Overcoming
Depression & Female Learned Helplessness
through Hypnotherapy
HypnosisAustralia,
May 2007
©Tracie
O'Keefe 2006
By Dr Tracie
O'Keefe DCH, as keynote speaker at the Women and Depression Conference,
6-9 April, 2006, Sydney, Australia.
Abstract
Introduction
Aim
Results
Discussion
Critique
Conclusion
Recommendations
Bibliography
Abstract
This is a
discursive paper and workshop illustrated by four women's cases where
they were able to overcome their sense of depression by learning a greater
sense of self-efficacy during hypnotherapy. In Australia, as in every
other country in the world, girls and women are of less social, work,
economic, religious and political importance than males. Women learn from
a very early age not only to acquiesce to perceived male superiority but
also to generally not pursue power over their own lives. Because Australia
comprises such a wide mix of people of varying ethnic derivations, women's
liberation is at times is years behind North America and Europe.
Many women
in Australia have been raised in family structures that value males over
females. This can profoundly undermine girls' and women's sense of ego,
self-differentiation and efficacy. Such learned helplessness is supported
by a society where few women are industry, religious or political leaders,
not through choice but exclusion.
In this paper
I look at four women who were helped in relation to a sense of depression
through hypnotherapeutic intervention and personality alteration. Hypnotherapy
has proved to be an accelerated form of personality re-invention and supplementation
that can help women find their voices and strengths in a very short period
of time. As a goal-focused therapy, hypnotherapy has shown itself to be
one of the quickest forms of personality change methods without resulting
to what are often over-prescribed medications that frequently oppress
women, rather than support them.
Introduction
When a person
is depressed they can have a sense of unhappiness, helplessness, despair,
sullenness, impending doom, tiredness, exhaustion, lack of energy and
lack of self-efficacy. They are unable to focus on the positive aspects
of life and become obsessed with the negative aspects of their existence.
Along with those psychological difficulties a physical malaise also takes
over the body and people have a sense of not being in the best of health,
wellbeing or spirits (Beck, 1973).
There are
two kinds of basic depression identified in medicine and psychology. The
first is endogenous depression that is the result of illness or profound
chemical changes in the body due to an upset of homeostasis, which is
the balancing of the body's systems, causing secondary psychological effects.
The second kind of depression is called exogenous or reactive depression
which is the result of a person experiencing primarily psychological reactions
to a situation which then activates physical symptoms (DSM IV 1994).
In some cases
people are diagnosed as manic depressives in that they continually swing
from one extreme of heightened manic happiness to very low states of morbid
depression (Fuller, Torrey & Knable, 2002). The allopathic medical
model considers this a mental illness and generally medicates in the first
instance and very rarely offers psychological help.
Depression
is also graded as minor or major in accordance with its severity, debilitating
effects and length of duration. In grading and looking at depressive behaviors
a clinician needs to also remember cultural influences and ideations that
may have a major effect on how they see a patient and how the patient
sees themselves and their own experiences. Breggin (1993), the American
psychiatrist, observed that depression is recorded more in cultures where
there is great profit from treating the concept of depressive illnesses,
particularly through hospitalisation, electric convulsive therapy (ECT),
and psychopharmacology.
Laing (1985),
the Scottish psychiatrist, talked about how, after many years of practice,
he came to believe that the institution of medicine often becomes just
that - an institution. His work was largely responsible for the decommissioning
of many mental health hospitals internationally in that he saw medicine
as often being devoid of human understanding. He was particularly horrified
by the way women were treated by the medical profession when they had
psychological difficulties, seeing standard prescriptions as not being
the way forward for women experiencing psychological and emotional difficulties.
Pope (2001)
talked about how what is often forgotten in our culture, in the English-
speaking world, is that depression is part of the menstrual cycle that
has a function. Women experience many kinds of depressive states at differing
times of their lives including times when they are premenstrual, ovulating,
menopausal, post-partum, dealing with empty nest syndrome, ageing or during
illness. Natural depressive states for women are constantly being misdiagnosed
as illness and not natural functions. Instead of telling the women to
find a space, be alone to rest and recover, physicians are all too often
unnecessarily administering drugs. Our society, it seems, considers lack
of productivity the real illness in women that it seeks to fix with pharmacology
and sometimes electric shock treatment in order to create corporate profit.
