You struggle through a depressive episode, battling low mood, low energy levels, low self-esteem, or thoughts of shame. Depression impacts your ability to manage your daily life, disrupting how you eat, sleep, socialize, and focus your thoughts. Over time, or with treatment, your symptoms improve, and you’re back to your old self. But then you start to feel depressed again. Is that normal?
Recurrent or chronic depression affects many individuals. Many of Dr. Bryant S. Edwards’ patients at Iconic Infusions, PLLC of Fayetteville, North Carolina, suffer from chronic, recurrent, or even treatment-resistant depression.
While it may be disheartening to realize that your depression is coming back, with Dr. Bryant’s care, you can weather this storm and even come out of your current episode with a better understanding of your condition and ongoing treatment needs.
Increasingly, research suggests that depression operates on a “relapsing-remitting” pattern. If you’ve gone through clinical depression, there’s a chance you’ll experience recurrence at least a few times. For some people, depression is chronic, with relapses following periods of recovery, or at least some symptom relief. Others fully recover from a depressive episode, only to live through additional episodes in the future.
Your depressive episodes may be connected to triggers in your life, such as grief, or comorbidities in your mental health, such as an anxiety disorder. It may also not be clear exactly why your depression has come back to trouble you again at this point in your life.
Some factors correlate with recurrent depression, helping you assess your risk. Most strongly, repeated depressive episodes are associated with childhood trauma. Living with a comorbid anxiety disorder also increases your risk of depression recurrence. There may even be neurocognitive or neuroendocrine issues at work in your body that mean you’re more prone to depression coming back repeatedly.
When you live with ongoing disruption from depression that continues to affect you over years, it’s difficult for you to thrive. The effort of identifying and responding to returning depression symptoms starts to wear you out. Feelings of hopelessness, common when you’re depressed, become more challenging to bear when episodes continually recur.
Professional support and treatment relieve your symptoms and can help bring your depressive episode to an end. If you have concerns about chronic depression, your treatment may reflect that. For example, you may benefit from ongoing psychotherapy, even after your symptoms recede. You may need to continue taking medication for at least a year after the end of your most recent episode.
If approaches to depression treatment haven’t worked well for you, and your depression still keeps coming back despite everything you do, consult with Dr. Edwards and his team about whether you could be a good candidate for IV ketamine therapy. Ketamine is FDA approved and has been shown to relieve even treatment-resistant depression. With this type of treatment, you may be able to escape from what has previously been a chronic condition.
You aren’t alone in the ongoing struggle with depression. If your depression is coming back again, reach out to Iconic Infusions, PLLC today. Schedule your initial consultation appointment online or over the phone now.
