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Depression is the word people use when they feel bad. What people in this piece are struggling to understand is that depression is not one thing or in fact “a thing” at all. It’s certainly not a useful diagnosis. DSM diagnosis constricts our understanding rather than enhancing it. Here they are struggling to understand states of arousal, and they lack the words for it. High arousal will lead to anger outbursts and ambient fear, as well as crippling shame, and people will describe themselves as depressed. They feel bad.
In this article, the depressed person with anger outbursts comes to understand the impact of childhood trauma on her state as an adult. Trauma was the issue- it left her disregulated. Therapy helped. Therapy with neurofeedback would help even more.
-SF
If You're Often Angry Or Irritable, You May Be Depressed
npr.org
Physicians have been taught to look for signs of hopelessness, sadness and lack of motivation to help them diagnose depression. But anger as a depression symptom is less often noticed or addressed.A recent conversation I had with a well known trauma researcher:
Me: "So how would you diagnose him?"
Him: Laughing briefly and ruefully, "I don't think there is a diagnosis"
Although in a way this may be uniquely true for our international patient, I want to suggest that it is always true. We are never treating anything so discreet as a singular mental illness, The brain does not parcel its problems that way. It struggles with its origins, its developmental impacts and errors, its many discontents but these are manifest as problems in circuitry, in connectivity and in amplitude. We look to history and symptoms as a way to begin a conversation with our patient but even more so with his brain and to guide our protocols. In the case of our international patient we don't have enough reliable history but we can see that he is driven by overwhelming affect particularly anger, shame and fear; that his affect overwhelms thought and memory and makes it impossible to think; that he demonstrates poor executive function which we see in primary process lying, limited cause and effect relationship and inability to understand the consequences of his actions; and failure of the self/other system as shown in all of the above as well as in his truncated capacity for empathy.
In Part Two, Session Three of the webinar on Developmental Trauma we will discuss a model that links arousal in the brain to affect, state and trait, and look at the nature of state dependence and what we now consider personality disorders. We begin again on Feb3/4 depending on where you are in the world. Join us!
For more information go to www.trainingtrauma.orgFor more information go to buff.ly/2Dp4o6t
Looking forward to beginning Part 2 of this journey on February 3/4. Part 1 is still available for viewing- I hope you'll join us!"With her great clinical insights and unique ability to translate current research in the neuroscience of trauma into guiding principles for neurofeedback practice, Sebern’s webinars are without doubt the best way to learn how to integrate neurofeedback and psychotherapy in working with trauma survivors.”
- Mirjana Askovic, #STARTTS, Australian Neurofeedback Institute
We've gotten some fantastic feedback from #neurofeedback practitioners who have taken courses with Sebern Fisher in the past. See more testimonials here: trainingtrauma.org/testimonials/