Depression treatment can be supported with hypnosis and hypnotherapy. Hypnosis for depression may not be the first thing you think of, and with some forms of depression, it is quite normal. For example, if someone is suicidal due to depression, psychiatric help is often sought in the form of medication that allows life to return to something more positive. For some, that is enough, while others do not want to need that little pill because of the side effects, and then it is important to find out why someone ended up in such a depression and to give the depressed person tools to make their life optimal. Hypnosis can provide support in the treatment of depression. Therefore, in this article I will discuss depression, its treatments and the role hypnosis can give in it
What is depression?
Everyone has dips from time to time in response to a life event, such as after a death or after personal problems that may have caused a dip in your self-esteem. These feelings usually pass.
If you are dejected out of the blue, or yet due to an event, and feel that you are worthless and helpless for weeks and even months at a time, then depression may be present. Especially if those feelings interfere with your daily functioning.
Symptoms of depression include:
- A depressed mood during much of the day, especially in the morning.
- Not being able to sleep or just sleeping too much.
- Concentration problems.
- Having difficulty making choices.
- No interest in doing things that are "fun" and not liking those things when you do them.
- Thoughts of death and suicide.
- Feeling restless or feeling like everything is going slowly.
- Weight changes (either losing a lot of weight or gaining a lot of weight).
Depression is often also a manifestation of disruption of the neurotransmitter serotonin. For example, your brain may not be producing enough serotonin to make you feel unhappy.
In the Netherlands, nearly 20% of people experience symptoms of depression in their lifetime - that's almost 1 in 5 people! Per year just over 5% of people in the Netherlands suffer from depression, that is 1 in 20 people. So depression is a big problem.
Fortunately, there are multiple ways besides antidepressants to treat depression.
Depression treatment: cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)
Cognitive behavioral therapy assumes that your mood is determined by your thoughts. Negative thinking affects your mood and self-esteem. Therapists who provide cognitive behavioral therapy want to help patients with depression return to more positive thinking.
The therapist then first determines with the depressed person what thought patterns they have that need to be interrupted. Together with the therapist, goals are devised to be achieved by breaking those thought patterns.
In addition, you are often given homework to recognize moments when a thought pattern begins.
There are several techniques that can be applied during a session, such as Socratic questions, role-playing, visualizations and behavioral experiments.
Does hypnosis help with depression? CBT and hypnosis
If you read my blogs more often, you may have noticed that CBT and hypnotherapy have an overlap of visualizations and wanting to change thoughts, but which I call beliefs. Multiple studies on anxiety and stress have shown that hypnosis in support of CBT has a reinforcing effect on the outcomes of therapy.
So in this case, the state of hypnosis is meant during therapy. So you first bring the patient into hypnosis and during hypnosis you perform some techniques, such as Socratic questions and visualizations.
Depression: Hypnotherapy instead of CBT
In fact, research has shown that cognitive hypnotherapy works better against depression than CBT without hypnosis(2). A study involving 84 people who received cognitive hypnotherapy for 16 weeks and people who received CBT for 16 weeks found that while both groups suffered less from depression, the cognitive hypnotherapy had better results and those results were still better after six months and one year than those who had only cognitive behavioral therapy.
Depression Treatment: Movement
People who exercise a lot are probably familiar with the "runner's high" this is because exercise enhances the production of serotonin. Regular exercise is therefore also often recommended to address depression. Research shows that exercise is a good addition to taking antidepressants. In this study, 156 adults with major depression did aerobics in particular, and after four months the results were improved for all, with and without medication. However, after 10 months, those without medication were not as well off as those with medication(3).
There was still improvement over depression at the beginning of the study, though.
Sports and hypnosis
Do you shudder at the thought of exercising? Then hypnotherapy can help you exercise anyway. Hypnotherapy can improve your motivation to exercise. The beliefs you have about exercise are changed by hypnotherapy in such a way that it is attractive to exercise. This can be done through suggestions, visualizations of your goals and other techniques.
Through self-hypnosis, you can maintain that motivation to exercise. For example, if you have a negative outlook on being able to perform exercises, you can repeat suggestions that make it clear that it is more important to do something than to do it perfectly.
For example, a friend of mine took steps with a group class and the entire class was better than her. By keeping repeating to herself that at least she is moving and that everyone is there to move and not to run the best over that step she could just finish the class.
Depression treatment: interpersonal psychotherapy (ITP)
ITP is a short-term treatment for depression that appears to be especially effective with adolescents and children and mild depression. The goal is not to eliminate personal problems that can cause depression, but to show how depression can affect interpersonal relationships. The therapy shows how depression symptoms affect relationships with friends, family and acquaintances. The goal of ITP is to reduce symptoms and show the patient the benefit of "normal" behavior(4).
Therefore, patients' symptoms are identified and social functioning is assessed. The therapist then uses the following techniques to find a solution:
- The therapist offers insights into situations the patient did not yet see.
- Provides a listening ear where others do not.
- Role Play.
- Communication Analysis.
- Acceptance of feelings.
Hypnosis for depression: Regression instead of ITP
What I very much miss with the ITP is addressing personal issues that may have led to the depression. Through regression during hypnosis, you can find out if and when a problem arose that led to the depression.
Then you can use various hypnotherapies to change the way the patient views and deals with that trauma that can reduce depressive symptoms. For example, depression may be related to relational problems and childhood traumas that you do not initially associate with the depression.
Depression treatment: neuro linguistic programming (NLP)
Neuro linguistic programming assumes that everyone has their own view of how the world works. This partly determines our behavior. In addition, NLP also distinguishes between the conscious and subconscious. NLP also uses modeling to teach patients new things.
One exercise, for example, is mirroring the therapist.
Another exercise is building your own identity during or after overcoming depression. You then often need to reinvent yourself because you have lived under a heavy cloud of negative energy for so long. This can be done by recalling memories and putting them back in a good order and assigning good values or beliefs to them. A case study shows that this can help overcome depression(5).
Supporting NLP with hypnosis
By applying hypnosis in an NLP therapy, it is easier to uncover and correct subconscious beliefs that define the person's view of the world if they do not help with depression. There is also an overlap with the mirror exercise that is also often applied in hypnotherapy(5).
Sometimes it is difficult to give your memories a good spin. Hypnotherapy can provide support when this is difficult for the patient.
In short:
The most well-known therapeutic treatment for depression, cognitive behavioral therapy, can be reinforced with hypnosis or even completely replaced with cognitive hypnotherapy. These two treatments have strong overlaps which may explain the results.
NLP and hypnosis also have many overlaps in terms of the different view people can have of the world.
In addition, hypnosis can help complement other therapies and increase motivation to exercise, which also works against depression.
Want to learn more about how to help people with depression by applying hypnosis during treatments? Then check out the Hypnosis Institute Netherlands' events and trainings.
Sources:
2. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207140601177897
4. http://www.webmd.com/depression/guide/interpersonal-therapy-for-depression
5. http://gerontologist.oxfordjournals.org/content/33/2/265.short
