What is depression?

Disclaimer: Depression is a serious disease that could kill. Please take it seriously and seek professional medical or mental health support if you have suicidal thoughts or lower life qualities due to low mood spirits or down-spiral thoughts. This blog is just my personal experiences sharing and personal viewpoints and shouldn’t be considered as any form of medical advice. 

It’s clearly a stage. In WHO’s definition, it’s characterized by persistently depressed mood or loss of interest in activities, causing significant impairment in daily life.

It’s dangerous to all groups of people, poor or rich, good or bad, young or old. Many celebrities lost their lives to the disease, including Kate Spade, Robin Williams, and many many more (https://www.wonderslist.com/top-10-comedians-who-committed-suicide/). 

Depression lingers around. Relapse is almost certain, there are beliefs that it’s tied to your genetics and once you get depressed once, you’ll suffer from it throughout your life. 

However, let’s not overlook characters like Eckhart Tolle who suffered badly from depression but reached a totally new level and become a successful spiritual teacher and author to guide people to enlightenment.

There are many more cases like him, who survived depression and proved that “what doesn’t kill you, make you stronger.” 

How do you explain this? 

Is that possible to cure depression? Medician clearly helps but it’s not able to cure the disease. Meditation clearly helps but doesn’t cure either. Sport helps, friends and family help, but none can guarantee the cure. 

It’s easier to understand if we change the angle to look at depression. It might not be a bad thing for people, instead, it could be a  transformation, which is a painful process but also lead to a new life form. Think about the process from a caterpillar to a butterfly; or an egg into a chicken. Depression indicates that you’re ready for further growth. 

However, if you don’t realize the ultimate positive outcome and choose to resist the process instead. It could be extremely dangerous. Because the transformation is determined to happen, until it’s successful, it’ll “relapse” all the time. The more resistant you are, the longer the process would be. And the longer the process is, the more resistant you would likely be. Some people may even wrongly think it’s a never-ending painful process and give up their own life, not knowing that what they give up is a precious opportunity to reach a more peaceful stage. 

I tried to convince some to embrace the pain and accept the pain, but they responded by:” no I DON’T want the pain!”. Sure, no one wants it, but when it comes to you, accept it is the most effective way to get over and shorten the pain as much as possible. 

People who never suffered from depression either naturally have the ability to bear the pain and accept it right away or have effective ways to redirect the emotion outward instead of inward to themselves. If you have never resisted, you’ll never truly suffer from the so-called “mood disorder” depression.