Just as the body will repair broken bones and tissue, the mind too tends towards healthiness and productive functioning. An average depression, if left completely untreated, will lift after around eight months.
The most common approach to treating depression is, of course, to use anti-depressant drugs like Prozac, which result in higher levels of serotonin, the body's natural 'happy' chemical. This is sometimes effective, temporarily raising a person's mood and therefore giving them an opportunity to jump out of the cycle of depression themselves. Drawbacks to a purely chemical approach are possible unpleasant side-effects, a danger of dependency and, most crucially, that they do nothing to change the patterns in a person's life that brought the depression on in the first place, thus leaving them prone to more suffering in the future. This is why some people can find themselves taking anti-depressants for long periods of time -- nothing is really changing.
Analytical ('insight') therapy, which looks into the past to find reasons for a present problem, is counter-indicated in treating depression. One of the key problems the depressed person is suffering from is the pattern of ineffectively ruminating about a certain issue. Doing more of it with a therapist is likely to deepen and prolong the depression.
The most comprehensive survey ever published on treating depression found cognitive and behavioural therapy to be the most effective technique even where depression is severe and that sufferers who had received cognitive therapy were less likely to relapse than those who had taken medication.
A good therapist treating depression will use cognitive, behavioural and hypnotic techniques concretely and effectively to help sufferers free themselves from the misery of depression and avoid sinking back into it in the future.
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