How I understood and then escaped

Mar 16, 2015, 01:03 PM

Im becoming part of the SNAP club. Thank you for sharing this with us.

floridaman38 · Mar 17, 2015, 04:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vital

Just to keep track of it, here is an update of what I personally think is the best plan if you are depressed. I'm not a medical professional, I'm only writing this up because this makes so much more sense to me than what usually happens.

1. Deal with any physical/nutritional issues first.

As pointed out by Mark Hyman, M.D., there are a large number of common medical or nutritional issues that can case mental problems including depression. These include Vitamin B or D deficiencies, hypothyroidism, heavy metal toxicity, pre-diabetes, infection, gluten allergy, omega 3 fat deficiency and others. If you have any of these common issues, the best thing to do is surely to address them first. For references, see

The UltraMind Solution: Fix Your Broken Brain by Healing Your Body First: M.D. Mark Hyman: 9780743570480: Amazon.com: Books

The latter book by Mark Hyman is a great resource for diet as well. I often also use Andrew Weil’s web pages as a source of information.

2. Try all the safe healthy ways to overcome depression next.

Very often if people see an M.D. and have the symptoms of depression, they are immediately put on an antidepressant. However, I think that this is a terrible idea. Antidepressant drugs have dangerous short and long term side-effects, can lead to dependence and often don’t work:

Why Antidepressants Don?t Work for Treating Depression - Dr. Mark Hyman

Negative Effects of Antidepressants | Mad in America

It is important to realize that because of oppositional tolerance, taking these drugs may cause negative changes in your brain, which may be irreversible. It’s also important to realize that the “chemical imbalance” theory of depression is wrong (see the references above). If you have depression, you are not fated by biology to take drugs in order to get better.

Because of all this, it seems so much better to first try all of the safe, easy and/or healthy ways to overcome depression first, before even considering a drug approach. Promising things to try include exercise (walking, running, swimming, yoga, weight training, for instance), improving your diet and taking supplements (see Mark Hyman’s books for great advice and for inspiration about what this can do), meditation, improving your sleep, talk therapy, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, light therapy and mind training. I especially recommend starting with SNAP CLUB as described at the top of this thread. It is easy and fun and usually works and sometimes works spectacularly well, and, when it works, it really helps you take further steps on your upward healthy path.

3. If 1. And 2. above fail and you are desperate, go to the next steps with a medical doctor.

I suspect that in almost all cases of depression, a serious attempt at some combination of 1 and 2 above will greatly help or completely solve the problem, but that’s really only a guess on my part. Meditation is a good example of the need to try seriously, I think. If you look in the depression success stories on this site, you’ll see that some people have completely resolved their depression, just with meditation. They also report, however, that it takes a solid couple of weeks of doing it before they get the big benefit. There are cases that I believe (on this forum and elsewhere) where people report that antidepressant drugs work dramatically well for them, even in the long term. This sometimes happens only after trying many different drug combinations. If nothing at all works in 1 or 2 above, you may have to try this, after, of course assessing the risks with a Medical Doctor. I have heard similar testimonials from people for whom only Electroconvulsive Therapy worked. See, for example,

Sherwin Nuland: How electroshock therapy changed me | Talk Video | TED.com

and people for whom nothing worked except for a cyngulotomy. See, for example,

Andrew Solomon: Depression, the secret we share | Talk Video | TED.com.

Now GO GET EM!!

As Stephen Colbert used to say: I’LL SEE YOU IN HEALTH!!!

- vital

thanks vital, I am in therapy and she uses cognitive behavioral therapy but I seem to be fine until the next day then I get lonely and depressed I don't know why I just do. I feel as if I miss talking or something. It's really weird

vital · Mar 17, 2015, 07:16 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by floridaman38

thanks vital, I am in therapy and she uses cognitive behavioral therapy but I seem to be fine until the next day then I get lonely and depressed I don't know why I just do. I feel as if I miss talking or something. It's really weird

Try "SNAP CLUB" as explained at the top of the thread. It works like magic and you can tell your therapist about it. I think all the CBT people are going to end up using it at some point anyway!

- vital

BreakForTheLight · Mar 26, 2015, 12:03 PM

SNAP - I just decided I'm going to give this a try

vital · Mar 30, 2015, 04:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by BreakForTheLight

SNAP - I just decided I'm going to give this a try

Hi BreakForTheLight & everyone;

Yay.

I just gave at talk and demonstration of SNAP CLUB to about fifteen new patients at the Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston. I can tell that it's really working for them already

.

Here is a pdf of the notes from the session:

http://egg.bu.edu/~youssef/SNAP_CLUB...0164151576.pdf

SNAP!

- vital

eggplantlife · Apr 03, 2015, 05:28 PM

Hey vital, that's great about your talk.

helpless79 · Apr 14, 2015, 08:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vital

Hi BreakForTheLight & everyone;

Yay.

