Practical Strategies to Prevent Depression Relapse

Let's Start with an Even Dozen

1. The most important first step in relapse prevention is a repetition from the Preventing More Pain page: identify the contributing causes of your husband's depression and face them with the bright light of truth.

2. Stop all substance abuse: drugs, alcohol, and smoking.

3. Get adequate sleep/rest. Start with going to bed before 10pm each night.

4. Medications that are helping must not be stopped until he is told to do so. Relapse most commonly occurs when medications are abandoned too soon.

5. Monitor the warning signs that his body sends. You will be able to see some of those signs earlier than he can. Watch for a return to irritability, loss of focus, and confusion.

6. Create a wellness understanding in your household. Health is more than just the absence of symptoms.

7. Take all holidays and vacation time, including weekends and statutory holidays.

8. Show your husband how to take the time to create and maintain healthy relationships. Emotional stress caused by estrangement from your family members and friends will handicap his recovery from depression

9. He may consider changing jobs, levels of responsibility, or even a career change. Such decisions are best made after the depressed person has made significant strides toward recovery. See the Career page for more on this topic.

10. Monitor his health in relation to other conditions and diseases that afflicted him before his depression began and new problems that arise afterward. Chiropractors will tell you that chronic pain over long periods of time can contribute to depression.

11. Take note of the side effects of any other medications prescribed for him. Depression is listed as a potential side effect of many pharaceuticals, including anti-depressants themselves!

12. I recommend that you read The Book of NO I discovered this helpful book while recovering from my illness. One of my contributing issues identified in my counseling was that I was a pleaser who said yes to requests for help when I should say no. This practical book provides 250 ways to say no when the people pleaser wants to say yes. Details on the resource page.