There's honestly is no escape from depression.
There's no way out. You can distract yourself with work, hobbies and exercise all you want, but deep down, you're still not as happy as you want to be while doing it all, and looking back at it retrospectively, you won't find that overall happiness.
Medication doesn't work either - it just masks the depression and compresses it even more.
Compressing it will make you have a complete nervous breakdown where you'll be at the crossroads of going completely crazy and doing something that you'll eventually regret, or suppressing it until the next nervous breakdown where you're compounding it on top of the depression that you've been carrying your whole life.
I've had several breakdowns & been hospitalized for stress, homelessness, and 2 suicide attempts.
I just had a breakdown 3 weeks ago where I was almost murdered outside of my apartment building for having a breakdown & my whole neighborhood watched. My asshole neighbors would've rather gone viral for recording a murder on their phones than actually using it to call the police.
The only escape is death. It's honestly the only way for your soul to be relieved of the pain of your deep seeded depression.
Your brain is a problem solving computer. It's presented with patterns, some simple, some complex, and attempts to solve them.
Your brain is a massively parallel problem solving computer. Some problems can't be solved. Some of those problems are minimal and are put aside. Some are less minimal and your brain continuously tries to solve them. This can happen consciously or unconsciously. Your genetics and environment may predispose you to treating minimal problems as more important than they are, and you can't get past them.
So parts of your brain just get stuck looping through problem solving. Over and over.
Your brain is a biological massively parallel problem solving computer. It runs on cells. Those cells require energy, those cells require resources. When a bunch of those cells get stuck looping, they burn too much of those resources. This causes dysfunction in other areas of the brain.
This is clinical depression.
How do you escape it? It's possible but difficult. It can be mitigated to a significant extent. Keep your nutrition up, don't skip meals, take supplements. Even plain old multivitamins will help. Meditation can help you find those loops and bring them to the front. If you can accept those problems, at least for now, you can possibly stop those loops.
It’s a little known fact you can actually beat depression out of your head quite literally with a hammer.
There is amino acid therapy now that is working, neurotransmitter balance is measured through urine tests, and then supplemented, but it's rather costly.
You can escape, and it takes time. Your brain takes time to re-wire, but it's possible. A mountain is carved by water over thousands of years, so too the brain's connections are carved by years of doing. How do you expect to undo a lifetime of bad habits in a few months?
If you have a defeatist attitude about it, you will prove yourself right. Obviously, you'll never escape it if you convince yourself you can't.
First step in doing anything is convincing yourself its possible. It has always helped me to think about all the things I'm thankful for. I love laying in the bed because I'm warm and relatively safe there, I contrast it with the thought of what it is like being cold and on a dangerous street, and I take relief and joy that I am not in that situation. I can find tons of little things to be happy about, and anytime I need to, that's what I do.
Making myself stronger helps too, exercise is a natural anti depressant, gotta get those natural endorphins flowing! But honestly most people don't start exercising because they try WAY too hard at the beginning. You gotta start small and just dedicate time to doing something easy on a regular basis. Go for a walk once a day for a week, and just dedicate the time, don't kill yourself jogging at the beginning. Eventually after enough days, you'll decide to walk farther, or faster on your own. Its more about time dedication and consistency than it is about diving in head first.
I know and understand the feeling, but people do find their way out.
The answer to it is that being depressed gives you something. For me it was a feeling of comfort and power (ironic I know.) Suicide was definitely all about contol over my life.
As soon as I stopped wanting what they claimed to offer me - they had no power.
Why depressed people bug the crap out of me is that they always argue to stay depressed, and then when I say that there is hope, they say I was never really depressed.
Pardon my french, but fuck them and go fuck yourself with all that bullshit. And I say that lovingly.
If you want to stay depressed I'm not going to stop you, but I'm not buying that load of BS.
I saw and read this article today and it made me think of you: https://www.psypost.org/2021/06/psilocybin-therapy-appears-to-be-at-least-as-effective-as-a-leading-conventional-antidepressant-61015
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