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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When everything feels flat
Low mood does not arrive labelled as a mood. It arrives as facts about you, that you are useless, that nobody wants you around, and it is very hard to argue with a feeling from the inside. Naming it as something your brain is doing puts a small gap in there, enough to act from. This matters especially for young people, whose sense of who they are is still setting, and who can otherwise fold a bad few months into a permanent self description.
Your Lord has not forsaken you, nor does He hate you (Quran 93:3). Those are the two things a flat mood keeps telling you, and both are answered here.
الضحى
مَا وَدَّعَكَ رَبُّكَ وَمَا قَلَىٰ
your Lord has not forsaken you [Prophet], nor does He hate you
Qur’an 93:3read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
The habit of chewing over the same thoughts is worth interrupting. In a longitudinal study, rumination predicted later increases in both depression and anxiety and statistically accounted for much of why the two so often occur together. The design is observational, so it shows a pattern over time rather than proving that changing the habit changes the outcome.
McLaughlin KA, Nolen-Hoeksema S. (2011). Rumination as a transdiagnostic factor in depression and anxiety.. Behaviour research and therapy doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
A mood you can name as a state stops being a verdict on who you are.
A few treatments are only given in a clinic, with someone sitting with you afterwards. The chair and the hours are part of the treatment rather than paperwork.
The standing side-effect list is sexual difficulty, less appetite, an unsettled stomach, disturbed sleep and headache. Sexual side effects are common, and almost nobody raises them unprompted.
If you know something about a person's history that the prescriber may not, say it. A past eating disorder or a single seizure can change what is safe to prescribe.