Dissatisfaction with treatment

I am Mitesh Sharma, a 32-year-old man. I have been diagnosed as suffering from a chronic form of depression and personality problems. I have tried various forms of treatments but none of them seems to work. I have changed at least 4-5 psychiatrists and 2-3 psychotherapists. They have tried almost all the antidepressant medicines but none of them seems to work. I have gone through the entire gamut of alternative medicine therapies like aroma therapy, art of living, yoga, meditation, alpha therapy, reiki, hypnosis, ayurvedic and homeopathic medicines and a host of others but still failed. I have gone to some religious gurus also but to no avail. I am extremely frustrated with all this. I feel that my entire life has passed in this search of an answer to my problems. I also question as to whether an answer will ever be found for my problems.

It seems Mitesh that you searching for a utopic solution to your problems. Often it happens that you might not be able to find an answer to your problems because it is difficult for you to accept your problems in its entirety. It is entirely possible that before the deeper traumatic problems are discovered, you may become so anxious that you would leave treatment rather than face the trauma. It is possible that you are searching for an external blame for the treatment failure than to look at the depth of the problems that you are having. It would also seek that you may be searching for a quicker solution than possible. You may be leaving the treatment before it has actually started to work. The pattern of your treatment defies logic.

While it is true that psychiatry has still not reached a level where it has an answer to each and every problem, there are still patients who have not been completely cured and who still suffer every day, it appears that your problems are more of the nature of faith and ability to tolerate the pain of the treatment. It is entirely possible that one or two people have made an error in the diagnosis of the problem, but if you have been to the best of healers and still failed to get a solution, you may need to look at the complexity of the problem and the disturbance of motivation at an unconscious level before you arrive at the conclusion that you cannot be helped. Often what happens is that the motivation to stay ill may be more than the motivation to be cured. If there is an external situation that can develop (for e.g. you might be saved from making a marriage choice as long as you are ill and might be faced with the prospect of having to endure the anxiety of a rejection as a marriage prospect if well) when you get well, you might be tempted to not get well for a long time. In such a case, as soon as the external situation clears up, the depression might go away.

There is also a condition where you might be feeling life as such a burden that this depression has actually become a part of your life. It has destroyed your will to live and your desires to be happy to such an extent that you might not be motivated to seek treatment with the full faith. It is possible that the failures that you have experienced in life, you might want to see others also fail and henceforth may not be able to allow any treatment to succeed. You probably desire that all the treatment fail so that you can blame the external situation and henceforth be able to gain some sympathy from yourself as will as others regarding the failures of modern life inspite of so much advancement. However, little do you realize that this is only a temporary reprieve and no the ultimate solution. You have just found a way of distraction from the real problem.

You really have little choice in this matter. The only thing that you can now do is to put your faith into the best possible treatment that you have had from all of the above. Look at the treatments and the maximum improvement that you had from them. Choose that and then wait for your time. It may take a long time before you may be able to review. You will have to keep your patience.