If you’ve ever suffered from the condition or know someone personally who has, then you know that it’s one of the most profound and debilitating illnesses one can have.  It leaves you questioning everything while simultaneously caring about nothing.  It leaves you feeling like a husk of your former self.

It’s a global epidemic, one that sees more than one million people take their own lives each year.  My uncle was one of those people.  Next time it will likely be someone that you know, as depression will affect at least one in four Americans within their lifetime, and that number is rising with each generation.

The prominence of this disease has urged many scientists and researchers to figure out just what exactly is causing so many people to fall into a state of depression.  

Stephen Ildari, author of The Depression Cure, says that depression takes away many aspects of life that we need to thrive, like sleep, energy, focus, memory, sex drive and the ability to enjoy the little things in life.

Depression works by stimulating the pain circuitry in the brain, so much so that many of Stephen’s psychiatric patients use words like torment, agony and torture to describe it.  “Many begin to look to death as welcome means of escape,” says Ildari in a Ted Talks presentation.

Depression has been dubbed a “disease of civilization,” meaning it stems from living a modern lifestyle.  Other diseases included in this category are diabetes, atherosclerosis, asthma, allergies, obesity and cancer.  These types of diseases seemingly exist only in developed countries, as they are practically non-existent among aboriginal peoples living today.

So, what makes the lives of people living in modern countries so different than the lives of aboriginals?  A study of 2000 Kaluli aborigines from Papua New Guinea found only one marginal case of clinical depression.  The lack of depression in tribe people has been attributed to their hunter-gatherer lifestyles, you know, the lifestyle all humans had for nearly 2 million years before the invention of agriculture.

“We were never designed for the sedentary, indoor, socially isolated, fast-food-laden, sleep-deprived frenzied pace of modern life,” says Ildari.  “There’s a profound mismatch between the genes we carry, the bodies and brains that they are building, and the world that we find ourselves in.”

The Cure

While Ildari notes that he is not opposed to medicinal treatments, he says that using them will likely not result in much success.  The best way to rid yourself of depression is through a six-step program:

• Exercise

• Omega 3 Fatty Acids

• Sunlight

• Healthy Sleep

• Anti-ruminative activity

• Social connection

These six steps are a great place to start if you’re looking to end the suffering of depression for yourself or a loved one. Watch Stephen Ildari’s full Ted Talks presentation to learn more about depression, as well as the six-step program (which can be found around ten and a half minutes into the video).

(h/t Uplift Connect)

[Image Credit: Pixabay]

This blog post has been reproduced with the permission of Expanded Consciousness. The original blog post can be found here. The views expressed by the author are not necessarily endorsed by this organization and are simply provided as food for thought from Intellectual Takeout.