Yes, exactly. Thank you. For me, depression/mania is like a volume dial on life. Normal is groovin' to the music, bippin' and boppin' along to the ups and down

Yes, exactly. Thank you. For me, depression/mania is like a volume dial on life. Normal is groovin' to the music, bippin' and boppin' along to the ups and downs. Mania is the music cranked up to 11, the frenetic beat driving you, compelling you, controlling you. Depression is the world put on mute, nothing to connect with; you're drowning in silence. At the risk of belaboring this metaphor, depression is not listening to the blues; depression is a bubble of dead air, where you see other people enjoying music you can't hear and you don't know why.* That's why I think the phrase "feeling depressed" is almost oxymoronic. You can feel unhappy or tired or something. When you're depressed, you're not feeling much of anything. You're just trying to exist in this apathetic, foggy cloud of pain and vague guilt.* What's weird about depression is that the causes and symptoms are all mixed up a big feedback loop – unlike brain cancer (mentioned elsewhere in this thread). In the throes of depression, most people 1) do not exercise 2) have really erratic sleep schedules 3) do not eat healthy. If you could somehow reverse each of those symptoms, the underlying cause usually improves too. The problem, of course, is that no depressed person has the will or energy to do any of those things – even if they do them when they're not in the midst of a down cycle. And obviously, chemical or physical (ECT) intervention is absolutely required for some people. But kind of like code duplication, treating the symptoms treats the disease too, for many cases. It comes back to something Alan Watts said. Humans like to try to separate ourselves from reality, differentiate between the experiencer and the experience, but of course, experiencing the experience is just part of the experience! Thus, if you change the experience (treat the symptoms), you also change the experiencer (affect/improve the disease). * Depression is different for each person. These are just metaphors/ideas I've used in the past that people have identified with.