As Irving Berlin put it, there are times when we just have to face the music of our personal problems and learn to dance anyway. Certainly, after extraordinary turmoil in the economy last year, just about everyone has something to worry about. But sometimes change is not always for the worse. The trick is to, first, adjust by facing our problems.
Let's face the music......
If your life is becoming too much to bear for you, your GP is a good first port of call.
It's shocking there's still a stigma about depression when one in seven adults is depressed enough to need treatment. But some people still worry about the implications of consulting the medical profession. This is a great shame because GPs can not only offer really useful help nowadays but can also point you in the direction of specialist therapists, trained specifically in the field of mental health.
Everyone feels down sometimes - it's a normal reaction to our everyday lives. But clinical depression is something quite different. Here are the key features to look out for: lack of pleasure in doing ordinary things, lack of energy, weight loss (or gain), sleep problems and suicidal thoughts.
The difficulty for GPs is that not every depressed patient walks in saying they're feeling depressed and that they want therapy. They might say they have no energy or focus maybe on a specific physical symptom or problem, which usually alerts the doctor to the need for more specific questions about the patient's mental health. Two pertinent starting questions might be:
- During the past month, have you often been bothered by feeling down, depressed or hopeless?
- During the past month, have you often been bothered by lack of interest or pleasure in doing things?
If you answer ‘yes' to both, it's likely you're depressed. Research suggests that out of 100 patients with depression, these two questions should pick up 96.
There's evidence that talking therapies can be very effective in treating depression, and unlike some anti-depressants, carry no side-effects! Whether you consult a therapist via Uticopa's vast catalogue of trained counsellors using their Find a Therapist tool or whether you go it alone, the key is to change your mental attitude to positivity.
Take a deep breath, think about the worst possible outcome and how you can survive, and then look forward with optimism. Think of how the current economic recession has eliminated many of those fat-cats. This is not just an act of justice, it has made life better for us all by reducing the price of luxury. The recession means relatively more affordable goods for the ordinary man in the street. Just think: before the recession, the fat-cat demand pushed up such things as the cost of good wine, restaurants and honeymoons far above the normal rate of inflation. Now they'll all become cheaper. And that's not all to make you feel good. There'll be fewer confident businessmen on cell phones in trains and restaurants and fewer arrogant bankers to make us feel small. There's even a belief that, as in wartime, our neighbours will become nicer.
....and dance
The good news is that people will now spend less time feeding their wallets and more time feeding their souls. Now we can all stop feeling depressed over that elusive affluence that continually evaded our reach, and learn to live positively in our own comfort zone.
Whatever your lifestyle, let's all dance to the tune of positivity.
Irving Berlin can at last smile.
