Depression can be scary and debilitating. It can make doing even the simplest tasks, like pouring a bowl of cereal or taking a shower, seem difficult.
 
If you experience depression, you may decide to engage in psychotherapy, and your doctor may even prescribe medication for you.
 
Whatever path to recovery you choose, you can expect professionals to point you in the direction of developing more and better skills for coping with your life, your feelings and your depression.
 
Coping skills are a must in order to overcome depression. The research makes it clear that the better one is able to solve problems, develop good relationships with others and self-manage one’s feelings, the better one does overall.
 
If you are severely depressed, you might think that there is no real solution. You may feel that you are trapped at the bottom of a well.
 
However, to decide you are hopeless illustrates the point--you make the mistake of thinking things can’t possibly improve, and then you believe it as if it were true. That’s a mistake.

When you get therapy and learn how to change your thinking (cognitive therapy) and your behavior (behavioral therapy), it’s like someone dropped a rope ladder down the well. As you climb up, one foot in front of the other, you see a way to escape the trap.
 
To alleviate your depression and climb out of the well, it is imperative that you learn to change hopeless and helpless thinking and associated destructive behavior.
 
Working with a skilled psychotherapist is critical to learn how to properly recognize and correct your debilitating thinking and actions.
 
Is Depression Manageable?

 
Yes! You can manage your condition so it goes away--and when you know your vulnerabilities and how to handle them intelligently, depression doesn’t have to come back to haunt you. You don’t have to live in the shadow of clinical depression