Is there a spiritual explanation for depression?

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Hi Ashley. Just like science is limited to that which we can empirically ascertain with tools and senses, spirituality is limited to those who can think both rigorously and critically about it. I’m not aware of a spiritual explanation for depression that I would consider fully adequate, not even mine.

What I can say is that I have been depressed at various points in my life and I can tell you what I’ve figured out regarding it. It’s my depression and my experience of it, so it very likely won’t be the same as your depression and your experience of it.

What I can say is that there were two rock-solid treatments for it that I would recommend anybody try before they resort to anti-depressants.

The first treatment I would recommend is to talk to someone trustworthy about whatever is bugging you. Since you are female I have to warn you against talking honestly and vulnerably with people you don’t trust. Find somebody you can trust to not take advantage of your weakened state. Then tell them everything. Everything that relates to the depressed state you’re feeling at the moment.

Just verbalizing what’s going on has a psychic effect that is impossible to deny for those who have felt and benefited from it. Your mind stops hiding from realities it’s hiding from and starts actually working them into the models of how everything and yourself work.

It also alleviates any latent loneliness you might feel. We as people tend to think that opening up is this horrible thing that will cripple our place in society and make it impossible to accomplish your goals. It’s not true. Opening up grants us more agency and not less. Even if there is a negative surface reaction from whoever it was we opened up to. We did it once, we were honest once, we can do it again. Just pick someone more trustworthy next time.

The second treatment I recommend is sleep deprivation. This is more of a physiological cure than a psychological one. I think humanity used to heal it’s existential issues, before we had modern life and jobs keeping us from doing so, by just staying up all night and thinking about it. Sleep has this interesting property of clearing certain compounds out of the brain. Sleep deprivation allows them to instead build up. Then when you finally fall in your bed, exhausted, you’ll clear them all out at once, and the difference between your waking state and your previous going-to-sleep state will be huge.

Both, in my experience, work better than every other treatment including psychiatric drugs. Not that drugs can’t provide a positive benefit. But the drugs address the symptoms and not the cause. The cause is always some deeply-held egoic principle. Both of my interventions force a reckoning, denying the ego the chance to get its egotistical say in.

The being is not the ego, so it can recognize and utilize techniques that marginalize the ego. But if the being can’t distinguish itself from the ego, then it never will think to even try.