Treating Depression: How To Go It Alone and When To Get Help
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Depression is deceptive. It can sneak up on you and pull you under before you even realize what’s happening. Suddenly, your depression can become severe—and leave you feeling totally lost.
While many of us go through it at some point in our lives, not all kinds of depression are the same. So, we don’t always know how to help each other. We try, though, which can cause a lot of confusion. It’s easy to get the wrong idea about what you’re dealing with based on what someone else told you about their own experience.
What helped your friend get through their own dark times might not work at all for you. What helps with the blues doesn’t always work for clinical depression—and vice versa. The best possible advice for one person might be the worst possible advice for another.
And when you’re not finding the right help, and nothing you’re trying is working, it can make you feel hopeless.
But there is hope. You can recover and life can shine again. The trick with depression is to use your own light to find your way out of the dark. You might think there’s no light inside of you, but it’s there. Depression covers it with a thick fog, but it doesn’t put it out.
So, if you’re having a hard time finding it, don’t give up. It’s always hard to see at first when it’s just a faint glow or a brief spark. Follow that first glimmer, though, and things will get brighter. The dark night of depression will end.
We’re here to help you find your way. In this article, we’ll explore the different kinds of depression, share things you can do to deal with it, and explain how therapy can help when self-care isn’t enough.
What Are the Different Kinds of Depression?
Depression is different for everyone who experiences it. However, there are two basic ways to categorize depression: by how severe it is and by how long you’ve had it.
Many people call milder forms of depression—the kinds that that come and go in response to life’s disappointments—“the blues.”
What sets even mild, situational depression apart from sadness is that depression is more than just a sad mood.
When you’re depressed, you feel tired. You lose your ability to enjoy the things you normally enjoy. You might sleep more or less than usual and want to hide from the world a while.
This isn’t always severe. Many of us go through some degree of social withdrawal, fatigue, sad mood, and a change in habits in response to painful experiences of loss or hardship. But it’s important not to take depression for granted, because untreated depression tends to get worse.
Severe depression is dangerous. While the blues can mute life’s colors, major depression makes the world go totally gray. When you have major depression, you can start to lose hope and to feel like life is meaningless. It can make you want to give up on everything that’s holding your life together.
When depression is this severe—no matter how long you’ve had it—it’s time to ask for help.
Where to Call for Help
If you’re going through a mental health crisis, there’s someone you can call.
If you’re at immediate risk of harm, or have already harmed yourself, you should call 911 immediately.
If you’re thinking of suicide, but are not at immediate risk of acting on those thoughts, you should call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988 or a local mental health crisis hotline.
You can also call a crisis or suicide hotline to get support, help, and referrals even if you’re not at the point you’re thinking of suicide. They are there to help with any kind of mental health crisis.
For lists of different mental health hotlines you can call, go to any of the following pages on our site:
- National and International Suicide Hotlines
- Free Mental Health Hotlines in the United States
- The United States Mental Health Services Guide
On that last page, you can find information specific to your state, including the mental health crisis hotline for your city or county. Just select your state to get the local information you need.
Even mild depression can become a serious problem when it goes on for a long time.
You may have heard the term “clinical depression,” which refers to a kind of depression that doesn’t go away even when your life circumstances improve. Usually, as it drags on over time, it worsens in severity too, going from mild to moderate or even to severe.
Clinical depression can also refer to what mental health professionals call major depressive disorder.
DEEP DIVE
How Doctors Diagnose Clinical Depression
Mental health professionals use a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to diagnose clinical depression. (In the DSM, clinical depression is called “major depressive disorder.”)
According to the DSM, to be diagnosed with major depression, you must have had five or more of the following symptoms for most of the day, nearly every day, for at least ...
Mental health professionals use a book called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) to diagnose clinical depression. (In the DSM, clinical depression is called “major depressive disorder.”)
According to the DSM, to be diagnosed with major depression, you must have had five or more of the following symptoms for most of the day, nearly every day, for at least two weeks:
- Being in a depressed, sad, or low mood most of the time
- Feeling hopeless, worthless, guilty, or like you deserve to suffer
- Losing interest or pleasure in almost all activities you normally enjoy
- Feeling restless, agitated, and irritable—or lethargic and slowed down
- Struggling to think clearly, concentrate, or make decisions
- Experiencing significant changes in your appetite or weight
- Having significantly less energy than usual
- Not sleeping enough or sleeping too much
- Frequently thinking about death or suicide
To be diagnosed with depression, your symptoms must also affect how you function in your daily life and must not be caused by substance use or a medical condition.
Clinical or major depression may seem to come and go with no apparent cause. Even if there’s a deeper cause, it’s not obvious. For this reason, clinical depression can make you start to feel like a “depressed person” instead of a person who happens to be depressed.
