The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson, and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Seven Alternative Therapies for Depression.

As I discussed last month, depression is the yin to anxieties yang.

Between these two troublemakers, they've got dark clouds hanging over both the past and the future,

making the present moment complicated at best and for some people unbearable.

Taken as a composite, it's an unfortunate trade-off for being cognitively complex.

The problem is there's just too many confounding factors surrounding depression that it's

hard to know where to start. Your mind is an infinitely complex lattice work of moving parts,

one which continues to baffle and divide the scientific community. How does a practitioner prescribe suitable treatments for a problem they don't fully comprehend?

And yet, medical science often, and perhaps inevitably, works with incomplete information.

The result is a suite of antidepressant drugs that may be effective in treating certain aspects of depression in certain people, but which also present a suite of their own often debilitating

problems.

It doesn't mean these approaches don't have their value.

I recognize that for some, these medications may be life-saving or sustaining.

For others, they offer support through acute or overwhelming times, or in still other cases,

give a leg up while other interventions have the chance to take hold.

My purpose here isn't to suggest people give these drugs and other conventional

treatments the boot. I see this post as a dialogue that offers supplementary strategies to

augment any assigned treatment. It can hopefully be or contribute to a toolbox that moves beyond

the scope of simple self-care into research-supported territory.

And while they're likely more effective for mild-to-moderate depression, I think it's fair to say

that no one should write off the therapeutic benefits of healthy lifestyle measures for their

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