Solving Depression

[MagicalMrsMistoffelees]

Please forgive my ignorance here!!

If I understand correctly, depression is often caused by chemical imbalances in the brain and this can be solved by taking antidepressants.

But what if the depression I caused by external factors? Like a difficult childhood that's only just starting to come to the surface in your late thirties? Antidepressants wouldn't help with that would they because the depression is caused by an actual event rather than chemical imbalances. What would work? Is counselling the best thing?

Thank you for any advice / insight and, again, sorry if I've got this all wrong - it's quite new to me!

Antidepressants can help. They're not always just for depression - some can be used for OCD, anxiety, social phobia and post traumatic stress disorder. No it's not going to make what happened go away but it can help you to cope better with certain situations and not dwell on things an unhealthy amount.

I've had reactive depression a few times - anti-depressants have definitely helped me but I think I have either underlying depression or a depressive personality to start with.

Counselling though is probably the first point of call but if you find yourself moping around in bed all day, crying a lot of the time, or feeling apathetic about life then I would give antidepressants serious thought. If however, you've never had any kind of depression before and it's not seriously impacting your everyday life then I think counselling alone would be a good idea and see how you get on.

It's circular - your thoughts, beliefs and emotions alter your brain chemistry. And your brain chemistry affects your thoughts, beliefs and emotions.

From what I've read depression is a mixture of inherited tendencies plus life experiences. It's not either/or with counselling and ADs - you might find both useful, or one or the other.

Thank you so much for these replies. Both very useful for me to start to
understand what is going on. It's so hard to get my head around.