Many women
presenting themselves to their doctors complaining of depression are primarily
offered poor and unproven drug therapy. Moore (1998), a senior fellow
in health policy at George Washington University Medical Centre writes:
"Nearly every one of the most popular prescription drugs has potential
side effects, yet doctors seldom discuss them for fear that patients will
be too frightened to take their medicine. For example Mortin, Advil, and
Aleve may cause life-threatening perforated ulcers: Prozac is linked to
242 different adverse effects: Xanax can be highly addictive. Tranquilizers,
sleep aids, painkillers reduce blood pressure - all have documented risks".
Jensvold,
Halbreich, & Hamilton (eds, 1996) said: "Until recently, women
were excluded as research subjects from much pharmacological research,
including the early phases of drug testing and numbers of prominent large
studies, as well as many smaller studies. Also commonly, when women have
been included in drug research, data have not been analyzed with regard
to sex and have not been reported in a manner that allows such analyses
to be performed. Factors unique to women have often been used as justification
for excluding women from drug research."
This means
many of the medications currently being prescribed to women for depression
have not been tested on women. There is no knowledge of how those medications
affect the hormonal cycles of women or how the hormonal cycles affect
the medications' reactions on the body.
Since Australia
was a British colony, much of European-type immigrant Australian culture
over the past 200 years has been based on Judeo-Christian theology. Within
the past 30 years a large influx of Asian and Muslim communities have
been added, but mainly in the cities. There is also the native Aboriginal
cultures that are now a smaller part of the population who do use the
services of Western allopathic medicine but also rely on traditional community
support and medicine (Census of Population and Housing - 2001, internet).
In Christianity and Judaism, Adam and Eve were not made equal but woman
was made as a companion and servant for man as an afterthought. Eve got
Adam thrown out of the Garden of Eden due to her initiating the act of
original sin. She is still seen as the temptress to be resisted and excluded
from power in the churches and the temple. In these religions people's
sexual and political power is purposely kept out of the hands of women
by men (Holy Bible, 2000).
In the Encyclopedia
of Feminism, Tuttle (1986)) writes: "Traditionally Jewish women have
been subordinate to men and forced to lead restricted lives". She
further goes on to talk about how many Jewish women have been liberated
in the 20th century. In truth, however, in Jewish communities men are
still the ones who hold the major power at work, and financially.
Chang (1993)
tells us about three generations of women brought up in China: "The
story of his wife, my great-grandmother, was typical of millions of Chinese
women of her time. She came from a family of tanners called Wu. Because
her family was not an intellectual one and did not hold any official post,
and because she was a girl, she was not given a name at all."
Mosteshar
(1995), who was born in Iran and educated in Britain, and then returned
to Iran, describes the choices of oppressed Muslim women in Iran and many
other countries: "Then they were shown various methods of contraception
and advised to use them 'until you are sure that the man you are married
to will be the man you want to stay with'. Few of these girls had ever
spoken a dozen words to the boys who were downstairs preparing to turn
them into women. Most of the brides told me that their grooms had been
chosen by their parents or that they were their cousins."
Roddick (2000),
the world famous entrepreneur who started her own chain of cosmetic stores
The Body Shop, wrote: "Is it far harder for a woman to be an entrepreneur?
Certainly the enterprise culture is full of contradictions for women.
On the one hand you are encouraged to get out there and conduct your own
destiny, but on the other hand there is the very strong moral authority
of home and hearth - the idea that we should be with our kids. It is still
far easier for any women to go to the bank and secure a loan for a new
kitchen or fitted wardrobes than one for starting a business. There is
still the prevailing notion that women don't have the necessary business
skills."
There are
still far less women in Parliament in Australia percentage-wise than many
other countries, even though it has been 120 years since the formation
of the Women's Suffragette League that was formed to get women the vote.