I just gave at talk and demonstration of SNAP CLUB to about fifteen new patients at the Brigham and Women's hospital in Boston. I can tell that it's really working for them already

.

Here is a pdf of the notes from the session:

http://egg.bu.edu/~youssef/SNAP_CLUB...0164151576.pdf

SNAP!

- vital

i will give it a try tonight..but i am sick and tired of wasting half of my life trying to solve my mental issues instead of actually living

it hurts a lot

thank you

zoetic · Apr 19, 2015, 06:53 PM

Came across this last night and made a account so I could reply...
I think this is really interesting, thank you so much for sharing it. I've already given the link to a few of my friends, and considering giving it to my school counsellor.
I think SNAP CLUB could be a really valuable therapy, can I ask what you've done to share this? Currently posted online and done a talk (congratulations!) from what I've picked up, but i almost want the whole world to know about this...so many people could benefit from it

vital · Apr 20, 2015, 11:26 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoetic

Came across this last night and made a account so I could reply...
I think this is really interesting, thank you so much for sharing it. I've already given the link to a few of my friends, and considering giving it to my school counsellor.
I think SNAP CLUB could be a really valuable therapy, can I ask what you've done to share this? Currently posted online and done a talk (congratulations!) from what I've picked up, but i almost want the whole world to know about this...so many people could benefit from it

Thanks very much for the comments zoetic. I also think that this is valuable therapy and could help many people. As for sharing, I've been in touch with several psychologists at one of the Harvard affiliated hospitals here in Boston (Brigham and Womens). They were interested enough to invite me to make a presentation for about 15 of their depression patients as part of their therapy (that's what those hand written notes are from). Pretty soon we'll have feedback about how well this works from those patients. Judging from a few earlier patients and from the reception I got, I think that the results are going to be really positive. The smiles from a few who have tried it for about a month and the "aha"s from the new patients as they recognize what has been really happening to them is very encouraging to me. I think that SNAP CLUB works because I'm right about how depression works, at least for many people. Feel free to spread the word in Australia in the mean time!

- vital

zoetic · Apr 21, 2015, 05:10 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by helpless79

i will give it a try tonight..but i am sick and tired of wasting half of my life trying to solve my mental issues instead of actually living

it hurts a lot

thank you

good luck

its definitely worth a try

zoetic · Apr 21, 2015, 05:13 AM

Okay, that's great! Yeah, I think you've hit on something key about depression here, I've never heard it described like that before but it feels all too familiar and I think you're right. From what you've said its going well with the patients, im glad. I will definitely be trying to spread the word around here, as well

Starburst90 · Apr 28, 2015, 09:19 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by vital

Hi BreakForTheLight & everyone;

- vital

Thank you for the link to the notes. I found myself towards the end I was snapping. I am going to keep trying this . I think this may help. Yayyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!

vital · May 01, 2015, 09:41 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by zoetic

Okay, that's great! Yeah, I think you've hit on something key about depression here, I've never heard it described like that before but it feels all too familiar and I think you're right. From what you've said its going well with the patients, im glad. I will definitely be trying to spread the word around here, as well

Hi zoetic, everyone,

I just got feedback from the professionals at Brigham and Women's Hospital here in Boston where I did a presentation for a group of patients. SNAP CLUB seems to be working for many of the patients and they want to keep using it

- vital

vital · Jun 06, 2015, 08:11 PM

== What's wrong with the "chemical imbalance" view of depression? ==

I want to record what I think wrong with the "chemical imbalance" view of depression. The specific idea that depression is caused by low serotonin was shown to be wrong by the late 1980s as is convincingly (to me) explained by Robert Whitaker

and others (see, for example, the Peter Gotzsche and the Cochrane Collaboration).

In spite of this, many patients still get told that they have a "chemical imbalance" in their brains and that's why they need to take medication. I suspect that many MDs and psychiatrists still say this in spite of the failure of the serotonin hypothesis simply because how you feel in general is determined by your brain chemistry. If you're feeling bad, then, there must, therefore, be something wrong with your brain chemistry. If it isn't just serotonin, further research will clarify exactly what the problem is and will lead to better drugs. In the mean time, the current antidepressants are the best we have. What could be wrong with that?

As reasonable as it seems, I think that this view can be very, very damaging. To see how, imagine that your laptop has a virus and has developed “laptop depression.” Your laptop is sluggish, unenthusiastic and sleeps too much. Suppose you then take it to the Apple store and they say that since everything happening in your laptop is determined by electrical signals, your laptop has an “electrical imbalance.” We are therefore going to try increasing your clock speed, add some more wires and pull out a few capacitors. Notice that even though it is correct that your laptop’s behavior is determined by electrical signals, the Apple store is about to make a very serious mistake that will likely harm your laptop and will likely not solve the problem. The point is that the Apple store has mistaken a software problem for a hardware problem. I think that depression is essentially a brain software problem and not a brain hardware problem. I think that depression is essentially caused by an ingrained, habitual, unconscious thinking pattern and not by neurotransmitter imbalances. If that is so, it’s not surprising that no biochemical test for depression has been found. It’s the same for laptops. You can’t get out a voltmeter and test if your laptop has a virus. Notice that technology improvements won’t change what you should do here. Even if extensive research into laptop depression shows that you can sometimes electrically determine if a laptop has a virus, the right treatment is still going to be to remove the bad software and not to have a hardware intervention.

