29
ANTI-DEPRESSANT LIFESTYLE: FLIGHT INTO HEALTH
29 April 2009
by
admin
Filed under
Anti Depressants-Sleeping Aid
The two main ways that all animals deal with stress are fight and flight. It is important to remember that a major way of managing stress is to leave it behind. To quit. The term ‘quitter’ has a negative connotation in our culture, but sometimes quitting is the smartest thing you can do. ‘Take your job and shove it’ are the words of a country and western song. Who has not considered such an approach at one time or another? Of course, it is generally unwise to quit one’s job impulsively or without due reflection. But there are times when, after careful consideration, the healthiest thing to do may be to leave an unpleasant job and find some other form of employment.
Epidemiological studies have shown that depression is increasing in frequency in young people. One possible reason for this increase may be the escalating stress placed on workers in modern organizations, where competition may be greater and job security and working conditions less appealing than in earlier decades. The modern workplace can be a very stressful and depersonalizing place. In many organizations, people are being expected to work harder for smaller rewards and with less control over their work environment. This can be extremely demoralizing. To address some of these problems, many people have attempted to gain greater control over their working environment by quitting their jobs and working as freelancers. Although in doing so they have sometimes had to take a cut in pay, many have found that the greater control they have over their lives more than compensates for this sacrifice. They enjoy setting their own hours, choosing their work and, best of all, not having a boss and a bureaucracy to answer to. If you are feeling disempowered at work, it may be worth considering whether an alternative situation will work better for you.
I want to sound one major cautionary note, however. If you are in the midst of a bad depression it is unwise to make any major life decision until the worst of the depression is behind you. When you are depressed everything seems bad, including your job. I have encountered people who have quit their jobs in the midst of a profound depression and then regretted it later after they feel better, at which time they may come to appreciate the more positive aspects of their former work. The best approach to this problem is to treat the depression medically, for example with St John’s Wort or some other anti-depressant, and after you are feeling a great deal better to consider the possibility that an unpleasant job situation may put you at risk of further depression or may hinder your complete recovery.
Just as it can be helpful to quit a bad job, so it can be healthy to leave a bad relationship. When this is a relationship of major significance, like a marriage, it is obviously worth spending a good deal of time and energy in making the decision as to whether to stay and try to work things out or to move on. Sometimes the most exciting relationships are also those that are most likely to trigger depressions. Dr Donald Klein described a condition that he called hysteroid dysphoria in which the affected person, usually but not invariably a woman, easily becomes enmeshed in a series of romantic relationships, each of which takes on the same pattern. Initially there is an intense feeling of falling in love, associated with enormous passion and elation. This is invariably followed by rejection or disappointment as the object of the woman’s affection either rejects her or no longer appears to be a prince on a white horse after all but rather, in the eyes of the angry and disappointed lover, the horse’s backside. A crashing depression ensues that is relieved only by the arrival of the next ‘prince’. While medications often help with such problems, making someone less vulnerable to being swept off her feet and then dropped unceremoniously, it is obviously critical to address the underlying issue as well, which is that the affected person is looking to her lover as a means of regulating her mood and, until she learns how to stop doing so, she is destined to suffer from recurrent depressions as a consequence. Psychotherapy and social support can help in this process.
Even more valuable than getting out of toxic relationships is learning how to avoid getting into them in the first place. Often the resolution involves entering a relationship with a different type of person, someone who is perhaps less thrilling than previous partners, but who is a more dependable and ultimately a more satisfying mate.
In the days when psychoanalysis was the dominant force in psychiatry, the idea of improving your mood by leaving a problem behind was often frowned upon and referred to somewhat pejoratively as a flight into health. The idea was that you needed to work on a problem to resolve it rather than to run away from it. Of course, it often makes sense to work on problems, as I have mentioned, but let us not underestimate the value of leaving a problem behind. It is after all a basic animal instinct to run from certain threats, and a principle of environmental medicine to recognize toxic influences and avoid them. There is no reason why that same good sense should not apply to the treatment of depression as well.
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