AshleyMills.com

Depressed people are prisoners of their own minds. They construct their prisons, and furnish them with all kinds of security features designed to keep themselves locked in.

This is not to say that depressed people are to blame for their predicaments; far from it. Their constructions are most likely an involuntary response induced by certain environmental stimuli or genetic factors, over which the depressed person initially has no control.

Indeed, to begin with the prison is like an open prison, and only gradually increases to a maximum security one over time. The transformation occurs in such subtle ways, that it is very difficult for the depressed person to notice that it is happening, and by the time they come to the realisation that it is, they open their eyes to Alcatraz.

The person then continues to maintain a kind of contradictory state of being, in which the person wants to alleviate their own suffering, but somehow partakes in its perpetuation and maintainence. Again, they are not to blame for this, since to begin with, this is done involuntarily.

At some point however, it will dawn upon them, that something odd is going on. That they are behaving in a manner they do not want to. That their mind is complicit in its own destruction. It is at this point that their will must come to bear on the problem, and the ball enters their court for the first time in their disease. With reflection and awareness, the person can learn to identify the little, and not so little, tricks that are going on and try to avoid them.

Why would the mind do this to itself you might be wondering? Nobody really knows at the moment so we can speculate: perhaps the prison is initially setup for protection from the outside world but the constructive mechanism self perpetuates and goes awry; perhaps it is a kind of memetic virus that once seeded grows into a monster, or perhaps it is a self-enforcing wiring problem in the physiology of the brain. Perhaps one of these was trigerred by a traumatic childhood event or from spending too long in a warzone, or perhaps you ended up like this for the same reason you have blue eyes.

Whilst the causes do actually matter, and their understanding will lead to better treatments, for the moment we have to address ourselves to the present situation, and within the extant knowledge of science. So I'm going to propose that we don't actually give a shit what causes it, unless that somehow helps us to overcome it. In this book, I therefore focus on trying to address the problem once it has already manifested. In this vain I would like to try and attack some of the points at which a depressed person might try to cling on to their captor. Let's prise your fingers off the bottle. We shall call this process "Smashing Depression for Fun and Profit".