Perspectives on Depression: Helping Holistic Professionals Understand Depression and Support Healing
Perspectives on Depression: Helping Holistic Professionals Understand Depression and Support Healing
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Issue Date
2012
Authors
Schwan, Stacy
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Abstract
Depression: It is something that most people experience at least once in their lifetime and something that holistic health professionals are likely to encounter often in the course of working with people. Since the early 20th century, depression has increasingly been defined as a disease and confined to treatment within a biomedical paradigm. Despite this trend, often, depression sufferers will seek out holistic health professionals for information and support in addition to, or even in lieu of, biomedical therapy. While holistic health professionals neither can nor should be expected to possess the expertise necessary to diagnose or treat depression, there is much that they can do to support individuals who are experiencing depression in ways that both honor the process and support self-healing in the individual. This paper describes a framework that is designed to help all holistic health professionals understand the interconnected nature of depression from three perspectives—from the outside in, from the inside out, and from the perspective of energy—so that they can work with depression more holistically and effectively. The framework uses integral theory as a foundation for understanding the inside-out and outside-in perspectives; it also draws insight from nonlinear dynamic systems theory to explore how depressed energy may become impeded or stuck, and how to gently get it flowing again.