Stress and Depression.
What Is Stress?
Stress is a feeling that’s created when we react to particular events. It’s the body’s way of rising to a challenge and preparing to meet a tough situation with focus, strength, stamina, and heightened alertness.
Stress can occur as a result of pressure. A job or report you are working on at work is not going right. This can often cause stress. Stress can often be fairly easily dealt with. Mostly you will recognise the cause. The work situation can be dealt with by just walking away from your place of work for a short break, go and make a coffee before re-attempting that task. Often that would be all that is needed. Talking can also help with stress.
The most natural form of stress coping is relaxation, as a person cannot be both stressed and relaxed at the same time. The condition of relaxation is unspecific, it is not really important how one relaxes but that one relaxes.
Planned relaxation calms anxiety and helps your body and mind recover from everyday rush and stress. Music, a long soak in the bath, or a walk in the park do the trick for some people, but for others it’s not so easy. If you feel you need help with learning to relax, try a relaxation or meditation class. Your GP and local library will have information about these.
A useful relaxation technique:
• Choose a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.
• Before you start, do a few gentle stretching exercises to relieve muscular tension. A warm soak in the bath can also help to relax you.
• Make yourself comfortable, either sitting or lying down.
• Start to breathe slowly and deeply, in a calm and effortless way.
• Gently tense, then relax, each part of your body, starting with your feet and working your way up to your face and head.
• As you focus on each area, think of warmth, heaviness and relaxation.
• Push any distracting thoughts to the back of your mind; imagine them floating away.
• Don’t try to relax; simply let go of the tension in your muscles and allow them to become relaxed.
• Let your mind go empty. Some people find it helpful to visualise a calm, beautiful place such as a garden or meadow.
• Stay like this for about 20 minutes, then take some deep breaths and open your eyes, but stay sitting or lying for a few moments before you get up.
What is Depression?
Depression is far more serious. It builds up gradually, possibly over several years. It is much more difficult to deal with yourself.
You feel severe despondency and dejection, accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and inadequacy. It is a condition of mental disturbance, typically with lack of energy and difficulty in maintaining concentration or interest in life.
The sufferer may not even know of the cause or when it first started.
If you are affected by depression, you are not ‘just’ sad or upset. You have an illness which means that intense feeling of persistent sadness, helplessness and hopelessness are accompanied by physical effects such as sleeplessness, a loss of energy, or physical aches and pains.
Sometimes people may not realise how depressed they are, especially if they have been feeling the same for a long time, if they have been trying to cope with their depression by keeping themselves busy, or if their depressive symptoms are more physical than emotional.
Whether you are stressed or depressed, to treat, the cause needs to be found and the patient be shown that there is light at the end of the tunnel.
Counselling can be a valuable and often desirable tool in dealing with stress and depression. Depression can and does lead to suicide if not faced and dealt with. Talking through your problems is good.
Can stress lead to depression? We look at the link that exists between the two.
Stress can be good for you. It keeps you alert, motivated and primed to respond to danger. As anyone who has faced a work deadline or competed in a sport knows, stress mobilizes the body to respond, improving performance. In the far distant past, when man was the hunter and was also the hunted by predators, stress triggered the fight or flight reflex (the body's stress/ response mechanism). Even though we now get our food from supermarkets, we still have that instinct.
Yet too much stress or chronic stress may lead to major depression in susceptible people.
A little stress is good for you but too much is bad. Even positive events, such as getting married or beginning a new job, can be stressful and may lead to an episode of major depression. Yet about 10% of people suffer from depression without the trigger of a stressful event.
The Stress/Depression Connection:
Stress, whether chronic, such as being a full time carer of a parent or loved one, or acute, such as losing a job or the death of a loved one, can lead to major depression in susceptible people. Both types of stress lead to over-activity of the body's stress/ response mechanism.
Sustained or chronic stress, in particular, leads to elevated hormones such as cortisol, the "stress hormone," and reduced serotonin and other neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine, which has been linked to depression. When these chemical systems are working normally, they regulate biological processes like sleep, appetite, energy, and sex drive, and permit expression of normal moods and emotions.
When the stress response fails to shut off and reset after a difficult situation has passed, it can lead to depression in susceptible people. This can show as, for example, ‘comfort eating’ leading to obesity.
No one in life escapes event-related stress, such as death of a loved one, a job loss, divorce, a natural disaster such as an earthquake, or even a dramatic dip in your income. A layoff , an acute stressor, may lead to chronic stress if a job search is prolonged.
Loss of any type is a major risk factor for depression. Grieving is considered a normal, healthy, response to loss, but if it goes on for too long it can trigger a depression. A serious illness, including depression itself, is considered a chronic stressor.
Stress and Depression: Lifestyle Factors
The connection between stress and depression is complex and circular. People who are stressed often neglect healthy lifestyle practices. They may smoke, drink more than normal, and neglect regular exercise. "Stress, or being stressed out, leads to behaviours and patterns that in turn can lead to a chronic stress burden and increase the risk of major depression. Losing a job is not only a blow to self-esteem, but it results in the loss of social contacts that would normally buffer against depression. You feel very much alone.
Interestingly, many of the changes in the brain during an episode of depression resemble the effects of severe, prolonged, stress.
Transsexuals.
When we reach the stage where we really need and ask for help, we need that help quickly, not in three, six even as long as 18 months. Usually our depression has reached a stage where we are physically and mentally suffering, many of us feel suicidal. This is often why we go for help usually as a last resort.
I know that I certainly did; depression showed itself in my comfort eating and drinking and suffering health. I became clinically obese and was becoming a candidate for a heart attack; I couldn’t even climb a flight of stairs without becoming breathless and my heart pounding. It was becoming a case of do or die. In my case self prescribing helped and gave me the breathing space to take stock and plan my way forward. Positive action is a powerful tool. I spent most of my Schooling and working life, just coping. I certainly never achieved my full potential.
The hormones would never have been enough on their own, only fully re-assigning and progressing to the reassignment surgery would. But for me was a good start, however, I still really needed help. If I had not been in a position to self prescribe, I do not know what I would have done or what would have happened to me. It is quite expensive so not an option for some.
Depression is a terrible affliction; it is painful, you can see no way out of it and the depressions get worse over the years. I suppose that I had been suppressing my Transsexualism for so long that I was actually scared of asking for help.
The only advantage we have is that we know what is causing our depression, (even though that for many years we have ignored it) but not what to do about it; this makes it no easier. In my case I suppose that I could have gone to my GP but their solution seems to be a handful of pills; this is masking the condition and not dealing with the problem. The problem must eventually be faced. Self medicating with female hormones, was my preferred solution.
Back then there was little information available and no obvious help.
When you eventually pluck up the courage and go to see your GP, if you are lucky and have one that wants to help, though he is unlikely to understand Transsexualism, he will or should refer you to the Mental Health Unit of your local Health Authority, where the Psychiatrist will assess you and refer you back to your GP with a letter of referral to the local Gender Clinic, which could take twelve months plus before you get a gender clinic appointment.
As far as the MHU in concerned, they have done their job and no further help or care is provided. This is wrong. They have a responsibility to also diagnose and should provide Counselling to deal with that depression. Anti-depressants may be appropriate as part of that treatment but not relied on solely and only short term.
I saw the Psychiatrist at our local MHU, the end of 2004 and I know that, nine years later, things are still the same.
Will things change? I do hope so but am not confident. GP’s need to be more pro-active and make sure that the MHU carries it forward and does their job. Otherwise what good are they? At the moment, the MHU appear to be failing us.
