Welcome to this video therapy course for depression. Over the course of the next eight videos,
I'm going to show you the most up-to-date and proven to be effective treatments for
depression. Now, for some of you, this course will be enough to resolve your depression
completely. For others, it will put you well on the road to recovery, but you might need
some extra help. Hopefully, over the course of these videos, I'll be able to answer all
the questions and worries that you have. But if not, you can contact the British CBT & Counselling
Service, and the clinical support team there will be able to answer your questions. I'll
put the link to that service in the description. Okay, so, in this video, I'm going to show
you how to self-diagnose depression so you can make sure that this is the right course
for you. We're also going to look a little bit at severity, so you know whether or not
this course is going to be enough, or you need a little bit of extra help.
Okay, so, I want you to start by asking yourself these questions. Do you feel sad a lot of
the time, and you don't feel like you can snap out of it? Do you feel that you have
nothing to look forward to? Do you look back across your life and just see lots of failures?
Do you find very little satisfaction in anything these days? Do you often feel guilty or disappointed
in yourself? Do you often feel irritated? Do you struggle to make decisions? Do you
find you have to push really hard to get anything done? Do you struggle to fall asleep, only
to wake up a few hours later? Do you get tired really easily? Have you noticed a change in
your appetite—either it's increased, or it's decreased? And do you find that you are
less interested in sex? Okay, so, if you've answered 'yes' to between
about one or three of these questions, and you've been experiencing your problems for
less than a year, this course is probably going to be enough to help you resolve your
depression. If you've answered 'yes' to between three
and five of these questions, and again, have been suffering for less than a year, it's
more likely than not that this course will be enough, but you might need a little bit
of extra support. If you've answered 'yes' to five or more,
and/or have been struggling for more than a year, it's quite likely that you'll need
more than this course. It'll certainly put you well on the road to recovery and give
you a really good idea about what therapy involves, but you're probably going to need
a little bit more professional help. Okay, so, now I want to talk to you about
monitoring your mood. Now it's really important, over the course of therapy of any kind, particularly
this course, that you notice the changes in your mood. Now, you're going to need motivation
to complete this course, to keep it going, and depression really kills that. So seeing
small changes in your mood will boost your motivation and help you get to the end.
Also, depression tends to make us discount the positive, which robs us of hope. So seeing
the small changes in your mood that you will see through regularly monitoring your mood
will help you get to the end of the course, so it's a really important part of your recovery.
Also, finally, noticing what makes you feel better, and what makes you feel worse is important—not
just for the changes you're going to make now, but for the future. So it kind of future-proofs
this therapy, this treatment, because you'd know then what to do more of, and what to
do less of if you want to change your mood. Okay, so, you need to start keeping a mood
diary. It's a quick and easy mood diary, but it's something that needs to be done every
day. So the best way to do this is to get a piece of paper and a pen, and put it by
your toothbrush; and every night, when you're brushing your teeth, just reflect on the day,
and try and rate your mood, on a scale of 0 to 10—0 being no depression, 10 being
the most depressed you've ever felt—and if you've noticed that your mood has fluctuated
across the day, write down the lowest and the highest scores. So you'll maybe have,
'Okay, I woke up in the morning and I was a 3, but by the end of the day I was more
like an 8', so you would have '3 rising to 8'. And then, every Sunday, sit down and spend
a few minutes reviewing your mood diary so you can notice any changes.
Okay, so, to get the most out of this course, you'll want to leave at least a week between
videos to give yourself a chance to digest the information that I'm giving you, but also
to practice the various tasks that I'm going to set you, because it's as important what
you do in between the sessions as what is listened to in the video—this is what makes
the biggest difference to your recovery, is what you're able to take from the video and
put into practice in your everyday life. Okay, so, that's the end of the video today.
In the next video, so in a week's time, I'm going to post another video which will help
you to start to put in some quite practical things to lift your mood.
Okay, I hope this was helpful. Thank you for watching, and I will see you
next time.