Posted by Tomatheus on April 18, 2016, at 23:40:51
In reply to Re: Helping those with mental health conditions, posted by baseball55 on April 18, 2016, at 19:32:53
Thank you for your reply, Baseball55. I think that without question, the experiences that you've had with various approaches to treating your depression are absolutely valid, and I most certainly think it's a good thing that you've been able to identify which approaches to managing your condition seem to be the most helpful and which approaches don't seem to be so helpful. As I said earlier in this thread, I think that there's a lot of variability in how different individuals with mental health conditions respond to some of the various treatment approaches that I mentioned in my other post, and I do think that some of the treatment approaches that I mentioned have more evidence to support their use than some of the other approaches that I mentioned.
In some ways, what you've written about exercise, healthy dietary choices, and meditation not being enough to prevent you from getting depressed (along with what you wrote about therapy not being enough to prevent episodes of severe depression, despite the fact that it helps you to cope with suicidal thinking and other depressive symptoms) sounds like it's similar to what I wrote about having too much difficulty applying psychological self-help strategies and making the healthiest of lifestyle choices when the biological aspects associated with my mental health condition aren't being addressed in an effective way. For me, exercise, talk therapies, and other treatment interventions that don't have certain direct biological effects don't seem to put a noticeable enough dent in any of my symptoms -- not in my affective symptoms, and not in my schizophrenia-spectrum symptoms -- when my condition isn't being managed with interventions that effectively target the biological aspects of it more directly. And like you, when my symptoms become rather intense, I try to focus what little brain power I have on trying to eat whatever it is that I can eat instead of on making the healthiest dietary choices.
I do, however, think that when looking at what treatment interventions might be helpful for individuals with mental health conditions more globally, paying attention to the treatment interventions that others report being helpful and to what scientific studies have to say about the efficacy of various treatment approaches can help us to understand which treatment approaches people with mental health conditions as a whole might find beneficial, even if we ourselves don't necessarily find them to be so beneficial. When looking at the various treatment interventions that I listed in my earlier post to this thread, I think that there's a great deal of variability in the amount of evidence that there is to support the use of these interventions. Psychiatric medications, for instance, are clearly evidence-based treatments, as are some other interventions, such as talk therapies and exercise (at least for certain conditions). For the most part, I don't think that any of the interventions that I mentioned in my earlier post are cures, although it's possible that a few of them (like vitamin D3, if levels of the vitamin are low, and if low levels of the vitamin do contribute to clinical depression) might be. However, with respect to major depressive disorder, although I think it's likely that many patients with the disorder won't respond to some or even all of the treatments, I do think that some treatment interventions -- especially talk therapies and also exercise, to what's probably a lesser extent -- have demonstrated efficacy in scientific studies. Some of the other treatment interventions that I mentioned aren't so much what I'd call evidence-based practices for major depressive disorder, but I think that there are some individuals with the disorder who might find the interventions to be helpful.
Tomatheus
"Maybe someday
We'll figure all this out
We'll put an end to all our doubt
Try to find a way to just feel better now"- Rob Thomas
poster:Tomatheus
thread:1088191
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20160331/msgs/1088277.html