While traditional medications can only help patients cope with depression, the majority of patients usually seek more solid help beyond just coping. Some patients also prefer non-drug treatments to help them manage their conditions and live a fairly normal life. The best way out for many is to try non-traditional treatment options that seem to work more effectively for relieving symptoms.
Whether you’ve suffered depression or someone you know is going through it now, you can benefit from learning the different non-traditional treatment options that exist. Here are four common ones to consider:
Ketamine Therapy
Thanks to its powerful biological and cognitive effects, ketamine therapy has been in use for decades as a dependable, safe medicine for treating symptoms of depression. The right application often focuses on harnessing ketamine’s ability to increase the user’s brain’s ability to heal and build new connections. 
The treatment uses low doses of ketamine to control the effects of various mental health conditions, such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), anxiety disorders, and treatment-resistant depression. While not yet FDA-approved, professionally administered, lower-dose ketamine injections can be used to treat pain, depression, and other substance use or mental health-related disorders.
Massage Therapy
Massage sessions are not just for relieving muscle tension anymore. Professional massage therapies are now delivered on the foundational idea that the mind and body are interconnected. When your physical health is in perfect shape, your mental well-being will almost always be assured.
Modern massage therapies are believed to help patients achieve a relaxed body that leads to a healthier mind with less depression and overall well-being. You can supplement massage therapy with a traditional treatment you’re already undertaking to improve your healing process and optimize outcomes.
Music Therapy
Music therapy is an old technique used and taught by the world’s greatest scientists and philosophers, like Pythagoras, whom you probably know for his famous mathematical formula, the Pythagorean theorem. Along with mathematics, he also focused on the physics of music, stressing that the musical harmony patterns are similar to how the planets are arranged around the Earth. He used stringed instruments to rebuild balance and harmony within people.
Today, therapists can recommend certain types of music for mental health patients to help ease their symptoms and improve their overall conditions. You can simply play good music on your headphones on the go or in your room to give your relaxing, soothing effect ideal for your moods. Music therapy is also recommended for people of all ages, helping relieve uncomfortable feelings like anxiety, fear, grief, and stress.
Guided Imagery
Guided imagery is a modern relaxation technique that some professionals use to help you create calm, peaceful images in your mind. The practitioner’s work is to guide patients into visualizing positive scenarios or images to create a calming, therapeutic outcome in relation to the patient’s condition.
Peaceful mental images, such as images of the patient controlling or managing their condition, or ocean waves, can be used to assert positivity to the patient’s mind. This way, patients are more likely to recover faster and regain control of their mental health.
While these alternative non-traditional treatment options offer satisfactory solutions to many mental health symptoms, they don’t usually work the same way for everyone. The good news is that you can experiment with all these alternative therapies until you find one or more that work best for your condition. You may fail with guided imagery, but succeed with ketamine therapy or both.