Psychotherapy over SSRIs
Dr. Rupali Jeswal
12/29/2008 3:35:21 PM
Psychotherapies over SSRIs have proven effective in all my clients who have battled with mild to moderate depression and reading "Eric Kandel on the year in Neuroscience" made me confident that I am on the right track in my beliefs, theories and practice.
Emotions are direct appraisal of our surroundings, what we perceive, feel and cognitively react to. Feelings and thoughts are subsets of our behavior, in a way they are topology of our perceptions. For an individual to function in life, which in itself is a systemic process, the individual relates to the stimulus which it relates to through emotional meaning (following our biological make-up—brain learns innately) and this emotional meaning is set into motion in the form of action through emotional support received by the individual which helps in self-expansion. This systemic process works either way negatively and positively.
A depressed state of a client can be caused by the weight of the emotional meaning to their situation and they get emotional support but in a non-constructive way, e.g the people around them do not detect something is bothering them, felt awkward to approach them and ask about the reason for their sadness, presumed everything was fine with the individual client and the clients go through self-expansion but in a negative way that is they further fuel their depression through emotional meaning and having no one around to coax them into revealing, leads them to self-expand in their depressive state. Organisms respond to environmental cues according to their emotional/motivational significance. In studies conducted it has been seen that pleasant and unpleasant stimuli cause the same changes in the brain. So basically our internal machinery works in harmony at all times, it’s the world-view of the person that instigates disharmony externally, leading to unpleasant feelings.
Brain sabotage occurs through visual images, when in 3/10th of a second a visual image passes from the eye to the brain and whether or not one wants to, the brain is structurally changed and memories are created. We grow new brain with each visual experience. So to change the world-view of the client it is very important to set the imagery code right to disentangle them from their state of “blues” or “Depression.”
This negative imagery code can develop in toddlers and children who haven't formed their own opinion and are functioning on interjected values of their caregivers. Their world-view changes watching their mothers/care-givers who are going through unpleasant situation, i.e. Depression. Children can decode instantly the images from their surroundings and modify their behavior. And in my view psychotherapies like interpersonal therapies compounded with solution focus can go a long way in curing mild to moderate depression without using SSRIs, as I have seen in my cases.
It's absolutely fantastic to read that there is now an independent, biological measure to see the effects of psychotherapies and to make science out of psychotherapy which should have been done long time ago and waiting 20 years seems like being on tenterhooks :) Operators in human design—feelings, thoughts, actions—react on each other or bring about changes in other mechanics within the body. The limbic space is the center and what better way to explore the limbic space of a client—through IPT.