What can you do when medication and therapy don’t work for your depression?  Or aren’t the whole answer?

I know what it means to be depressed.  Here’s how:

·        I started struggling with depression (and the anxiety that comes with it) as a child, and then continued into adulthood.  I worked hard to recover with the help of various types of therapies, therapists, and treatments, beginning when I was 10 years old. I have had over 20 years of treatment all together.  Medication didn’t work for me.  Therapy improved my life, my relationships, my skills as a therapist, my self-esteem, my sense of meaning and purpose, my ability to make good choices, my consciousness, and much more, but it didn’t cure my depression.

·        As a licensed psychotherapist myself, I have helped many patients recover from depression for over 20 years.

·        I have devoted my life to recovery from depression for me and for others, and I have discovered many ways to prevent and relieve depression that work independently of therapy or medication.  They’ve saved my life, and lives of my patients.

I know you’re skeptical; I would be too.  Maybe you’ve tried self-help books and they haven’t helped.  You probably wonder if this book is just the same old re-hashed material you’ve seen many times.  Or maybe you can’t imagine having the energy to read a book, much less do something it tells you to do!  You’ve probably tried to read books that drone on and on without even helping you.

I get really angry at the authors of those books, because I think they know (they should know) that no depressed person is going to be up to reading the book, and that even if people manage to read it, they aren’t going to be able to do the things the book tells them to do.

Usually the advice is something like “think positive thoughts.”  Well, if we could do that, we wouldn’t be depressed and reading this book, right?!?  I also think the authors know that the people who buy their books aren’t going to complain or ask for their money back.  Why?  Because they can’t read it and so don’t do what the book says, so they blame themselves for the book’s not working.  That’s what people do when they’re depressed; they blame themselves.

That’s the last thing a depressed person needs—one more thing to blame themselves for!

What if I told you, you have never seen anything like this before?   

I know how hard depression makes it to do things, because when depression attacks me, my energy and ambition to do anything get hit the hardest.  I think this is very important to understand in any book or treatment for depression.  Nothing is going to do any good if the person it’s intended to help can’t use it!  That’s why the tools in my book are each useful independently, and only an average of less than a page long.   I wrote this book for people who have very limited energy, ambition, and attention span, because that’s what depressed people generally have.

I’ve spent my whole life, and my whole 20+ year career trying for myself and my patients just about every type of remedy for depression that exists.  I go to workshops; I read books; I learn new techniques.  I almost never recommend a treatment for my patients I haven’t tried myself, and I have never stopped actively pursuing an answer to this question:

“How can depression be prevented and relieved?”

And I’ve put everything I’ve learned from all kinds of sources, everything I teach my patients; everything I use myself to this day into this book.

The real truth, that most professionals won’t tell you, is:

·        No depression treatment works for everyone.

·        We don’t know what will work for each patient, and it varies widely.

·        For the majority of people, medication doesn’t work.

·        For many people, none of our treatments permanently cure depression.

·        Even when medication does work, it can take weeks for an anti-depressant to start working, even though you need relief now!  It can also take months or even years trying different antidepressants before finding one that works and that you can tolerate without crippling or unpleasant side-effects.  Very often, even when antidepressants work, people are not cured—the depression is gone only as long as they keep taking the medication.

Psychotherapy can relieve depression in the first session, for some, or in the first 6 months for some, and not for years for others.  I highly recommend psychotherapy.  To some extent, good psychotherapy helps almost everyone.  We are even discovering techniques now that actually change the structure of people’s brains, and seem to truly cure depression when it comes from not getting needs adequately met as a child, which is where the majority of depression comes from.

But what do you do while you’re waiting for therapy to work; or if you are one of the unlucky people who can’t be cured of depression permanently. or if you can’t or won’t go to therapy?  If therapy does work for you, how can you contribute to the process so it will be as efficient as possible?

