I've never suffered from anxiety, fortunately, so I can't speak about how having a positive impact might help with that. However, I have suffered through two bouts of major depression that were so awful I've blocked them out. This post hit a raw nerve for me, so I apologize in advance if I'm overreacting. As many have said, different things work for different people; but for me the key was trying different things until finally something did work to get me out of them. For the first, I joined a women's depression support group and read everything I could to understand the dark hole of depression. I learned that two main neurotransmitters were involved: serotonin and norepinephrine. The doctor was prescribing antidepressants addressing serotonin that were not working for me. I read about Effexor, which addresses both, and asked her to prescribe that. Literally an hour after I took it, I felt a fog lift from my brain. Nothing, i.e. Effexor, other antidepressants, or talk therapy, was working to get me out of the second bout; so in desperation I decided to switch gears totally and tried acupuncture and TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine). Thankfully, with the help of a brilliant Chinese doctor, who also had a western MD, that depression lifted after four weeks of acupuncture and Chinese herbs. I'm glad being positive helped the author of this post; but I think depression is a medically based disease like cancer that we can't will our way out of by being positive. I was in such dark holes I couldn't be positive, although I'm generally a very positive person. I've become interested in functional medicine lately and have been reading that scientists are finding connections between gut health and brain disorders like depression and anxiety. You can find out more about this by doing a google search. I've dealt with a lot of medical issues over the years, such as two years of debilitating headaches after brain surgery, chronic fatigue, various accidents and operations, malaria, etc. but major depression has been the worst by far. The increase in cases of depression throughout various age groups from COVID related causes is genuinely alarming and something we all need to watchful for. I just hope you won't make the mistake of telling someone with major depression to snap out of it or take a walk or be more positive and it will go away. For me those things would not have been helpful. Nancy

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