How to Get Out of Depression

Is depression a sentence handed down by fate?

For years, mental health experts claimed depression was a byproduct of a chemical imbalance in the brain.

But in recent years, science and medicine have been arriving at new understandings, because of how ineffective today's treatments for depression have proven to be.

We're starting to understand that depression isn't connected to a chemical imbalance in the brain the way we thought until now.

I, for one, having studied people and not just research papers, am certain you can come out of depression through fundamental, consistent lifestyle changes like meditation, sun exposure, movement, dietary change, and taking responsibility for your life.

But this approach can upset "experts" who got used to the idea that humans tend to fall into illness and depression for no visible reason, and that they, or science, are the only salvation.

And it's not just the experts. Our culture has gotten used to prioritizing the normalization of victimhood.

And I'm not talking about people who suffer from depression. I'm talking about the narrative in our culture.

I personally don't see people as victims, and since every fiber of those experts' being believes in that approach, it creates a big gap between me and them.

But I'm not willing to let people who don't believe in the powers that exist in every one of us, and in the opportunities hidden inside the challenges that come our way, keep leading the narrative.

As long as we normalize illness, whether physical or emotional, and when I say normalize, I mean the perception that these states are a sentence handed down to us from the heavens for no reason, and as long as we don't choose to learn from these states and how to turn every challenge into an event meant to improve our lives, we stay victims.

Don't get me wrong. If I didn't know it was possible to overcome depression, I wouldn't be writing this.

But as long as there's one person who did succeed, the only narrative that should be the norm is how to come out of it, not how to normalize the idea that you can't.

Many people have managed to heal themselves from deep depression. Certain stories have become daily practices for millions around the world, like the healing story of Wim Hof, who beat depression after his wife took her own life.

It's just that the focus is on ice baths and not on how he used it to recover. But how many people do you know who'd be willing to step into a frozen lake every single day for months to change their life?

None of this means I don't believe depression is a complex condition. We'll get to that later.

I recently read an article by a psychologist titled "A Hypothesis in the Eye of the Storm: The [Failed] Biomedical Revolution in Psychiatry Lies at the Root of the Mental Health Crisis."

Throughout the rest of this text I use various quotes from it, and I invite you to read it too. The author talks about how, despite scientific progress, rates of distress and demand for treatment only keep climbing.

And the hypothesis is that the dominant conception in psychiatry may have actually made the public's mental well-being worse.

For that to be the case, experts need to lean harder into the belief that depression is a sentence handed down for no reason, and therefore that you have to justify the victim or rescue them, rather than give them the strength and support to overcome their challenges.

According to the World Health Organization, about 280 million people worldwide suffer from depression.

In the US, about half of young adults (18–44) reported in 2023, in a survey by the American Psychological Association, that they suffer from some mental disorder (APA, 2023).

In Sweden, a massive study published in JAMA Psychiatry found that roughly 80% of the population received, over the course of their lives, a diagnosis or a prescription for psychiatric medication (Kessing et al., 2023).

So despite scientific progress, rates of distress, diagnoses, and demand for treatment only keep rising significantly across psychiatry, psychology, and social work.

In moments of pain, the urge to take medication makes total sense to me. I'd take a painkiller too during a stretch of suffering just to function.

And there's no shortage of situations where medication saves lives and helps people overcome challenges. That said, we all know medication doesn't heal, it has long-term side effects, and in many cases it causes us to ignore the root of the problem.

Medical hubris

Despite historical approaches and events, like various cruel treatments that left the patient far worse off than before and were proven to cause more harm than good, there's a certain arrogant attitude in the world of medicine, brain research, psychology, and psychiatry, that only what comes out of science and research is the truth.

But was that always the case?

Let's go back in time.

Before the era of psychiatric drugs, one of the ways to treat depression was through surgery.

Thousands of patients underwent surgeries to sever connections and remove parts of the prefrontal region of the brain. This surgical intervention was considered, in the 1940s, the cutting edge of science.

It was seen as an effective and precise strategy for relieving mental pain (Freeman & Watts, 1942) and even earned its inventor, the Portuguese neurologist Egas Moniz, a Nobel Prize. And despite the scientific consensus of that era, over the years it became clear that the lobotomy was a cruel experimental intervention that caused severe, irreversible damage (Terrier et al., 2019).

It's no accident that the lobotomy "earned" universal condemnation and became a symbol of the dangers of medical hubris in psychiatry. But it wasn't the only intervention pulled from the shelves in shame.

The history of medicine is full of stories about "safe" drugs that turned out over the years to be lethal substances, like opioids, the addictive painkillers that have spread widely, and there are hundreds of drugs we know of that were banned from use only after being distributed to the public, even though they had all the necessary safety approvals (Onakpoya et al., 2016).

