Heather Bellamy spoke with psychotherapist Peter Mockford to find out how you can deal with the roots of depression and what others can do to help.

Peter Mockford

Have you lost interest in life and do you struggle to enjoy anything? Perhaps you can't cope with the things that you used to? Do you feel tired or irritable? According to Young Minds, rates of depression and anxiety have increased by 70% among teenagers in the past 25 years and it's a subject that needs to be talked about. Heather Bellamy spoke with psychotherapist Peter Mockford to find out what depression is and how it can be treated.

Heather: So how is depression different from sadness?

Peter: Sadness is one of these things everybody goes through, but sadness doesn't tend to linger all the time. The difference between sadness and depression is sadness is a normal human experience, but depression is much more toxic and normally continues for much longer.

Heather: What would be the symptoms of depression?

Peter: Depression is a catch all phrase and this is one of the problems with it. If somebody says they're depressed you think you know what they mean, but it can mean all sorts of things. If you talk to a psychotherapist they don't really like using the word depression, because there are often many roots. However it's often characterised by high anxiety, a lack of hope, despair, darkness, not being able to see a way forward and sometimes it has massive physical effects like not being able to get out of bed, not eating properly and often not sleeping properly. There can be a whole range of things that take place under that criteria of depression.

Heather: What causes depression?

Peter: One of the root causes of depression is the very early relationship that we have with our main care giver. Teenagers replay in the teenage life that very early pattern of separation and detachment with their main care giver, which is in the main their mother. One of the biggest problems that we face in this country is that our capacity to generally look after children is so compromised, because often we've not been looked after. We're passing down generation after generation the inability to properly care and love because we've not been properly cared for and properly loved. That's the reason for the massive increase particularly in teenagers.

Heather: Would that be the main group of people who are more susceptible to depression, those who have had troubled childhoods, who have had difficult relationships with parents? Or are there other groups of people who would also be susceptible to depression?

Peter: There's two main categories in depression. Some depressions have a genuine biological root; for one reason or another somebody is not wired up properly, or the balance of hormones is not right. The way to address that one is to get the proper medical treatment. That's very common, for example, with postnatal depression; it's about readdressing the balance of hormones after birth. But it also happens in other kinds of depression. So you have to be very clear as to what the root of the depression is, because you've got those two main areas, one is a medical area as a root of depression, another one is to do with how we were brought up.

Heather: Is depression still a social taboo?

Peter: My feeling is that we're still suffering from massive stigma on this. One of the reasons is if somebody is suffering from depression, in some ways we find it quite fearful, because you think well that could be me, I may go like that and the truth is I might. So I think that sometimes makes us very wary of having the necessary love and care that we need towards those who are suffering from depression. We do have to normalise it a lot more in our society.

Heather: As a psychotherapist how do you treat depression?

Peter: From a psychotherapeutic point of view, if depression is due to difficulties in a person's very young life, then we would encourage people to look at the roots very carefully and take them through that process. It's often incredibly painful, but there's no way of avoiding the roots of some of these things. It takes an awful lot for people to have the courage to face the roots and you cannot do it by yourself.

Heather: What are some of the main things children need that would stop them getting depression later on in life?