Assessments
Trauma
Trauma
Depression is a painful experience that can lead to feelings of worthlessness, hopelessness, and despair. Shame and helplessness often prevent people from seeking help, leading to debilitating effects on daily life. I offer a compassionate space to work through depression, learn new skills, and prevent future occurrences. Let’s work together to understand the root causes and create a roadmap to healing.
Depression affects people differently.
Here are some signs to be on the lookout for:
- Emotional Disturbances
Depression is characterized by disturbances in one’s emotions. From deep feelings of sadness, to being tense and irritable to having no emotions at all and feeling numb. While depressed, emotions can also change so quickly that you can feel like you’re on an emotional rollercoaster. Depression also causes feelings of guilt, shame, worthlessness, helplessness, and hopelessness. These feelings can prevent or delay help-seeking for depression.
- Physical Manifestations of Depression
Depression is also marked by fatigue, sleep disturbances, and eating disturbances. Sometimes these physical symptoms are what cause people to seek therapy or medical care, not knowing that they are actually suffering from depression.
- Cognitive Problems
Depression often leads to problems with concentration and feeling like you’re in a fog. Thoughts themselves are often very negative and irrational. There is often a lot of self-loathing. Ruminating about problems is also common problem with depression. Sometimes depression gets so bad that there are delusions (fixed false beliefs) and hallucinations (seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling things that are not there). These cognitive problems are not just symptoms of depression – they actually make depression worse.
- Suicidal Thoughts
People suffering from depression usually think a lot about their own death and dying. If they’ve lost hope in their ability to get better or for their lives to turn around, they may contemplate or attempt suicide. Suicidal thoughts often stem from unbearable emotional pain and the desire to stop the suffering. They want an exit door. In therapy, our focus is to treat the source of that unbearable pain.
Call me if you or someone you love
has been affected by trauma
Depression is a very treatable condition
- Evidence-based treatment for depression includes cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), behavior therapy, mindfulness informed therapy, and eye movement desensitization reprocessing (EMDR).
- The benefits of therapy can be enhanced with medication, herbal supplements, exercise, and gratitude mediations.
