Over the last few days, I have posted several blogs that deal with the place of values in our lives. I have talked about how naming and giving expression to our values can help with anxiety, depression, and relationships. For example, living without a sense of purpose and meaning is true for lots of people with depression. You may want to put a lot of energy into figuring out where the depression comes from and come up with strategies to avoid it or at least control it. But it is just as important to consider what you would doing, how would you be living and ordering your life if the depression were not there, or if you decided not to spend all your energy controlling it. The answers to that question would be an expression of your values.

All these efforts to overcome depression are about controlling or managing your thoughts and feelings. You try to control by avoiding or pushing them away. You try to control by identifying and replacing with different ones. You try to control by understanding them which will lead to more positive thoughts and feelings. But here’s the thing.  Let’s say I run into you in ten years and ask you how are doing with your depression.  My guess is that you don’t want your answer to be: Well, for the most part I am managing and controlling it and getting through life.  You want to be able to speak about how your life has a sense of meaning and vitality. 

When people come to me for depression treatment, many of them are taking an antidepressant medication prescribed by a psychiatrist or a primary care physician. Often I will have people ask me whether they should take one of these medications. Will it help with my depression? Will it make it go away?

If you go to my specialty page on Depression Treatment, you will read about an approach to dealing with depression that does not focus on gaining control of and eliminating the thoughts and feelings of depression. You will learn how depression does not mean that there is something wrong with you; it is not a problem that you have to fix. Instead, depression means that there are some ways of thinking and acting that are not working for you; they are working against how you want to live your life.