How a Housewife Reconnected With Her Family and Recovered From Depression

A 35 y/o housewife and mother of two complains of insomnia and anxiety and depression.  Counseling and prayer help somewhat. She has little time to exercise. Her energy is low from poor sleep and hours spent cooking and cleaning.  She can’t stop obsessing on her mistakes. Her sleep got better on trazodone, mood got better on Lexapro, and she pampered herself twice per day with breaks to enjoy herbal tea and meditation.  With meditation she saw how she was so hard and judgmental towards herself and learned to care for herself more. An app helped this learning as did podcasts she could listen to while caring for her children. Part of her depression was feeling disconnected from her husband, but now that she felt better and more mindful, she opened up to her husband on how she wanted to see them grow closer together.  She also drew up a weekly chorelist and gave some chores to her husband, some to her kids, some to herself and some to a once per month house cleaning person. Gradually as the chaos in the home calmed down, she phased off her sleep medicine, replacing it with meditation, exercise and chamomille tea at night with melatonin. She took a sophisticated approach to her life that she needs to ask for help to get her needs met so she can be happy, like other people do.

One problem I often see is once the brain experiences depression or anxiety or insomnia every day for one month, it can take that as “the new normal.”  Then even doing helpful things for these problems, such as exercise to boost your mood, doesn’t work. The brain has taken depression as the new normal for itself, and will refuse to respond to actions that might otherwise have changed it.

Medication can often “break through” this refusal of the brain to respond to healthy activities that often worked in the past.  This is the advantage of using the modern medical model of understanding the brain because you can catch it going off track and get it back on track.