"Psychiatric drugs are drugs."

Amphetamines, for example, which were meant to "treat" attention disorders, are called "speed" on the street. Psychiatric drugs are mind-altering substances, and they're prohibited under dangerous-drug laws without a medical prescription.

Psychiatric drugs don't heal.

They might ease pain or boost functioning (temporarily), they might be given in carefully measured doses under medical supervision, but many of them are not fundamentally different, chemically and in terms of how they act on the human brain, from other mind-altering drugs.

Like other drugs, psychiatric drugs cross the blood-brain barrier (which is meant to protect the brain from harmful toxins) and interfere with the process of synaptic transmission.

And like other drugs, when used over time, psychiatric drugs are likely to trigger the brain's compensation mechanism (called pharmacodynamic tolerance), which reduces their effectiveness in the long run and increases the risk of developing dependence and addiction (Poulos & Cappell, 1991).

In the world of psychiatric drugs, there is indeed a battle over the narrative about how they work, but in practice, it's hard to deny that psychiatric drugs create an artificial disruption in biochemical processes that occur naturally in the brain.

Some psychiatric drugs, for example, inhibit the reuptake of certain neurotransmitters. There may be some temporary gains in that, but at the end of the day, this is a disruption of the synaptic transmission process and a direct effect on the brain's biochemistry.

Forty-five years ago, the percentage of children taking stimulant medication daily was negligible.

Today, there's almost no household without a prescription.

We chose to restrain energetic, hyperactive children (mostly boys, and mostly healthy ones) with chemical substances.

We "treated" problems from the realm of education with chemical substances that we know create dependence (physiological and/or psychological), that we know suppress the body and the mind, and that we know are not fundamentally different from other stimulant drugs (Ophir, 2022b).

In other words, that same attention-and-focus drug given to more and more young people could be the trigger for a decline in emotional states down the road.

So is depression a sentence that points to a deterioration in the genetics of the human species?

Or is it worth and preferable to assume that something about the advanced lifestyle, the technology, the lack of a sense of meaning, and the bare minimum of learning about mental mastery and emotional balance are relevant too?

I've thought a lot about this topic. Of course I also got on the phone with a couple of doctors to go deeper beyond my own insights.

So episodes on the subject with the two of them will be coming soon.

And by the way, some incredibly important episodes on the subject have already been created on the podcast with various guests.

What is depression?

So let me start with the questions and insights I had before I spoke with them.

What is depression, if we set aside any scientific diagnosis for a moment?

Since mental health problems are mostly on the rise in modern society, and are rarely found in hunter-gatherer societies, the environment where humans spent most of their time in the past, it's worth and important to reflect and wonder about the cause of the rise in complex emotional states, and especially about the familiar narrative that may even be making things worse.

Life in the Western world is endlessly complex: nonstop distractions, technology, news (loops of negative events), a culture that demands you fit in, which sometimes requires a person to live a life where they give up on themselves, are governed by their image, lie as a matter of routine, don't know how to set boundaries, and please everyone around them. All of this, together with the consumption of foods that function like drugs for some, alcohol and drugs, and let's not even talk about medications of all kinds.

People spend entire lives giving up who they are and what they want, doing things for their parents, society, their image, afraid of themselves and of life.

How many people can answer the question: who am I? Or what am I living for?

All of these together can already do serious harm or create severe emotional distress, especially in a sensitive person.

Jim Carrey once said something that I can't get out of my head:

"Depression is your avatar telling you it's tired of playing the character you're trying to play."

And of course there's also the matter of more complex events that we won't all experience to the same degree, like severe trauma. But even those don't always lead to depression. They can lead to post-traumatic growth.

And if we choose to believe that every event in our lives has a reason, why did the depression come?

Even though we've gotten used to seeing depression in a negative light, if we can find faith in life, in our bodies, and in our own development, we'll understand that depression is an opportunity, or a request, to change the things, habits, beliefs, thinking, or people in our lives so we can cope better.

In a world of comparisons, violence, and technology that gives more and more room to all of these, it's no surprise that more and more people are meeting depression.

What about tools to cope with depression?

The Western person never learned any method or approach to serve them in coping with life's challenges and emotional challenges: not meditation, not a positive approach, not faith, not tools for emotional management. In other words, a first step toward preventing and coping with emotional challenges would be a basic learning of philosophy and emotional tools so we can practice and take care of ourselves.

These won't necessarily help someone already suffering from depression, but they can absolutely prevent it from developing.

