There is a lot to be said for starting with an approach whose effectiveness has been established by good research. Unfortunately, the limitation of research is that it is only able to evaluate those things which have actually been studied. Many clinical psychologists (and graduate students) in sci.psychology have been adamant in insisting that it is not their job to investigate any treatments except their own favorites. This means that consumers who want to know about other approaches are dependent on other ``non-scientific'' sources of information.

In article <769358645.36snx@verstek.com> stever@verstek.com (Stephen Robbins) writes:
>In article <2reamc$g8u@jadzia.CSOS.ORST.EDU> barryr@CSOS.ORST.EDU writes:
>>
>>Does NLP work with & help depression suffers? As example, a person who
>>would be on Prozac.
>
>As far as I know, there's been no research addressing NLP and
>depression. However, I have worked with depressed people using NLP
>and have colleagues who have done so, and we have all helped our
>clients (as determined by client self-reports in the months following
>the interventions).

I am sure that there are individual therapists using NLP who have been successful in treating depression for a number of clients. However I have never heard anyone claim that they have a generally effective systematic NLP approach for treating depression which can be taught to other therapists. And I think that there are some good reasons for this.

I think it's fair to say that going to NLP for help with depression is a crap shoot unless you have information that a particular therapist has a really good track record.

Now the term ``crap shoot'' generally has a pejorative connotation, but one of the characteristics of a crap shoot is that sometimes it pays off really well. In any case, if you're going to get involved in a crap shoot then you need to use an appropriate strategy, which would mean trying out lots of different practitioners until you find one who gets results. Since many people find the process of going to a new therapist one which is itself fraught with anxiety (not to mention expense), this is not necessarily a strategy that will appeal to many depressed people.

If you really want to try NLP and don't know of a particular therapist who seems to be good with depression, you might at least try to find therapists with conventional credentials who also have quite a bit of NLP training. There are a number of these around now.

The ideal (in my opinion) would be to find someone who does cognitive therapy and also knows NLP. In my opinion (for what it's worth) there are a number of NLP techniques which ought to be able to significantly speed up the course of cognitive therapy.

As I will indicate below, I found a number of things in NLP that were of major help in dealing with my own depression. But my experience has generally been that the approaches that work with me are different than the ones that are effective with most other people. And I myself still find it sometimes useful to take Prozac.

>Using one system's categorizations with another system's
>interventions is not likely to yield well-defined results. Let's say
>you know cars well, based on a car you used to have with a radiator.
>If you are in an air-cooled car which breaks down, a diagnosis of
>"not enough water in the radiator'' might match the symptoms, but
>would lead to interventions (``fill the radiator'') which wouldn't
>apply. You need a diagnostic system which fits the intervention
>system for a given situation.
>
>"Depression'' is a categorization of symptoms which isn't defined in
>the NLP model. The underlying cognitive structures which create
>depression in two people may be different, although the surface
>symptoms are similar. Some structures which produce ``depression'' may
>be easily treated with NLP; others may not.

It's easy to argue on sci.psychology about NLP with respect to anxiety disorders, because this is the one area where NLP and clinical psychology are addressing pretty much the same questions. But otherwise, clinical psychology puts a major emphasis on assessment of disorders, a topic which is not even mentioned in NLP trainings. Whereas in NLP the emphasis is on producing change, whether this change is a matter of fixing something that's broken or simply teaching someone to be a better speller or to be more resourceful in dealing with the opposite sex.

NLP works best when the client and therapist can identify very specific changes that the client wants to make. (You might want to look at the file changework.2 in my archive, which describes the NLP ``well-formedness conditions'' for a change.) (Actually, my file gives only one version of these conditions, but you'll get the general idea.) To use NLP with depression, you first need to ``chunk down'' to identify very specific behaviors (and thoughts and feelings) that need to be changed.

This is an area where I think that clinical psychology and NLP could work hand in hand, if they could ever learn to stop throwing stones at each other and cooperate. Most conventional therapists are pretty good at identifying the things that a client needs to change. But they're not so good at actually accomplishing these changes, which is what NLP is about.

For instance, it seems extremely plausible that depression has a lot to do with negative beliefs that the client has. For instance, I once worked with a friend who believed that pleasure was something she should avoid because she believed that pleasure must always be paid for with even more pain. Or a person might believe that ``There's no point in my even trying to get what I want, because everything I do always comes out wrong.'' (In my experience, for what it's worth, the use of universal words such as ``every'' and ``always'' are very characteristic of both depression and anger.)

NLP has some very fast techniques for changing beliefs. If these techniques are in fact effective (and in my experience they very often are) then it would make good sense for a therapist to try them first before going on to slower, clumsier approaches. (The danger, though, is when a therapist falls in love with a particular technique and keeps trying to make it work for session after session even when it clearly isn't working with a particular client, instead of moving on to other approaches. This is totally contrary to the spirit of NLP. Nonetheless, many NLP practitioners are often guilty of this.)

There's another NLP technique that I found useful for stopping negative thoughts that repeatedly went through my mind. It's very simple and essentially involves nothing more than slapping my knee, taking a couple of deep breaths, and moving my eyes up and down. (Yes, I know, this sounds totally bizarre. All I can say is that it helped me more with my depression than any conventionally trained therapist ever has.) You can find it described in my NLP archive in the file neurological.technques.1.

Another good technique for getting rid of obsessive negative thoughts is the Swish Pattern.

The thing is, these techniques are all very fast. From a cost-benefit point of view, it makes a lot of sense to try them out first before moving on to some much slower approach. But it also makes sense to be going to a therapist who is skilled with more conventional approaches in case these short cuts don't work for you.

And you shouldn't automatically assume that by changing negative beliefs and thought patterns you will cure your depression.

>"Depression'' is a categorization of symptoms which isn't defined in
>the NLP model. The underlying cognitive structures which create
>depression in two people may be different, although the surface
>symptoms are similar. Some structures which produce ``depression'' may
>be easily treated with NLP; others may not.

The fact is that depression is still not understood that well. We don't in fact know that depression is created by cognitive structures. In fact, one can plausibly ask ``If depression is caused by the way a person thinks, then how come anti-depressants are effective?'' On the other hand, one can equally ask ``If depression is biochemical in origin, then how come cognitive therapy works so well?''

I can repeat what I said about my own experience. Changing my thought patterns has helped me immensely with my own depression. In particular, I almost never have the intense, almost suicidal feelings that were common for me before I went through NLP training. On the other hand, there are still times when I sink into a state of general apathy and a feeling that I just can't cope with life. At such times I find it useful to take Prozac.