(www.parliament.ns\v.gov.au/prod/web/common.nsf/key/ResourcesFactswomenmp3)
In a lot
of ways Australia is many years behind many English-speaking countries
such as Britain and North America and even some parts of Europe concerning
the way in which women are not integrated into controlling society and
their own lives. Australia is still very much a macho culture with very
few women at the top of industry or politics. Many women were brought
up and are still being brought up with little concept that they are able
to do and be anything they want in life, instead being seen as second-class
citizens. Many first, second and third generation Australians come from
cultures where women still have much less value or importance and power
than men:
"The
inferior social and economic position of women, gender bias in the law,
lack of access to legal services and lack of concerted government action
continue to underpin women's legal inequality in Australia. Those suffering
special disadvantage include Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women,
women of non-English speaking background, women living in rural and remote
areas, older women, women with a disability and women who are multiply
disadvantaged." (National Women's Justice Coalition contribution
on Articles 15 and 16 of CEDAW to the Australian Non-Government Organisations'
report to the UN Commission on the Status of Women particularly in response
to the Australian country report, prepared July 1997).
There are
also groups of people who I wish to mention in my discussion who damage
the central egos of many female children and women. They can include women
themselves who are part of certain groups of separatist feminists, as
well as female religious fantasists. They are elite idealists who preach
to women about what they should and should not be and are extremely judgmental.
Women with
overbearing religious or philosophical ideations can foist doctrine so
oppressively upon their daughters that they are left with feelings of
insecurity and inadequacy in that the daughters can never live up to the
mothers' standards. They are women who sometimes teach their daughters
to give up their own power to their husbands out of religious duty in
a male-dominated religion. This child becomes a woman who becomes a professional
victim with a sense of powerlessness about being able to create her own
life course, happiness and wellbeing.
Gauld (1995)
describes how hypnosis in varying forms has been used considerably over
thousands of years in the healing process of all human beings from the
Egyptians to modern times). Crasilneck & Hall (1985) write about how
many different kinds of practitioners practise hypnosis including hypnotherapists,
psychotherapists, counsellors, psychiatrists, anaesthesiologists, oncologists,
dentists, social workers, nurses and sometimes educators. Erickson (Vol.
I-IV, 1980) the 20th century's premiere medical hypnotist, believed that
in treating depression with hypnotic techniques the practitioner generally
needs to have had training in the psychological and maybe physiological
disciplines as well as hypnosis.
The use of
hypnotherapy in the treatment of depression has been greatly explored
by the psychologist and hypnotherapist Yapko (1992). He contests the validity
of many psychopharmacological studies and their choice as a primary treatment
in many cases of depression. He also talks about how there has been great
fear around the use of hypnosis and ameliorating depressive states that
he sees as being unfounded. His work clearly shows that the use of hypnosis
can accelerate self-evolution, psychodynamic and cognitive therapy through
brief hypnotic therapy.
The use of
hypnotic techniques and considerations in treating women needs at times
to be different than those used with men (Hornyak, 2000). Women's bodies
are different from men and their life issues and illnesses are often different
to those of men. While some universal hypnotic techniques can be used
with men and women alike, some hypnotic therapeutics need to be specifically
designed for women.
Aim
In this paper
I will look at four cases of women who have improved and moved away from
overly depressive states by the use of modern eclectic hypnotherapy which
is a combination of hypnosis and psychotherapy. All cases experienced
a combination of endogenous and exogenous depression. In reporting and
reviewing these cases I seek to show that such women can seek help from
hypnotherapy that is other than a psychopharmacologically-based remedy.
Results
Case 1:
Sharon
Sharon telephoned
on the recommendation of her friend who had seen an article about me in
a newspaper. Initially the friend telephoned me because she was concerned
about how depressed Sharon had become since the friend had last visited
Australia.
When she
telephoned me herself, Sharon told me she was of Middle Eastern derivation,
her family were strict Muslims and she beseeched me that her husband must
not know about her treatment. Since she was unused to the centre of Sydney,
the friend dropped her off at the clinic and picked her up afterwards.
It was easy to see the extent of her involvement in her religious system,
because Sharon wore a head scarf, which covered all of her face, with
only her eyes showing when she was in public. At 23 she had already had
four children but all of them, she explained, are girls so she was depressed
because her husband was not happy without a son.
