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Areas › Low mood and hard feelings › When everything feels flat
A visible flinch teaches the person that this is not something you can hear, and the next disclosure goes elsewhere or nowhere. It can also make the behaviour the loudest thing they can do to be noticed. Steady is not the same as cold. Warm, unhurried questions about when it happens and what it does for them tell someone you can hold this, which is what makes the rest of the conversation possible.
Be steadfast: your steadfastness comes only from God (Quran 16:127). The steadiness the moment asks of you is not something you have to manufacture alone.
النحل
وَٱصۡبِرۡ وَمَا صَبۡرُكَ إِلَّا بِٱللَّهِۚ وَلَا تَحۡزَنۡ عَلَيۡهِمۡ وَلَا تَكُ فِي ضَيۡقࣲ مِّمَّا يَمۡكُرُونَ
So [Prophet] be steadfast: your steadfastness comes only from God. Do not grieve over them; do not be distressed by their scheming
Qur’an 16:127read it in the library
Translation: M.A.S. Abdel Haleem, The Qur'an, Oxford University Press, 2004.
Meeting difficulty early, before it hardens, has measurable value. A meta analytic review found that psychological interventions delivered to people who did not yet meet criteria for depression reduced the risk of later developing an episode by roughly a fifth. Early conversations are not small conversations.
van Zoonen K, Buntrock C, Ebert DD, Smit F, Reynolds CF, Beekman AT, Cuijpers P. (2014). Preventing the onset of major depressive disorder: a meta-analytic review of psychological interventions.. International journal of epidemiology doi
Strength of evidence: one line of research. A single study, or a theoretical account.
People tell you more when your reaction has not made the telling costly.
Steadiness is about your manner, not about withholding action; where there is immediate danger, act on it that day.
If pain is part of what you are carrying, bring it into the same conversation as the low mood. They are not two separate appointments.
Discontinuation gets mistaken for relapse constantly, by clients and by clinicians. The mistake runs in both directions and both directions cost something.
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.