What Are the Reasons You Might Be Depressed?
The most important thing to know when you’re depressed is that it isn’t your fault. Many do-it-yourself articles for depression can make it seem like the reason you’re depressed is that you’re not doing all the self-care activities they describe. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.
While there are some things you can do to manage (and hopefully improve) your depression symptoms, simple self-care is no more the cure for depression than lack of self-care is the cause.
There are many different things that could be causing your depression. Genetics and biology can make you more prone to it. You may have suffered a recent loss or setback. You could be facing difficulties in your life that make you feel hopeless (or at least sorely tested).
There may be troubles in the world that are getting you down—social, economic, or political. You could be going through a spiritual crisis or “dark night of the soul” in which you’re questioning everything you once believed.
You might be going through these things alongside other people in your community or the world who have suffered through the same difficult world events as you. Or you could be going through something that makes you feel totally alone.
Unresolved trauma or unhealed emotional wounds from your childhood (or any time in your past) could be surfacing and calling for your attention so you can start to heal them. Or you could finally be hitting the wall emotionally and energetically after a long period of intense stress.
Sometimes feeling guilty about something can make you depressed. But usually, with depression, that guilt is excessive or irrational. In many cases, you’re blaming yourself for something that’s only partially, if at all, your fault.
Usually, when you’re depressed, it’s not because of something you did wrong. It’s because something in the world is wrong, you’re struggling and need help that you’re not getting, something in your brain or body isn’t working like it should, or something bad happened to you that you didn’t deserve.
Whatever the cause of your depression, you don’t have to suffer alone. There are many ways to get help.
When Can You Recover from Depression on Your Own—and When Do You Need Professional Help?
You need professional help when your depression is severe and you’re at risk of harming yourself or being seriously harmed by depression in other ways.
Untreated clinical depression can make it hard, if not impossible, to keep up with everyday demands. Trying to deal with it on your own can leave you in a tangled mess of financial, health, substance use, and relationship problems that can cause significant harm in your life—and worsen your depression.
Depression makes you want to avoid other people, but trying to care for yourself when you’re depressed can make you feel like you're trying to dig a tunnel out of a cell with a spoon.
For any kind of depression, the turning point often comes when you turn toward someone else and say, “I need help.”
Getting help from someone—whether a loved one or a stranger—is one of the most powerful ways to flip depression’s script. It can knock the belief “No one cares” off its foundation and loosen the hold negative thoughts have on you.
But it can be hard to ask for help, especially when you’re depressed. And there are things you can do for yourself that will help in the meantime. If the severity of your depression is mild to moderate, you’re not having any thoughts of harming yourself or giving up on life, and you’re still functioning pretty well at work and home, do-it-yourself techniques can go a long way toward helping you get back on track.
What You Can Do to Start Your Journey Out of Depression
Connecting with other people is one of the most important things you can do to heal from depression, but it can also be one of the most challenging things to get yourself to do when you’re depressed.
The key is to be compassionate with yourself. Try to take on small social commitments that don’t feel too overwhelming, like a short lunch visit or phone call. You can even connect with others online when meeting face-to-face feels too overwhelming. Just be careful, as too much time online can actually worsen depression.
PRO TIP
Finding Healthy Distractions
It can be helpful to find distractions that pull you out of your thinking mind (and the cycle of rumination) when you’re depressed. But some distractions can make your depression worse in the end—these include substance use, overeating, and watching television or scrolling social media for excessive amounts of time....
It can be helpful to find distractions that pull you out of your thinking mind (and the cycle of rumination) when you’re depressed. But some distractions can make your depression worse in the end—these include substance use, overeating, and watching television or scrolling social media for excessive amounts of time.
Research shows that social media use can contribute to depression and that it makes you more likely to become depressed in the first place.
Any kind of excessive screen time, including binge-watching movies or shows, can worsen your depression symptoms. Using substances can, too. All these activities alter your brain chemistry in ways that make you feel a bit better right away but worse later.
This doesn’t mean you should beat yourself up if you’re doing these things or that you should avoid them altogether. We all need to zone out a little bit every now and then. We all naturally look for ways to turn our brains off when we’re depressed or anxious.
But becoming aware of how these distractions affect your mood over the long term can keep you from overdoing them. It can also inspire you to change them up with other things that have a more lasting positive impact on your mood.
Hobbies that connect you with your creativity and put you in a flow state—such as dancing, painting, writing poetry, or playing music—can boost your mood and your sense of meaning. They also have few, if any, negative side effects.
Exercise is another essential tool in depression recovery. It’s also another thing that can be especially difficult to get yourself to do when you’re down. Depression makes your body feel tired. It can make a short walk feel impossibly long. But if you can push past your resistance and get in a solid half-hour walk, jog, swim, or group fitness session, you’ll probably find it lifts your mood.
