by psycho ZIM » Thu Feb 13, 2014 9:09 am
I think you can self-help your way out of this, you analyze why you're depressed and work your way out of it. I dunno if it's something everyone can manage though, I'm autistic with severe depression (on/off depression 15 years then last year I slowly fell into a deeper depression, and now severely depressed) and one of the traits of autistic people is the ability to step outside of the 1st person perspective and see it from a 3rd person perspective.
Even as i'm severely depressed, before i got a therapist, before i went on medication, I was self-helping by determining what's wrong, writing things out and analyze, figure out a solution ,then work on getting towards that solution. medication helps me out but isn't absolutely necessary for me to self-help my way out of this.
I take meds thought because i need to maintain my job and without medication i doubt i'd be remotely functional enough to go to work at all. but even when i wasn't on meds and completely dysfunctional i as still working towards figuring this out and self-helping my way out of it.
Progress was slow and often times i'd go backwards step or two when i fell apart because i'd get that depressed.
My depression is asperger-related though, and without meds I won't be able to get out of it because the solution I've determined is to get a social life, and without medication stabilizing myself that would be impossible since i randomly flip between nice & socialabe me and psycho me and i know from experiences in the past (how i got here in the first place!) i'd spend months building friendship only to destroy it in minutes when i suddenly flip to the other me... and worst when i flip personalities i'm unaware of what i'm doing is wrong. it's only when i flip back that i knew what happened.
As long as you're without this issue and your problem that caused depression isn't something that requires you to be stable and functional for, you should be able to solve this on your own, although without medication it may take alot longer.