Chemical imbalance?
Pretty sure it's due to my only sibling overdosing in 2019, and the mother of my son dying of cancer in 2020, and my fiancee dying of cancer in 2021.
The article does disambiguate between (what they call) "true sadness" and depression:
> Gold dismisses the common idea that depression is medicalised sadness, noting that “true sadness is often associated with cherished, loving memories of, for instance, a lost loved one, combined with grief over their loss, and, at times, a bittersweet feeling encompassing both the bounties of life and the harsh reality that all relationships must come to an end”. Such feelings, he says, are typically unavailable to seriously depressed individuals, whose emotional repertoire is constricted to “a deadening litany of self-excoriation and hopelessness”.
And I think it is an important distinction. "Depression" has been treated as a catch-all term for what turns out to be a myriad of different causes that happen to look the same to an outside observer.
I personally experience chronic inflammation due to Crohn's disease and it does cause depressive symptoms even though there isn't any major external reason that I should feel that way.
And it makes no sense that the same treatment should be used in both of our cases.
-- Carol Hanisch, 1970
> If you get exposed to a lot of glucocorticoids, you're more at risk now for depression. You can see this epidemiologically: you get people, and statistically, before their first major depressive episode something awful stressful occurs. Have one of those first depressive episodes, due to some stressful event, you come out the other side eventually. You are no more at risk for depression than anybody else. Along comes a second major stressor, and you fall into depression, come out the other end, no more at risk than anyone else for depression. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth stress-induced depression, something happens and things start cycling on their own there and you no longer need a major stressor to cause you to get depressed like that. That's when the clocks are off and running. That's the transition.[0]
Will your life ever have meaning again? Probably not, no. Not the meaning it had before those three very important people were taken from you. Probably nothing of value makes sense, anymore, not in light of their absence. What's the point of watching TV you can't talk about with them? What's the point of going on trips you can't share photos of with them? At least, that's how I've been thinking about my losses.
I'm just a stranger on the internet, but if you told me life had lost its meaning I would believe you, and you would be right.
...but there is also a neurological component.
0. Dr. Robert Sapolsky, PhD, 2009 - https://youtu.be/NOAgplgTxfc?t=2165&si=P0pg-W5lOe3n0LWb
Time theoretically will help heal your wounds but for many it's not that simple (as the article points out, we're still trying to figure it out).
An incredibly bitter irony is that one can take steps to ameliorate the condition but when in the throes of it, finding the strength and ability to do so is incredibly challenging.
If you want someone to talk to, you can email me or DM via Twitter. Happy to just listen.