t exactly sure what fear felt like because he was a Marine, and as far as he knew he wasn’t afraid of anything.

The young man was sitting about five feet in front of my desk and his body language was screaming at me how afraid he was. “With your permission,” I said, “I’m going to move my chair closer to you and you tell me if you start to feel uncomfortable at all.” I moved my chair to the side of the desk and began to move closer and closer to the young man. When I got to about a foot from him he shouted, “STOP. I’m uncomfortable. I’m uncomfortable.” And indeed he was sweating and was quite red in the face. “That’s fear,” I said. “That feeling of discomfort that you are feeling now is the pain of fear. If you think back to a few seconds ago, you will remember feeling some gradations of that pain as I moved closer. It’s a natural defense mechanism to feel fear when a stranger is invading your space.”

As children we may have been victims of abuse and our only means of survival was to dissociate ourselves from it psychologically since we couldn’t save ourselves from it physically. The way we dissociate ourselves from our painful feelings is by switching to thinking about something else rather than what is happening in our present reality. But dissociating from painful feelings isn’t escaping from painful feelings. These repressed feelings hang around and drag us down in many ways, including depression.

If we have repressed fears we should dredge them up with therapeutic massage work, exercises, or sad music and finish feeling them. Just because we have fearful feelings does not mean that we should be afraid of them. The trick is to have our feelings without letting our feelings have us. We are much more powerful than our feelings and we shouldn’t collapse into them as if we were the helpless victims of them.

DO YOU HAVE ANY FINAL WORDS FOR OUR READERS?

No matter how depressed you are, something is always doable. Because depression is the idea that nothing will work, almost anything you do to get going with your day will help lessen your pain. Try to remember that when you are depressed there are many others “out there” that are trying to get going with their day as well. You are not alone.
________________________________________

Comments on this article:

Submitted by Nathaniel S. Lehrman on Sat, 2007-07-14 19:41.

Can depressed people help themselves? Or must they seek medication and/or counseling aid from others? At a time when millions are increasingly relying on drugs, often unsuccessfully, Arline B. Curtiss chooses self-help in her ”Brain Switch; Out of Depression; Break the Cycle of Despair.” In it, she shows firmly, persuasively and importantly how depressed people can indeed help themselves.
The simple notion that anyone can change his mind at any time - even when that mind is caught in a slough of despond - is the basis of her “brain-switching.” Passivity is the essence of depression, and its antithesis is activity. “When one little neural pattern goes ‘I am depressed,’” she writes, “another one pops up that says ‘time to do an exercise.’ And I do. And the depression always goes away in a few minutes.... I used to think I couldn’t enjoy something until I felt good. It never occurred to me that the very behavior of enjoying something, as an overt, on-purpose act, would bring on good feelings.”
Her book is a mighty weapon against the learned helplessness which so often characterizes depression. It brings prosaic reality to W.E. Henley’s "Invictus - I Am The Captain Of My Soul,” a poem which begins with depression:
“Out of the night that covers me
black as the pit from pole to pole ...,.”
and ends with triumph:

“It matters not how strait the gate
how charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul..”

The book is highly recommended for those seeking to regain from depression control of their own lives.
Nathaniel S. Lehrman, M.D., 10 Nob Hill Gate, Roslyn NY 11576; 516/626-0238; former Clinical Director, Kingsboro Psychiatric Center, Brooklyn NY; former Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry, Albert Einstein and SUNY Downstate Colleges of Medicine;
___________________________________________________

Submitted by Maria on Thu, 2007-07-12 11:01.

This is a very encouraging and enlightening interview. A.B. Curtiss brings to her profession a new element of self empowerment to those suffering from depression.
I have attended seminars in the past that discuss neurotransmitters and neuropathways and how we as individuals do have the capability of changing them - or perhaps it would be more accurate to say we have the capability to create NEW ones.
I am excited to see this concept coming into the psychotherapy arena. A.B. Curtiss is certainly providing new hope to those who suffer from depression.
Maria Edwards
www.AmericanAuthorsAssociation.com

Depression with Catatonic Features

Dear A.B. Curtiss,

I am excited to have found you via your website. My 20 yr. old daughter has been recently diagnosed with depression that has catatonic features, especially extreme negativism and elective mutism. We have been seeing a psychotherapist and a psychiatrist. We also did blood tests, CT scan and saw a neurologist to rule out any other problems. The psychiatrist suggested medication and possibly ECT. I abhor going this route and have been “fighting” for alternative therapies. So far, we did 3 acupuncture treatments with Chinese herbs. However, when I found you, I knew that your solution is the right path to take. I will purchase your book today in order to learn more. However, since we live in Murrieta and you in Escondido we are close neighbors. Therefore, my question to you is this:
Will you treat my daughter???

