Depression is a serious illness, and it has been shown to affect no less than 6% of any sample population (America for example) at any given period. This means that many people in any given population, especially in the more industrialized countries, will be taking prescription drugs like Paxil or Prozac. These drugs have been out for many years now, even decades, and their production increased every year, yet there is also a steady increase in the number of depressed people in the U.S. and throughout the world. One can only infer from these facts that synthetic prescription medications for depression are not curing people of depression.
What's more, most antidepressants have very serious, sometimes even fatal, side effects or withdrawal effects. Many studies have shown that large percentages of people will experience at least one side effect from any given depression medication, and one recent study found the average side effect rate for the most effective depressions medications to be around 60%, or 6 in 10 people. Perhaps most daunting when taking any depression medication is the chance that you may be one of those rare people who suffer serious side effects like suicidal thoughts or kidney failure.
The combination of the above two factors for depressed people taking prescription medications has led many of them to seek healing from natural cures, and the demand for natural depression remedies continues to grow. Many natural methods for treating depression involve simple common sense and have been proven to work at least to some degree, most of which are not supplements or organic compounds. These include Bright Light Therapy, daily exercise, yoga, meditation, prayer or other spiritual exercises, building better relationships with the people around us and creating new and good relationships, and spending time in Nature everyday or as much as possible.
There are also many proven and well-known natural supplements that those with depression can use. These include St. John's Wort, 5 HTP, any of the Omega-3 fatty acids, amino acid compounds of several types, DHEA, SAMe, and a variety of herbs, including ginseng, ginko biloba, and Kava Kava. The two best natural supplements with the most research proving their effectiveness are St. John's Wort and 5HTP, both of which anyone should be able to fund at your local health food store, and which you should start out with when searching for natural depression supplements.
Depression is now known to affect the mind, body, and even the spirit, not just the mind as originally thought, so with whatever natural treatments you find, make sure that you have at least one treatment each for the mind, body, and spirit, for example Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (mind), exercise (body), and meditation (spirit). This holistic approach has proven to be the most effective way to treat depression.
Don't forget to make use of the Internet in finding natural treatments for your depression. I recommend the following extremely useful sites for information, support, and natural treatments for depression:
My name is Jonathan Antenucci, and I have been depressed for about 2 years now. I have also just recently started a blog on depression, which you can visit at http://naturaldepressiontreatments.blogspot.com/. There isn't any new information there yet, but it will be coming soon.
My name is Jonathan Antenucci, and as mentioned in the abstract, I have suffered from depression myself for about 2 years now, and have researched the illness and treatments for it as much as the next depressed person.
I have taken the above information from various websites on the Internet, but I have summarized and paraphrased all of it, in order to create my own arguments and theme.
Also, coming soon I will be updating this article and adding more research at my blog website, which you can visit at http://naturaldepressiontreatments.blogspot.com/2007/07/natural-depression-cures.html.
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