The last
birth had been nine months ago. She was still breast feeding and her husband
was angry because she was not getting pregnant again so she could try
for a son. It was quite easy to see from her description of her life,
body language and her mood of deep solomnness that she was suffering from
both post-natal and reactive depression. She was also overwhelmed by her
isolated domestic life. If it were not for her friend she would not have
had the money to come for treatment.
During four
sessions of hypnotherapy and teaching her self-hypnosis she was able to
reorganise her daily schedule, installing sharing the childcare with a
cousin, visiting a family planning clinic without her husband knowing
for oral contraception, and joining a women-only gym. Her self-esteem
strengthened and Sharon enlisted the help of her mother-in-law to persuade
her husband to give her a few years before they tried for another baby.
The hypnotherapy
was expediently useful in helping her take back control of her life and
the self-hypnosis she was taught was something she could do every day
in the privacy of her own home, without anyone else knowing that she had
ever had help.
As Sharon's
life became more under her own control she became fitter, more confident,
and happier and the post-natal depression lifted. The friend eventually
went back to the Middle East but by that time Sharon had built a new network
of helpers and she felt she was better able to cope with her life.
Case 2:
Larna
Aged 35,
Larna had been involved with drugs since she was 13, regularly taking
amphetamine, ecstasy and smoking marijuana on a daily bias. She was a
single working mother, with a son of four, making her living in the sex
industry in a brothel.
In recounting
her history to me Larna had talked about how she had always felt she was
intellectually inferior and did not have the mental abilities to succeed
in life. Due to her involvement at school with drugs she had become estranged
from mainstream education and gravitated towards other out-of-control
drug abusers during the whole of her adult life.
The women
in her family had not become ambitious professionals but been mothers
and simply worked to survive as an additional income to the males' role
as primary breadwinner. Added to this was the fact that the father of
her child was articulate with deep religious convictions and not involved
with her lifestyle in anyway. When she saw him to give access to the child
she constantly felt intimidated by him.
What was
plain for me to deduce at the first interview was that she had very low
self-esteem, poor self-image and a lack of positive self-belief. What
immediately contrasted to that observation was that she had a good command
of the English language, used quite complex sentence construction and
very articulate use of adjectives. The disparity indicated that she was
in fact a very intelligent woman who was not aware of her own intellectual
abilities and that no one from her background had ever emphasised to her
how capable intellectually she probably was.
She sought
therapy because she was depressed about her circumstances and wished to
stop drugs, get an education and live a different way of life. Over several
hypnotherapy sessions, and the work she was set to do at home, she was
able to become free of drugs, and stopped smoking. She learned to future-pace
her own success, change her belief system and plan how she was going to
start a degree programme to take her towards the profession in which she
wanted to work. And in saying this, I make no judgement on the sex industry
as I see many clients who work in this area. As opposed to being depressed
Larna learnt to be involved in creating her own reality, cut herself some
slack, and realised that she was much more capable than she had believed
during her life.
Case 3:
Diane
This patient
was a 35-year-old long-term psychiatrist patient with a 20-year history
of admittance and discharge from mental hospitals for bouts of Bipolar
II disorder. She had had more then 80 electric shock treatments (ECT).
At the time of consultation Diane was in a depressive stage, on Lithium
Carbonate, and trying to progressively come off tranquilisers that she
had been taking for 18 months. She also had a history of complex multiple
drug abuse usually with partners who were also drug abusers.
Previously
to attending my clinic she had been seeing the same psychiatrist once
a week for several years when she was not hospitalised. The psychiatrist
was currently on a six-month sabbatical and she had not been offered an
alternative. Diane sought help with her depression because she was living
alone and trying to get over the break-up with her boyfriend, who had
been a fellow psychiatric patient in a hospital and had been violent towards
her.
Certain things
struck me about this patient right from the outset. Firstly she was an
absolutely compliant person who seemed to expect people to tell her what
to do, including her family, the psychiatrist, and her ex-boyfriend. Secondly
she seemed very comfortable in the roles of someone's daughter, victim,
member of the family that was mentally ill, patient, and her ex-boyfriend's
ex-girlfriend.
