DEPRESSION: The Infinite Layers of Your Discontent

“Why do you want to shut out of your life any uneasiness, any misery, any depression, since after all you don't know what work these conditions are doing inside you? Why do you want to persecute yourself with the question of where all this is coming from and where it is going? Since you know, after all, that you are in the midst of transitions and you wished for nothing so much as to change. If there is anything unhealthy in your reactions, just bear in mind that sickness is the means by which an organism frees itself from what is alien; so one must simply help it to be sick, to have its whole sickness and to break out with it, since that is the way it gets better.” - Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

The medical model of depression tends to present a one size fits all cookie-cutter approach to healing and recovery, which seems to rely chiefly on medication therapy.

This approach, relying a specific set of symptoms, fails to incorporate the rich tapestry of mood states affected by external and internal influences upon the central nervous system, and seems to ignore the fact that the "I-me" identity is ultimately devoid of consistency and is a fluid amalgamation of nebulous moods based on external and internal influences, most completely outside conscious awareness.

There is no constant state one could label as "depression," rather a rolling, undulating spectrum of psycho-emotional moods that inform the 'states of being' that ultimately influence, thought, feeling and behavior. 

You could be dysthymic or somewhat despondent. You could be experiencing grief, melancholy, distress, desperation, hopelessness, dreariness, worry, downheartedness, abasement, abjection, blahs, bleakness, bummed out, cheerlessness, dejection, sorrow, desolation, discouragement, dispiritedness, dreariness, boredom, ennui, gloom, sadness, disconsolation, aloofness, disconnection, helplessness, unhappiness, trepidation, angst, etc, etc, etc, and these psycho-emotional states of being could alternate and change based on numerous variables, both internal and external, with fluctuating levels of frequency, intensity and duration and most outside your capacity to even acknowledge, let alone control.

"Depression is likely caused by multiple biological, psychological, social and environmental drivers, and these factors often overlap, such as cortisol hormone levels going up in response to stress from troubled relationships or economic hardship. Yet most previous research on depression focused on only one or two factors, and not how the many factors intersect and unfold over time.
Wittenborn and colleagues analyzed nearly 600 scientific articles on depression and incorporated the major drivers of depression discussed in the research into a complex model that essentially diagrams how one driver affects another. Depression drivers range from sleep problems to social isolation to inflammation of the brain." LINK 

A "depression" diagnosis completely fails to define the moment-to-moment fluctuating experience of mood states, which can run the spectrum, from paralysing suicidality to intermittent episodes of abject boredom and lethargy to peaks of creativity and intense awareness leading to crippling fear and anxiety only to level off into blank nothingness provoking intense introspection generating joy and relief, rebounding into a morose perspective of the world which eventually provokes laughter and anarchistic surrender that slowly develops into a sense of compassion which then settles into a sense of confused chaos merging within the low mental hum of total meaninglessness.

“I'll never forget how the depression and loneliness felt good and bad at the same time. Still does.” - Henry Rollins, The Portable Henry Rollins

The cultural indoctrinated response of running from such experiences may result in the intensification of symptoms. Hence, a feeling of compounded or 'double' depression arises in which your fear of being depressed intensifies your depression, because you live in a culture which is negatively biased against any moods that are true and accurate, requiring all moods or mental states be consistently positive regardless of circumstance, even though the unnatural lifestyle that you engage in, and that your culture endorses as positive, may be the chief cause of your depressed mood state, because you feel compelled to participate and endure. This can only erode the quality of your relationships, which then becomes an additional participatory aspect of your declining mood states.

"Part of the problem is that we become corralled into a consensus of belief that does not serve our higher purpose. The desire to fit in and conform induces us to lose our inner voice. We are products of a cultural belief system that ignores or devalues matters of the heart and then turns and points its accusatory finger at those who suffer. When we do so, we victimize the victim. If we began to look at the depression as symptomatic of living depressing lives, we'd begin to understand that the cure lies in addressing what our souls are longing for. When we suppress the voice of our soul, depression arises. Depression surfaces for a reason. The symptoms of depression are crying out for our attention. The epidemic of depression is simply indicative of lives lived errantly, without joy or purpose." LINK

DEPRESSION: A Disease of Civilization