Introduction to Depression | Addiction and Mental Health Recovery Counseling Activities

Hey there everybody, and welcome back to the Addiction and co Occurring Disorders treatment manual unit one, part three, the introduction to depression. I'm your host, Dr. Donnellice Snipes. In the last part we discussed mood disorders in general. In this part we're really going to do a deep dive into what depression is and how it may interact with addiction and physical issues. So depression is a term that we use to define or describe when we feel apathetic and have low mood. More days than not we just have difficulty caring about things and we feel depressed, hopeless, helpless. Depression also is characterized by changes in eating or sleeping patterns. Some, some people don't have an appetite. Some people are binging on high fat, high sugar, feel good foods. Some people can't sleep at all, they have insomnia. Other people sleep or are in bed most of the time and they have difficulty waking up. Their sleep is not quality, they're just getting a lot of it. Some people struggle with excessive guilt. Now guilt is self anger. And remember in the last part we talked about how unpleasant emotions can trigger unpleasant emotions. When somebody feels exhausted and hopeless and helpless and has has a low mood, they may not be behaving the way they feel they should. They may not be doing the things that they feel they should be doing because they just don't have it in them. As a result, they start to feel guilty. Well, that guilt is self anger, which in turn compounds the depression and feelings of hopelessness and helplessness and worthlessness. Difficulty concentrating is another symptom of depression. And this can be very common when you're not getting adequate quality sleep because a chemical called adenosine builds up in the brain. And when you're not getting that good restful sleep, it doesn't get cleared out, so you feel foggy the next day and it's hard to concentrate. You also may have difficulty concentrating because when you're depressed there's a imbalance in your neuro neurotransmitters. And that imbalance in the neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine and norepinephrine, make it more difficult for you to concentrate. That doesn't mean you can just take a pill and suddenly start concentrating again. It's important to explore what's causing that imbalance. Some people when they're depressed are fatigued. If you're not getting good quality sleep well, you're probably going to be tired a lot of the time. Additionally, when people are depressed, it means those excitatory neurochemicals like norepinephrine and glutamate are not in high supply, which contributes to people feeling low energy. Some people when they're depressed also have symptoms that we call psychomotor slowing. And that's when it feels like you're carrying around 100 pound backpack on your back all day long. Everything literally feels harder to do. Your body feels heavier. It may feel like when you're walking somewhere, you're walking into a 60 mile an hour wind, because that's just how it feels. Other people have what we call psychomotor agitation. And these are the people who tend to have anxiety with their depression and they have difficulty sitting still. They may be more fidgety, there's just nothing that really makes them happy. They don't have a lot of energy, but they still can't sit still. And some people with major depression may also experience thoughts of suicide. If you're having thoughts of suicide right now, pause this video and call 988 or 911, whichever is more appropriate for your situation, and get help. That's an emergency. If you're not having thoughts of suicide, then let's talk about an activity. Spend about 50 minutes thinking, how could each symptom apathy, changes in eating, changes in sleeping, excessive guilt, difficulty concentrating, fatigue, and psychomotor slowing or agitation. How could each of those symptoms trigger addictive behavior? Anxiety, anger, guilt, grief or jealousy? And what are three healthier ways of dealing with each symptom? So think about times when you've had a little blip where you haven't had that symptom, what was different? Or times when you've had that symptom and you figured out something healthy that you could do to deal with it. What are some strategies that you've used? They may not have worked forever, but if they worked for 10 minutes or 30 minutes or a day, great. Let's build on those. It's important to go through each of the issues individually. For ex, for example, apathy and low mood could trigger addiction because when people are feeling that way, they don't want to continue to feel that way. So they may gravitate towards behaviors that make them feel good, that produce pleasure. Changes in eating or sleeping patterns can trigger addictive behavior. Food addiction is one of them. And sleeping patterns, for example, if you're not getting good quality sleep, it may trigger addictive behaviors. And use of addictive substances that are designed to help you feel more awake and alert. Excessive guilt can trigger addictive behaviors because it's really painful to feel that intense searing guilt all the time. So some people may engage in addictive behavior to just escape from that, to numb that out for a minute. Difficulty concentrating may trigger addictive behaviors because some substances, and especially ones that tend to be more stimulatory or anti anxiety in nature, depending on why you're having difficulty concentrating, may help people concentrate in the short term, unfortunately. Remember, addictive behaviors tend to make the problem worse in the long run because it causes you to burn through all those chemicals a lot faster. So then when you're not using, your problem's even worse. It's intensified fatigue. We already talked about how that could trigger addictive behavior and psychomotor agitation. When people have difficulty sitting still, when they're restless, they may be looking for something to do. I've seen people have things like Internet gaming or gambling triggered when they're experiencing psychomotor agitation because they just. They can't sit still and watch a television show. They're having difficulty getting to sleep, they don't want to eat, so they may turn to something else because they don't know what to do with themselves, they can't wind down again. Go through each one of the feelings, anxiety, anger, guilt, grief, jealousy and addictive behavior and think about how each of these symptoms could trigger those feelings or behaviors and three healthier ways of dealing with each symptom.