Depression & Chinese Medicine

Depression is an often chronic condition that has become all-too-familiar in the modern world. The causes are manifold and as a society we have not fully wrestled with the various ways that depression asserts itself into our lives. Often it is difficult to even find a direct link between something going on in our lives and our feelings of demotivation, fatigue, uncontrolled nostalgia, regret, or any other combination of less-than-desirable emotions. These feelings can gather and recombine leading to increasingly negative headspaces where our emotional selves usurp our rational selves and we have a harder and harder time pulling ourselves out of the negative spiral.

In response to the growing number of people experiencing symptoms of depression, our bio-medicine colleagues have worked diligently to try and identify the causes of these feelings biochemically. This work has led the creation of a wide swath of pharmaceuticals that try to recalibrate a person’s chemistry to reflect what the biomedicine doctors consider “normal.” These innovations have done wonders to help stabilize people in the midst of their negative spirals and often helped those same people to recover a sense of the lives before symptoms of depression. Importantly however, biomedicine does not fully understand why people experience these changes in neurochemistry. Nor does it fully grasp why some people who are not experiencing symptoms of depression might nonetheless have “less than optimal” levels of one neurotransmitter or another. That is, there are people walking around with depression-inducing levels of neurotransmitters but who are not experiencing symptoms of depression. How can a diseased person not show symptoms of the disease? This confusing question assumes a key reality: that depression is a disease, usually a chronic one, that a person will have to battle for their whole lives and that our measure for the presence of this disease is the levels of certain chemicals in the brain. Here Chinese medicine can step in to clarify some things from its point-of-view.

Chinese medicine does not hold that any state of dis-ease is a permanent or insurmountable condition. That is, because you are experiencing symptoms of depression, even serious ones, does not mean you have drawn the “short-straw” for your health. You aren’t just an unlucky person whose body has failed them or whose life experience will be permanently plagued by this current circumstance. The idea that your body is a dynamic thing, constantly changing and shifting, is not just an opinion or a philosophical position but is instead based on all of our own lived experience. People get sick and they improve. They are wounded and they heal. They are tired and they sleep to recover. The rises and it sets. The seasons shift endlessly from one to the next and around again and again and again. Our senses and our lived experience tells us that everything is in flux, all of the time, and though in an instance things may seem fixed, they are not. Your health is no exception.

Chinese medicine is based on a diagnostic system that is looking at the interconnections between multiple body systems at once. That means that Chinese medicine sees connections between your cold hands and feet, your fatigue, and your loose stools with your feelings of a heavy body and lack of motivation. Chinese can see that by treating various systems in your body, we can shift them individually toward balance and that such a shift will encourage your whole self to the same level of comfort and ease.

What might a treatment plan for Depression look like?

After talking with your practitioner to layout the history and details of your symptoms of depression, they will build a custom treatment plan that will include a combination of herbs and acupuncture to help resolve your symptoms. For chronic symptoms of depression, treatment plans usually begin at 8 weeks and then can be extended depending on how well your body reacts to treatment. For more acute presentations, treatment can be as short as a few weeks to help ease the stagnation and deficiency that often give rise to feelings of depression.

Additionally, we have several therapists that we work with to help you build a complete team of professionals who can help you feel like your best self. If you are already set up with someone who can help you develop coping strategies, then all the better. And if not, we can help get you set up with someone who gets you and can help you feel like your best self.

How long will it take to feel differently?

Particularly in cases of chronic symptoms of depression, it may take many weeks to help you feel more like your old self. Feelings of depression are not usually symptoms that appear suddenly and are often linked to larger lifestyle factors like activity and diet. So making sure that we take into account the time of onset as a measure of the time it will take to return a person to themselves is an important calculation. Rest assured however that your practitioner will remain steadfast in their attention to your case to help you understand where you are in treatment and what to expect week to week as they make adjustments to your formula and acupuncture that reflects your feedback and experience.

What if I am already taking pharmaceuticals for my symptoms?

We work with patients in all different states of discomfort, including people who are currently taking pharmaceuticals. We do not recommend that people change any of the prescription strategies without consulting with their prescribing physician because changes in drugs, especially psychopharmaceuticals, is serious business. That said, we can absolutely still work with you to support that treatment you are already receiving with both herbs and acupuncture. If you are looking to make changes in the way you are treating your symptoms of depression away from pharmaceuticals, we have experience helping people with that transition, but we will insist on looping your prescribing physician in on the process to make sure that you are making those changes in a safe and monitored way.