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The cure to depression is a) calm the mind via the breath and once that is complete, usually after days of effort, and b) to observe your physical sensations from moment to moment without reacting to them in order to see Reality as it is.

The. Fishes. Are. Dead.

Is this a reference to something? Google returns naught.

Yes, the comic.

just a guess :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2_%2B_2_%3D_5#In_popular_cultur...

There.Are.Four.Lights

I suspect you didn't read the article.

Apologies, I got a way through it and gave up. I don't take content in comic form very well.

Maybe you were just tired.

I actually really think there's something in mindful meditation, but flatly stating it as the be-all and end-all solution is more than a bit patronising, belies the endless effort required to make it work, and comes across as somewhat arrogant, which is probably why you've been downvoted into oblivion here!

Agreed, there is no 'cure', however mindfulness and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy are certainly part of the start of a solution for some people.

If not a part of a 'solution' as such, sometimes they simply help people cope for a little while, which can be valuable.

Cure, though? Absolutely not.

>some chemical missing in the brain

Meh, we have been walking down this path for the last 20 years with SSRI's and except for the worst forms of depressions have no real proof that chemical imbalances are a root cause and/or that antidepressants are an effective cure.

http://healthland.time.com/2012/01/18/new-research-on-the-an...

"some day it will be curable" is the kind of helpless positivism the blog post portraits.

Indeed.

The fact that depression is not transmitted by virus, bacteria or gene and is heavily correlated with cultural context make it a very suspect 'disease' if that word is to have any meaning.

Cultural context determines so many things that influence brain chemistry like diet, sleep patterns, sitmuli patterns, amount an the patterns of stress, air pollution, etc.

Depression is probably pretty chemical thing. Just very hard to track because we are pretty lame when it comes to brain chemistry.

Don't assume you know what 'makes sense' from the point of view of evolution - feeling very anxious about embarrassment doesn't really make that much sense until you consider the consequences of violating the norms of the tribe in our hunter/gatherer past, for example.

Additionally, the whole 'chemical imbalance' thing is somewhat questionable - if you were to do extreme sports all the time you might find aspects of your mental experience changing over time, has your brain chemistry become imbalanced, or has experience changed the chemistry of your brain?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I simply question your certainty about the inevitability of a simple chemical cure (as mentioned by sibling post, SSRIs are still a bit of a crap shoot.)

Saying there will be a cure to depression like we have with other diseases is a bit like saying there will eventually be a spray-on lubricant that can magically fix any malfunctioning machine. It really oversimplifies the problem. We'll get better and better at treating depression, but I don't think it will ever be an easy fix until we have nanomachines that can reprogram our brains.

A simple spray-on fix (‘Take this pill daily for the next two weeks and everything will be fabulous’) is indeed likely an oversimplification. However, we are making progress treating cancer, HIV and hundreds of other diseases and bodily malfunctions, and I see little reason to be that pessimistic about treating psychological malfunctions. Just recall how far medicine got in the last 100 years and how much faster research moves forward nowadays than it did during most of that time. Sure, there won’t be an easy treatment any time soon, but I’m sure that there will be an effective treatment.

And even if you think that nanomachines reprogramming the brain are absolutely necessary to treat depression, I can assure you that people work on that, too.

> They do not make any sense, and do not help survival of the individual.

"Here's the real hell of it: depression and frustration and hatred are mechanisms to prevent activity in a different world than that in which we live now. It is best to sleep long hours and move little when the nights are long and the days are short and the food is scarce, during the dark European winter. But the adaptation is no longer relevant now when we are expected to move about, when we can shut ourselves inside and make an artificial night.

We must instead play a different trick on the wicked and limited body and brain. We must convince it that we are heir to the greatness of our ancestors, that we are still the mighty hunter on the plains of Africa. We must run - a block or two at first, and damn the opinions of the onlookers. We must gradually run further until our breath comes in ragged gasps and the sweat of our back runs down the crack of our ass, and we must learn to love the fire in our lungs and muscles." (taken from a reddit post)

The reasoning in this post resonates with me, although I understand that it is dodgy at best.

[1] Long note: I was depressed and passively suicidal for a while, a few years back, and I know what it feels (or rather doesn't feel) like when the fishes are dead.

I remember that I started running, but can't tell if I did so because I was better, or the opposite. (Probably the latter: reminiscing on the worst times, I cannot possibly imagine that I would have had the drive to do anything therapeutic, much less physical activity. Depression came in waves, maybe I did so during the softest crests?)

Unlike the article, I do not think that running is cure for depression; Even if it does physiologically help, even if you are aware of that fact, you just lack the motivation to act. would a dead fish take the necessary steps to get back in the water, if you told its dead body water would bring him back to life?

But once it eases, running keeps it at bay (what works for me, etc) .

This is not so easy: we had candles and fun at nights for a long time, and while it's not clear how widespread it was, there were definitely periods in history when it was common to sleep in separate chunks. Social life is important, in fact most of the not-sleeping we're doing nowadays is due to social interaction and/or entertainment, not acquiring food. Furthermore, depression is has a very strong impact on survival and breeding chances[citation needed], so it shouldn't really need that much time to disappear unless there are reasons for it to stay there.

