Sometimes depression can be triggered not by life circumstances alone, but by your involuntary cognitive responses to those circumstances — interpreting innocuo

Sometimes depression can be triggered not by life circumstances alone, but by your involuntary cognitive responses to those circumstances — interpreting innocuous social cues as devastatingly negative, for example. Maybe you have no objective “reason” to be depressed, but none of us has access to objective reality unfiltered by our own (sometimes broken) interpretations. It’s a perfectly “reasonable” reaction to feel depressed if your brain is telling you that everyone hates you, that nothing you do matters, and that the world would be a better place without you. These misinterpretations don’t always come out of the blue — sometimes they are learned behaviors, perhaps coping mechanisms for a previous environment that have now become maladaptive. This seems to be why interventions that focus on disrupting your subjective interpretation of reality (like CBT, but also psychedelics and even electroconvulsive therapy) can be helpful in treating depression. If you can retrain your brain to respond in more helpful ways, you can avoid spiraling into self-reinforcing depressive thought patterns. Neurotransmitter reuptake modulators like SSRIs (and stimulants like bupropion) can also play a role, mostly by giving you the energy and mental “space” to engage in reshaping cognitive behaviors. I think that’s also why they have a pretty mixed track record of being long-term helpful in the absence of more cognitively-focused interventions. (IANAP but I’m married to one so live these conversations daily).