Does Depression Resolve on Its Own?

When you’re caught in a depressive episode, the future can feel bleak. Feelings of sadness, hopelessness, and worthlessness prevail and obscure any feelings of hope. Depression is common. In fact, as many of the 21 million adults in the United States have had at least one episode of depression. Fortunately, there are solutions that can help you break free from depression.

If you’re a person who prides yourself on going it alone, we urge you to reconsider when it comes to something as important as your mental health. To underscore this point, Dr. Sanjoy Sathpathy and our team at So Cal Psychiatric Care take a closer look at some reasons why it’s best to treat depression as opposed to hoping it will resolve on its own.

A potentially long-haul

If you’re in the middle of a depressive episode, you might wonder if you will ever feel like your old self again. While this mood disorder has no specific timeline, a depressive episode can last for months or years. One study found that major depressive episodes typically last 6-12 months if not treated.

There are also more persistent depressive disorders that can last for two years or more.

Getting help for your depression is the best path to avoiding long hauls of depression that cloud every aspect of your life.

A potentially long cycle

While one depressive episode is bad enough, the recurrence rate after one episode is 50%, and these numbers jump to 70% after the second episode and 90% after a third episode.

If you want to break the cycle of depressive episodes, it’s time to seek treatment.

Better options for treating depression

Another reason why we recommend getting help for your depression is that there are more treatment options than ever before. In recent decades, antidepressants and psychotherapies have been the go-to protocols for treating depression, but up to 30% of people don’t respond to antidepressants.

At our practice, we’ve had great success treating depression with transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) therapy, which is making significant headway in the mental health field. With TMS, we deliver harmless magnetic impulses into certain areas of your brain to create healthier neural pathways that improve your mood.

While we can undoubtedly herald our successes, we can also back these up with studies. For example, one study found that clinical trials using daily TMS created remission rates of 30-40%. Not only were the successes high, but the report found that TMS worked faster to resolve mood symptoms, and the treatments came with far fewer side effects than medications.

Another study found that 50-60% of people with treatment-resistant depression had clinically meaningful responses to TMS therapy. And better still, one-third of participants entered complete remission.

Our point is that there’s no reason to remain in the seemingly endless cycle of depression when we offer effective and fast-acting options like TMS therapy.

If you’d like to break free from your depression, we urge you to call our office in San Diego, California, at 858-923-5226 or book an appointment online today.