This is an excerpt from my upcoming book, We Get Better: 48 Treatment Options for Chronic Depression.

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Treatment option 2: Creating your individualized treatment plan

Many books on depression management are incredibly helpful. But often, they’re limited in scope. They focus on one intervention, such as meditation, exercise or cognitive therapy, and attempt to convince us that it’s all we need. However, most people who experience chronic depression know that it’s more complicated than that. While depression responds well to many individual treatments, over time, a more well-rounded, comprehensive approach is usually needed.

For this reason, I invite readers who suffer from some form of depression to create an individualized treatment plan that meets their personal needs and preferences. It might be helpful to seek the support of a psychiatrist, licensed mental health counselor or another mental health professional in this endeavor. My hope is that by taking a whole-person approach, rather than identifying one treatment at a time, depression sufferers will experience sustainable, long-term symptom reduction.

Four dozen treatment options is a lot to take in. Keep in mind that perfection is never the goal. As you work through these pages, try to remain a bit lighthearted about the whole thing. It can be fun to make optimistic plans. Later, you can revise your expectations and your goals, adjusting them to the reality of daily life. 

One more important point here: though all of the treatments included in this book work some of the time for some of the people with depression, six options are backed by more research than are the others. I call them the Big Six, and they are: maintaining healthy relationships and a sense of community; sleeping well; taking antidepressants as directed and at an adequate dose; exercising regularly; going to therapy; and doing written cognitive therapy exercises. Spending time in nature is also surprisingly effective (see Lost Connections by Johann Hari for more on this). Psychotherapy’s high rates of effectiveness are enhanced when the client connects emotionally with the counselor and when therapy is used as a meta-strategy that includes and encourages other changes. I should also note two other less accessible heavy hitters for treatment-resistant depression: taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting and undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). More on all of these to come.

Strongly consider each of these when creating your treatment plan.

Grab a journal or a notebook (or even just some loose leaf paper) and start your individualized treatment plan. This can look however you want it to look, but my suggestion is to keep it simple: write “Depression Treatment Plan” at the top of the first page, and write “Emotional Coping Skills” at the top of the second page. That’s all for now; as you work your way through this book, you will write down the treatment options you would like to try on these lists. More specific tasks related to your treatment plan can go on your to-do lists or elsewhere in the notebook. 

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