Thirdly she
had only ever worked a couple of years up until she was 20, after which
her family had supplied her with a stipendiary from their large business
interests but they had little contact with her. During hypnotherapy Diane
was asked to construct a new kind of image of herself that was different
from any she had ever had before. Through interactive psychotherapy and
hypnotic suggestion she was taught to be the kind of independent person
that she had never associated with herself before.
Since she
was very afraid of people thinking she was weird and an outcast I insisted
that she became much weirder and told her that I totally objected to her
becoming normal in any way whatsoever (paradoxical intention). This was
very shocking to her at first and then we designed a way of hypnotic dreaming
for her to use at home for her unconscious mind to come up with new ways
of becoming out of the ordinary.
I saw Diane
for five hypnotherapy sessions, after which she was using daily self-hypnosis,
had a belief in her own efficacy, had devised a regular daily schedule
so that she could exercise, shop for fresh food, study and do some volunteer
work at a local charity. One of the most useful things she said she acquired
in therapy was an ability to define the boundaries in her relationships
so that she let people into her world on her own terms. Her depression
lifted and for the first time in her life she found that she was quite
comfortable being an individual pursuing her own interests.
Case 4:
Martha
Martha presented
with two main complaints which had led her to become very depressed and
to consider suicide, even though she was a devout Catholic and said she
believed it was a sin. She had just had a bilateral mastectomy due to
cancer of the breasts. At the time she had been undergoing chemotherapy
and radiotherapy. She had also suffered long-term from Irritable Bowel
Syndrome (IBS) with alternate constipation and loose motions and was struggling
to even keep food down after meals. All this plus the fact that her niece
was coping very well with her own bilateral mastectomy made her feel she
was a loser and had lost all her attractiveness to her husband.
Martha also
told me that she had very caring husband and three teenage sons who were
doing the best they could to help her through her cancer treatment. Although
she loved her niece she felt overwhelmed by the fact that the niece seemed
to be sailing though her treatment remaining cheerful.
Initially
I told Martha I could not help her because I was not qualified enough
to do the job she had asked of me. Annoyed that she had travelled two
hours to see me she demanded I explained because I had said on the telephone
that I did help people in her situation. I told her that I believed she
had already given up on herself and what she was seeking was a magician
and I was not a magician. I could, however, teach her to be a magician
herself, but only if she was prepared to treat herself with the things
that I taught her.
Intrigued,
she decided that she had nothing to lose and agreed to learn self-hypnosis
and use it four times a day. I also got her to promise on the Bible that
she would keep her word. We then started hypnotherapy to change her eating
patterns, types of food consumed and reprioritise her daily schedule so
that the three sons and her husband would be looking after themselves
over the next six months.
She was taught
psychoneuroimmunology to help combat the cancer, the ability to change
her mental state, the differentiation of herself as a person apart from
her family; and she was asked to teach those things to her niece. After
a few hypnotherapy sessions Martha became more philosophical and decided
to take one day at time and get as much out of that day as she was able
to while taking care of herself first.
I saw her
for six sessions and the depression quickly lifted as she learnt how to
control her eating and bowel movements. She also made plans to have breast
reconstruction but then cancelled the surgery because her husband pleaded
with her not to go through with the operation. Her self-esteem increased
and she learnt the cancer had been a great physical blow to her, but if
she took her time, she was able to cope and continually try to get better.
What was new to her was that she began to see herself as a separate person,
an individual and not just an appendage to her family, which was what
she had been raised to think she should become.
Discussion
Each of these
four cases were women who sought hypnotherapy from a private clinical
hypnotherapist (me) to alleviate depression and become motivated toward
resolutions. They all paid for their own treatments, bar one, who was
funded by her friend, and none were funded by government heath funds.
Some, however, did get partial rebates back from their private medical
insurance companies. During treatment it became clear that they all suffered
from low self-esteem and a lack of self-efficacy in their abilities to
move beyond the depressive state. What became clear as well is that as
women they did not believe they were capable enough to cope with whatever
came their way. Either they had not learnt significant coping mechanisms
in the first place for self-integrity; or the vagaries of life had led
them to a place of dependency on the patriarchal all-powerful medical
system; or they had been ill and felt that their self-reliant resources
were depleted.
