Often the issue of mental health is stigmatized within religious communities. Last week, the Islamic centre of England (a Muslim community centre) had a programme discussing ways of managing depression. Depression is feelings of severe despondency. The programme was led by Dr Yasmin Mohsin and explored three main methods of managing depression.

The first method of managing depression is through scheduling your week. Through scheduling your week in advance, you are able to place compulsory activities and regular activities you do in a timetable of your week. You should then identify activities you find pleasurable by measuring them using a scale of 1 to 10. You should then attempt to remove activities which you don't find enjoyable in order to be happier.

The second method of managing depression is by disproving negative automatic thoughts (NAT). Negative automatic thoughts are thoughts you have on a regular basis such as I am lazy. In order to disprove this NAT should write it in a table with the advantages and disadvantages of thinking this way. The last thing you should include in this table is evidence to disprove this NAT. This will enable you to see that this NAT is an illusion and not actually applicable to your daily life.

The third method of managing depression is through the use of experiments. Often NAT thoughts can also be disproved through the use of experiments to contradict these thoughts. If you often believe that you are not liked by people an experiment you could conduct is talking to people you know. As the person or people will interact with you, you will then know that the NAT was not really real.

I hope these methods of managing depression were useful and helpful. These were my personal interpretations of a talk I attended by a psychiatrist.