Goodbye to a Long Bad Day - by Matthew Wingett

Recently, a woman came to me who had just been diagnosed with "moderate depression" by her GP, who the day before had prescribed her Seroxat.  She had not yet started the treatment, and we had arranged a meeting on the very day she was due to start.

Because it was a preliminary meeting and I wanted to keep it light and fun, we agreed to meet in a local café in my hometown of Southsea.  It was a bright, crisp winter morning, and sunlight was flooding in through the windows into this large, empty room at the top of the building, where we sat facing each other over two steaming cups of hot chocolate.

She was pretty low in herself.  Her long-time boyfriend had left her, he had got a new girlfriend, she was "on the shelf", her whole life was going to be "one long sequence of rejections" and blah, blah, blah.  I could see that she was in genuine distress.  Her skin was pale, her eyes were sunken and she had a lot of tension across her face, while her movements were awkward and self-conscious.

The standard depression test her GP had given her had come out somewhere in the middle between no depression and serious depression.  The thing is, my view is that if you catch almost anyone on a bad day and do exactly that test on them, then most of them are going to come out as "having moderate depression". 

In reality, it wasn't the depth of her "depression" that was necessarily the bad thing for this woman, it was that she had experienced a series of bad days for months on end - and each one had reinforced her feeling that it was never going to end - which of course made her feel worse. 

But hey, one day at a time!

...if you catch almost anyone on a bad day and do exactly that test on them, then most of them are going to come out as "having moderate depression"...

I reckoned that if she was taught how to focus on having one good day for a change, that would be enough to pull her out of the rut she was in.

So, over the hot chocolate I did all the things that we were taught to do on Richard Bandler's NLP Practitioner course.   I reframed her relationships with this guy, I anchored laughter, I got her thinking about her future in a better way, we played with the submodalities of her pictures and sounds.

Why did I do it there and then?  Well, firstly, because after assessing her, I believed I could.  I reckoned she wasn't as bad as she thought she was, and that actually being labelled "moderately depressed" was now a contributory factor to keeping her in that very long day from hell she had been enduring.

But also because she was about to start on a course of anti-depressants and I wanted her to experience this result as quickly as possible so that she would know that she could get benefits from just thinking differently, rather than having to run to the pharmacy every time she felt blue.

Half an hour later a giggling, fun-loving woman was staring across the table at me.  It had been easy because she was extremely fast at learning to think in new ways, and she was really desperate to make a change.  It was quiet in that top room, and with no-one else around I had even popped her into a hypnotic trance - going for the hand levitation and visualisation - which would have been a peculiar sight if the waitress had wandred up at that point! 

When we stepped outside into the sunshine, I could see that her skin tone had changed.  She was really laughing with me, and full of optimism about what was going to happen next, rather than grieving for what had gone.

I asked her to keep me posted over the next few days how she was doing.

A week later, she called to let me know that she had gone back to the doctor and told him that she now felt much better, and that she didn't really feel that she needed to be on drugs.  Bearing in mind at this point that the effect of the Seroxat wouldn't have been felt until 3 weeks into the course, it seemed a perfectly reasonable assertion to make to him to say that she was now fine.

...I was chatting with my GP recently, and he told me that he is allowed only 7 minutes with each patient...

The GP took a more conservative line, which is understandable.  He didn't want someone who had been quite low just a week before suddenly coming off medication and maybe relapsing into their old patterns a week later.  He insisted she stay on the Seroxat for 6 months.  She did as she was told. 

It is not for me to intervene with the decisions of the medical establishment.  But I am critical of the initial approach her GP took to simply reach for the prescription pad straight away.  Again, it's not his fault.  I was chatting with my GP recently, and he told me that he is allowed only 7 minutes with each patient.  That is probably just long enough to say hello, print out a depression form, have the patient fill it in, then print out a prescription.

It's all done in the name of efficiency.  I believe it's a false efficiency. Because without the tools to start thinking more usefully, the next time she felt a bit low, she would have been straight back to see him.  In fact, for some patients those seven minutes with the GP are part of the payout of the illness.

By taking some time with her, and showing her that the bad day she had been having wasn't necessarily going to last much longer, and that good days were to come, I am fairly confident that she won't need to build a sense of reliance on her GP for her mental well-being. She'll get it from the place we all do: from our interactions with our friends, with our loved ones and with the adventures that we have in our lives.

I wonder, how many millions of pills are prescribed every year because the box-ticking ethos of the current medical culture means that, as Richard Bandler puts it in his seminars, the doctor "treats the symptom, not the patient"?
 
Sometimes, the right words are really all it takes.  Serious-sounding terms  and beliefs like: "I've got moderate depression" just vanish, as you realise the past is behind you, a bright future is in front of you, and the present is right now in your head - waiting to be enjoyed.
 

To find out how to take control of your own thinking and help others to do the same at Richard Bandler's NLP Courses, click here.