Depression Features
- Getting Started: Exercise for Depression
Exercise may be as effective as medication in treating depression. Any type of exercise is helpful. These 6 tips will help get you started with an exercise program.
- How Your Depression Medicine Can Affect Your Life
If you’re taking an antidepressant, it’s important to know what to expect and how it will affect your life. Here are the answers to five common questions about taking antidepressants.
- How Long Should You Take Antidepressants?
Not everyone needs to take antidepressants long-term. If you want to stop, talk to your doctor about when and how to do it safely.
- Exercise and Depression: Expert Q&A
WebMD discusses how exercise can help treat depression and provides tips for starting, guidelines to prevent overexertion, and more.
- Tempted to Quit Antidepressants?
Thinking about quitting your antidepressant? Find out what you should do before you take matters into your own hands.
- Lifestyle Tips for Treatment-Resistant Depression
If you have treatment-resistant depression, your diet, exercise, and lifestyle can help support expert medical care.
- What's Stopping You From Seeing a Doctor About Depression?
A look at common reasons why people avoid treatment for depression and expert advice on how to get past them.
- Traveling With Holiday Depression
WebMD offers expert advice on how to travel despite having the holiday blues. Find tips for keeping holiday depression at bay.
- Generic Antidepressants: What You Need to Know
WebMD explores the facts about generic antidepressants. Are they as effective as brand-name antidepressants? Are there potential problems in using generic antidepressants?
- The Ups And Downs of Depression Treatment
Fluctuations in how you feel are normal. Here’s what you can expect as you journey from depression to wellness.
- Unhappy With Your Antidepressant?
WebMD explains what you can do if your antidepressant isn’t working the way it should
- Depression: Asking Loved Ones for Help
Family and friends can be a big help when dealing with depression. WebMD explains how they can help you and how to ask for their help and support.
- After Baby is Born: Postpartum Depression and Relationships
Between 10% and 20% of new mothers experience postpartum depression, but more than half of them go undiagnosed. Here are symptoms of PPD, and treatments.
- Foods to Help You Feel Better
Nutrition experts say that the foods you eat can help you feel better – or feel worse.
- Craving Carbs: Is It Depression?
Many people crave carbohydrates when they feel low. How can you tell if it’s a sign of depression?
- Depression: When It’s All in the Family
If depression runs in your family, you can help your children identify and cope with the disease.
- Craving Carbs in Winter: Is It Depression?
If winter weather triggers carbohydrate cravings, you may be suffering from seasonal depression.
- New Year’s Blues
While some people look forward to New Year’s parties and resolutions, others dread this traditional time to take stock and look back on the past year’s accomplishments – or lack thereof.
- Winter Babies and Postpartum Depression
Find out the difference between the normal 'baby blues' and postpartum depression. Also, learn why some new moms may be at greater risk in the cold, dark, and more isolated winter months.
- Fending Off Depression Symptoms in Winter
Up to 3% of Americans may suffer from depression in winter. Some have seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, which only occurs in winter. Others may feel depressed year round, but worse in winter.
- Depression and Divorce
Depression can affect your spouse, your relationship, and ultimately the entire family.
- Midlife Crisis: Transition or Depression?
Midlife transitions can mark a period of tremendous growth. But what do you do when midlife becomes a crisis that develops into depression?
- 25 Ways to Find Joy and Balance During the Holidays
People with depression -- or who have had depression in the past -- need to be especially careful when coping with holiday stress. Here are 25 tips to reduce stress, and maybe even find holiday joy.
- Foods That Boost Mood and Fight Holiday Weight Gain
Neither stress nor holiday weight gain need ruin your holidays this year. Here are tips about eating habits and foods that can boost your mood when a stressful situation strikes. You’ll feel calmer – and be trimmer -- throughout the holiday season.
- Vacation Depression: How to Cope
Psychologists explain how to avoid vacation depression, plus tips on creating a vacation that matches your personality.
- Cognitive Therapy for Depression
Cognitive therapy for depression teaches people how to use a mental "toolkit" to challenge negative thoughts. Over the long term, this process can bring about positive changes in how a depressed person sees the world.
- Facts About Antidepressants
Are antidepressants effective? WebMD explores studies on the use of antidepressants and placebos and presents the truth about how antidepressants work.
- Serotonin: 9 Questions and Answers
There are many researchers who believe that an imbalance in serotonin levels may influence mood in a way that leads to depression.
- The Dalai Lama's Advice on Depression
Scientists are researching traditional Tibetan Buddhist practices and ethics as a possible treatment for depression.
- Antidepressants and Weight Gain: What to Know
Some antidepressants are more likely to make you gain weight than others, but the pros may outweigh the cons.
- Could You Be Depressed and Not Know It?
WebMD can help you recognize depression -- and find relief
- Role Reversal
Actress Lorraine Bracco plays a psychiatrist on TV. She's also battled depression in her real life.
- One Woman's Battle With Depression
After two suicide attempts and seven hospitalizations, Cindy Michalewsky's long battle with depression finally ended.
- Depression: Is Your Child Depressed?
Depressed kids are in need of rescue -- do you know the signs of childhood depression?
- Questions to Ask Your Doctor About Depression Symptoms
Several different mood disorders -- including anxiety and bipolar disorder -- cause symptoms of depression. Here are questions to ask your doctor to make sure you get the right treatment.
- Finding Joy: A Mind-Body-Spirit Guide
Treating depression with a combination of Western and Eastern medicine.
- Help Yourself out of Depression
Experts give advice about steps people can take to help ease their depression.
- Many Emotions Can Damage the Heart
Volatile emotions like anger and hostility are bad for heart health. But studies have shown that some of the quieter emotions can be just as toxic and damaging.
- Foods That Fight Winter Depression
When long nights bring on a long face, this can mean seasonal affective disorder (SAD). Here are some tips to help fight off the winter blues.
- Kids and Antidepressants: A Growing Problem
The FDA warned of a drug-suicide link this year. Are we rushing to medicate our kids or rushing to judgment about drugs that may truly help some of them?
- Childhood Depression: Matter of Life or Death
Because some depressed children appear happy, depression in children can be difficult to diagnose. But many depressed children become suicidal, making diagnosis crucial.
- Recognizing Childhood Depression and Anxiety
Learn the symptoms that signal depression in children and how childhood depression differs from normal sadness.
- Depression: Children Not Immune
Sometimes, it isn't just a phase kids are going through. Sometimes it's depression.
- Depression: The Mask of Sorrow
In the tough, male-dominated environment where he worked, Weaver put on a show of confidence. But when he got home, he would yell at his wife and kids, and cry for hours with a gun in his hand.
- Depression Often Starts in Childhood
Depression rates are rising and researchers and clinicians now say that depression often begins in childhood.
- Beating Winter's Woes
If your mood is as cold and dark as your landscape, you're in good company. But here's how you can ease that seasonal slump.
- How I Manage My Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD)
What is it like to have seasonal affective disorder? Read how one woman found out why her mood worsened every winter.
- Can Caviar Cure Depression?
Omega-3-rich diet could protect against some mental illnesses.
- Elderly Depression Often Unnoticed
Depression is as common in the elderly as it is in younger people, but the cure can often be very different.
- Walk Away the Blues
Exercise is a powerful antidepressant, studies show. It can work even better than drugs.