Will depression go away on its own?
Q: If I do nothing, will depression go away like other ailments?
A: The answer depends on what the depression is based on. You can think of depression as having two basic forms: situational, and chronic. Situational is based on external, contemporary, and temporary events. It’s what you experience when a loved one dies, when you lose your job, when a cherished plan falls apart. If you do nothing, in this case in the sense of letting yourself feel what you feel, for however long that takes, then yes, it will pass just like a common cold. Our systems are organized to expel depression just like a cold, if all things go well.
If all things do not go well, then what you get is chronic depression. With chronic depression, what may have started as an external source triggering depression (an addicted, inconsistently available parent, growing up impoverished, etc.) becomes an internal source. The fact that your parents are not loving converts to the internal belief that “I am not lovable” (or, perhaps, “The world is depriving”). And because that’s a self-reinforcing phenomenon, unlike outside events that trigger and support depression, you have to do something to resolve the chronic form of depression. Which is really saying that you have to do something about how you define your self: with chronic depression, essentially it is you that has to change–or more precisely, how you have defined your self. And “You” doesn’t change by itself the way a cloud naturally changes; “You” defends however it is defined, and changing that takes effort.
Think of the difference between a flu, and an auto-immune disorder. In the former, your body does not think that the flu is it. The flu is seen as external, foreign, and is fought off. Given enough support (rest, food, liquids) your body will expel it and you’re return to normal. With an auto-immune disorder, your body gets confused about what’s what, and starts attacking itself. In that case, if you let things run status quo, then the body will essentially destroy or disable itself. There has to be intervention (medications, therapies) for the auto-immune attacks to stop. The same is true in the relationship between situational and chronic depression: with the former, “you” remembers that the depression is not you; with the latter, “you” get confused and believe the depression is you, and the problem is that then “you” will defend the depression because it is seen as “I”. What is “I” is defended against change. (That’s just how we’re built…)
Therefore, you have to intervene, you have to do something, to interrupt the psychic equivalent (chronic depression) of a bodily auto-immune disorder.
