Depression Counselling Perth and Fremantle

Depression, more than just feeling down.

“I’m feeling depressed” or “this is so depressing” are commonly used expressions for feeling down or being overwhelmed with sad feelings. Depression takes away your motivation, energy, optimism, and desire to do the things you enjoy like socialise. All the good aspects of your drive decrease and feelings of anxiety, despair, lost confidence, hopelessness and exhaustion take over.

You may notice that you start to think differently, things you don’t normally worry about start to bother you, small problems become huge and the future loses its appeal.

Take control of your health with effective depression counselling

Have you been wondering why you are down and feeling depressed? Depression can often be situational. There could be a range of factors related to your lifestyle, family, work, medication or thinking styles. Counselling can help you identify and overcome these challenges.

Counselling can help to:

• Identify what you need to get out of life to feel ok
• How to meet your physical, emotional needs and exhaustion
• How to overcome your negative introspection
• How to increase positive lifestyle factors that improve your mood
• How to identify and overcome your unhelpful depressive thinking styles or internal dialogue

Counselling for depression can help

Depression can be worked on either with medication or psychotherapy or a combination of both. Your GP can prescribe anti-depressant medication but we can help you identify the underlying causes and help you make decisions about the best treatment.

The approach to overcome depression is different for every client. Some clients may begin by working on improving their lifestyle or sleep while others may look at improving their relationships and work life. Most clients begin therapy by looking at the situations that stress them and identify their potential unhealthy thought patterns or behaviours that are maintaining their depression.

Cognitive behavioural therapy and/or mindfulness helps you to make a connection between your thoughts and the feelings of anxiety. Learning to identify and counter negative or depressed thoughts improves mood, and lifts depression.

This therapy sounds simple but is extremely powerful. Cognitive behavioural therapy and mindfulness has been well researched for anxiety, anger and depression and has a high success rate.

DEPRESSION COUNSELLING PERTH, FREMANTLE AND APPLECROSS

With our convenient near Freeway location, we service clients across Perth and Fremantle. We are located on Canning Hwy Applecross, just a few minutes from the Kwinana Freeway

Katherine Shanhun – Senior Psychologist

Katherine loves to help clients with depression. She helps assess its strengh and how long it has been around. Katherine helps you identify your schemas – self-defeating, core themes or patterns that we keep repeating throughout our lives. Our maladaptive schema modes are triggered by life situations that we are oversensitive to (our “emotional buttons”). Many schema modes lead us to over or under react to situations and, thus, to act in ways that end up hurting us or others. Katherine also focuses on the following:

• Understanding the “vicious cycles” of depression
• Monitoring our daily activities
• Identification of goals and values
• Building an upward spiral of motivation and energy through pleasure and mastery
• Activity Scheduling: purposefully scheduling in enjoyable and meaningful activities
• Problem solving around potential barriers to activation
• Reducing avoidance
• Working as a team to make gradual,
  systematic, sustained progress. Change doesn’t happen over night!
• Using between-session assignments. Practice changes the brain, little by little!