> From my understanding, depression is a deadly spiral of mental state leading to chemical imbalance

There has never been any good scientific evidence that depression (or any other mental health issue for that matter) involves a “chemical imbalance”. It is, at the very best, a debatable and unproven hypothesis - yet many think it is some proven fact. To pick out just a couple of the numerous sources which confirm this, see https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-022-01661-0 and https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1277931/