About 10 years ago, I had my first experience with depression. Not sadness. Not extreme sadness. But severe depression, the life-threatening kind.

That first experience was a nightmare that lasted for three days, but felt like three years. At every waking moment, I was suicidal. It was not triggered by anything I could identify. It was not about this or that cause. It was about severe mental pain.

About five or six years ago, I had my second experience. That one was just as intense, but lasted twice as long. It kept me in a bed in a hotel room for more than a week. It nearly killed me.

Before those two episodes, I thought I knew what depression was. I would have defined it as a persistent state of sadness. Feelings of gloominess. A lack of ambition. An attitude of “Why bother?” These were feelings I’d had many times before.

And because I had always been able to pull myself up from such doldrums, I thought of depression as a form of mental frailty – a tendency to self-nurture negative feelings, coming from a habit of thinking too much about oneself.

Now I know that there is a world of difference between that sort of  “depression” and what I now think of as “true” or “deep” or “severe” depression, the much rarer kind I experienced. The difference, in fact, is so great that I believe it is misleading and hurtful to call both of them by the same name.

 Feeling lousy and unmotivated… not wanting to get out of bed. If those are symptoms of depression, they are symptoms of what I would call “healthy” depression – i.e., the symptoms everyone experiences from time to time and pulls or pushes themselves out of them.

Severe depression – the kind I’m talking about here – is not just about feelings, but thoughts and functionality, too. I believe it is biologically based, not a mental weakness that the mental health industry has designated as a mental disorder to increase their revenues. Severe depression may be triggered by thoughts or memories or feelings, or it may have no cause. It may be simply an inexplicable change in brain chemistry, like having an extended bad hallucinogenic trip.

It’s not my intention to define it. For all I know, adequate distinctions and definitions already exist. For today, I want to talk about something I did as I slowly emerged from that second experience that was very helpful to me, to K, and to several others with whom I’ve shared it.