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How to numb the pain of depression


SAMHSA’s National Helpline | SAMHSA

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  • SAMHSA’s National Helpline is a free, confidential, 24/7, 365-day-a-year treatment referral and information service (in English and Spanish) for individuals and families facing mental and/or substance use disorders.

    Also visit the online treatment locator.

SAMHSA’s National Helpline, 1-800-662-HELP (4357) (also known as the Treatment Referral Routing Service), or TTY: 1-800-487-4889 is a confidential, free, 24-hour-a-day, 365-day-a-year, information service, in English and Spanish, for individuals and family members facing mental and/or substance use disorders. This service provides referrals to local treatment facilities, support groups, and community-based organizations.

Also visit the online treatment locator, or send your zip code via text message: 435748 (HELP4U) to find help near you. Read more about the HELP4U text messaging service.

The service is open 24/7, 365 days a year.

English and Spanish are available if you select the option to speak with a national representative. Currently, the 435748 (HELP4U) text messaging service is only available in English.

In 2020, the Helpline received 833,598 calls. This is a 27 percent increase from 2019, when the Helpline received a total of 656,953 calls for the year.

The referral service is free of charge. If you have no insurance or are underinsured, we will refer you to your state office, which is responsible for state-funded treatment programs. In addition, we can often refer you to facilities that charge on a sliding fee scale or accept Medicare or Medicaid. If you have health insurance, you are encouraged to contact your insurer for a list of participating health care providers and facilities.

The service is confidential. We will not ask you for any personal information. We may ask for your zip code or other pertinent geographic information in order to track calls being routed to other offices or to accurately identify the local resources appropriate to your needs.

No, we do not provide counseling. Trained information specialists answer calls, transfer callers to state services or other appropriate intake centers in their states, and connect them with local assistance and support.

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    For additional resources, please visit the SAMHSA Store.

Last Updated: 08/30/2022

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How to get rid of chronic pain?

Some people experience pain all the time, literally live with it, and there is no physiological explanation for this. They go to doctors, take a bunch of tests, but do not find any obvious reasons for their condition. However, this does not mean at all that they invent everything or want the attention of doctors. Such people do feel pain, it's just that this pain is psychosomatic, its causes do not lie in physical injuries or inflammatory processes. People with such pain find it very difficult to live, they feel despair and hopelessness and often become depressed. In most of these cases, all you need to do is trust the therapist and learn how to work with your own feelings correctly. nine0003

How does chronic pain appear?

Pain can vary. For example, it may have a clear physiological cause: some kind of injury, fracture, or inflammation. But there are chronic pains that have no obvious cause. People with such pain are constantly being tested, they turn to different doctors, but they do not find any source of pain. The fact that a person is definitely in pain can be shown by such instrumental tests as functional magnetic resonance imaging or EEG - when you can see the activity of parts of the brain and nervous system during pain. Chronic pain can be felt by a person as pain in any part of the body, such as in the leg or arm, but usually such pain is expressed in the form of migraines and pain in the lower back, knees and back. And it happens that the whole body hurts completely, such a disease is called “fibromyalgia”. nine0003

Suffering for a long time from pain, a person begins to experience despair.

Chronic pain for which there is no physiological explanation usually appears suddenly. It can begin almost imperceptibly, and then gradually intensify, or it happens that acute pain immediately comes. As a general rule, to become chronic, the pain must return regularly or be felt continuously for a long time. Suffering for a long time from pain, a person begins to experience despair. First, he tries to find out the reason, and turns to a variety of doctors, but the doctors can not find anything. The person feels irritated and indignant that no one can help him. Moreover, with each new unsuccessful test, they try to convey to him that he has problems with his head, and they advise him to consult a psychiatrist. As a result, when such a patient realizes that no one can help him, he waves his hand at everything and still goes to the psychiatrist in the hope that he will explain everything to him exactly. Most often, he does not find help there either, since not all psychiatrists know that a patient with a similar problem should be referred to psychotherapy. nine0003

See also

Painful emotions

How do people with chronic pain live?