Dear N. B.

I don't treat private patients anymore, but I will answer any email you send even if it's every day for a while. I don't charge for this. My techniques work and I'm always willing to answer questions when people get stuck on some small point which keeps them from going forward. But in order to work, you have to actually do the techniques and have a small understanding of how your own brain works. You are not alone.

And don't get too distraught over omnious diagnosis. There is no medical basis for any of the DSM IV diagnoses anyway. Read both the books if you can even though your daughter won't because you can help her because when you are more educated on the subject. The first book is the philosophy of getting out of depression and amazon.com usually has a used one for less than $5. It's called “Depression is a Choice”. “Brainswitch out of Depression “is the neuroscience of getting out of depression. That's discounted on amazon.com as well A. B. Curtiss

A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Thank you so much. We are desperate parents.

Your website is loaded with practical and inspirational advice, and I have already gotten a lot out of that alone. You have such great ability to guide a person through the difficult time. Moreover, in light of the fact that your technique of "directing our thoughts" is not taught to us, I find it a great tool for all humanity. Your book "Brain Switch" was not immediately available for purchase at any book store in my area, not even the library had it. Unbelievable! Nevertheless, I have ordered it and should get it by tomorrow afternoon. I will also get your other book, "Depression is a choice."

Thanks for all your help so far. N. B.


Dear A. B.

My daughter was panicky and nervous throughout the day. I have given her Bach's Rescue Remedy to calm her down. She has been saying things like: It's going to flood, I have an infection, (when I asked her to tell me where the infection was, she replied "everywhere.") When her dad went to Lake-Ellsinore, she worried about him. When dad took her paychecks to be deposited in her account (she never wanted to go to the bank herself or with our help) she panicked and said he was going to loose them. She started to shake and went up to her room.

I wanted her to tell me her thoughts, but she didn't immediately verbalize.I said there was nothing to be afraid off. I spoke to her about thinking good or neutral thoughts. I gave some examples: rain drops keep falling on my head (twice she was singing that one sentence since her depression.) Also, pointed to pictures on the calendar. Than I said, think "I am at home" "it's nice and warm" "I am alive." As soon as I said the last words, she replied "I don't want to be alive." I was shocked but didn't show it. She never said such a thing. When her doctors asked her if she ever thought of hurting herself, she whispered "no." This was not a good day. May be because yesterday was her 21st birthday, but she didn't want to celebrate it.

Since she became severely depressed, she has been repeating this words: I want to go back (as if she wants to fix something,) I messed up (like she is blaming herself,) I am really sick, I have an infection, I am sorry (she feels she inflicts sadness on us,) and "help." Sometimes she cries, almost like howling, but she stops abruptly. I wish she could cry more and let that anxiety come out. When she says "I want to go back" I tell her to "take action" and do one thing she needs to do, like brushing her teeth or taking a shower. I tell her to think of one thing and do it. I than help her do it. I tell her this is how she can catch up and fix things so she can feel better. She seems to understand, especially when she cooperates. I want to help her solve her pain and suffering and enormous guilt and blame she feels.

Your feedback is greatly appreciated. N.B.


Dear N.B.

Since we make our own brain neuron by neuron I find that it is not helpful to spend a lot of time thinking about past mistakes, screw ups, etc., which we all are guilty of making. Which is why typical psythotherapy is mainly useless. Thinking these habitual negative, guilty, or blaming thoughts merely makes them stronger in the mind and therefore easier to fall into since the brain, that works by learned association, always follows the direction of its most current dominant thought.

Psychotherapy, as I learned it in graduate school, held that delving into the past helped to make the "unconscious conscious". What it really turns into is unhelpful and circuitous negative thinking. On the other hand, what may be helpful is to realize that repressed pain is actually stored in the cells of our bodies so that when these painful thoughts come we can move them more quickly out of our bodies by emotional release like crying, or getting down on the floor, thrashing around, and groaning out loud, "Oh No No No." But this emotional release is a physical one rather than thought thinking.