Meditation, when it was introduced to the world, changed the lives of tens of thousands of people who suffered from emotional distress, suffering, and suicidal feelings. Yet that same technique and philosophy isn't taught anywhere or at any stage in a person's education, and is barely practiced daily by most of the world's population. Most people aren't aware of the power meditation has for mental mastery and emotional balance.

People who are exposed from morning to night to technology and communication tools, news, social media, cinema, and TV shows, when most of these tools can put the brain into alpha waves and thereby change a person's perception of reality, do you really think that, after years upon years of continuous viewing, this can't harm a person's brain?

The Western diet has been directly linked to the development of diseases and depression, including: white sugar, seed oils, alcohol, artificial colors and flavors, pesticides. All of these also lead to nutritional deficiencies that alter the chemistry in the brain.

By contrast, some foods rich in omega-3 are considered natural serotonin boosters (like fatty fish), as are foods rich in tryptophan (like turkey, organic tofu, or nuts).

By the way, 90% of serotonin is produced in the digestive system, so it makes more sense to think that diet and drug use would create disturbances in our brain than that the brain does it on its own.

Rumination — thinking and talking about your problems over and over has been found to intensify emotional problems and can lead to and worsen depression. That's why it's so important to get out of the house, whether for a walk, to run errands, or to sit on a bench outside in the sun.

If we turn to a therapist for support in challenging states, it's worth using one who works with methods focused on solutions and various tools — for example CBT or somatic psychotherapy, rebirthing, sound healing, kambo, ayahuasca.

"I tried everything"

is a response you hear from people dealing with physical and emotional challenges.

Of course there are situations where the person with depression can't or doesn't even want to get out of bed, and in cases like that it's good that there are medications that can help with recovery — but there are also other things we'll talk about in an upcoming episode.

Who's familiar with other methods for treating depression that aren't pills?

How would they become familiar, when pharmaceutical companies control the narrative of medical schools (psychiatry), brain science research, and psychology?

What would the media talk about if not the drugs, when pharmaceutical companies fund the media all over the world?

Depression is a real condition, but the treatment is part of that same indoctrination of drugs that don't work or that treat symptoms, in a world where people are only getting sicker and sicker.

How many people do you know who want to make a change, but if you ask them how they ate this week, how much time they spent in nature, how much exercise they did, when they went to sleep after sunset and woke at sunrise, how much daily meditation practice they did, and so on, you'd find there isn't a single one who dedicated their entire self to improving their condition for the weeks or months required to create deep change.

Even if they had to use medication to get started.

There are those who still insist on giving power to our genetics when it comes to the development of diseases, despite epigenetic research (above genetics), which proves that our genetics are mostly influenced by our environment and habits. In other words, we can influence our gene expression at any given moment with our choices, and as we said, years upon years of "wrong" living can give expression to certain genes. When we blame the genes and not the lifestyle, it leads to victimhood.

The average person knows of two methods for treating depression: pills or talking with a psychologist. But a psychologist can't really treat depression, and a psychiatrist doesn't talk with the person to understand how it developed, and mostly just gives pills.

And even though those can help in certain situations, they can also do significant long-term harm.

The scientific world (like the data from the health organizations) doesn't offer empowering approaches but rather ones that affirm and normalize depression. This isn't a state we have to accept and turn into the truth of our lives.

The journey of each of us on this planet is the journey of a soul that wants to grow. If you want to look at yourself as a random, scientific event with no spiritual approach whatsoever, this text won't be relevant to you. A person without a sense of existential meaning won't overcome any emotional or mental challenge.

And the more we let unspiritual people lead the conversation, the more distress there will be in this world.

Depression doesn't arrive in a single day, just as illness doesn't break out in a single day.

The mind can create heaven out of hell, or hell out of heaven.

Taking responsibility is an approach to life that must exist in every person, no matter how hard their situation, so they can get out of it. If we treat a person as a victim, we deny them the invitation to come out of every challenge.

A victim — blames, waits and hopes, plays the martyr.

A responsible person — accepts reality and acts to change it.

The power is within us, and even if it doesn't feel that way right now, it's important to remember that everything is temporary and passing. There's no point clinging to what's happening this moment as something that will never end. Everything will pass.

I believe depression is a real thing.

But so is living a life you don't love,

working a job you don't love,

being in the wrong social circle,

always people-pleasing, not knowing how to set boundaries, giving up your needs, self-criticism, pessimism,

years of developing the wrong consciousness through news, social media, and culture.

The first way to change an existing state is to change what you know, how you live, your environment, and your beliefs.

And more than anything, to get victim-minded people out of your life, no matter what letters they have in front of their name.