Man, if I believed that this was a problem I'd never see the end of, I'd be depressed for sure. Thankfully, people like Lucinda Bassett and especially Dr. Claire Weekes have convinced me that you really can recover and get your life back. That doesn't mean you'll never have anxiety again. It just means you won't experience it any more than the average person does, and you'll recognize it and know how to deal with it. Depression is definitely something you can get over. So many people experience a bout of depression during their lifetime, but they don't stay depressed for the rest of their lives.
I think the difference is in the way people go about treating it. Some people get doctors who want to put them on medication indefinitely and just change the prescription whenever they develop a tolerance for it, and those people may very well spend their whole life battling this problem as their brain gets used to having that extra help. Others will get doctors who put them on pills only temporarily while they also get the therapy they need to recover. Still others may not be put on medication at all, but opt for something like cognitive behavioral therapy to learn how to deal with this problem. These are just my opinions, but I do so highly respect the work of Dr. Weekes. When she starts her book off with "The advice given here will definitely cure you if you follow it," I believe her. It's the following it that becomes the challenge. It's not easy changing the way you think, and sometimes it takes us a long time to "get it," but that doesn't mean we never will. I recommend reading at least the first chapter of [i]Hope and Help For Your Nerves[/i] whenever you need encouragement about recovering.
I know there are two schools of thought out there: those who think we were born to have a chemical imbalance and that the best we can do is to just manage it, and those who believe our negative emotions created that chemical imbalance and that changing our thinking can lead us to recovery. I belong to the second school.