Exercise is one of the easiest and most powerful ways to immediately change your brain chemistry. But if you’re having a hard time getting yourself to do it, don’t beat yourself up. It can be hard to stay motivated to exercise even when you’re not depressed. There are other things you can do, too.
Setting and meeting small goals is another way to tackle depression. These can and should include goals to do things that are fun. When you’re depressed, it can be hard to find the motivation to do things you normally do because it’s harder to enjoy them. But things like playing sports, making art, and walking in the woods still have a positive impact, even if you can’t feel it right away.
The things you do matter for their own sake, and it’s also helpful to witness yourself doing them.
One of the tricks of depression is making you feel like you’re a failure who never does what you mean to do. Every time you do something on your list of things you want or need to do, you challenge this idea.
Offloading unnecessary stress can be a lifeline when you’re depressed. Chronic, unrelenting stress can cause depression. You can even think of depression as a natural response when your brain and body need a break.
So, give yourself one. Say “no” to unnecessary tasks and obligations that are draining and not helping you. Put up boundaries with people who demand a lot but don’t give much back. Be protective of the time in your day that you can be free from stress. Ask for help.
Asking for help can be hard under any circumstance. It can be especially difficult when you’re depressed. But there are people out there who can and will help, even if they’re not the ones you wish would help. (Note that another possible cause of depression is bad, invalidating relationships in which you’re not getting your needs met.) Consider support groups, local organizations, and spiritual communities.
Even if you’re raising children, caring for parents, or have other familial or social obligations you can’t avoid, you can often still find ways to get help and give yourself a break. For example, you can ask—or pay—for help with childcare or for respite services.
When you lower your stress level, you may start noticing that your depression is getting better—that more light is getting in.
Insiders’ Tips from Therapy for Depression You Can Try at Home
We’ve just gone through some activities you can do to alleviate symptoms of depression.
There’s something else you can do, too. You can notice and challenge your depressive thoughts.
In this way, you can do a little do-it-yourself therapy at home. One of the things you learn in cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT)—and many other types of therapy—is how to recognize and investigate the distorted thoughts that make anxiety and depression worse.
DEEP DIVE
Common Cognitive Distortions
Cognitive distortions are inaccurate ways of thinking that fuel anxiety and depression. They warp the way you see the world—and yourself—and make everything seem more negative than it is. Nine of the most common cognitive distortions are:
- Catastrophizing: Expecting the worst to happen.
- Overgeneralizing: Turning a few examples into a general rule.
- Magnifying or Minimizing: Exaggerating the significance of negative events or minimizing the value of positive events to support a faulty one-sided narrative about your experience.
- Disqualifying the Positive: Dismissing positive qualities or experiences so that they don’t count in your assessment of yourself or your life circumstances.
- Jumping to Conclusions: Making conclusions that aren’t supported by the actual evidence from your life.
- All-or-Nothing or Black-and-White Thinking: Removing shades of gray. Thinking things are either wonderful or terrible or that only perfect results count.
- Personalizing: Blaming yourself or taking it personally when something goes wrong that was out of your control.
- “Shoulding”: Thinking in “shoulds” when there is not an actual rule that you or others should follow in a particular situation.
- Emotional Thinking: Assuming that your emotions always tell you the truth about reality.
Learning how to spot these distortions and recognize them as false is a powerful ability. Being able to do this can loosen depression’s grip and have an immediate effect on your mood.
In some cases, these thoughts can even be what’s causing your depression. If the thoughts aren’t a reaction to something like chronic stress overload, unresolved trauma, or emotional abuse, but are just a learned response, they’re less “sticky.” All it might take to dislodge them (and your depressed mood) is to question them.
You can start by asking, “Is there any evidence that this depressing thought is true? Is there any evidence it isn’t true?” Then examine your life for that evidence. Look hard. Go further than the typical emotional reaction that makes you want to believe the thought. Use your rational mind to weigh the evidence you find.
You can do this kind of CBT work in your head, but it’s most effective if you do it in writing. Sometimes even just freewriting in a journal helps you recognize and release negative, distorted thoughts. But the following CBT exercises may help you go even deeper.
PRO TIP
CBT Journal Exercises for Depression
One of the best ways to fight depressed thoughts is to get them down on paper and take a cold, hard look at them. This puts distance between you and your thoughts and makes it easier to view them objectively, challenge them, and pick them apart.
By giving you a structured way to uncover the distortions in your thinking, these five CBT journal exercises can help you go even deeper.
...One of the best ways to fight depressed thoughts is to get them down on paper and take a cold, hard look at them. This puts distance between you and your thoughts and makes it easier to view them objectively, challenge them, and pick them apart.