When we are panicked, we think a lot of crazy thoughts. This shouldn't be seen by us or others as proof that we are crazy. Just proof that, at the moment, we are extremely upset and not thinking with our rational mind but just letting our thoughts run away with themselves, in any crazy direction they choose, because we are too emotionally upset and all our neural activity is in the emotional part of the brain, the subcortex, and we don't have much neural activity going on in our neocortex, our thinking brain. When we calm down, work through our emotional upset with some physical activity, start thinking a few nonsense or objective thoughts which stimulate neural activity in the neocortex, we can return to more rational thinking.

Thinking thoughts like "I don't want to be alive" should not be taken seriously as real intention by either the thinker of the thoughts or by others, but as simply another negative thought which can be ignored by thinking some other thought instead of it. However, this said, suicide does happen when people dwell on the ideation of doing away with themselves and the brain gets into a strong thought pattern, a self-destructive mind set which can end tragically.

When someone has specific thoughts about how they are going to kill themselves, (saving up sleeping pills, buying a gun, picking out a particular bridge to jump off of), rather than just thoughts of not wanting to live, when they have specific plans, these should be taken more seriously. It is often successful to simply make a pact with someone that they will not entertain these thoughts anymore and turn their mind to more productive thinking, and that they will call you if they feel like their thoughts are starting to get too strong for them to ignore, and they are in danger of killing themselves.

If your daughter trusts you enough to let you help her, things can change. Things can change even if she doesn't trust you and you can learn how to earn her trust. 30 years ago I had to put my 16 year old daughter in a locked facility. Oh, it was a time I can tell you. But I didn't know how to handle the situation. So I put her in a locked facility and hired 3 psychotherapists and did therapy for hours every day for 30 days. Looking back from what I know now, my psychotherapists were pretty bad, but still I learned something.

When my daughter came home from the hospital she was so panicked she said she wanted to go back because she was afraid she was going to kill herself. I asked her what the hospital would do to prevent her from killing herself and she said they would put her on a 24 hour watch. “ I can do that,” I told her. And for two weeks I never left her side. If she went to the bathroom, I sat on the tub. If she took a shower, I sat on the toilet seat. I slept in her room. After two weeks she said she was all right.

It took two years after that of some remedial parenting but, of course, I wasn't a very good mother for not teaching her better, and paying more attention to her as I was quite a social butterfly type of person who was interested in a busy social life. Howsoever, this daughter, now 46 is a beautiful talented, good person who is the light of all who know her, and she is the treasure of my life of whom I am so proud sometimes my heart almost bursts with joy.

Things can change. I remember when my husband and I were floundering in our marriage although now after 50 some years we are quite in love with one another again. On our 25th anniversary my husband said to me, I didn't get you an anniversary present this year because I didn't think there was anything to celebrate and I couldn't help but agree with him.

If your daughter can overcome her fears at this time of her life she will be much stronger and even many years ahead of me, for instance, in growing up. When I was in my late 40s and returned to graduate school one of my professors told me that I was a very afraid person. I said, "yes, you are right, I am an afraid person." He looked as me very kindly as I freely admitted his appraisal of me and said, "that can change." And of course it did as today I am a hopeless optimist and practically fearless.

Not that I don't have my bad days, my stress times as everyone does. However, I handle them as they come along and spend very little time, anymore, in these dark places. If I had been taught, early on, how my brain worked I could have started to handle things correctly in my teens. But my role model was my father who was always under the care of a psychiatrist for manic depression (bipolar) and I learned from him what you were supposed to do when negative thoughts came along. I learned from him that you were supposed to succumb to the bad thoughts, take to your bed, and feel bad and take lots of drugs.

I had to unlearn this when I began to study neuroscience. And because I was such an afraid person for so many years, my life tended to be shallow, dependent on image, and being "Miss Wonderful." Now I'm just a wise old lady. As the song says, there's wisdom from the pain. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Thank you for the education and sharing your inspirational story with me. Thank you for telling me that it is counter-productive to dig up the past and all its negativity. It is just so ironic that this is one of the ways we are taught to deal with our issues. Personally speaking, there are many events in my past which are very depressing/painful and dwelling on them would be unhealthy.