Three of
the four patients reported that they had been prescribed antidepressants
by their GP and not gained any relief from them. The GPs had consulted
with those patients for around five minutes each. None of those GPs referred
the patients on for any form of counselling or arranged any kind of follow-up
with regard to the effects the antidepressants were having. The one patient
who had been previously identified as long-term Bipolar II seemed not
to be supervised by anyone at the time. Breggin (1992) criticised at length
the culture of allopathic medicine - GPs and psychiatrists prescribing
unsubstantiated antidepressants at the drop of a hat without even finding
out what was bothering the patient.
One of the
major problems with the way allopathic Western medicine sees depression
is that it always sees it as an illness. In trying to fix this pathology
it administers chemical cocktails to change the body's levels of serotonin
without dealing with the cause of the depression. This is rather like
hitting the foot with a hammer to make it fit the larger shoe.
Australian
women within the medical system who defy the patriarchal rule books are
cited as being upstarts and proletariats. Kerryn Phelps, the first female
doctor to be the president of the Australian Medical Association had to
employ lawyers to defend her against defamation when the press over-profiled
her because of her lesbian relationship (Mitchell 2002).
Women's way
through and out of depressive states needs to be different and needs different
strategies from men by nature of our unique social positions of having
had such a long history of social oppression. This is the kind of oppression
that has often been shared by gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and
intersex (GLBTI) cultures or people of ethnic derivation (Paglia 1994).
Just as Paglia demands that GLBTI people need to take charge of their
own future, so do therapists dealing with women and depression need to
charge their patients with responsibility for their own recovery.
Many Australian
and international women have been made to feel subservient to the men
in their families and have lowered career, social, personal, and economic
expectations. The mental health system in Australia also has not yet grasped
the concept of helping a client heal themselves and doctors are still
revered as omnipotent. So when medics tell women they have an illness
called 'depression' and they should take medication, that is what the
client does, joining in what is often a folie a deux.
Women today
in Australia still live mainly in a patriarchal culture and are taught
a degree of helplessness and dependency from an early age. They perceive
themselves as done to rather than doers. They are further disempowered
when, experiencing natural depression, they are told that they have some
kind of dreadful illness, which can only be cured by drugs. This is often
further exacerbated when even female medics join in the deception and
prescribe unnecessary medical treatments when what is needed is caring
and talking, not unproven pharmacological prescriptions.
It would
be better to see being in a depressive state as a gift in that the mind
and/or body is seeking to draw attention to a particular problem or situation.
As human beings we are meant to experience sadness as it is part of the
whole repertoire of experiences like happiness, anger, delight, jealousy
or fear. It only becomes pathology in Western medicine because there are
trillions of dollars to be made out of it by drug companies.
With the four women in this study, they were required to change their
exercise schedule, eating, prioritising and organisation of their lives.
In treating depression, or as it used to be known 'melancholia', there
is a need to consider all aspects of the person including physical, mental,
spiritual, and social. What is also important, and can be found out quickly
through hypnotic regression, is the onset and possible causes of the melancholia.
What purpose
does it serve?
To what does the person need to pay attention?
What needs changing?
What does the person need to do to move to the normal state of bodily
homeostasis which is happiness?
How can the person once again, or even sometimes for the first time, lead
a fulfilling life?
All four
patients were predisposed to the idea that they could get help from hypnotherapeutic
treatment and that help could be effective. With each of the patients
I spent time in the first session suggesting expectation for change to
them. They were also told that change at times could be dramatic and they
were asked if they were ready for those kinds of changes to happen in
their lives. This is what Erickson (Rossi ed, 1980) called a double bind.
First the client was told that there would be change (expectation of change);
then they were told that change may be dramatic (compounding the first
suggestion); and then they were asked for assurances that they would be
prepared for that kind of change when it came (double bind).
Patients
were also made aware that they would have tasking (homework) that needed
to done between sessions and that part of the therapy needed to be completed.
My experience over the years has been that patients who task well always
stand a better chance of therapy being expedient. This also makes therapy
interactive and commits clients to being largely responsible for their
own recovery, improving their egos, self-esteem and self-efficacy.