When a person experiences pain for a long time, it affects his behavior and life. Pain causes him to become more withdrawn and unsociable, to narrow his living space. Such people function less and less in society, work less often or even quit their jobs and apply for disability. They stop seeing friends, playing sports, eating into their depression. These people experience depression in their own way. This is not clinical depression, which is genetically inherent in a person - it is associated precisely with pain. Pain goes away and depression ends. Because people with chronic pain often eat away at their condition, many of them become obese. nine0003

How to cure chronic pain with psychotherapy?

If a person with chronic pain does decide to see a psychotherapist, it takes a long time for the specialist to overcome the barrier of mistrust. Indeed, most often the patient remains convinced for a long time that the pain has a physiological cause that simply no one can detect. And of course, first of all, the psychotherapist makes sure that all the necessary physiological checks have already been passed. Only when it becomes clear that the pain has no physiological cause, the therapist begins treatment. nine0003

If the psychotherapist understands that the patient's pain is due to psychosomatics, he tries to identify what could be the original psychological trigger.

First of all, the specialist finds out when the patient began to feel pain, after which it appeared. He learns how during this period the patient developed relationships with loved ones, what was the situation at work. If the psychotherapist understands that the patient's pain is due to psychosomatics, he tries to identify what could be the original psychological trigger. As a rule, in the course of therapy, a traumatic memory, a disturbing event, or a psychological trauma that provoked the onset of pain is identified. Such a cause may be a conflict at work, some kind of stressful situation in the family. nine0003

See also

First aid for anxiety attacks

When the cause is identified, the psychotherapist tries to remove the acute pain with the help of psychological methods. In fact, it becomes easier for a person when he begins to trust the psychotherapist and independently gets involved in the work, fulfills all the recommendations. This gives the patient strength, adds self-confidence and influences the physiological correlates of pain. One of the most effective methods of dealing with such pain is meditation. It teaches a person to retreat from pain in time, look at it from the outside and relax. The patient begins to understand how to notice the pain before it starts and how not to let it get worse. nine0003

Typically, the process of treating chronic pain with a psychotherapist takes from 2 sessions to 3-4 months, depending on the specific problem. It does not depend so much on the nature of the pain and its cause, but on the person himself, on his involvement in the treatment process. If he is ready to follow all the recommendations and advice of a specialist, just a few meetings may be enough for treatment. The pain goes away, becoming weaker and appearing less and less. However, the most important work happens after a person has learned to interact with his pain - for the rest of his life he needs to ensure that the pain does not return. After all, there are many disturbing moments in life that can start the mechanism of pain again. nine0003

  • Depression

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One easy way to deal with pain and negative emotions

July 4, 2017 Life

There are times in life when you need to get over the pain quickly and move on. There is one easy way to transform negative emotions.

CamMi Pham

Marketer, founder of ThinkRenegade agency, blogger. nine0003

When you are in pain, give yourself five minutes to yell, cry, and beat your pillow: feel the negative energy as intensely as possible. But stop exactly five minutes later. And use your sadness as a motivator to get active.

We all have times when we are sad, jealous, go crazy with envy, miss our loved ones, get depressed, when it seems to us that the world is collapsing. All these feelings can visit a person from time to time, or they can wait for us at the most inopportune moment, when we least expect a blow of fate. nine0003

Many people think that negative feelings should be ignored. Philosophers and psychologists break spears on how to get rid of negative emotions.

The truth is that there is no joy without pain. If we were always happy with everything, life would seem pretty bland to us. No one would in principle be able to feel anything.

In fact, it is not necessary to think exclusively positively. Just positive thinking allows you to push your pain, and therefore your problem deeper into yourself. nine0003

However, if you do not work with negative emotions, they will follow you everywhere and poison your life.

Try to be selfish: try to overcome your sadness in an unusual way. Convert feelings into actions.