SPIRITUALITY AS A TREATMENT FOR DEPRESSION

What Happens to Depression Without Identification With It?

We are not the depression. Nothing is wrong with us by having it.

Karsten Ramser
Speaking Bipolar
Published in
5 min readJun 21, 2024

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Photo of Georgia O’Keeffe. In black & white. She overcome depression with creation, in creation the persona is absence.
Photo by Alfred StieglitzPublic domain

Depression has many faces and ways of dealing with it, and yet we all share the same deep pain.

Some depressions have a cure; others do not. I for myself live with endogenous depression, for which there is still no cure. But I have nevertheless found a “cure”. Not in the sense of a natural biochemical regulation of the serotonin and dopamine balance.

My “cure” is that I no longer identify with the depression. It’s not my depression.

This may sound a bit strange, and I understand well that this sounds nonsense to some people. I would have thought the same thing 20 years ago.

Please don’t stop reading here, but give the article a chance. Maybe it won’t work for you, but maybe it will. Who knows?

It works for me. Of course, it’s not easy, and it’s hard work. It takes strong discipline, stubborn consistency, and a deep inner desire to control depression instead of being controlled by it. As I said, the biochemical imbalance happens from time to time, but it’s no…

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