8 ways to end depression -- proven to work better than drugs….

Today's Post: Friday, 8-21-2009

Drugs help about 25 % of people who have depression who take the drugs. But they have side effects, cost money, often cause problematic withdrawal symptoms if you quit taking them, and do NOT help 75 % of people who have depression who take the drugs!

So the market for effective nondrug approaches is quite large.

There are 8 things that do not involve drugs that help improve or end depression and have been shown to work.

In recent years, a psychologist in Kansas decided to do a study combining the 6 of these factors that the hunter gather peoples we are all descended from would have had in their lives -- and evolved to do well when they had those 6 factors as a result.

He then did a study of depressed people who got help engaging each of these 6 factors at least moderately well.

Did it work better than drugs? Yes. A little better or a lot better?

His 6 step method did three times better than drugs! 75% of the people improved.

If you want direct info on his methods written by him, it’s available in his new book.:

The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs
by Stephen S. Ilardi PhD

We’ve posted often on three of the six as helping prevent or stop depression.

1. Get enough omega 3 oils and cut back on omega 6 oils enough you have close to as much omega 3 oils in your diet as you do omega 6 oils. Eating wild caught fish once to three times a week that are low in mercury and other pollution works well. (Eating farmed fish not only does not, it tends to be high in pollutants.) Taking omega 3 oils that have been purified as a supplement also works.

Cutting out oils high in omega 6 such as corn oil, soy oil, canola oil, and safflower oil and switching to extra virgin olive oil helps. Stop eating virtually all refined grain foods. And, eat meat from animals fed only grass or eat a bit less of the leanest most fat trimmed kind of meat you can that has been fed by stuffing the animals with grain.

This not only helps prevent depression, it makes you less irritable, cuts your risk of mental decline, and by lowering inflammation and triglycerides and excessive blood clotting, doing this set of things also strongly protects your heart & tends to prevent heart attacks.

Lastly, this method tends to improve depression sooner after you begin it than taking the drugs – even when they work.

2. Get more time outside when its sunny or at lunch time even if it’s overcast or rainy and/or take at least 2,000 iu extra a day of vitamin D3 or both. Walking in parks or forests may even work better. People who live near such parks with trees or large lawn areas or both have a lower death rate than people who don’t. And this was found to be true even in really awful, lower income areas.

Some people who are deficient in vitamin D and spend hardly any time outside may need to take 5,000 or 10,000 iu a day of D3 to get back to desirable blood levels of vitamin D. If you are depressed in fact, this may be quite likely.

Mercifully vitamin D3 supplements are quite inexpensive even for the 5,000 iu & 10,000 iu capsules.

Taking this much vitamin D3 also has been shown to prevent many cancers and to help prevent autoimmune diseases. It may also prevent your immune system from overdoing its inflammatory response thus preventing a life threatening condition called sepsis that some swine flu victims have died from. So with that flu around, this may be an unusually prudent time to start taking vitamin D3!

In the winter, you can also try “light box therapy” where you expose yourself to light comparable to noonday sun when you first get up in the morning and for 20 to 45 minutes each day.

3. Regular exercise, by itself, has been shown to improve depression about as well as several kinds of antidepressant drugs against which it was tested.

Exercising outside during the day also has the extra benefit of sun exposure and vitamin D. Taking a 10 minute walk at lunch time or doing Tai Chi in a part before going to work in the morning are two ways to get this double effect.

Also, vigorous exercise not only seems more effective than less vigorous exercise in combating depression, it can have a positive effect that is almost immediate for even a 60 second burst of vigorous exercise.

To those 3 methods, Dr Ilardi’s protocol or set of areas he works on with his patients include these 3 others.

4. Social interaction.

People who have good relationships with their family and talk with them often, people who have a few close friends they talk with regularly, people who are married, people who volunteer, people who play team sports, and people who attend religious services regularly where they interact with others each independently has been shown to have better mental and physical health than people who don’t.

Some of the reasons why include the emotional support or seeing that others have problems, not just you.

But it’s recently been shown that conversation is far more mentally demanding and engaging than is at all common knowledge. It actually beats things like solving cross word puzzles or chess problems. The reason people don’t perceive that is they are so skilled at conversing.

5. Decent sleep also has been shown to make a big positive difference. It not only combats depression, it helps prevent type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity.

It can be hard to find more time to sleep. But here are some ideas to help you.

People who get regular exercise sleep dramatically better than people who don’t. People get more out of their sleep if they get up at exactly the same time each day or at least each weekday day and tend to go to bed at about the same time on most nights. If you can manage black out curtains or do other things to have your bedroom be really dark when you sleep, not only is your sleep quality better, because you release more melatonin, you may age more slowly and are less likely to get many kinds of cancer, specifically including breast cancer in women and possibly prostate cancer in men. Having your bedroom be cool and quiet also helps if you can manage it. (Heat proofing your house, air conditioning, noise cancellation devices, &/or earplugs can help.)

Do NOT have a TV in your bedroom or watch it from your bed. You’ll not only get more sleep of better quality, you’ll be less likely to get fat, & your sex life has been shown to be dramatically better compared to people with TV’s in their bedrooms.

And, instead of watching the late night TV news, go to sleep instead! (You can get faster and better access to news from scanning a newspaper or going to Yahoo news online earlier in the day. In addition, instead of being hooked by visual portrayals of bad news that you sit through passively on the TV news, you can scan over the ones quickly that are important to you and skip the rest entirely by using newspapers and online news.)

