Turning Toward Depression

Turning Toward Depression

For the community healers of the Kansas City metro, ReDiscover and NAMI Greater Kansas City, who keep a light on for families they’ve never met.

This piece is one person’s reflection. It is not therapy, and it is not a replacement for the care of a licensed professional. If something here resonates, let it point you toward help, not away from it.

Experienced · Observed · Studied

Experienced: lived, and I am the only witness. Observed: watched in others, with their details anonymized or left out. Studied: read in the literature, and cited at the back.

No light, but rather darkness visible.

— John Milton, Paradise Lost

I could go on for pages here. But there are no words that describe the feeling that is the word darkness. All through history, people have tried. Milton called it “darkness visible,” a strange thing to call a dark: a dark you can somehow see (Milton, 1674, Book 1, line 63). Three centuries later William Styron borrowed that very phrase for the plainest, truest little book we have on the subject, because, he said, the thing itself came close to being beyond description (Styron, 1990).¹ He wasn’t the first to give up and point instead of explain. Dante opened his whole descent by admitting he had lost the straight path and found himself in a dark wood (Dante Alighieri, 2002, Canto 1, lines 1–3). A sixteenth-century mystic, John of the Cross, wrote of a dark night of the soul (John of the Cross, 1991).² The ancient physicians, long before any of them, blamed a black bile they were sure was pooling somewhere inside us: melancholia, they named it. Black bile (Jackson, 1986). Everybody reaching. Nobody quite holding it.

And here I am, about to try anyway.

Here is my own attempt, with a few things I’ve noticed about the patterns people show when they’re going “through it.”

We all do. Sooner or later life drains the color out of everything and leaves us to find our own way back.

For some, it’s easy. They have their methods, and I have mine. You have yours, and so on. It’s all different, but here’s my view of it, which, again, does not substitute for a doctor’s.

A little theory

I have a little theory. It’s based on a lot of things, but mostly on me. It’s also based on what I’ve read, and on what I hear people say when they’re depressed.

Most of the time, and when I say most, I’ll be fair and admit that even that is somewhere near half.

Most of the time, depression stems from past mistakes.

Not necessarily the mistakes themselves, but their outcomes.

For most people suffering from depression, the thoughts are tied to past mistakes, or past traumas, or to what those mistakes and traumas are still doing to their lives.

I need to make one clarification right now. Trauma, harm inflicted on you, often by people who don’t understand themselves, is not a mistake you made. At all. That much I can promise you.

Mistakes and traumas are two very different things. They can affect you in similar ways, and in the same breath I’d suggest both shadows can be released. The way through each is different, but the depressive thinking that follows them seems to fall into the same pattern.

Mistakes come in all shapes and sizes. To some people they’re children that later turn into blessings. Sometimes they’re the result of our ego fighting its way through the world and somehow always coming up short.

For some, getting through it is as simple as waking up and going to church. For others it’s more complicated than that. So let’s stick with the basics, and my theories. Final reminder: this is not medicine, and I am not a doctor. I’m only a person who treats failure as a way not to repeat it, and as a way to teach others not to repeat it either.

We lose, we learn, we also teach. But we don’t consider.

That statement can go many ways, but I’m going to take it two.

First: we never know what people are going through. We aren’t considerate of their moment in time. Even the slightest snap of irritation can come moments after someone’s whole world just shifted. We don’t consider this. So it’s important to be kind in everything we do.

For me, this became an avenue for crushing depression. When I approach people and ask about their day before going on about mine, the whole conversation changes. Often I don’t even get to talk about my day, because it isn’t important to them.

That’s perfectly okay. That’s their choice to make.

The second way I want to take consider is the consideration of why.

Why are we sad? Often we refuse to admit it. We turn away from the demon and say, “I don’t know. Sometimes it just is.”

Yes. Sometimes it is, for reasons I can’t explain. That’s what the professionals are for.

But for me, and a few others, there are reasons. We just ignore them. They sit at the top of the psyche and seem so small we can logically brush them off as nonsense.

Of course I’m not depressed because I couldn’t afford the phone bill.

Or am I?

