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Reply to "Managing depression/anxiety without meds - what helped you? "
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[quote=Anonymous]I also had some very difficult experiences with side affects and just never found a medication combination that successfully addressed my depression/anxiety without seriously impacting my personality or ability to work and maintain relationships. Also had to taper off meds before trying to get pregnant and have never gone back on. None of this is a perfect solution, and I do sometimes contemplating going back on medication. But I would say this manages my mental health about 85-90% of the time: - Routines (making my bed everyday, meal planning, having a planner and sticking to it) - Therapy and journaling. I don't go to therapy all the time, but will do a 12-week stint with my therapist when I feel a depressive episode coming on. I also journal a lot to practice what I work on in therapy, and find the practice of observing my depression and anxiety and recording it helps to mitigate it's effects. This is probably the single biggest "breakthrough" I've had in treatment -- that it is possible to detach from my depressive and anxious thought patterns by simply observing them. - Caffeine, but controlled intake. I don't do highly caffeinated sources, but one caffeinated tea in the morning and a Coke in the afternoon, pretty much every day, helps modulate my moods which makes it much easier for me to tell the difference between my depression/anxiety symptoms and ordinary mood fluctuation. - Online message boards like this one. You have to find the right ones and be careful about how you use them, but I have found them particularly helpful for talking through CBT or DBT methods that can help, or just talking through a particularly intense anxiety attack or depressive episode (i.e. if I wake up at 2am with intense anxiety, it can help to put a post on a message board for people who struggle with anxiety, just describing what's happening and asking for support). It genuinely helps me to feel less alone and has also helped me identify therapeutic methods that have helped me. I do still have that 10-15% of the time where it does not feel well controlled. My therapist and I have been talking recently about how to create a kind of "emergency kit" for those times so that I know what to do. The good news is that it's mostly just anxiety, because they generally don't last long enough to qualify for a true depression event. I find anxiety more frightening but also more responsive to stuff like mindfulness training and meditation. And if I can control and mitigate the anxiety, the depression is less likely to set in. I hope this is helpful.[/quote]
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