[jm__87]

I've read and followed the advice in both "The Depression Cure" and "The Mindful Way Through Depression" and can say both helped quite a bit. I personally did not find that therapy did much of anything for my depression (though I will say CBT for sleep was a life saver for me, so it was worth it just for that).

Depression is a pretty tricky thing to deal with, but I personally find that keeping a daily meditation practice helps a lot. Ultimately, being more mindful throughout the day means you'll ruminate less and dealing with the psychological component of depression is like 90% of the battle. Mindfulness will not improve your life in any of the areas that might have led you to feel depressed in the first place (e.g. feeling alone because you are alone, feeling like you have not accomplished enough, etc), but it will allow you to break away sooner from the rumination associated with these feelings so you can work on improving your life in some measurable way instead of wasting time feeling miserable.

I also think depression can just be a tradeoff for some people with a given mindset. Some people are very hard on themselves when they fail. These people are probably going to have a better chance at being successful since they are always taking responsibility for their failures and trying to improve themselves, but they are also going to have a higher chance of becoming burnt out and depressed as a result of the high expectations they have placed on themselves. The state of being depressed is obviously extremely counterproductive to what they were trying to achieve in the first place - eventually the goals shift from trying to start that business or get that promotion to just trying to get out of bed in the morning, and ruminating on this setback only feeds the depression. Ultimately, cutting out the rumination is how to resolve this in the short term, and mindfulness is the tool for doing that. In the long term, these people need to realize they are only human and have limitations and figure out how to take better care of themselves or learn to not be so hard on themselves in the first place.