Miss Fortune on Overcoming Depression

Here's an article about the psychiatric benefits of willpower that's not just Positive Thinking:

http://voices.yahoo.com/overcoming-depression-after-catastrophic-limb-loss-11372338.html

I believe this one's true, because I've been following this writer (under a different screen name) for years. She doesn't write like a depressed person. She writes like a person who plays a lot of computer games, but has a job and a life and a talent. Every year or two she's also mentioned having an artificial leg. I know a few non-depressive amputees, and paraplegics, and that's the way they talk.

Why do some people with clinical-level depression say that antidepressants make them feel worse? For most people antidepressants do at least seem to produce a mild temporary "high." However, at least three different biochemical phenomena are known to relieve different types of depression. Antidepressants boost serotonin metabolism, which is only one of these three phenomena. For some depressives, sugar and alcohol--and breaking the addictive reaction to both--is more helpful. For others, especially active people who've suddenly been disabled, restoring blood endorphin levels is the key to relief from depression. In her clinical work, Kathleen Desmaisons found that when sugar imbalances or endorphin deficiencies are the problem, depressed patients usually say that antidepressants seemed to help for a few weeks, but then they felt worse. More information on these conditions is available at
www.radiantrecovery.com. When depression is caused by sugar or endorphin issues, reliable, permanent relief is much safer and cheaper than prescription antidepressants.

Endorphin is the biochemical specifically associated with diaphragm activity. Physical exercise keeps most active people well supplied with endorphin. If unable to get adequate arm and leg exercise, patients can maintain endorphin levels by working the diaphragm muscle--laughing out loud, singing, praying, chanting, or doing breath control exercises.