But, there are attempts to figure out why exactly wasn't depression weeded out by now (other than the rather sad "because it's somehow inherent to other aspects of our brain and really hard and/or costly to avoid): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_approaches_to_depr...

we had candles and fun at nights for a long time

Then they shut that home out on the range :-)

The depressed brain isn't a machine that broke that just needs a replacement part. The brain is a machine that in the course of its operation changes the way its made. Depression is a dark anti-pattern in which the brain begins to disassemble itself. What you think changes your brain and changes in your brain affect what you think.

The only way to "fix" it is to build again what is lost. Can a drug help? Sometimes, but building is long and hard. A depressed brain is like a house thats been neglected for 20 years. It needs lengthy remodeling, not a new paint job.

Brilliantly put.

> Depression is a dark anti-pattern in which the brain begins to disassemble itself.

I'd agree that it's an anti-pattern, but rather than the brain disassembling itself I'd say the brain assumes a very stable, self-reinforcing thought model which rewards negativity or anhedonism. I describe my experiences with depression above, so I won't repeat them here, but I'm convinced that the only "cure" is finding a way to disrupt this feedback loop. Like others suggest sometimes it's drugs, sometimes it's traditional psychotherapy. Believe it or not there's been a lot of recent success with shock therapy treatments for various forms of deep depression - I'd assume because it disrupts this thought model.

"What I cannot create I do not understand." -Feynman

Personally I think we won't fully understand depression and other "thought model" problems until we have an accurate general model of thought processes in the brain and the ability to manipulate them. In the mean time I think that the tools we have are blunt instruments.

The thing about the brain disassembling itself was meant literally. Cells actually degrade and die during depression, and have to be grown back later as you get better.

Except anti-depressants can start working in ~2 weeks. SSRIs do something to serotonin levels/receptor levels. If your brain is literally degrading itself, that could just be a side effect of the lethargy, low stimulus, etc. that a depressed person is subjected to. When someone takes MDMA, I don't think they suddenly grow a bunch of connections; it just jacks up the level of serotonin to an extreme degree.

We don't understand them well and SSRIs don't work for everyone, but I don't think your cell-death theory is an open and shut case at all.

The cell death is a feedback loop. I've taken lithium carbonate when I got depressed. The fact is that however much you may be fighting the depression on your own, the chemical aid will not "cure" you, nor "make you happy and right", but it is an immense aid to breaking the neurochemical feedback loops and thus to letting you run your own brain again.

Please read about Ketamine and depression. This stuff literally regrows parts of neurons lost due to depression and fast too.

I do not wish to sound ignorant of the real pain/anguish people suffer from depression and damage it causes (I have experienced it, see below the quote from Wikipedia), but I have recently taken to the idea that maybe, for some people, it is a just another part of a natural mental process. I think I may be one of them.

Maybe depression does not need a "cure" so much as it needs better understanding. Maybe it should be reframed to be a little like dreaming - dreams are definitely unique and can be very frightening/challenging but they very often serve a purpose in our psychology and physiology.

Eastern philosophy certainly might have some agreement with this. From Wikipedia's article on "nothing" (and "nothingness"):

"The understanding of 'nothing' varies widely between cultures, especially between Western and Eastern cultures and philosophical traditions. For instance, Śūnyatā (emptiness), unlike 'nothingness', is considered to be a state of mind in some forms of Buddhism (see Nirvana, mu, and Bodhi). Achieving 'nothing' as a state of mind in this tradition allows one to be totally focused on a thought or activity at a level of intensity that they would not be able to achieve if they were consciously thinking. A classic example of this is an archer attempting to erase the mind and clear the thoughts to better focus on the shot. Some authors have pointed to similarities between the Buddhist conception of nothingness and the ideas of Martin Heidegger and existentialists like Sartre,[18][19] although this connection has not been explicitly made by the philosophers themselves.

In some Eastern philosophies, the concept of "nothingness" is characterized by an egoless state of being in which one fully realizes one's own small part in the cosmos..."

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing

I have been there, even just recently - unemployed, out of the "flow" of everyday life, alone, and "in the dark". I have been there before that too.

My family/friends (a small circle as I am a little more introverted) knew I was unhappy/depressed. They wanted to do something for me, but nothing in particular could be done. One thing they did do for me, was when I asked to just be "left alone/let be" - for the most part, they honored that request, staying just enough available so that if I needed them, they were right there. But they let me "wallow" so to speak, as needed. They let me work through it by myself (which is what I wanted - to find my strength from within).

One thing that was different about the most recent bout with "depression" was that I decided to a certain extent, based on my previous experiences with it, to just let it happen and feel it fully/accept my feelings. Luckily, I am not suicidal, nor never enough to be serious about it. I think sometimes the suicide part comes from listening to certain internal urges that people for one reason or another cannot resist.

This is just an idea from my personal experience - I know I have been "depressed" - and I know it doesn't feel good. But, somehow, allowing myself to feel it - with the limit being that I wanted to live because living is all about experience and feeling things (even feeling nothing) - allows me to get through it.

My kernel of corn moment was sitting on the bathroom floor holding my dog who was very ill and might have died from pesticide poisoning in my lap, crying and holding her as she slept in my arms. She just looked up at me and even feeling sick & tired, she licked my nose. For various reasons in my own life, that moment was incredibly symbolic and pretty much nothing else mattered except that. Somehow, that "realization moment"/"breakthrough moment" brought me back this time.