If after trying all of the above, you still feel that life isn't worth living, seek professional help. Depressions are dangerous not only for your mental, but also for your physical health.  A physician is likely to prescribe drugs.  Do not, however, take drugs without some psychological treatment or counseling which a good physician can and will give.  In severe cases psychotherapy and electroshock therapy could be helpful.

How To Prevent Some Depressions
Many times depressions could be less severe or would not occur if one could learn something about the art of relaxation and humor which is so necessary in order to have "normal" behavior.  Relaxation is more than getting away from a professional job, it is more than absence of stress situations.  Relaxation is something positive and satisfying, a feeling in which one experience peace of mind.  True relaxation requires becoming sensitive to one's basic needs for peace and self-awareness and to try to fulfill them.

There is a danger, however.  Some people pursue relaxation with the same concern for time, productivity and activity which they show in their every-day life.  Many people do not know how to live without  "watching the clock".  Not very many people are able to gain satisfaction from just being...instead of always scheming and planning.  The secret of getting the best results from attempts at relaxation are simple:  Find those activities which give you pleasure, and when you pursue them, commit your energies to total mental and physical well-being.  Keep in mind that relaxation, not achievement is the main reason for participating in the activity.  There is a healing power in consciously  "doing nothing", (no achievement).  In the meantime, it is also good preventative medicine against depressions.

A second help to prevent some depressions or to lessen their severity is to learn how to master the outcomes before being exposed to their uncontrollability.  In fact, as Seligman wrote in his book  Helplessness: "Successful therapy should be preventative.  Therapy must not focus just on undoing the problems, it also should arm the patient against future depression.  Would therapy for depression be more successful if it strove explicitly to provide the patient with a wide repertoire of coping responses which he could use at times when he found his usual response ineffective?"

Belief In Life
A very important goal of therapy for depressions is to help the patient to regain his belief that he is able to control some event to a certain extent.  That kind of therapy can start as early as possible.  Children have to be taught and have to learn how to control events important to them.  At first they have to start with little things which gradually would be more difficult to master.  The conviction that a person is, to a certain extent, master over his own life will help him to overcome his depressions more easily, and in fact, to be  "alive"  again. 

Never judge a person who is depressed, never treat him as a "lesser human being", because you, too, are a candidate for this condition.

To be depressed is a sign that a person is still a human being.  Depressions are an aspect of our humanity.  A healthy program of prevention and the courage to look for help where help can be found will be the best way to overcome that difficult time in life. To experience that there are still many good people around who are willing to help and that sometimes we have to live for a certain time with our problems could create new hopes in dealing with depressions.

From The Priest - July - August 1983  By Leo E. Missinne