Treatment in hospital

During your admission to hospital, you may be offered various forms of treatment, which may vary between facilities. Some of these may be:

Psychoeducational training

Education about your illness e.g.

• what it means to suffer from depression
• the typical course of the illness
• treatment options
• the effects and side-effects of the medicine

Social or ’Environmental’ therapy

This aims to enable people to live with the illness, training in social skills and the ability to perceive reality. This may involve taking part in shared tasks or activities with others and may be administered by nurses, carers, occupational therapists or social workers on the ward.

Psychotherapy

In some cases, we choose to treat people using psychotherapy. In the case of severe depression it may be necessary to delay psychotherapy until the patient is well enough to be able to concentrate and maintain a conversation. There are several psychotherapeutic treatment methods; cognitive behaviour therapy is a well known form of psychotherapy. The psychotherapy treatment can be individual or group-based.

Medicine

If your depression becomes so serious that you are admitted to hospital, treatment using medicines will almost always be necessary. This will usually include an antidepressant, and may also include other medicines such as anxiety suppressing medicines, sleeping pills, antipsychotic medicines and other mood altering agents.

ECT treatment

If you are one of the few people who do not respond to antidepressant treatment or who cannot tolerate medicines, ECT treatment may be considered. This treatment works faster than treatment using medicine and it is effective in severe depression.