Key Factors in Lasting Help for Depression: #1 – Depth
“Where can I find lasting help for depression?” This is a question on the minds of many.
It is a matter of great importance for those who are active in their seeking to obtain help for depression. Individuals don’t want to receive help that will make a difference just in the short term. They are seeking help for depression that is going to make a fundamental change through the course of their lives.
Lasting Benefit
Studies of groups are certainly not the last word in the search for individual healing and wholeness. Neither can any one study’s results be seen as definitive. Nonetheless, a recent study by Prof. Dorothea Huber of the Technische Universität München and her colleagues on the benefits of help for depression is quite striking. That study showed that the benefits from psychodynamic case studies persisted and were experienced 3 or more years out from the time of the therapy.
Psychodynamic therapy, also known as /a-midlife-transition, refers to those forms of therapy that concern themselves with the unconscious mind of the individual and its processes–what’s going on deep in the mind of the individual. And that’s part of the reason why, for many individuals, the benefits from psychodynamic therapy persist.
A Shift at a Fundamental Level
In forms of /a-midlife-transition like Jungian therapy, there is an emphasis in focusing on what is going on in the individual at quite a deep level. In this kind of approach, a great deal rests on what may be going on at the deepest levels of the individual, which are often in the unconscious mind.
In the Jungian approach in particular, the individual, and the unique characteristics of his or her life are given particular significance. In the following video, I read a passage from Jungian analyst June Singer that expresses this with great clarity:
Depression and the Unconscious Self
For the /a-midlife-transition, help for depression is inextricably bound up with a person’s unique individuality and the reality of the unconscious mind. From this perspective, depression is fundamentally related to the ways in which an individual’s vitality and spontaneity become locked inside them, as a result of the various wounds that are experienced in life, and also as a result of dilemmas in the present that may appear as insoluble to the person from a conscious perspective. As James Hollis states,
Depression can feel like a well with no bottom, but from a Jungian perspective
intrapsychic depression is a well with a bottom,
although we may have to dive very deeply to find it.
Diving Deep
From a Jungian perspective, lasting help for depression is to be found in the inward journey, and in bringing into contact with consciousness those energies within us which, for whatever reason, have become walled off. Individual case studies from a depth perspective can often be a powerful factor in the recovery of the natural and instinctive self, and in opening up an understanding of the meaning of my depression. This type of change can be a fundamental element in lasting help for depression.
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