When I work with people in my office, there is a certain amount of educating I do.  I consider this a different process than therapy, though it is therapeutic.  As a therapist, I listen carefully; I tell people what they can’t see about themselves and their situation; I offer compassion, attention, non-judgmental interest, and insight.

But sometimes people need information.  In that case, I take time to teach.  I try to take as little time as possible, because information can be obtained in books for much less money than I charge for my time.  But much of the information I teach hasn’t been in books—so I’ve had to teach it.  One day it occurred to me that if I put all the information I’d gathered throughout all these years of experience into a book, then my patients could use the time with me so much more efficiently.

So I did.

It’s taken me two years to write it, but I can now offer all the self-care information I’ve collected about depression: how to prevent it, how to get relief, and how to rid yourself of it forever, if you are one of the lucky ones.  Or, how to minimize its occurrence and effects if you are one of the ones like me for whom nothing can completely free you of it.

In this book, I reveal:

·        What causes depression (you may be surprised about this).

·        The difference between sadness and depression—they are very different, and you need to respond very differently to them.  What works for one can make the other worse.

·        How easy and pleasurable it can be to prevent and relieve depression.

·        How a suicide note can pull you out of even a suicidal depression.

·        Why you not only have permission, but the necessity to do what you want to do rather than what you think you “should” do.

·        The real “Secret to Life, the Universe and Everything,” (not what the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy says it is).

·        What to do when forcing yourself to do things while you are depressed is the opposite of what you need, and what to do when it’s exactly what you need.

·        The one essential choice you can make to turn exercise from something you feel guilty about not doing to something you joyfully do the rest of your life.

·        Why depression can be a good thing sometimes.

·        The 12 ingredients happy people have and you can acquire to create your own happiness, and the tools that show you how.

I can’t say this strongly enough.  This is not a book you will start to read, throw on a shelf and forget about it.  This book has the potential to improve the quality of the rest of your life.  You may carry it with you for reference until the pages get dog-eared, or you may incorporate what works for you into your cells.  You may come back to it over and over, but it is a manual you will use for the rest of your life.  This is the instruction book that should have come packaged with your depression.

I hope to help as many people as I can to find out life doesn’t have to be so hard and painful.  You have the opportunity to take the shortcut to living an easier, happier life, because this wheel has already been  invented—you don’t have to do it.

I know I can’t help everyone I want to help.  I help people through my website forum, and through private e-mails people send me all the time.  I don’t collect any fees for all that, and when I do psychotherapy in my office, I work with people at reduced fees when they just can’t afford my regular fee. Yet some can’t afford even a reduced fee week after week.  Others live too far from me to see me in my office or don’t want to come to therapy.  Even those who do come to therapy may also want to have this information to get as much relief as quickly as possible.  For all these reasons and more, you may want to have this book at your side.

But how can I put a price on this information I want everyone who needs it to have?

It has taken me hundreds of hours to write this book, even after having all the information in it.  It would take many sessions for me to teach you all this information in person, as I did with people before I wrote the book.  Since my regular fee for psychotherapy is $150 for 50 minute sessions (though I do work with people for less when they can't afford that), it would cost you hundreds or thousands of dollars to get this information that way.  To make this information available to as many people as possible, and recoup some of the income lost in all the time I used to write the book, I decided $19 was a fair amount of money that best accomplished these two goals.

I hope you agree that the book has value for you that far exceeds $19, even if it’s a stretch for you to pay that.  If you don’t agree, please let me know, and I will gladly refund your money.  Please remember that if this book doesn’t help you, it’s not your fault; it’s okay to get your money back.  If you want to have this book, or read more about it, including a view of it's contents, click on this link:

Ending the Blues: A Psychotherapist’s Secrets to Living Depression-Free

Warmly,

Cynthia W. Lubow, MFT 

Psychotherapist

510-525-2341, San Francisco East Bay, California

www.womenspsychotherapy.com

cynthialubow@yahoo.com