in my experience you don’t… it just comes and goes… and sometimes i remember that while in the throes… and sometimes i don’t

good fuckin question

maybe a drastic change in material and social conditions. move to somewhere with good public transit and cycling infrastructure with 20 of your friends, where you don’t have to worry about food, housing, or healthcare.

a hyper-individualist society will never adequately treat mental illness because it is incapable of addressing the material causes.

I think I accidentally stumbled into the perfect (for me) solution when I became the ‘mushroom guy’ in college at the same time that I learned about/became obsessed with meditation. i tripped every two weeks for a stretch of ~6 months while developing a meditation habit and consuming every Alan Watts lecture on youtube.

not saying at all that this like fixed me, it still hits from time to time. we’re not broken, just fucked up by our environment, parents, culture, poverty, biology, etc. me cramming shrooms and meditation simultaneously for a year just gave my brain a major reset and helped me develop mindfulness tools for keeping my nervous system on an even keel.

there is some scientific backing to this approach, I’ve learned about later on. psychedelics can help bump you off mental patterns, and mindfulness can help you create new patterns intentionally.
the key though is in the combo.

Do meaningful shit. Join a meaningful movement to make a better world that’s willing to train you to be a leader, that in combination with therapy and medication has done wonders for me

Can’t say this is a “solution”, but negative thinking is habitual. Our brains are hardwired to reward repetitive thinking by strengthening the connections we use the most. This is the same mechanism that allows us to get better at tasks through practice.

Unfortunately, our brains don’t differentiate between positive or negative thought patterns. It doesn’t reward us when we think good things, while punishing us for thinking bad things. it just makes it easier for us to think about things, that we think about often.

This means that negative thinking reinforces negative thinking…making it easier and easier to have negative thoughts. It becomes an automatic function that our brains execute like muscle memory.

The only way to stop this from happening, is to force your brain to think about something else…and repeat it often enough, that the new pattern takes priority over the old one. Eventually the new pattern will become as automatic as the old one, and will no longer require effort to execute.

First, I’m sorry you’re having to deal with that. I know how hard it feels to have your life be unenjoyable and bleak.

I tried meds and the did fuck all other than making me dizzy.

I eventually hit a sort of rock bottom and also almost simultaneously found a therapist and therapy situation that worked for me. Luckily enough it was at my university’s mental health center. CBT methodology worked really well and I still use some of the stuff I learned now, more than 10 years later. If I were to go back to therapy I’d probably look for someone who did DBT. Lots of good evidence it works well for depression.

page me if you find out won’t ya

Therapy and medication did nothing for me either and I still have my struggles, but doing a lot more physical stuff (not just exercise but meaningful physical activity IE certain types of volunteer work), getting 7-8 hrs sleep as many nights as possible and strategically limiting screen time has definitely helped.

Oh, and weed (and hallucinogens once a year or so).

Running every morning is the hardest thing to imagine doing when you’re depressed. The worst part is that it works.

You’re right about it being more about management than “overcoming”. I’ve also found, and heard others say, as you get older it naturally loosens its grip a bit.

I’m going to be trying esketamine treatment soon. I’ll tell you if it’s helpful. As with other commenters in this thread, I’ve had incredible periods of relief after psilocybin shrooms. Just 4 trips, but that was followed by months of improved mood and functioning overall. I’m hoping esketamine is similarly effective for me. It’s legal and FDA approved now by the way, so perhaps look into a psychiatry practice near you that provides the service.

The book ‘unsettled minds, strangers to our selves’ , gives four varied examples of how material conditions often cause then exacerbate mental conditions in different ways. I thought it was insightful.

Volunteer somewhere. Getting out and having a scheduled thing helps.

If not, you’re still miserable but at least other people benefit from your help and are happy.

My approach has been to lean into hobbies. A few of my favorites include: audiobooks, leather working, and managing a home server . I find if I microdose any of those while the dark thoughts are creeping in, these act as my patronus.

Maybe it’s a safety blanket kinda thing? Not sure. Good luck

I would post a joking answer “that’s the neat part, you don’t”. But my actual honest serious answer kinda ends up lining up with that anyways in a really depressing way, I really don’t know. Like the only thing that has kept me going so far despite my self-hatred, and depression is keeping myself busy/distracted from it.