Repetitive
homework with self-hypnosis on a daily basis is also a form of cognitive
behaviour therapy in that it installs new behaviour programmes and cognitions
through repetition. Depressed people need to break out of old ways of
thinking and move onto new, more constructive automatic mindsets. What
was of note from these four cases was that the women did not have a sense
of their own personal power. These women did not experience an ego state
that was sufficiently developed to support a belief that they could create
what they wanted. Each woman had low self-esteem and lack of self-efficacy
due to the way they were raised. They were not taught that they could
not only meet life on their own terms but also create life on their own
terms.
The hypnotherapy helped the four women in the study to experience and
create fast cognitive, behavioural and experiential change. They learnt
to change their moods and personal experiences at will, take charge of
their lives and to be able cope with life regardless of what happens.
In short, the four women matured into the kind of adult personalities
that are self-dependent and self-servicing.
It is important
to note that no matter how depressed a patient is, if they are motivated
towards change, the placebo effect generally kicks in and magnifies any
change so the placebo effect becomes compounded. Some women, however,
get caught up in vicious circles of depressive states, lack of ability
to work and economic and social decline.
Feeling depressed
arises from a sometimes simple or sometimes complex set of circumstances,
psychological ideations and/or physical concomitants that are always different
for every individual. No two patients are ever alike even though they
can experience similar physical aspects or psychological themes. For women
there are issues in therapy that are generally different from those of
men such as child-raising, access to education and economics, and legal
rights. All of these issues in a woman's life contribute towards feelings
of self-worth, ability to believe in herself, and ability to overcome
life issues, and recover from depressive states and illness.
Women have
special needs in therapy for depression because they carry with them their
social history of oppression. Germaine Greer (Greer, 1973) was born in
Melbourne in 1939, went to England and published her famous book The Female
Eunuch in the early 1970s which dealt with the call for women to further
emancipate themselves from what is essentially a male-dominated world
culture. She wrote: "This book is part of the feminist second wave.
The old suffragettes, who served their prison terms and lived on through
the years of gradual admission of women into professions which they declined
to follow, into parliamentary freedoms which they used more and more as
shops where they could take out degrees while waiting to get married have
seen the spirit revive in younger women with new and vital cast."
Greer was
right in some ways in that many middle-class women do waste their opportunities
for independence to differentiate themselves as individuals rather being
a male appendage. However, Australia today is such a mixture of cultures
and many of the women are from cultures where religion and social order
dictate that women's needs are second to men's. Those women, of whatever
class or derivation, have not been brought up with the belief that they
can do and achieve anything they want. Part of their indoctrination has
also been that they often see the medical establishment as the answer
to all their ills and are easily led into the illusion that a pill can
fix their woes during depression, but it seldom does.
The nature
of women is that they are generally seen as the carers in our societies
and that they do tend to operate on a micro-social level as opposed to
a global macro level as men do. Men derive much of their power bases through
associations and mutual support known as the 'boys club'. Knight (1983)
in describing the Freemasons taps into the very mechanism that gives men
their power through politics, religion, brotherhoods and lifelong associations.
Women, because they are often tethered to their families, do not have
such strong support mechanisms and are left with a sense that they are
without great self-power.
This idea
becomes very clear when we look at women like Nicola Horlick (1997) an
English woman who has been one of the leading directors of British pension
funds, earning millions of pounds a year and also having several children
at the same time. Horlick put her success down to the fact that she had
attended a boys' school as a small child and, unlike many of her peers,
grew up with the idea that she could achieve anything her male counterparts
did. Even when dealing with a child who was diagnosed with leukaemia,
she simply says that she took everything in her stride.
Need, however,
is the mother of invention and women do have an inbuilt natural aptitude
to regenerate themselves. The singer Marianne Faithfull (1991) tells us
how after international fame in the 1960s she developed a heroin dependency,
lost everything and lived on the streets of London's Soho during the 1970s.
In the 1980s she totally reinvented herself again, shooting back to international
acclaim for her work. Debbie Harry (2002), who fronted the rock band Blondie,
was the one of the famous American female rock singers of the 1970s who
broke through to international fame but gave everything up to care for
her boyfriend who had a life-threatening disease for several years. As
he recovered she had to build her career again virtually from the bottom
upwards and it took her 20 years to establish herself as a music legend.
