Depression
Depression Care
When feelings of sadness, emptiness, self-reproach and combined with other signs of depression and lasting continually for two weeks or longer, and are intense enough to disrupt most aspects of your life, then you may be suffering from a minor to a major depression.
A set of questions you might ask yourself are:
1. Do you suffer from a loss of energy and feelings of fatigue?
2. Do you have recurrent thoughts of death or suicide?
3. Have you lost your appetite or begun to overeat, or experience rapid weight loss or gain?
4. Do you feel yourself withdrawing from normal activities and involvement, or have you had a noticeable decrease in your sex drive?
5. Do you find it unusually hard to think or concentrate?
6. Are you restless, irritable, or overly active or inactive?
7. Do you trouble falling or staying asleep?
8. Do you have feelings of hopelessness, worthlessness or inappropriate guilt?
If you answered, “Yes” to at least five of the eight questions, and have two week stretches of those experiences, you may have a minor to major depression.
If you have been suffering from at least five of the following symptoms for most of the day, for more days than not and for at least two years, you may have more than major depression.
1. Unusual mood is dominated by dejection, gloominess, cheerlessness, joylessness, unhappiness.
2, Self-concept centers around beliefs of inadequacy, worthlessness, hopelessness and low self-esteem.
3. Is critical, blaming and derogatory towards self.
4. Is brooding and given to worry.
5. Is negative, critical and judgmental towards others.
6. Is pessimistic.
7. Is prone to feeling guilty or remorseful.
8. Poor appetite or overeating.
9. Difficulty sleeping or having trouble getting out of bed.
10. Low energy or fatigue.
11. Poor concentration or difficulty making decisions.
DON’t give up. I can help because I will design a program for you that takes your situation/needs/experiences into consideration and helps you to feel in control again. I also recommend that you visit your physician to discuss the option of medication to help relieve the symptoms until the reason for the depression can be discovered and worked through.
Virginia Satir once said. “Life is life. It is how you cope with it that counts…and we have the most powerful ingredient that exists in the world: the power to grow”
I use a large tool box of therapies with a strong basis in the Satir modality, that will help you to learn to cope with what life hands out so you can ‘Live Life and Love It” either again or for the first time! Check out
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virginia_Satir
Check out the following resources:
The following website is full of good resources to inform and empower people to heal from the life robbing effects of depression:
http://www.depression-help-for-you.com/diet-and-depression-references.html
Some tips to help decrease and eliminate depression
- 1. Good nutrition: http://www.beyonddiet.com/BD/Landing?hop=watertt&food=avocado
Foods to avoid:
– Soy products
– Processed foods
– Hydrogenated fats (often found in margarine)
– Aspartame
Foods to eat:
– Vitamins, which are antioxidents
– Vitamin B12
– The amino acid, tryptophan which is found in many protein foods
– Minerals found in fresh and steamed vegetables
– Polyunsaturated fatty acids
– Folate
– Butter is preferable over margarine
- 2. Reduce Cholesterol:
Please note that the following nformation on chelation therapy is not promoted by Barbara, but it is an option that many people believe helps to elevate a person’s mood.
“The Truth”
An article and advertisement
by:Dr Linus Pauling & Dr Matthias Rath
Cholesterol is one of the most maligned substances in history (with the possible exception of plutonium, which didn’t ask to be made into bombs! :0)
What is abundantly clear, though, to those who are willing to look with anything more than a fleeting glance at official statistics is that cholesterol is not the “axis of evil” it has been made out to be my the medical, and more importantly, the hydrogenated oil establishment.
Cholesterol is a naturally-occurring fat which is fundamentally required for good health. It is the precursor to both the male hormone testosterone and the female hormone estrogen, which cannot be made without it. In addition, it performs other vital functions in the body, but more of that later.
Contrary to popular belief, in most people, the levels of cholesterol found in the blood have little or nothing to do with fats consumed in the diet. Cholesterol is manufactured in the liver in the amounts required by the body to perform its various functions. It therefore follows that either reducing the amount of fat in the diet or taking pills to reduce cholesterol is absolutely pointless.
The main reason cited for the desirability of reducing blood cholesterol is the massive increase in ischemic heart disease (IHD) seen during the 20th century. IHD, the main consequence of which is angina and myocardial infarction (MI) was virtually unknown at the beginning of the 1900s. In fact, one well-known Doctor who practised for many years from the mid-1920’s is quoted as saying that he didn’t see a single case of MI for the first 7 years of his practice.
