Short video/talk by Dr. Don Wood arguing that antidepressant medication provides temporary symptom relief but does not cure depression because it fails to address unresolved past traumatic events; he describes depression as emotional shutdown (absence of emotions) when the subconscious repeatedly re-experiences trauma and the mind seeks action that is not taken.
Chapters
When you take depression medication, it helps you feel better. However, as soon as you stop taking the medication for a period of time, you're going to go back to the feeling of depression and you need more medication. So what is depression? In a lot of cases, when I work with people, I find that they've had traumatic events in their past that they just haven't been able to resolve. Your subconscious mind is operating in the present. It's seeing those events in real time. So. So it's constantly asking for a rework because your mind thinks it's happening now. So if your mind keeps using anger to get you into an action and you don't take the action, how does your mind protect you from that pain? It actually shuts down. Depression is the absence of emotions. So a lot of times people will say to me, well, isn't depression a chemical imbalance in the brain? A lot of times that's what it's viewed as. So they'll use SSRIs to try to fix that chemical imbalance. But what I say is, is it a chemical imbalance? Is it just a thought process that your mind is shut down? So what do you fix first, the chemical imbalance or what maybe created a chemical imbalance? The idea for depression is to get some movement going. When a person goes on antidepressants, they really don't feel motivated to move. Depression medication is trying to help manage the depression. However, it's not going to the root of the problem, which is to fix what the mind has been calling for. And that's why antidepressants are just a temporary solution to problem. They're not going to address the root of the problem.