Through the
emergence of monotheism - the idea of one all-powerful male god, from
around 2000 years ago - women lost their sense of power which was further
decimated by the industrial revolution and the separation of women from
nature. The reintroduction of matriarchy and pagan principles of the 'mother
the giver of life' (Straffon, 1997) and political liberation means that
women are slowly regaining their personal power in some areas of the world.
For many women, however, even in the depths of the most sophisticated
societies, they are still bonded to the role of subservient second-class
citizens. To overcome a depressive state a person needs a sense of personal
power; and part of the redress for the four women in this study was that
they left therapy with a sense that they were the ones in control of their
own lives.
Perhaps Western
allopathic medicine models can learn from the Aborigines of Australia
about Wuriupranili, a solar goddess who carries a torch that is the sun.
At the ocean to the West, she douses the torch in water and uses the glowing
embers to find her way beneath the earth back to the East again. The colours
of dawn and dusk come from the ochre body paints she wears.
General practitioners
and psychiatrists are generally the frontline for many patients who present
themselves as suffering from depression or are in what is perceived as
a depressed state. Those doctors fail in nearly all cases to distinguish
between exogenous and endogenous depression but use a sticking plaster
approach of prescribing dubiously tested antidepressant drugs to alleviate
and remedy depression.
Those doctors
adopt this approach for several reasons. They hope that for some patients
the depressive state is transient and that it will pass shortly; and by
giving the patient what they believe to be a cure, it will help the patient
wait for change. Doctors also prescribe those medications in the hope
that the very act of prescribing something will act as a psychological
catalyst to commence a healing state in the patient. Such medications
are also prescribed as a sugar pill depending on the placebo effect of
the patients believing in the medication. Some doctors actually do believe
in the efficacy of antidepressants.
Doctors also
often prescribe such medications because they fear the consequences should
they not prescribe those pills. Their medical associations give them strict
guidelines to prescribe such medications and should the doctors stray
from those guidelines they run the risk of being in breach of their insurance
policies.
We can see from the four cases that women suffering from what they believed
was depression were actually often dealing with life issues. Whether those
issues arose as psychological reactions to circumstances or due to physical
depletion of the body's wellness is immaterial. Each person suffering
from depressive states was able to benefit from interpersonal reactions
with me, the therapist trained to guide people through those states by
hypnotherapeutic treatment.
Critique
This study
only deals with four women who have presented themselves to a private
health clinic for help with their self-identified states of depression.
It does not deal with extremely economically disadvantaged women who are
unable to afford the services of a private hypnotherapist.
The four
cases reviewed were also women who were motivated towards change but felt
they were unable to make it happen without help. This study does not deal
with depressive women who are unmotivated towards change who have become
chronically morbid, may be in the depths of mental illness or be of a
paranoid or schizoid nature.
Conclusion
The four
women in this study suffered from a self-identified state of depression
and were successfully helped though hypnotherapeutic intervention. Each
of them in their own way suffered from low self-esteem and poor self-image.
This is a common theme found among women due to patriarchal cultural ideations,
who suffer from depressive states for extended periods of time beyond
the norm.
Three of
the women had previously failed to get any help through allopathic antidepressant
prescriptions. One of the major keys in their fast successful treatment
was that through hypnosis and psychotherapy they were helped to mature
their personalities and evolve a greater sense of self-efficacy. In this
case the hypnotherapy was goal-focused, encouraged and fostered cognitive
awareness and used both direct and indirect suggestion for behavioural
change.
Recommendations
In order
to help women in any kind of therapy it is necessary to afford them the
time to deal with their concerns. GPs would be more effective if they
referred patients complaining of depression to professionals specifically
trained to deal with depression exploring its emotional and biological
causes, rather than automatically administering unproven antidepressant
pills. Hypnotherapy is the use of hypnosis with psychotherapy and the
manipulation of the body's systems by suggestion for psychobiological
change, particularly the endocrine system.
Hypnotherapy
has proved itself time and time again to be one of the fastest and most
cost-effective ways to address depression. With treating women hypnotherapeutically,
who present with depression, it is essential for the clinician to consider
the women holistically to help change physical, psychological, spiritual,
social, intellectual, sexual and economic concomitants of the whole woman.
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