A New Approach For Treating Depression

The one thing I hate more than "self-help advice" is when I hear myself giving it to others. But sometimes it just seems important, so here goes...

I was recently talking to a person about their long history of depression. They had suffered from depressive episodes for many years and had contemplated suicide along the way. Medication of varying sorts had been prescribed at various points by various doctors. Sometimes the pills worked and made a bit of a difference and sometimes they made things ten times worse, but nothing had ever really helped. The person that was talking to me feared that the episodes would just get worse and worse until they were unable to cope.

As well as depression the person was also aware that their life was gradually getting smaller and smaller; friends had drifted away and the few family members they had kept in contact with had also moved away. They spent most of their spare time alone, and as they were self-employed only had their own company at work as well. It sounded a very bleak existence with little human contact.

The longer they talked the louder the voice in my head kept repeating the name "Harry Stack Sullivan". It wasn't a real voice in my head (although it would have been highly appropriate name to hear as amongst other things Harry Stack Sullivan achieved ground breaking work understanding Schizophrenia).

The reason I kept thinking of, who I like to refer to as "The Great Man", was because of his revolutionary view of depression and other mental health related issues. The Great Man was the first to suggest that mental health was intrinsically linked to our interpersonal relationships. That depression, for example, was not a product of a faulty personality or a mysterious clinical syndrome, or as he so poetically put it, the product of "unburied shards of a tragic childhood", but simply a product of something going wrong, or having gone wrong, with our interpersonal relationships.

It's a fairly radical theory now, let alone when he first published it back in the first part of the last century. It's certainly an important idea that is still covered in many psychology degree programs around the world.

As the person who was talking to me recounted their life it became impossible to distinguish between their feelings of depression and their acute loneliness and isolation. The more they talked the more it became apparent that both issues were inter-twined. The more impoverished the interpersonal relationships became the more they became depressed, until it became a vicious circle both feeding from each other.

Often The Great Man's theories do not transpose easily into real life but this could have come straight from one of his text books. I'm also happy to report that the person I refer to has made some important changes and is slowly but surely reconstructing their life to minimize the recurrence of depression.

So, in the spirit of "self-help advice", which, bear in mind I hate, I do think it worth having a look at the quality of our relationships next time we are feeling down and depressed. It sounds obvious, but according to The Great Man it is literally at the root of all evil.