We have to listen to what our minds are telling us. That’s what my mind tells me about it.

What kind of ego has been built, where the one trusted “I” is the one you’re most willing to ignore?

The chemical story

Some depression, of course, involves brain chemistry. For a long time “chemical imbalance” was simply what everyone said. These days it isn’t so simple. A team of researchers led by Joanna Moncrieff gathered up decades of the main serotonin studies and looked at them together, and reported finding no consistent evidence that depression is caused by low serotonin (Moncrieff et al., 2023b).³ That review did not test whether antidepressants work, and leading psychopharmacologists have disputed its methods and its conclusions in print (Jauhar et al., 2023; Moncrieff et al., 2023a).⁴ But the simple story most of us grew up repeating was, in my opinion, sold to us nearly as hard as it was ever shown to us. So I’ll ease up on my of course. Some depression surely has a chemical side. But maybe not in the way we were told.

There is also a large amount of evidence for therapy, for simply talking it out. And I don’t mean a little. When researchers set therapy against the pills, head to head, the difference in how much each helps comes out small, often close to nothing (Cuijpers et al., 2020; Cuijpers, Sijbrandij, et al., 2013). Put the two together and you often do better than either alone (Cuijpers et al., 2014). And here is the part that stays with me: the talking seems to hold longer. Months after treatment ends, people who had therapy tend to relapse less than people who stopped their medication (Cuijpers, Hollon, et al., 2013; Furukawa et al., 2021; Karyotaki et al., 2016). If a conversation can do the work a pill was supposed to do, maybe the thing being mended was never only chemical.

None of that is an instruction. If you’re on medication, every change belongs in your prescriber’s office, not in the margins of an essay.

But it does make me think the surface problems were the problems, for me.

Even on the darkest days, it was usually regret, or the torment of living with what the regretted choices had caused. Even when I was looking toward the future, being chained to the past was regret at its core.

At least for me it was.

The light bill

One day started with the light bill. It wasn’t even past due. I had two weeks to pay the damn thing, and for fourteen days straight I wrecked my body and mind over the simple thought of my lights getting shut off.

Somehow that was penance, in a sense. The money showed up when it needed to. I claim no miracle other than dumb luck. No details here. Just the obvious.

What I’m trying to say is: why do we worry so much about things we have no direct control over?

One that bothered me for a long time was what other people thought of me.

That is literally the ego telling the ego it isn’t … ego enough.

You can’t control what people think; you can only control how you respond. A very wise man told me that. Someone I once rejected, who is now an important and inspiring person in my life. He knows who he is. He told me this because I was being a jerk to his daughter. Somehow he still knew exactly what to say, exactly when I needed to hear it, so that I heard it, and it never left.

Every time after that, when my mind went to that place, I could practically read his words in my head.

As time went on I got better at it, and before you knew it, people were calling me arrogant because I didn’t care what they thought. But my equation just cancels that out. I no longer mind if people don’t like me. They can tell me why; I’ll just ask them why it matters. I know I’m kind when I need to be. That’s what matters to me.

Who handed us the dark

There’s one more thing I’ve come to believe about where the dark comes from, and it’s the belief the rest of this series is built on.

Children are not born depressed. They inherit it from us.

Some of that inheritance is in the genes, and I won’t pretend otherwise; twin studies put the heritability of major depression at around 37 percent (Sullivan et al., 2000). But that leaves most of it to everything else, and much of everything else is in the room. Children of depressed mothers carry noticeably more depression and other struggles of their own; across nearly two hundred studies the link is consistent (Goodman et al., 2011).⁵ And when researchers have been able to separate what a parent passes down in the genes from what a parent passes down in the house (by studying families where the children were conceived by IVF with a donated egg, so the mother raising the child is not related to them by blood), a mother’s depression still tracks with her child’s (Harold et al., 2011; Lewis et al., 2011).⁶ The child did not inherit her genes. The child inherited her dark.