So instead of losing an extra half hour of sleep and getting stuffed with bad news you have no control over, you can sleep during that half an hour and be in a much better frame of mind.

Some people do better if they take a half a gram of melatonin at bedtime or about half an hour before. (Taking more melatonin than that costs more, doesn’t work that much better, and tend to leave you groggy the morning after or even the day after.)

Do NOT use prescription sleeping pills. They have resulted in deaths from people driving or walking in unsafe ways while not really awake. They are not necessary to get a good night’s sleep. They are expensive. And they tend to have dreadful withdrawal symptoms.

6. Avoid ruminating. Stewing and mentally reviewing your problems or worries while not actually doing anything to end them tends to produce depression and does so quite reliably.

Instead put up a BIG mental STOP sign if you catch yourself doing it.

Here are the two things to do instead.

a) If you need to solve the problems involved and are willing to WRTE DOWN potential solutions, research potential solution, and/or try some solutions, by all means do that. It will make you feel empowered and less depressed even before you actually solve the problems

b) Or, do something that is totally mentally engaging to take your mind off of the problems or worries. Call up your favorite relative or best buddy on the phone. Read an exciting novel or watch a favorite movie you really get into. Have sex. Drink one or two drinks while talking to people or watching a favorite sport on TV. Go play basketball – or ping pong. Do your strength training or interval cardio or at least the most vigorous parts. Do some gardening or weeding.

One extremely successful sales executive in a very high stress industry described his system to combine these methods.

His motto was: “I ONLY worry about things once a week!”

He literally had a time each week where he set aside time from half an hour to two hours to actually force himself to write down what he was worried about AND what he would do about it.

If he found himself beginning to worry at other times, he either ignored it totally once he realized he was doing it or wrote a note to look at during his weekly session and filed it where he’d easily find it then.

If necessary, he’d forcefully remind himself, “I feel better than most people because “I ONLY worry about things once a week!” and it’s NOT that time of the week now.”

Guess what? If you do all 6 of these things, we now know you have 75% chance of ending your depression or preventing depression.

But you can do more still.

7. There are other supplements that for many people turn down depression effectively.

a) Enough caffeine to give you a boost without ingesting so much you sabotage your sleep at night has been proven to improve mood.

Two or three cups of coffee a day can work. But more than three tends to waste your money and backfire by disrupting your sleep the following night.

Drinking tea or green tea is easier to without overdoing it since each cup has less caffeine you can drink far more cups without getting wired or anxious or having it ruin your sleep the night after.

Dr Al Sears also has a supplement that combines a low, moderate dose of Guranine from Guarana fruit combined with choline to restore the choline the caffeine tends to deplete. It seems that Guranine due to its fat content is like a time release pill for caffeine so you avoid getting too hyper but tend to stay alert and feeling good without and crashes or letdowns. (I did find out that it can be dangerous to take some Guranine supplements because they use massive doses that can put you into overdrive for hours.)

b) St John’s Wort of 300 mg a day to 900 mg a day has been found to be as effective as some antidepressant drugs for mild depression.

But it does have one drawback. If you are taking a medication for other conditions, it can cause your body to process the medication out of your system enough to lower the effectiveness of the drug.

c) Panax ginseng also tends to improve your mood an perceived quality of life. But small amounts are far better than larger amounts. 100 mg taken once a day is enough to be effective. Taking more adds very little to the positive effect but can cause your blood pressure to go up more than is desirable.

8. The talk therapy for depression that works makes use of the discoveries of Dr Martin Seligman. (His initial book is called Learned Optimism.)

People who are optimistic by his definition are far less depressed, have more friends, have better health, and tend to make more money than people who are not.

(It’s been separately found that such optimists who are also prudent, take responsibility when needed, and share credit with others even when they know what they themselves did to achieve good results, do even better and remain optimists while people who do not, often get bad enough results they stop being optimistic.

It’s pretty basic what he found.

Optimistic people expect good things to happen. They work to make them happen. They expect their efforts to work most of the time or at least eventually. They notice that some good things keep happening or tend to do so. They notice when good things happen. They know their assets and tend to use them well since they do. (Since optimists can overdo this and tend to believe them MORE than the facts support, the good news is they take action to solve their problems and make good things happen, the bad news is that they need to be quite careful to reduce avoidable risks and make prudent, safe decisions.)

Conversely, when bad things happen, optimists get very, very analytical and scientific in their approach. The look for specific causes and tend to see bad things as temporary, specific, and to have limited effects. They virtually never expect bad things to continue because the causes are often temporary or can be overcome.

They do NOT expect bad things to continue when the facts either don’t support that or never were checked to begin with.

They say, I tried 12 things that I found didn’t work if that is actually what happened. They may even be able to say they know why some of the 12 things didn’t work.

They do NOT call themselves a failure or expect the bad results to continue when there is no evidence to support that. They know they may find a new solution or figure out how to use what they learned from the 12 failed attempts to create a solution.


In conclusion, for as many as 95% of the people who are depressed and who don’t have a physical cause such as brain damage or something that prevents it, it’s possible to end or prevent depression by using these 8 methods together.

This is because the last two methods can help some of the 25% who didn’t quite respond to the first six. The first six methods will have had some positive effects that adding the last two can enable to work enough better to stop the depression.