By giving you a structured way to uncover the distortions in your thinking, these five CBT journal exercises can help you go even deeper.
- Spot the distortions. Write down your depressed thoughts and see if you can “match” them with the cognitive distortions they represent. Label them accordingly. You can use the list of distortions above for reference.
- Do your ABCs. Track where your depressed thoughts and cognitive distortions come from. First, record any “Activating Events” you experience (a fancy CBT term for things that trigger you). Next, write down the “Beliefs” you have about what those events mean. Finally, list the emotional “Consequences” of having those beliefs. (According to CBT, your beliefs about an event affect your mood more than the actual event does.)
- Put your thoughts on trial. Pretend you’re a lawyer and prosecute your negative thoughts. Gather evidence against them. Cross-examine them. Write down a list of all the evidence you gather that they’re not true.
- Shift your attention to the positive. The purpose of focusing on the positive isn’t to ignore negative things or pretend they’re not there. The purpose is to remind your brain they’re not all that’s happening. Depression emphasizes the negative and exaggerates how much it dominates the total picture. Writing down even just one thing that was good about your day can have a surprisingly powerful effect on your mood. Keeping a daily gratitude journal can do even more—especially if you can think of positive things to write about yourself.
- Question your negative beliefs. Pretend you’re a three-year-old and ask “Why, why, why?” in response to the thoughts you otherwise automatically believe. The most important “Why?” to investigate is “Why do I believe this?” Keep following that question. Track it like a rabbit. You’re likely to run up against distortions as you go. You may see how you’ve magnified one powerful event and made it matter more than it really does.
Another depression-fighting trick therapists know about is how pushing back against procrastination can create an upward spiral out of depression. This is because it challenges your negative beliefs that you’re worthless and ineffective at life. Start with a short and simple task or break up a large goal into smaller steps. You might be surprised by how much it boosts your mood to do even just one thing on your list.
Again, though, there is no simple, magic cure for depression, because the way you got here was complicated. Pushing back against negative thoughts can be part of the process of recovering from depression, but it’s only part of it. To fully heal, you have to go a little deeper.
What Makes Therapy for Depression Special—and So Important
Getting good therapy is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself when you’re depressed. It can be a great complement to medication or may be all you need to fully recover.
What makes therapy different from self-care is that it can address the root causes of depression even when they’re complicated and deep.
One of your therapist’s most important roles is helping you figure out why you feel the way you do. Sometimes, this means delving into your past. At other times, it means figuring out what’s not working in your life right now. Many times, it means both.
Unlike self-care, therapy can help even if the reason you’re depressed is rooted in how your parents or peers made you feel about yourself when you were growing up. By helping you process and release painful memories and beliefs, therapy can give you corrective emotional experiences that permanently change how you feel about yourself—and the world.
This is work that’s hard, if not impossible, to do on your own.
It’s hard to see yourself clearly, and depression makes it even harder.
Your mind has many defenses. It wants to protect you from past pain and from frightening present realities.
Weirdly, your brain would prefer to cling to what’s making you miserable than take the risk of doing things differently. The reason is that there’s a part of you that believes if you change how you live and how you think, your very survival is at stake—even if the opposite is true.
The way out is through. Therapy’s not nearly as difficult or painful as some people think it is, but there are parts that can be hard. And the hard parts of therapy are where the most powerful healing can happen.
Facing what you normally avoid can completely change your life.
In therapy, you can overturn beliefs that have made you feel bad about yourself since you were a child. You can process emotionally painful and traumatic memories so they don’t hurt anymore. You can make peace with the bad things that have happened to you and see how there’s so much more to your story.
As you heal in therapy, you start to see yourself clearly instead of through the distorted lens a parent or someone else saw you through. As you deconstruct your beliefs, it becomes more and more difficult to sustain the negative view of yourself that was fueling your depression. And that’s when the light starts to come in.
Conclusion
Depression can make you feel helpless. It can make you feel like things will never get better. But things can and will get better if you get the help you need.
First, there are ways you can help yourself. Doing activities like exercising, making art, or connecting to others can lift your mood. You can also use techniques from cognitive behavioral therapy to release the negative, distorted thoughts that fuel your depression.
But these self-care activities aren’t always enough, and there’s no reason to struggle through depression alone. One of the best things you can do for yourself when you’re depressed is connect with a therapist and start going to weekly sessions.
Therapy can help you go deeper than you can on your own because it can help you address the root causes of your depression. It can help you resolve trauma, heal emotional wounds from childhood, and address the things in your life that need to change for you to get better.
So, if you’re depressed, please reach out. The help you need to recover from depression may be only a call or click away.