Maybe you're depressed because your life and environment is actually shit and you don't know how to fix it. Maybe taking happy pills just eliminates the only signal telling you to take your hand off the hot stove.

I don't think depression is like that. Depression is not being sad but rather just blank and those are not happy pills, those are feel a bit something again pills. Which enabled you to take the hand of the stove albeit imperfectly.

Is that really how it is for you? The blank days in my opinion are the good ones, the level and balanced ones where I can just be in the zone or frankly even just zoned out.

The depressing days are the ones where my brain decides to sample from its wine cellar of my past mistakes without my permission.

I'm not really depressed or I don't think I am, although many things in accounts of depressed or formerly depressed people resonate with me.

I'm basing my understanding of what depression is on accounts of people who were depressed and got their meds. They always mention starting to actually feel some emotion. Like in case of this patient it was sadness about his children that made him cry for the first time after many years of just thinking how sad it was. Another case that ifluenced my tinking was illustrated accout by Hyperbole and half. After she got her meds she initially started to feel anger then joy then sadness in sort of explosive manner. As opposed to before the meds when she was feeling just empty and wanting to not exist.

The belief that underlying cause is not events or thoughts but physical damage to nervous system comes for me from experiments with ketamine I read about, where in vivo it shows to grant very rapid improvement in depression symptoms and in vitro it literally makes neurons grow new dendrites (or similar structures).

As for me personally I recently experienced a loss of a loved one and my life is very empty right now. So I'm thinking about it a lot and I have some of the coping mechanism the patient from this article invented. Like for example I started walking a lot this year and thinking about a lot not so great things when doing that. I walked to the point I injured my feet from the sheer amount of walking. Ball of my right foot still hurts after two months since I quit. But I still can cry or laugh or be excited about stuff and while some aspects that were never my strong suit like keeping my living environment orderly are now very inadequate I managed to function for 3 years with my sadness gradually lessening.

This belief that depressive thought have physical reason I think is helping me a lot. It makes easier to disassociate from their content.

I can just gloss over their content with statement that of course I'm making up bad stories and interpretations because I'm in a bad mood caused by bad physical condition. Once I improve it by eating, sleeping and all that I'll think more reasonable thoughts.

No depression treatment is anything close to a happy pill. Those would be more like opiates and perhaps uppers.

I was responding to this:

> misguided as not taking pain medicine when you have a broken leg until it has properly set first.

I'm arguing that pain killers are a calculated risk, and can lead to further trauma, even in situations of broken limbs. It's not misguided to forgo them entirely, if you can.

More broadly to the greater discussion: treating mental illness as a chemical imbalance risks further trauma because it risks masking the symptoms without treating the cause. It can be appropriate, but should not be taken in isolation as a potential cure or sole treatment.