Depression

The current mental health paradigm does not know what causes depression, and the treatment protocols are not very effective.

The Australian website for ‘Beyond Blue’, which is government-backed, contains information about depression and anxiety. The following comments come from that site.

‘Three million Australians are living with depression or anxiety.’

‘Sometimes there is no obvious cause at all.’

‘While we don’t know what causes depression……’

‘Remember everyone is different and its a combination of factors that can contribute to developing depression.’

Similar statements can be found on the website for the National Institute of Mental Health (USA).

What the above institutions have in common is that they do not understand the brain from its three very different levels of functioning.

Imprinting of both good and bad experiences occurs in the first level of consciousness. These imprinted memories give rise to sensations that flow upward into the second level of consciousness (the limbic system) where they are experienced as feelings.

If the feelings are pleasant in nature then the person experiences these good feelings at the third level of consciousness in the prefrontal cortex. The best feeling of all is LOVE, and love gives rise to happiness, joy and the human spiritual element.

However if the imprinting was from traumatic experiences, especially at the baby and infant stage of life, then the sensations given off  will reflect the awfulness of those experiences. Our  feelings will also be experienced as overwhelmingly awful.

The following is a very important principle that can only be fully understood from the three levels of mind. If feelings become too awful they have to be kept from conscious awareness, otherwise they will destabilize the prefrontal cortex, or thinking part of the mind.

The subconscious mind has a way of shutting down bad feelings without the person being aware of what is happening, and so the ‘feeling’ body becomes detached from the ‘thinking’ body. When the brain shuts down feeling between these two levels, this is what the  medical profession refers to as depression.

Someone has described depression thus – One feels as if one where lying bound hand and foot at the bottom of a dark well, utterly helpless. This is a good description of how the brain has to restrain the rising feelings, in a forceful manner, from coming to conscious awareness. Basically our life force that should give us feelings of love and joy is seconded into diverting its energy into repressing painful feelings.

From the three levels of mind we can see that depression is the repression of painful memories, and the cure is to feel the pain in small manageable doses. This is what Primal Therapy does.

The current belief that everyone is different and that a combination of factors can contribute to developing depression is not supported from the three levels of mind and the process of Primal Therapy. In fact we humans are all very much the same, especially so at the first level which contains our imprinting and generates the powerful sensations.