Now here’s the part that made me put my pen down. In the large depression-treatment trial I wrote about in Turning Toward Mental Health, STAR*D, researchers also followed the children of the mothers being treated. When a mother’s depression lifted, her children’s symptoms and diagnoses went down. When hers didn’t, theirs didn’t (Weissman et al., 2006).⁷

Read that again. The cure for a child’s darkness started with an adult turning on a light.

A child psychoanalyst named Selma Fraiberg had a name for what passes down this way. She called them “ghosts in the nursery”: the unremembered pain of the parent’s own childhood, walking back in to stand over the cradle of the next one (Fraiberg et al., 1975). The ghosts don’t leave because we ignore them. They leave when the adult finally remembers, and feels, what happened to them. Jung saw the same thing from his side of the couch: “Not knowing acts like guilt” (Jung, 1954, para. 92).⁸ What a parent won’t look at in themselves, the child ends up carrying.

That’s why I keep saying the dark is something we can do something about. If we were handed it, we can stop handing it down.

The flashlight

Consider with me, for a moment, that being the light shining in the darkness is all a person really needs. Consider the person you hate the most, and imagine you told them something constructive instead of something hurtful.

Then imagine a child watching you do it.

In my theory?

That’s all it takes.

♥

Notes

1. Styron calls depression a disorder of mood “so mysteriously painful and elusive” in how it becomes known to the self “as to verge close to being beyond description” (Styron, 1990, p. 7).

2. John’s night, in The Dark Night, is a spiritual passage, not a clinical depression, and he took care to tell the two apart. The likeness I’m pointing to is the dark, not the diagnosis.

3. The review found “no support for the hypothesis that depression is caused by lowered serotonin activity or concentrations” (Moncrieff et al., 2023b, p. 3243).

4. Several other replies appeared alongside Jauhar et al. in the same issue of Molecular Psychiatry; Moncrieff et al. (2023a) is the authors’ response.

5. Across 193 studies the associations were consistent but small; on their own, studies like these cannot separate genes from environment.

6. In genetically related pairs, Harold and colleagues found the link ran through the mother’s hostility and warmth toward the child.

7. The authors write that the findings “suggest that an environmental influence (ie, the impact of maternal depression remission) had a measurable impact on the child’s psychopathology” (Weissman et al., 2006, Discussion section).

8. See Turning Toward the Subconscious for the fuller passage on the parents’ unlived life.

References

Cuijpers, P., Hollon, S. D., van Straten, A., Bockting, C., Berking, M., & Andersson, G. (2013). Does cognitive behaviour therapy have an enduring effect that is superior to keeping patients on continuation pharmacotherapy? A meta-analysis. BMJ Open, 3(4), Article e002542. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2012-002542

Cuijpers, P., Noma, H., Karyotaki, E., Vinkers, C. H., Cipriani, A., & Furukawa, T. A. (2020). A network meta-analysis of the effects of psychotherapies, pharmacotherapies and their combination in the treatment of adult depression. World Psychiatry, 19(1), 92–107. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20701

Cuijpers, P., Sijbrandij, M., Koole, S. L., Andersson, G., Beekman, A. T., & Reynolds, C. F., III. (2013). The efficacy of psychotherapy and pharmacotherapy in treating depressive and anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis of direct comparisons. World Psychiatry, 12(2), 137–148. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20038

Cuijpers, P., Sijbrandij, M., Koole, S. L., Andersson, G., Beekman, A. T., & Reynolds, C. F., III. (2014). Adding psychotherapy to antidepressant medication in depression and anxiety disorders: A meta-analysis. World Psychiatry, 13(1), 56–67. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20089

Dante Alighieri. (2002). Inferno (R. Hollander & J. Hollander, Trans.). Anchor Books.

