Educating yourself is, I believe, the single most important thing you can do. First, it sets you on the road to recovery. It will get you working on the problem instead of bemoaning your helplessness and becoming more depressed. It is a positive action that has the benefit of making you think and exercise your brain. One problem of severe, especially long term, depression is that it becomes very difficult to concentrate, to focus, to keep the attention from wandering. The committment and intellectual exercise required to educate yourself will help rejuvenate your brain.

Education will also arm you with facts making you less susceptible to attempts at a quick fix. There are no magic bullets. It takes commitment and work to overcome depression.

Finally, the knowledge you gain will make for a more level playing field between you and doctors and therapists. You will be able to ask better questions and evaluate their answers instead of simply taking their word as gospel. Education enables you to take responsibility for your recovery.

There is a great deal of good information on the web that you should become familiar with. I suggest you start with my depression links. Most of them have a number of additional links. They will provide enough information to keep you busy for quite a while.

As a seriously depressed person with thoughts of suicide, I was fortunate that my health plan had a mental health component. The therapist that evaluated me lost no time in referring me to a local hospital’s intensive outpatient depression program. Although they had a psychiatrist to prescribe medication and therapists for limited individual attention, it was primarily an educational program (classes and group discussion) designed to impart information about depression; stabilize the patient (stop the slide into deeper depression); and provide some basic skills and tools for coping with life on a day to day basis.

It was an excellent program. If you have severe depression and have difficulty functioning I would encourage you to discover whether or not something similar exists in your locale.