I think that believing the chemical imbalance story can be particularly harmful for depressives because it feeds into the idea that you are helpless. If you have defective brain chemistry, it's very natural to think that you are just unlucky genetically and can't expect to fix the problem yourself. You have to rely on the experts and take the drugs. On the other hand, if depression is a brain software problem, no one has control of your brain software (your thoughts, in other words) except YOU. This is the reverse situation. NO ONE can help except you yourself!

- vital

chunkymonkey555 · Jun 10, 2015, 09:55 PM

i've just been referred to this page, so far its fun snapping, and its taken away some of the painful emotions of negative thinking. Thank you for this idea!

Lika Li · Jun 11, 2015, 01:05 PM

Hi Vital,

How long using your method you see results in depression? Do you feel like a normal people (who don't have mental ilness)?

Thanks

vital · Jun 11, 2015, 01:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Lika Li

Hi Vital,

How long using your method you see results in depression? Do you feel like a normal people (who don't have mental ilness)?

Thanks

Hi Lika Li,

You should feel something quickly, within the first day, maybe right away. That's the way it was with me and others who have tried it (others in this thread and patients at a hospital in Boston). I kept doing it and completely dissolved my depression after a couple of months. I feel completely healed now - not depressed at all and not mentally ill. This feels

W O N D E R F U L

by the way

. I would look at this too and check for physical/nutritional issues that may be holding you back.

http://forums.psychcentral.com/4262681-post105.html

- vital

vital · Jun 20, 2015, 12:13 PM

Here's edmerch1984's thread where he's trying snap club too:

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...epression.html

- vital

Hopeful1901 · Jun 21, 2015, 11:59 AM

Your posting makes great sense to me. I am starting to try it in addition to improving my diet with more healthful foods.

vital · Jun 21, 2015, 07:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hopeful1901

Your posting makes great sense to me. I am starting to try it in addition to improving my diet with more healthful foods.

Hi Hopeful,

Thanks. If you haven't seen it already, these notes might help

http://egg.bu.edu/~youssef/SNAP_CLUB...0164151576.pdf

I'm working on my diet too. I tend to like books by Mark Hyman or Andrew Weil for that

http://forums.psychcentral.com/4262681-post105.html

I personally also do long walks and yoga, which I also find to be very helpful.

- vital

ajohnson45 · Jun 22, 2015, 01:27 AM

the way I escaped was by being hospitalized. it changed my life.

KBreal70 · Jun 24, 2015, 09:53 PM

Well first of all let me begin by saying i really enjoyed reading your post and i really like the idea of Snap Club after reading all what you had to say has made me look at alternative treatment for Major Depression from an entirely different perspective thank you

vital · Jun 25, 2015, 09:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by KBreal70

Well first of all let me begin by saying i really enjoyed reading your post and i really like the idea of Snap Club after reading all what you had to say has made me look at alternative treatment for Major Depression from an entirely different perspective thank you

Thanks KB. You can see examples of people trying it in this thread

[ like Ed from a few days ago

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...epression.html ]

and it's also been used in "Behavioral Activation" therapy at a hospital in Boston.

Here are some notes from that session

http://egg.bu.edu/~youssef/SNAP_CLUB...0164151576.pdf

- vital

vital · Aug 03, 2015, 10:27 PM

Hi everybody,

I want to save a link to profound_betrayal's thread before I forget about it:

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...3191-blah.html

SNAP CLUB still works wonderfully for me and for some patients from B&W hospital that I'm in contact with too. It is still the basic thing I do, but I also keep deciding (SNAP) to add things looking to make my life better and better. Besides long walks, I do yoga many times a week. I am especially impressed with the "Pranayama" (breathing) part of yoga as a powerful way to affect your mood and health. My latest experiment is to try probiotics in the form of....sauerkraut (!?)

Sauerkraut Test Divulges Shocking Probiotic Count | Nourishing Plot

This is something that may, I understand, have a big effect on your health in general including your mental health. If it works for me, I'm going to keep doing it.

In recent months, I have had a chance to find out how my new self reacts to some high stress situations. It hasn't always been pleasant, but I'm really pleased to find that I have much more resilience now and stress has much less ability to drag me down than it used to have.

- vital

vital · Aug 29, 2015, 07:32 PM

Hi everybody. Saving a link to EmmieBlue's thread

http://forums.psychcentral.com/depre...ng-afraid.html

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