Fraiberg, S., Adelson, E., & Shapiro, V. (1975). Ghosts in the nursery: A psychoanalytic approach to the problems of impaired infant-mother relationships. Journal of the American Academy of Child Psychiatry, 14(3), 387–421. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0002-7138(09)61442-4

Furukawa, T. A., Shinohara, K., Sahker, E., Karyotaki, E., Miguel, C., Ciharova, M., Bockting, C. L. H., Breedvelt, J. J. F., Tajika, A., Imai, H., Ostinelli, E. G., Sakata, M., Toyomoto, R., Kishimoto, S., Ito, M., Furukawa, Y., Cipriani, A., Hollon, S. D., & Cuijpers, P. (2021). Initial treatment choices to achieve sustained response in major depression: A systematic review and network meta-analysis. World Psychiatry, 20(3), 387–396. https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20906

Goodman, S. H., Rouse, M. H., Connell, A. M., Broth, M. R., Hall, C. M., & Heyward, D. (2011). Maternal depression and child psychopathology: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review, 14(1), 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10567-010-0080-1

Harold, G. T., Rice, F., Hay, D. F., Boivin, J., van den Bree, M., & Thapar, A. (2011). Familial transmission of depression and antisocial behavior symptoms: Disentangling the contribution of inherited and environmental factors and testing the mediating role of parenting. Psychological Medicine, 41(6), 1175–1185. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0033291710001753

Jackson, S. W. (1986). Melancholia and depression: From Hippocratic times to modern times. Yale University Press.

Jauhar, S., Arnone, D., Baldwin, D. S., Bloomfield, M., Browning, M., Cleare, A. J., Corlett, P., Deakin, J. F. W., Erritzoe, D., Fu, C., Fusar-Poli, P., Goodwin, G. M., Hayes, J., Howard, R., Howes, O. D., Juruena, M. F., Lam, R. W., Lawrie, S. M., McAllister-Williams, H., . . . Cowen, P. J. (2023). A leaky umbrella has little value: Evidence clearly indicates the serotonin system is implicated in depression. Molecular Psychiatry, 28(8), 3149–3152. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-023-02095-y

John of the Cross. (1991). The collected works of St. John of the Cross (K. Kavanaugh & O. Rodriguez, Trans.; Rev. ed.). ICS Publications.

Jung, C. G. (1954). The development of personality (R. F. C. Hull, Trans.; Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Vol. 17). Princeton University Press.

Karyotaki, E., Smit, Y., Holdt Henningsen, K., Huibers, M. J. H., Robays, J., de Beurs, D., & Cuijpers, P. (2016). Combining pharmacotherapy and psychotherapy or monotherapy for major depression? A meta-analysis on the long-term effects. Journal of Affective Disorders, 194, 144–152. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jad.2016.01.036

Lewis, G., Rice, F., Harold, G. T., Collishaw, S., & Thapar, A. (2011). Investigating environmental links between parent depression and child depressive/anxiety symptoms using an assisted conception design. Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 50(5), 451–459.e1. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2011.01.015

Milton, J. (1674). Paradise lost (2nd ed.). S. Simmons.

Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., & Horowitz, M. A. (2023b). The serotonin theory of depression: A systematic umbrella review of the evidence. Molecular Psychiatry, 28(8), 3243–3256. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-022-01661-0

Moncrieff, J., Cooper, R. E., Stockmann, T., Amendola, S., Hengartner, M. P., Plöderl, M., & Horowitz, M. A. (2023a). The serotonin hypothesis of depression: Both long discarded and still supported? Molecular Psychiatry, 28(8), 3160–3163. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-023-02094-z

Styron, W. (1990). Darkness visible: A memoir of madness. Random House.

Sullivan, P. F., Neale, M. C., & Kendler, K. S. (2000). Genetic epidemiology of major depression: Review and meta-analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry, 157(10), 1552–1562. https://doi.org/10.1176/appi.ajp.157.10.1552

Weissman, M. M., Pilowsky, D. J., Wickramaratne, P. J., Talati, A., Wisniewski, S. R., Fava, M., Hughes, C. W., Garber, J., Malloy, E., King, C. A., Cerda, G., Sood, A. B., Alpert, J. E., Trivedi, M. H., Rush, A. J., & STARD-Child Team. (2006). Remissions in maternal depression and child psychopathology: A STAR*D-Child report. JAMA, 295*(12), 1389–1398. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.295.12.1389

CC BY 4.0 · ORCID 0009-0009-8618-398X · DOIs MINTED ON DEPOSIT

© 2026 JAMISON TODD JOHNSON · LEGIBLE TRACES LLC