I'd rather adopt your system of moving forward with good positive thinking and optimism. Being in my 50's, I now know that past pain doesn't really matter and nobody cares anyway. At the end, each person is left alone to deal with his/her own dilemmas. We might as well adopt the "Brain-Switch" technique.

I know I am going to read this email again and again till I get the books. In the meantime, I am going to look for a cognitive behavior therapist through my employer. If you have anybody in mind please let me know. Currently, we are seeing a therapist in Riverside. As a matter of fact, we have an appointment with her at 5:00 pm today. She actually wants to delve into the past. I think that can be interesting maybe (to see what she is going to do with it,) however, I think it's only going to prolong the therapy for my daughter.

Thanks for your feedback, N. B.

Dear N. B.

If you are suffering from depression then in your past there is a lack of dealing with your fear. You don't really need to know what caused you to be unable to deal with your fear. You are an afraid person. Get in touch with your fear, not your past, and start pushing beyond your fearA. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

My 21yr old daughter is still depressed. She thinks everything is ruined. "I ruined my body." "I ruined my family." She exaggerates a lot. For instance, she asks her brother if she can go with him to work and stay in the car. And yet, at times she can be very sane. This morning she wanted to go to Starbucks and she paid for the bill out of her own volition.

Although, it is true that her periods stopped, I am not so worried about that. I think that once she gains her normal weight, her hormones will kick in. I love your books. It gives me hope when you write "Depression always ends. Not because of Prozac" etc, and "Essential Happiness is our original state of well-being that is always available to us."

Today, she stays mostly in her room. I just wonder, how long is she going to choose not to take care of herself? She has already wasted 3 months of her life. Her dad wants to use intravenous medication per the psychiatrist recommendation (and he will even go with the shock therapy if necessary.) I am against it. Besides, our daughter will never agree to it and I wouldn't force her. A few days ago she would say "Everybody hates me," and "I hate everybody." I have been talking to her about the angels Michael, Gabriel, Ariel, Rafael, that surround her, love and protect her and she is not alone. I mean, anything positive I can say to combat her bad thoughts.

Thanks for your feedback, N.B.

Dear N. B.
Isn't there anything she is interested in--art, books, music, yoga, volunteering. She should be doing something, because until she starts doing something she has nothing to think about except how bad she feels. What was she interested in as a child? If she is artistic I would buy yourself and her some paints and canvas, and sit her down to them right along side of you.

Or get a paper route with her and start delivering papers. Or make her accompany you to some volunteer project, taking care of children in a children's home. She needs some physical activity rather than mental activity. How about getting her to take a yoga course, or even a martial arts course. Sign up with her and go along. Anything that gives even the smallest sense of something accomplished with her day.

You need to start somewhere. You can't wait for her to do something until she FEELS like it. It is her duty as a human being to get interested in something and be a help to her fellow man no matter how she feels. So she feels bad, so what. Millions of people feel bad. Why is she so special she can't do anything when she feels bad.

As far as drugs are concerned or electric shock they do no good. It took me ten years to get my psychiatrist-addicted brother off medication.

Sometimes these doctors are truly idiots. One psychiatrist prescribed Abilify for my brother without even checking to see if he was a diabetic. I guess because he is so thin, and diabetics are usually overweight. Diabetics are not supposed to take Abilify. That was the final straw for my brother and he finally went off all his meds and is finally sane after 35 years on doctor prescribed drugs. He has a lot of physical problems such as Tardive dyskensia due to the drugs, his whole body has an essential tremor caused by the drugs, but at least he is sane.

He works as a night guard in a church sponsored retirement home after being the most highly paid journalist in NYC. But now, he finally understands that he is not special like all the psychiatrists tried to tell him. He is just an ordinary person who is supposed to be self-responsible to make something out of his day and be of some use to his fellow man.

When your daughter says things like "I hate everybody" and "Everybody hates me" tell her: "So what if you think this. This is simply a negative thought which does not necessarily have any basis in fact and should not be relied upon as legitimate information that you should take seriously, this is just your mind doing a number on your because you have not learned how to control your own thinking.

When she says "I ruined my family," tell her that this is just a negative thought with no basis in fact and that you are just fine thank you very much. RESPOND TO ALL HER NEGATIVE COMMENTS WITH LOW KEY DISMISSAL. Say something like, "Oh, well, this is just negative thinking--don't take it so seriously , Dear. It's just a thought."

