I am depressed and I need someone to talk to

It is my experience that if things aren't working with a current therapist--whether this is the case needs to be seen, but after 7 years with the same therapist, he's on 10 pills/day, he experiences a serious relapse and feels he has to call on HN for help, is not a good sign. After 7 years there should be some more professional safety-nets installed.

Anyway, if it's not working well, get a new therapist. From personal experience, sticking with the same one for too long while you know it's not going further has done nothing but slow progress. The reasoning is, a therapist is also a creature of habit and they're not going to change their general approach much, even if you discuss the matter with them. And I don't mean trying out different meds or therapy, but the sort of general approach they use in their profession. And there's nothing wrong with that, even the really good ones do it, and even with them I still got stuck after some time, simply because their bag of tricks (as good as it may be) ran out and we tried all the things. And that's nobody's fault because therapy isn't a hard science or engineering problem, so it's very possible that even the "best" one runs out of ideas while another may have some approach that fits you right now (which is another factor: a patient changes as a person, the therapist that was right when you were at point X in your life may not be the one you need right now).

Disclaimer: this may be bad advice because of reasons of US Healthcare that I know nothing about. So, Think For Yourself. But also don't go waiting for a therapist to fix things if it doesn't seem like they're doing that. Which I need to repeat, is not (necessarily) a failure of the therapist, but sometimes a new pair of eyes can get you moving again, if the old pair got stuck.

Depression is hard and it hurts. You can actually rewire your neural pathways. Therapists can help with this. It gets better.

1. Heard this from a Vietnamese Buddhist Monk on depression that made a lot of sense to me: "Nothing can grow without food - stop feeding your depression and start feeding something that you want for yourself - health, wellness, happiness"

2. Another good advise I heard from a noble guy on depression - get out of yourself and try to do something good for someone else. you will see something shift inside you and you will feel better. Service is something that can instantly get you out of your depression

3. Try to find a community where you can visit and interact with people. Human contact and personal interaction (not online) can make a lot of difference

Hope this helps and good luck SKR

I would put it this way: apart from really impressive experience and knowing very well what goes on in people's minds (of course in a different way than the neurologists do), my mother has never paid for a speeding ticket, because she knows how to talk to a policeman to avoid the fine, discovering all his weaknesses, fears, frustrations in 5 seconds - honestly, I'm not exaggerating! She get's paid for two hours of work what many people earn by working the entire month.

She usually deals with CEOs and other top-management guys who, for instance, are extremelly good and efficient in what they do, but their subordinates cannot stand the pressure the boss is creating, or to put it straight - the managers are practically monsters. And so she comes in and turns a Steve Jobs into a Wozniak, if you know what I mean.

Think for a second of a police negotiator who persuades a terrorist not to blow himself up, or a suicidal person not to jump out of the window.

I know I have used the examples remotely related with therapy, but I wanted to give you a broader picture of what this artful science (yes!) is coupable of.

There are of course certain limits to what can be achieved and an experienced psychologist is able to define if a person needs to consult a psychiatrist to get medication, or if recovery is at all possible - the goal of the therapy can be differently defined, sometimes it is just to make the patient "stable", but healing is not possible.

To give you an example, while meeting my mother at the mental institution where she worked, I once stumbled upon the head of the drug addictions department whom I asked what is their "success rate" in therapy. She asked me: "What do you mean?" - "How sure you can be that a person is not going back to the addition", I replied.

"We are sure that almost all our patients sooner or later would return to drug abuse". I was shocked, but this is the realistic, frank approach.

To sum it up let me just mention that when my dear mother was doing PhD she had a very distinguished supervisor, one of the best specialists in the country, for many years the chairman of the National Psychologists Association (not in US/UK obviously), and one of his most important books was titled something like "The therapeutic aspects of therapy", and his conclusion was "talking to people change them, but it is yet to be discovered how and why".