Subsequent examination of those who died of MI showed that their arteries had been “clogged up” with fatty deposits that were high in cholesterol. The connection between cholesterol and IHD was made and that was that. Ever since, Doctors have been trying to invent ways to reduce blood cholesterol levels, but have not stopped to consider why they were elevated in the first place! If they had, they might have been surprised. In order to explain, we need to examine the physiology of blood vessels, particularly arteries.
Construction of arteries: Arteries are the large, elastic blood vessels which carry blood away from the heart, both to the lungs (deoxygenated blood) and to the rest of the body (oxygenated blood). They are composed of three layers, whose names are not relevant to this discussion, but which, in varying degree are made up of various structural components, the most important of which is collagen – a soft, pliable, elastic substance, which allows the artery to stretch and contract under the control of muscle systems.
Like all other cells in the body, the artery cells are constantly under attack from free radicals http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/antioxidants.html and other cell-damaging forces and are in a continual state or replacement and repair. As a consequence, they need a constant supply of new collagen to replace the damaged cells, so as not to “spring a leak”. Collagen is, itself, constructed of a number of components, not least Vitamin C.
When there is insufficient Vitamin C in the body, new collagen cannot be formed to repair the damaged artery cells. this causes a problem for the body, which does not plan for future problems, but is only interested is surviving the “here and now”. It therefore has to find something else to repair the damage and uses what could be referred to as the body’s “band-aid”, namely cholesterol. Molecules of cholesterol actually bind to the damaged sites, preventing blood loss and its disastrous consequences.
Ischemic Heart Disease: As time goes on, this process repeats itself (in the absence of Vitamin C) and gradually the arteries become clogged with cholesterol “bandages”, restricting the blood flow until something blocks the remaining space , causing ischemia (lack of blood flow) and infarction (cell-death due to oxygen “starvation”).
Hence cholesterol is a sign of a problem, not the cause of the problem – and the problem is vitamin C, or, more specifically, lack of it! this led the only man who has ever won two Nobel prizes, scientist Dr Linus Pauling to suggest that heart disease was in fact chronic scurvy and could be treated with vitamin C. Pauling was ridiculed by the medical establishment, which clung to it’s shoddy science and did nothing to test his hypothesis. Incidentally, the symptoms of acute scurvy (that is a total lack of vitamin C) are…..leaky blood vessels, leading to massive hemorrhage!
Others were not so ignorant.
Treatment of IHD: Pauling and his colleague, Dr Matthias Rath, spent many years examining this situation. They found that the problem of IHD (and high cholesterol) was one that was specific to a very small group of mammals, man included, and the one thing that these animals had in common, which differed from ALL other animals was that they could not make their own vitamin C. EVERY single other animal in the whole planet makes its own vitamin C in the liver. Man and the other few animals which suffer from IHD do not!
The result is known as chelation therapy – the only known method of reversing IHD, and one that is almost totally ignored by modern medicine in favour of drugs which do nothing but control the symptoms http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/modern-medicine.html of the problem.
Others have suggested that, if the problem is a chronic lack of vitamin C, perhaps ischemic heart disease can be prevented by increasing vitamin C consumption. The only practical method of doing this is by supplementation, and adherents take anything from 3g (3,000mg) to 12g (12,000mg) of Vitamin C per day – hundreds of times the “recommended daily allowance” used by most Governments of 90mg/day..
The answer of the medical establishment was somewhat different. they decided the best thing to be would be to invent cholesterol-lowering drugs to reduce the amount of cholesterol circulating in the blood. According to the physiology above, this will have disastrous effects, as the body will not be able to perform its normal healing processes. Scientific studies are now showing that cholesterol-lowering drugs have serious long-term effects which bear out this hypothesis.
What should you do if you have “high-cholesterol”
The decision is yours.
Ask your Doctor about chelation therapy or “Pauling therapy“. Bear in mind that during his 7 years training, it is likely your physician has had no more than 1 or maybe 2 HOURS of training on nutrition is it any wonder w are so reliant on pharmaceuticals?
For a medical view on the dangers of cholesterol-lowering drugs, visit Dr Mercola’s website.
If you plan to increase your vitamin C intake, inform your Doctor and make sure you read the section on Vitamins http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/vitamins.html to ensure you know which minerals http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/minerals.html and trace elements http://www.natural-health-information-entre.com/trace-elements.html are necessary to absorb vitamin C.
Back from cholesterol to fats http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/fats.html
Further reading
Transforming Your Health In 90 Days Or Less! http://www.natural-health-information-centre.com/transforming-your-health-in-90-days-or-less.html