If she "ruined her body," she can jolly well now make the effort to heal herself. Watch the video by Jill Bolte Taylor who suffered a massive stroke and healed herself when she couldn't even feed herself, walk or talk. Go to www.ted.com and search for Jill Bolt Taylor. Remind her that negative states of mind are normal for someone who is not doing anything productive with their lives and therefore has nothing to like about himself and falls back upon habitual negative thinking.
Then slowly she will get the idea that maybe she should not take her negative thoughts so seriously. Your husband is like most people who want the easy way out. The medical profession has convinced him that he can take her somewhere to be cured of her ignorance of how her brain works by taking mind-altering drugs, and anesthatized from the pain of her repressed fear.

She probably has the emotional age of 3 or 4. But once she starts doing the work she can advance to her right emotional age in less than a year. She needs to be helped to grow up emotionally. She has to do it herself, with loving help. How many times has your husband insisted that your daughter go for a walk with him, or jog, or go to the gym. Has he offered to engage in some activity and invite her to go along?

You are totally supporting her and she should be kindly made, cajoled, and talked into doing those things that you want her to do. You may have to do them with her at first, just like you hold the hand of a small child just learning to walk.

She needs to be assisted into doing some things which can give her some sense of accomplishment.. Most people suffering from depression stopped confronting their fears when they were very small children for lack of knowing what to do they just started repressing fear.

Now she should be encouraged to confront fears. She is probably afraid to paint a picture, or join a yoga class and doesn't know she is afraid so she thinks she doesn't WANT to do it. As long as she can concentrate on her negative thinking she can avoid the pain of her real fear of risking herself in actually doing something. Read Chapter ten in DEPRESSION IS A CHOICE to understand about getting in touch with repressed fear. A. B. Curtiss

Dear A. B.

Fantastic information and empowering words.

I will keep doing my share to keep her doing some tasks. Last weekend, after reminding her a few times of her promise to show me her favorite beach, we finally went and she drove. However, she didn't want to get out of the car to take a stroll. Also, she plays the violin, but refuses to touch it now. I will keep finding ways to get her involved.

THANK YOU, N. B.

Dear N. B.

Yes, nevertheless she is sick, she still has her responsibilities like everybody else. Depression does not excuse you from life. After hearing from you today I was reminded of Sister Kenny and her fight with the doctors to insist that polio victims exercise their muscles to keep the muscles alive when the doctors at the time put the children in iron braces and kept polio victims immobile in wheelchairs and tied down in hospital beds. It seems to me that the doctors who are trying to heal people's minds are in the same way making people immobile with drugs that allow their minds to stagnate, instead of insisting that patients exercise their minds with thoughts and their bodies with exercise that build new neural patterns to replace the old depressive ones. Because of the brain’s neuroplasticity, with the growth of new neural patterns new behavior is possible and vice versa, with new behavior, new neural patterns can grow and develop.


Dear A. B,
Yes, yes, yes. And thanks to you and pioneering the "Brain-Switch" technique.


Dear N. B.

I received this letter today and thought there might be something in it that you could use. A. B. Curtiss.

HERE IS THE LETTER

Dear A. B. Curtiss

After reading the summary of your book depression is a choice, I came across many things that I had discovered personally. Although I have no scientific knowledge of depression or manic depression, Iknow what its like to "Snap" from the neocortex to the subcortex. In reading the summary of your book, I was reassured, in a sense, that what I have been going through is valid. I have found the wayto beat the cycle of depression. It is about creating yourself at every waking moment, completely giving up any preconceived notion of yourself, and ultimately shutting off the past. I understand this may be hard for those who are traumatized by deaths in the family, rape, ptsd, etc., however I believe with these techniques, depression merely turns into a thing of the past; a phrase that is commonly used to fuel the booming pharmaceutical economy. I am glad that I have found someone that sees past all of the medication and modern-treatment that most of the "depressed" consider.

Depression and Happiness Set Point

Dear A. B. Curtiss,

I am in the process of writing a dissertation (in part) on mental depression as measured by a single administration of the Beck Inventory. Can you refer me to any literature addressing my hypothesis that once a set point is reached (even in an acute depressive episode), the individual is prone to future depression at the level of that set point? Thank you.

