The Depression Cure Quotes

“I believe many of us now live as if we value things more than people. In America, we spend more time than ever at work, and we earn more money than any generation in history, but we spend less and less time with our loved ones as a result. Likewise, many of us barely think twice about severing close ties with friends and family to move halfway across the country in pursuit of career advancement. We buy exorbitant houses—the square footage of the average American home has more than doubled in the past generation—but increasingly we use them only to retreat from the world. And even within the home-as-refuge, sealed off from the broader community “out there,” each member of the household can often be found sitting alone in front of his or her own private screen—exchanging time with loved ones for time with a bright, shiny object instead. Now, I’m not saying that any of us—if asked—would claim to value things more than people. Nor would we say that our loved ones aren’t important to us. Of course they are. But many people now live as if achievement, career advancement, money, material possessions, entertainment, and status matter more. Unfortunately, such things don’t confer lasting happiness, nor do they protect us from depression. Loved ones do.”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs

“Watching television is another high-risk situation. This might seem counterintuitive, since people often look to TV as an escape—something to take their mind off things. But here’s the problem: Most programs are simply not interesting or engaging enough to fully occupy the mind, so it’s all too easy for our thoughts to wander off when we’re sitting in front of the tube. Add to this the fact that depression impairs our ability to concentrate—including the ability to stay focused on a TV program—and it’s no surprise that watching television is often a recipe for disaster. It’s one of the most effective ways to usher in an extended bout of rumination.”
― Steve Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The Six-Step Programme to Beat Depression Without Drugs

“The two treatments worked about equally well for the first few months, but by ten months into the study, the exercisers were much more likely than those taking Zoloft to remain depression-free.”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs

“You might imagine that an exercise regimen would have to be pretty grueling to be effective against depression. Maybe hours of running every day? Or some kind of strenuous weight lifting—the kind that makes people’s neck veins bulge? Incredibly, however, Blumenthal simply had his patients take a brisk half-hour walk three times a week. That’s it. And yet this remarkably low “dose” of exercise proved to be more effective than the Zoloft.”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs

“Among severely depressed patients—those whose symptoms are so profoundly disabling that they can no longer function at all—depression drugs have been found to work much better than placebos. Although most severely depressed patients aren’t completely cured by antidepressants, at least half of them will experience meaningful improvement within a month or two. By comparison, few such patients ever improve while taking a dummy pill.”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs

“Consider, for example, the landmark 2004 study that followed several hundred patients treated with one of three popular antidepressants: Zoloft, Paxil, or Prozac. Among those who took the drugs as prescribed, only 23% were depression-free after six months of treatment. (As you might expect, patients who failed to take their meds did even worse.) And all three medications yielded roughly the same dismal results. A fluke result, perhaps? It’s actually pretty typical. The recovery rate with antidepressants in similar studies usually falls somewhere between 20% and 35%. Clinical researchers at forty-one treatment sites across the country have just completed the largest real-world study of antidepressants ever conducted, and the results fit the same overall pattern. This multimillion dollar project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Mental Health, followed about three thousand depressed patients who initially took the drug citalopram (marketed under the trade name Celexa) for about twelve weeks. By the end of that short-term treatment period, only 28% of study patients had fully recovered. The study’s 28% response rate might even be an overestimate of the medication’s true effectiveness, because patients received higher drug doses and had more frequent doctor’s visits than people do in everyday clinical practice. (In real life, insurance companies sharply restrict the frequency of “med check” follow-up appointments). Remarkably, the study’s authors—a veritable All-Star team of clinical researchers—noted that the observed 28% recovery rate was about what they had expected to see based on comparable studies. That’s right: They weren’t surprised to find that the majority of study patients failed to recover on an antidepressant. In the study’s published write-up, the researchers also raised a provocative question: What percentage of their patients might have recovered if they had received a sugar pill—a placebo—instead of the medication? Could it possibly have been as high as 28%?”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs

“recommend a starting omega-3 dose of 1000 mg of EPA and 500 mg of DHA each day”
― Stephen S. Ilardi, The Depression Cure: The 6-Step Program to Beat Depression without Drugs