Using Light Therapy for Depression

Depression is one of the few disorders that can be treated successfully, and it responds well to it. But to find out which type of treatment works best is difficult, especially one that is new to the market such as light therapy for depression. But there are many medical conditions similar to depression, and medications can cause the symptoms of depression--fatigue, loss of pleasure, or sadness. And for a fact depression will not leave until the actual problem is not only identified but treated correctly.

Conventional methods for treating depression include psychotherapy, electroconvulsive or ECT therapy, and antidepressant drugs. The medical field recognizes that treatments for depression can vary, depending on its severity and its cause. Both holistic practitioners and traditional medical physicians agree that for extremely serious depressions, light therapy for depression should be considered as a complementary treatment as compared to the conventional ones.

These complementary conditions considered acceptable for light therapy for depression would be seasonal depression or seasonal affective disorders, not major or chronic depressions such as manic depression or manor depressive disorders. But there are several other conditions, including the light therapy for depression of SAD, that accept light therapy as an excellent treatment--early morning insomnia, productivity enhancement, night-owl insomnia, jet lag, late-shift drowsiness, bulimia, lupus, nonseasonal depression, or even prolonged menstrual cycles.

A lot of the early research on light therapy for depression has been inadequately funded, which has led to its lack of research at the very beginning. Also the studies had lots of flaws in its design problems, which caused them to be weak in their quality. 

But research in Canada has completed one of the most recent studies that says light therapy for depression is just as effective of a treatment as medications, and is considered to be the safest treatment for bipolar depression. And not only is it effective, it is cheaper than traditional medication and treatments, in addition to being much safer with fewer side effects. Almost all of antidepressant treatments, except lithium, have the ability to make the condition of bipolar disorder much worse than without them, forcing an increase of subtle "manic side" symptoms.

When applying light therapy for depression treatments for winter depression or season affective disorder, light therapy originally started out with early morning treatments. But recent results have demonstrated how light therapy treats depression is still unknown, and is very much unestablished in its results. Recent studies have shown us that research in light therapy may occur in the evenings or other times with just as good of results.