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What’s Stopping You from Seeing a Doctor About Depression?

Common reasons people avoid treatment and expert advice on how to get past them.

By Mary Anne Dunkin

Are you struggling with depression? Are you getting treatment for it? If not, you’re not alone. About two-thirds of people with major depression never seek appropriate treatment, and the consequences can be devastating: personal suffering, missed work, broken marriages, health problems and, in the worst cases, death.

Yoga: Not Just an Exercise

When Jenny Smith was 41 years old, her mental illness became so severe that she could barely walk or speak. After days of feeling wonderful one moment and hallucinating that spiders and bugs were crawling on her skin the next, she landed in the hospital.

Depression: Finding a Doctor or Therapist

To get better, you need expert help. Many people with depression have a team working with them. This might include your regular health care provider, a psychologist or therapist, and a psychiatrist or psychiatric nurse.

In fact, studies show that combination treatment – antidepressants and talk therapy – is the most effective way to treat depression. But getting the right people may seem intimidating. Here are some answers to common questions about finding a doctor and psychologist or therapist. Below these questions, you’ll find a list of tips for how to prepare for your first appointment,

You Can Start Feeling Better: 8 Important Things to Do About Depression

Better Sleep

Depression can rob you of rest by making it hard to fall asleep or by waking you up too soon. That leaves you dragging the next day. And more important, lack of sleep can make depression more severe. Treatment for depression can help improve sleep.

Better Love Life

Some antidepressants may dampen the libido. But often, the bigger roadblock to a happy love life is depression itself. One study showed that 70% of people with depression reported a loss of sexual interest while not taking medicine. Treatment may help restore your self-confidence and strengthen your emotional connection with your partner.

Common Causes of Depression

If you're depressed, it might not be easy to figure out why. In most cases, depression doesn't have a single cause. Instead, it results from a mix of things -- your genes, events in your past, your current circumstances, and other factors.

Here are a few of the things that can play a role in causing depression.

• Biology. We still don't know exactly what happens in the brain when people become depressed. But studies show that certain parts of the brain don't seem to be working normally. Depression might also be affected by changes in the levels of certain chemicals in the brain, called neurotransmitters.

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A Blood Test for Depression?

ScienceDaily (July 23, 2010) — Blood tests have been extremely important tools aiding doctors in making medical diagnoses and in guiding the treatment of many diseases. However, psychiatry is one area of medicine where there are few diagnostic blood tests.

New scientific fields may someday generate blood tests that can be used for these purposes. Some of the areas under increasingly intensive study are genetics, the study of variations in the genes (DNA) that can be extracted from blood cells, and genomics like proteomics, the measurement of the levels of specific proteins in the blood, and gene expression profiling, which measures the levels of RNA produced from DNA as an indication of the level of the "activity" of particular genes.

Why Does Everything Look Gray When You Feel Blue?

ScienceDaily (July 20, 2010) — Regardless of culture, language, era, or individual artist, the arts consistently depict depression using darkness. Scientific findings now lend empirical support to this representation of depression that everything looks gray when you feel blue.

Researchers at the University of Freiburg in Germany showed previously that people with depression have difficulty detecting black-and-white contrast differences.