Women experience clinical depression twice as often as men. Studies show that one in four women suffers severe depression, too.
Clinical depression causes a range of negative feelings and effects. These include sadness, helplessness, hopelessness, and worthlessness. You also suffer apathy, sleep problems, low self-esteem, fatigue, and appetite loss. Some even feel suicidal, while others make attempts to take their own lives.
What surprises many women is that their depression causes physical symptoms, too. Maybe you feel physically sick, suffer digestion problems, have chronic pain, or show other symptoms with no explanation.
Bipolar disorder is a mood disorder once called manic depression. In this mood disorder, you suffer the lowest of lows and the highest of highs on a manic cycle. Mania is the high energy phase with an elevated mood. This upswing lasts days, weeks or months before cycling back to depression. Although you feel happy on the surface of your mania, this condition causes grave risk to your well-being and even your safety.
Symptoms of mania with depression include:
A quality depression treatment program will know the difference between depression and bipolar disorder, and adjust treatment accordingly.
With all of the adverse effects of depression and bipolar disorder, it is no wonder people feel uncomfortable and seek to self-medicate. Many of these people have no awareness of their disorder, only knowing they feel uncomfortable and struggle on a daily basis.
Drinking alcohol or using drugs helps you feel stable and upbeat for a very short period. However, you keep trying to recreate those positive feelings by using more and more of your substances. Soon, you develop tolerance and need more alcohol or drugs to feel earlier effects.
Sadly, the more you use, the deeper you dive toward addiction. Dependence comes after tolerance. In this stage of early addiction, you start to need your substances just to make it through your day and function normally. Of course, dependence is sadly a short road to full-blown addiction.
When you struggle with addiction and mental illness like depression at the same time, you suffer co-occurring conditions. This dual diagnosis disorder, as doctors call it, requires treatment of both of your problems at the same time.
In a dual diagnosis depression treatment program, you gain freedom from your substance abuse and mental health problems. You learn about your conditions, how to prevent relapse, and what you need for healthy living. You learn how the two conditions relate to each other and signs for knowing you need more help from a depression treatment program.
With this dual diagnosis care, you can rebuild your life for happiness and stability in addiction recovery. Of course, you need help from a rehab and depression treatment program capable of meeting your unique needs. For women, Soledad House in San Diego provides this important help.
Your depression treatment program at Soledad House helps you recover from the addiction and the mental health problems you face on a daily basis. Programs and services at Soledad House include:
