Depression is not a physical/medical illness.

If you are feeling depressed and low, I got one important advice for you:  avoid a medical doctor or psychiatrist.  95% of the time,  he or she is the one most unqualified to deal with your depression.

I say this because a medical doctor is predominantly "biochemical" in training and protocol. After a mere 10 or 15 minutes talking, the psychiatrist gets his prescription pad and issues you a drug. That is, because he believes that your depression is a physical/medical illness.

How mistaken and dangerous to your health!  With depression, there is no scientific or objective proof that something is wrong with the tissues of the physical body. Even the label "chemical imbalance" (serotonin abnormality) in the brain most often blamed causing depression remains a theory, not a fact, up to this day. There are no laboratory tests (empirical evidence) that will show damage or breakdown of any body tissues when you are depressed.

The diagnosis "clinical depression" is based on thinking, feeling, and behavior - not on something wrong in the physical body. So when a psychiatrist gives you an organic or synthetic drug to treat your depression, he is really unable to help you. You're given something your body does not need and may actually just contribute to worsening your condition (as I've witnessed in so many patients!).

Of course, there are physical illnesses (e.g. cancer) that can lead to depression, but they will have a truly medical disease label and laboratory evidence. It's not just the stand-alone label "depression." In that case, you treat the physical problem with organic drugs - but not the depression. The depression is treated in another way based on the patient's unhealthy attitudes or responses in thought, feeling, and behavior to his or her various life situations.

Be careful!