Strategies for Coping With Depression and Chronic Pain

Lynne Nelson says she "fought it and fought it."

"My primary care doctor and my neurologist had been telling me for over a year that I need to be on an antidepressant. Finally my primary care doctor said 'Look, do you want to get in your car every day after work and cry all the way home? That's what you do every day. That's depression. People who are in chronic pain are depressed, and you don't need to be depressed.'"

Nelson went on Effexor and within three months, she "felt like a cloud had lifted. It was very subtle and it's a very low dose," she says. "But I was depressed and I didn't want to believe that. So I am much happier now."

The benefits of talk therapy
For others, counseling or therapy is effective. Sandy Frandsen was finally able to regain an active life with family and friends after doing a eight-week, multidisciplinary course that worked on breathing techniques, stretching and physical activity, and methods for helping to manage the way she viewed her pain.

Beverly Thorn, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa conducts cognitive-behavioral therapy sessions with chronic pain patients and asks them at the end of their therapy, "What has changed since the treatment? The things they say are 'I still have the pain, but the pain doesn't have me anymore. I'm able to take back my life.'"

Frandsen was able to see this change during an exercise in which she expressed her emotions in a collage. "When I started I was just doing layers of different colors. And they were all dark colors, black, purple, red, the gloomy colors, they were grey, you know, it was just because that was the place I was in." she says. "And at the end of the course, the last thing I did was just a big yellow happy face."