Can this work cure depression?

Ack! I don't know how to answer the poll - because as with most things in this crazy life, I have much more to say on the subject.

I have a half-nephew who is bi-polar, and I knew his grandmother (my father's first wife)(don't even try to figure that out) who was also bi-polar, and a terrible alcoholic (which is why my dad divorced her). My nephew's mom (my half-sister) escaped it, but her brother (dead at age 60) did not. To top that all off, we had a foster daughter who was diagnosed with bi-polar II at 16, but clearly had it when she came to live with us two years earlier. And her mom had it (and was an alcoholic) and it sounded like her grandmother did as well. Thanks to modern SSRIs, she did not fall into the drug-and-alcohol trap.

This is a terrible and evil mental disease. And it is so intense, that I really don't know if it's possible for someone who suffers from it to have the mental strength that is needed to shift their mindset even a fraction. It might be possible - but is a temporary fraction even worth the effort? And I think I mean the effort of others to convince the sufferer that they should be able to do this.

The kind of depression that I experienced is, I believe, similar to that which affects the elderly - some say it's to prepare the brain to accept death. That's kind of what it felt like, except for the fact that I was 60 and healthy, so I knew all along that it was not acceptable, even during the weeks "Before Sarno" when I was starting to experience it frequently and had NO idea what to do about it. During the immediate weeks "After Sarno" it wasn't even an issue, so in the incident that I describe, it really felt like it came totally out of the blue. But by then I had new tools, although it took a huge amount of will power to force my brain to make the shift out of negativity. It's scary stuff.

 

Oh, I think this is absolutely true - and I think @Rainbowdash also said essentially the same. In his later years Dr. Sarno certainly started to believe that anxiety and depression were probably TMS equivalents. But there are many different types of depression, and also many different levels of depression. @plum has effectively described the kind of depression that can be controlled with mindfulness, acceptance, and self-love, but I think there are severe forms of depression for which mindfulness is simply not going to be an option, simply because the black hole of the negative subconscious is just too deep.

That being said, someone like your co-worker might be able to make use of TMS theory for pain and other symptoms of emotional stress - and she could probably do that without having to make the bigger leap of seeing her depression as TMS. I think there are many variations and gradations of success when doing this work!

This was a really interesting question, @JBG1963 !