Why Depression Is a Healthy Life Experience

The feeling associated with giving up something loved, or at least something that is a part of ourselves and familiar — is depression. (M. Scott Peck, in "The Road Less Travelled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth")

Depression does not deserve the mental stigma with which it seems stuck forever.

Depression is not a manifestation of mental illness; it's a significant pause in life's journey. It's a stage of transition in our personal and spiritual growth.

Depression is a spiritual crisis. Some brain areas may change, but at its root, depression happens when the physical body falls out of sync with the subtle body or the energy body.

We think of birth and death as two single episodes, one the beginning of life and the other the end of life.

We are born and die every day, physiologically and metaphorically. Old cells die, and new cells appear continually. We change our attitudes, habits and worldviews every day. As they say, we don't step into the same river twice.

We are not today who we were yesterday.

The self with which we have identified is fluid. If we want to grow, we have to give up parts of ourselves to enter the next stage of life confidently.

The unconscious mind knows everything about us. It keeps a record of every feeling and every thought that we experience.

The unconscious mind experiences the mental shift we need to transit to the next stage of our personal growth. But the conscious mind is the ego's prisoner. It refuses to heed the unconscious mind's signal.

“It is precisely because the unconscious in its wisdom knows that ‘the way things used to be’ is no longer tenable or constructive that the process of growing and giving up is begun on an unconscious level and depression is experienced.”( M. Scott Peck)

Since our awareness is tuned more to the conscious mind than the unconscious mind, we may wonder why we have experienced depression. We may attribute so many causes to our depression other than the need to grow.

Transitions in life, like from childhood to adolescence or from adolescence to adulthood, are painful because they demand we give up parts of ourselves that no longer serve our personal growth. If we undergo the pain and shift to a new phase of life, we accomplish a minor feat of spiritual growth.

The pain of transformation is elevating; the pain of resistance to change manifests as depression.

Final thoughts

It is fair to reframe depression as a spiritual crisis caused by our resistance to give up old ways of thinking and living that have lost relevance in the stage where we have reached in life.

Depression is not mental sickness; it's a spiritual aberration. Psychotherapy addresses depression's spiritual deficit. It helps us accept reality and achieve the mental shift necessary to grow personally.

The unconscious mind speaks through intuition. If we ignore intuition, we heap unnecessary suffering because we treat change as a threat and depression as a disease.

Depression is a healthy experience if we use suffering for personal growth. Depression becomes unhealthy when we ignore its spiritual underpinnings and resist change.

Depression is not a mental illness; it's a step in the ladder of our spiritual growth.