Natural Ways to Treat Depression
This topic is near and dear to my heart, and even carries some trauma for me. For the first 12 years of our marriage, my wife was severely, clinically depressed. The doctors called it the big bad bear of depression. They said, “It’s genetic, and she’ll have it til the day she dies—but we can manage it with medication.”
So we tried that. We tried one after another for years, and none of them worked for her. Later, when our friends would find out that she was depressed and not on medication (because none of them had worked), they typicaly wouldn’t believe it. “Of course they work, they have to work. They worked for millions of people!” I didn’t really feel validated until 2012, when Dr. Irving Kirsch of Harvard Medical School did a special on 60 Minutes, saying that antidepressants don’t work, or more specifically, that their effect is not significantly greater than that of a sugar pill. Now, if this is an issue you or someone you know struggles with (which is statistically very likely), I’m not telling you not to go there, just to go informed.
So what can we do about depression? To answer this question, we need to ask another one: what is depression’s source? For the last 75 years, the experts have been telling us that it’s a combination of five things:
- The chemistry of your brain and body.
- Negative emotions.
- Negative thoughts.
- Negative beliefs.
- Life circumstances.
Over that same period of time, we’ve seen a vast wealth of experts and books, huge amounts of resources being poured into treating these things and coming away with millions, even billions of dollars in profit. You may well have heard or even tried some of these methods. We’ll put a list of common industry recommendations at the end. You’d think we’d have made some headway, right? But what we’ve seen instead is a failure rate of approximately 97 percent, reported by those same experts. Now it seems to me that a 97 percent failure rate should be unacceptable in practically any industry if people were aware of it, but most are not. How can we have such an abysmal degree of success even as we devote so many resources and make breakthrough after breakthrough?
To cut to the chase, it’s not possible. Nothing works like that. When Mercedes makes a technological breakthrough, their cars get faster or safer or more efficient. When there’s a breakthrough in electronics or computer technology it opens new possibilities that would previously have been the stuff of science-fiction. So what other explanation could there be? I pondered this question for about three years, and could only come up with one answer: none of those five things are the true source. So all of these resources we’ve poured into treating them are no more than bandages that can’t touch the underlying illness.
So what’s the true source? Memories, primarily (about 90 percent according to Dr. Bruce Lipton) in your unconscious or subconscious mind. What we need is a way to find and heal the memories containing anger, unforgiveness, rejection, etc. Believe it or not, this is 8th grade physics. Virtually anything, including nonphysical concepts such as those above, can be represented by a frequency or wavelength, and can be changed by hitting it with another one. This is the fundamental premise of energy medicine, which I’m told by industry experts is the fastest-growing area in all of medicine. Why? Because it works, it’s cheap, and it has no known side effects. Dr. Oz predicted this in 2007 on the Oprah Winfrey Show and in his bestselling book, saying that energy medicine was the next big frontier in medicine, that in the future it won’t be about bone and blood and tissue, but about changing energy.
Prayer and energy medicine healed Hope’s incurable genetic depression in a matter of a few months, and she’s been depression free for 18 years now. I believe with all my heart that if we had continued to work on the five so-called causes of depression presented by the mainstream experts, she would still be depressed today, and I’ve seen similar results from people all over the world. They come to us thinking we are strange and unlikely, but they’ve tried everything else, and report incredible healing after making use of these methods.
The detractors will say that there’s a scarcity of double-blind controlled studies, which is true. The reason is that in order to properly conduct double-blind studies, we would need a machine that can acccurately diagnose memories in the unconscious mind. Obviously, this machine does not currently exist, but just because we can’t yet measure this method doesn’t mean it isn’t credible. In the future, we may very well have the capability to do this, and I believe that if and when we do, they will show the same 97 percent success rate that we have found in our own experience.
A list of common recommendations for coping with or treating depression.
- Stay connected to family and friends. Don’t let depression isolate you.
- Get in a routine. Depression often comes with a loss of structure.
- Set truth and love-based goals. Start very small with them.
- Do things you find fun, even if you may not initially feel like it.
- Exercise, even if it starts out as only a few minutes a day.
- Try adjusting your diet. There’s no magic combinations, but there are some things that have been known to trigger chemical imbalances, and others which are known to be beneficial to the condition.
- Get enough sleep. Sleep deprivation can cause or worsen almost any illness.
- Challenge negative thoughts. I would add my own note to this one, not to just challenge negative thoughts, but to turn them into prayer.
- Find out what supplements might help you.
Have a blessed, wonderful day!
Alex Loyd
