Depression

What is depression?

When you are not enjoying life or do not experience feelings of pleasure, for weeks, months or even years, you may be experiencing depression.

Depression can make you feel worthless and simply unable to get yourself going. It can change the way you go about daily activities and can affect your appetite and sleeping patterns.

Through depression, you may experience:

• low moods, feeling sad or a lack of motivation
• a loss of pleasure, which can impact your day-to-day activities
• negative changes to your appetite and sleeping patterns
• feelings of worthlessness and even thoughts of suicide.

How depression treatment programs can help you

The aim of our depression treatment programs is to help you understand depression and how negative thinking affects your behaviour.

Our programs help you develop strategies to deal with low moods and lack of motivation so you can manage your condition and help prevent depression from ruling your life.

Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) is at the core of our programs as it has been shown to be a highly effective way to treat depression by changing the way you think.

When you receive treatment for depression at our hospital, your therapy will include exploring the following topics:

• understanding what depression is and its causes
• overcoming lack of motivation and lethargy
• making positive change through a balanced lifestyle
• an introduction to mindfulness
• how to recognise patterns of thinking and challenging negative thinking
• understanding how depression affects self-worth and leads to self-blame or feelings of guilt
• developing awareness of core beliefs and challenging these effectively
• relapse prevention.

Our depression treatment programs are offered our multidisciplinary teams including psychologists, psychiatrists, nurses, allied health professionals and pastoral services caregivers who look after all aspects of your emotional and physical wellbeing.