The most useful model of depression I've found is that it's anger directed inward.
Essentially, a restriction of emotional freedom and a suppression of feeling all our emotions.
This is typically due to trauma or neglect or some other developmental adaptation not to feel fully.
This is reinforced by a culture in which people try to fix or cheer you up when sad or angry.
In a culture where actually feeling basic human emotions are taboo, feeling said emotions can be extremely isolating.
If you've never felt safe fully feeling your emotions, it will be unlikely you will ever learn unless you conciously work on it and build relationships with people who can hold space for your entire range of experience.
Psychedelics can help because they loosen the pathways of suppression and can help us reintegrate the parts of ourself that we've been suppressing.
Main stream treatments like SSRIs end up making things worse long term because they just reinforce suppressing symptoms.
I spent a decade of my life dealing with depression, psychosis, schizophrenia, suicidal thoughts, bipolar, anxiety and panic attacks.
The things that helped me were a mindset that feeling all of my emotions was fully was required to be healthy, seeking out people and processes to help me get more embodied and to feel, Psychedelic therapy (specifically to be able to go deeper into emotion), NARM therapy to help me do relationship in a way that was connected; telling the 100% truth in relationship and holding space for the emotions that emerge; falling and staying in love; Gratitude.
I've mapped out these states of consciousness enough in myself and in people I've worked with combined with finding enough accounts of others as well as emerging research to believe that we are on the cusp of a fundamental shift in how people deal with mental health.
I'm now in love and enaged, working on a number of creative projects, my relationships are antifragile and honest, I have a practice helping others with relationships & mental health; don't take psychiatric medication (occasionally a tune up with psychedelics); and if I encounter a context which triggers something like depression, psychosis, mania, anxiety, etc. I understand how to work with those states to emerge from them even more integrated and connected to myself.
The biggest developmental edge now is that once you start healing old traumas, you need to finish the work. Meaning, things will continue to come to the surface for your attention. It's not always easy, but the end result is always worth the time and work to release and heal.
This last month I've really gotten aware of how being sexually assaulted at 25 really left an imprint. I had remembered what happened intellectually, but realized I never released the somatic memory of it.
Residual anger, shame and fear kept coming up during sex with my fiancé and it wasn't until I made space to fully go into those emotions that I was able to see the connection with the assault (in grad school a male student got me drunk under the pretext of going to pick up girls and then tried to have sex with me while I was too drunk to move.)
So, the work is not done, but man, my life is unrecognizable to where it was when I began this work and my creative life has really opened up to more possibility (we just signed a contract to buy a tropical island in Panama and build a village for visionaries! Please come visit!).
Anyhow, I feel its my dharma to share my story and experiences and the personal research I've done, so thanks for giving me a space to do that.