Paul J. Flaer
Stempel School of Public Health
Florida International University

Dear Paul,

I wrote an article about the connection between depression and the Yerkes-Dodson Law that might be of help to you.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law and Happiness Set-Point Determining Depression

Now that neuroscience has explained the brain mechanics involved in the upside-down U graph called the Yerkes-Dodson Law, we might use this law to understand the cyclic nature of depression. The trick to reading this essay is to remember that the U is upside down. If you don’t remember that, the essay will not make the same kind of sense.

The 1908 discovery of this law proposed that when our physiological arousal is low, as it is in the passive, disengaged, and subjective self-focus of depression, our overall thinking performance will be poor. This situation would be plotted on the bottom of the first leg of the upside down "U".

But, as we become engaged and objectively outer-focused, and thus physiologically aroused, our thinking performance begins to improve until it reaches the brain's "sweet spot" (at the top of the upside down U). Beyond that point, additional arousal produces anxiety. Then the fight-or-flight response is activated and stress chemicals flood the brain producing the well-known "chemical imbalance" associated with depression (plotted on the downward second leg of the "U").

The Yerkes-Dodson Law joins together two disparate physiological dynamics: the down curve of the inverted U shows the negative effects of both passiveness and "frazzle" on depression, the upward part reflects the energizing effect of objective focus and interaction as a means to get out of depression.

Frazzle is the emotional upset we get from an overdose of daily hassles, when the brain switches into crisis mode. You would plot passive self-focus low on the first leg of the up-side down U and frazzle low on the second leg. Since it is cyclical, depression itself would be at the bottom of both legs.

In frazzle, the heightened neural activity shifts from the rational center in the prefrontal area to the more primitive emotional midbrain. Frazzle causes the brain to give priority to self-focus over-thoughtfulness, and habitual, knee-jerk, rudimentary responses over proactive, creative, and complex ones. In this mode, the overactive emotional center blitzes the prefrontal rational area, fragmenting attention, and lessening the space available in memory to take in new information.

The more the emotional pressure builds, the less a depressed person is able to hold information in working memory, to pay attention to the outside world, or to interact with others. Stressful thinking is thus left to take on a life of its own, pumping more and more stress chemicals into the brain. The further a person goes down this incline, the more stress chemicals they produce. These chemicals are extremely hard on the metabolic processes of the body leading to the helpless, weak, and fearful feeling we know as depression.

On the other hand, the left-legged upward arc from passivity and depression to peak performance wherein our happiness set point is reached, describes an entirely different set of brain mechanisms. As the depressed person begins to turn from subjective, self-focused thinking to objective, outer-focused thinking, by use of mind exercises, or actual interaction with some project or some another person, the mind, were it to be imaged at that point would show a diffused pattern of activity.

The activity would be in numerous neural areas, not just the depressive emotional brain, because the person is thinking thoughts in addition to depressive ones.
As the depressed person becomes more outer-directed and engaged, their motivation increases, and their attention focuses. Neural activity rises to the peak of mental efficiency. Along with the new focus, cognitive abilities increase, peaking at the happiness set point at the top of the "U". At this point further arousal causes more agitation than happiness, and the downside of the depressive cycle begins.
How does this graph help a depressed person? When a person is depressed, they can start to engage themselves in small mind exercises or tasks to physiologically arouse themselves in order to get their cognitive faculties functioning better. Some mind training is part of any regular cognitive therapy for depression. My book "Brainswitch out of Depression" is almost entirely based on mind exercises to get out of depression.

When a depressed person is in the part of the depressive cycle where they are feeling good again, they need to be aware of any anxious feelings that arise. At the first sign of anxious feelings they could engage in some physical activity, or stress reduction mental exercises to offset adrenaline and other stress chemicals that will ultimately lead them back into depression.

Many depressed people already track their mood swings using such tools as "The Cyclothymia Workbook." But the lesson of the "U" graph is that depressed people should learn to become aware of smaller gradients in passivity and stress so they can take action before feelings rise to the point of actual mood change.

The Yerkes-Dodson Law predicts the cyclical nature of depression in that the same neural activity that gets you out of depression, if left to escalate on its own, will get you back into it. There's an old saying in child psychology that the time to talk to your 16-year-old daughter is when she's 12. In the same vein, a corollary to the Yerkes-Dodson Law as concerns depression would be that if we're going to manage our depression correctly, we need to spend more time in the "sweet spot" by learning to better manage both passivity and anxiety.