Between school and Oxford, I borrowed a recently published book from the local library:Â The Myth of Mental Illness, by Thomas Szasz. It has achieved some fame over the years, and has provoked some intelligent articles and book chapters. However, its central argument seems never to have been accepted by the medical/psychiatric professions, and now ‘mental health’ has come to be acceptable when analysing emotions such as depression.
I myself suffered a severe bout of depression in my mid-thirties, which lasted for six or seven months. And, working as a counsellor, I often had to deal with people who consulted a counselling service because they were seriously depressed.
My understanding of depression, both from when I was depressed myself, and from working with depressed people, is that it is not any kind of illness, and that recovering from it does not mean a return to ‘health.’ Rather, depression is a form of grief, or mourning. When a person loses someone who really mattered to them, they are robbed of a vital support. Depressed people have been robbed in the same way: an illusion, or set of illusions, which has kept them going, is no longer working. (The appropriate counselling is often akin to loss and bereavement counselling 
.)
To some depressed people, this is not what they want to hear. One person, a trained nurse, kept insisting to me that her depression came out of nowhere. It just happened to her, “like breaking a leg.” (Her own exact words.) Not surprisingly, people who feel this way often give up on the hope that talking things through with someone is going to help, and turn instead to drugs. (Drugs can ease the pain—but they cannot deal with the problem, because the problem is not an illness.)
Of course, to believers in ‘mental health’, depression can be ‘cured’ via cognitive therapy. The idea is that you examine your own thinking habits and change them for the better. If you don’t have to look at your own life, or what you have been hoping or longing for (perhaps without realising it) this will rob your depression of human meaning, and very likely keep it going—but underground.
When I was in the grip of depression, I used sometimes to make a joke of it: “normal numbness will be resumed as soon as possible.” It was absolutely clear to me that my depression was not an accident, or an illness, but a growth in awareness. I was in vivid touch with disheartening realities which I had been hiding from myself.
And, appropriately, that is how depression, after months, finally lost its grip on me. One afternoon, I stopped by a Palms delicatessen window in the Oxford Covered Market, and looked at the products on display: different sorts of cakes and biscuits from all around Europe. I didn’t need to ‘adjust my thinking habits’: I just found myself touched by the range of human inventiveness, going into such ordinary temporary things as cakes and biscuits.
Within moments, my world lightened. The depression had evolved into something more inclusive. Awareness hadn’t been returned to numbness: it was enhanced by a further awareness. Which has survived.
Which, in turn, may be a more general guide to understanding and dealing with what is generally regarded as an aberration—even when the ‘health’/’illness’ model is rejected.