Hypnosis and Depression

Hypnotherapy can be used to treat Depression and Anxiety Issues

The term depression covers a wide range of conditions for many people.

The word is only useful as a label when examining how it can be treated.

Much modern treatment for many forms of depression and anxiety involve cognitive behavioral therapy.

When this is combined with hypnosis the results can be extremely effective.

When used systematically and over time the levels of success are far greater than by using medication alone.

There is a tendency amongst sufferers to feel isolated but many people experience similar features or distortions.


Some of the very common ones include.

All or nothing thinking: You see things in black and white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure.

Overgeneralization: You see a single negative event as a never ending pattern of defeat.

Mental filter: You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like an ink drop that colours an entire glass of water.

Disqualifying the positive: You reject positive experiences by insisting they do not count for some reason or another.

Jumping to conclusions: You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion.

Mind reading. You arbitrarily conclude that someone is acting negatively towards you, and you do not bother to check this out.

The fortune teller error. You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is already an established fact.

Magnification (Catastrophising) or minimisation: You exaggerate the importance of things, (such as your mistakes or someone else's achievements), or inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny, (your own desirable qualities or others imperfections).

Emotional reasoning: You assume that negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are; "I feel it, therefore it must be true"

Should statements: You try to motivate yourself with shoulds and should nots, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. "Musts" and "oughts" are also offenders. The emotional consequence is guilt. When you direct should statements towards others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment.

Labeling and Mislabeling. This is an extreme form of over generalization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself: 'I'm an idiot' When someone else’s behaviour irritates you, you attach a negative label toward them. ‘She’s a fool’.  Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly coloured and emotionally loaded.

Personalization: You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.

Many people suffer unnecessarily with these distortions and false beliefs. There is now a substantial body of evidence to show once you have been treated with hypnosis and cognitive behavioral therapy, you are far less likely to experience it again as frequently or at the same level.