I don't have the answers yet, but I have learned enough to be dangerous, and ask better questions..

James Hillman, speaking on depth psychology, says that the condition of depression is actually the place where one is coming into new knowledge.

But the experience is something quite difficult. It feels like a death, and often is a death of self. I am reminded here of the saying (author unknown) that pain is something struggling to break through your limited circle of understanding.

Having gone to the depths of depression, and having found the journey essentially entailed allowing some long-held illusions to shatter so that the real picture could emerge, I am necessarily against the administering of drugs or alcohol to treat the condition. If you have a bad marriage, and you are depressed, all the prozac or booze in the world won't fix the marriage, even though you may temporarily escape reality from time to time, or have a grin painted on your face for no reason.

The task is to fix the marriage. Or whatever is dying some death in your life. How to do so?

See what's real.

The midieval alchemists believed that in making the philosopher's stone, there were four stages:
nigredo, or the death and putrefaction stage where everything disintegrates:
albedo, or white stage, where the new substance is just forming
Rubido - red stage, where union, or conjunctio, has been reached, and the philosophers' stone is near.

The alchemists believed that they were turning lead into the gold of the philosopher's stone and that this enabled them to help elevate the human condition. They were doing more than working with metals. As they worked through their experiments and substances, they found actually that their psyches were also undergoing the work. Alchemy was largely informed by Gnosticism, and so many of the alchemists believed they were following the feminine deity Sophia, the embodiment of wisdom, and that they were thus redeeming themselves, and humankind.

Seen against this backdrop, depression could then take on a rather different connotation than the popular view that you just need a pick-me-up. Instead, depression becomes a hero's journey, a trip to the Underworld required to free oneself of hampering illusions that keep one enslaved. The buddhists believed that the Buddha wrestled with the demon Mara, the illusion maker, before he achieved his enlightenment. It was a final test. The name Lucifer has its origins in the latin word lucere, or light. Lucifer is sometimes referred to as the light bringer, the trials and tests that bring one to the light of God.

Perhaps if we viewed conditions like depression with less of a pharmacological view, and more of a spiritual / historical view, we might see that these conditions have purposes that require us to step up to the plate and face something, grow somehow, or shed something that no longer serves us.

I have loved people who are depressed, and it is horribly painful to watch, leaving me with that feeling of wanting to fix it somehow, as though such a thing were actually in my power. In the end, just like with alcoholism or any other dance with illusion, there is nothing I can do but offer my support and unconditional love, and my hopes that they undertake soon that which is required in order to set them free of the illusions causing their pain.

If you have had experiences of depression, I would be curious to know how you have come through it, and what your journey entailed.