7 Unanswered Questions About Depression That I Had to Answer for Myself
Depression is one of the most researched mental health conditions in the world, and yet, some of the most important questions about it still don’t have definitive answers.
- What actually causes depression?
- Why does depression return for some people
- Is it really a chemical imbalance?
- And then there’s perhaps the biggest question of all: Can depression be healed permanently?
These are questions where researchers, psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers continue to disagree.
And I don’t claim to have all the answers. Perhaps nobody does.
I’m also not a medical professional, psychologist, or psychiatrist. Nothing I discuss here should be taken as medical advice or as a substitute for professional care. If you are struggling with depression, please seek appropriate support from a qualified healthcare professional.
What I can offer is something different:
My perspective as someone who has lived through it.
For more than 20 years, I struggled on and off with depression. I know what it feels like to lose your energy, motivation, sense of meaning, and connection with life.
But I also know what it feels like to come out the other side. I have experienced what I would describe as profound healing from depression.
What led me here was curiosity and a deep desire to heal. I vowed that if I ever found the answer to what it takes to be healthy and happy, I would share the answers with everyone.
I’ve tried to learn everything about depression from multiple perspectives: the physical, the psychological, and the spiritual. I’ve explored neuroscience and psychology, but also went on a deep journey into my beliefs, emotions, relationships, environment, sense of purpose, and perhaps most importantly, what it actually means to be human.
So in this blog post, I’m going to try my best to answer some of the biggest questions about depression that science has not yet answered definitively.
I won’t pretend that my answers are “the answers”.
But they are the best answers I can give based on what I have learned, experienced, questioned, and tested in my own life.
1. What is the root cause of depression?
Depression is highly individual. There is no single path into depression, and there is no universal solution. Life circumstances, relationships, stress levels, personal history, and temperament all shape how depression appears in someone’s life. What helps one person may not help another, which is why understanding the individual context is so important.
But despite the uniqueness and individuality, there are common themes that play a role.
My best answer is:
Depression is often the result of misalignment.
By misalignment, I mean a state where different parts of ourselves are no longer working together.
- Our mind tells us one thing while our emotions tell us another.
- Our daily lives move in one direction while our deeper needs pull us in another.
- We ignore our grief, suppress our pain, abandon our boundaries, disconnect from meaningful relationships, or live in ways that conflict with what we truly need to thrive.
In my experience, depression is often a sign that we have become disconnected from ourselves, from our needs, and from a way of living that supports our well-being.
One form of misalignment happens externally
Modern life has brought incredible benefits, but it has also created conditions that many people struggle to thrive in:
- chronic stress
- social isolation
- constant stimulation
- lack of meaningful community
- disconnection from nature
- economic insecurity
- lifestyles that ignore our biological needs
We become disconnected from community, purpose, nature, meaning, and ways of living that support our well-being.
The other misalignment happens internally
We become disconnected from our own emotional experience, especially grief.
What if depression is not sadness, but the long-term consequence of pressing down sadness, grief, anger, fear, or emotional pain that desperately wants to be felt?
The word depression itself comes from Latin roots that literally mean “to press down.”
Emotions are meant to move through you. They are meant to be expressed (the root of express is also Latin, literally meaning to press out).
In my own healing journey, learning to acknowledge, feel, express, and process grief (as well as other emotions) was one of the most important turning points.
So if one or both forms of disconnection persist for long enough, the result seems to be depression.
When we become disconnected from the world around us and from the truth within us, depression is the signal telling us that something important has been lost, ignored, or left unhealed.
2. Is depression a disease or a normal human response to difficult circumstances?
We’re used to thinking of depression as an imbalance in brain chemistry, or otherwise as something “breaking” in our neural processes.
And per my first answer, depression could also be a reaction to external circumstances, i.e., our lives not being aligned with a healthy, supportive way of living.
When we talk about depression, we often view it as a single, clear-cut diagnosis with a universal cause and universal effects. Therefore, we expect it to be treated in much the same way for everyone.
But depression isn’t one clear-cut condition; it’s a cluster of symptoms that can manifest in wildly different ways. This is why two people can share the same diagnosis while inhabiting completely different inner worlds.
For one person, depression might look like agitated, high-functioning anxiety, with a heart that won’t stop racing and a mind that won’t shut off.
For another, it might be profound emotional numbness, where the world feels wrapped in a thick fog, muting both joy and pain.
For someone else, it might be
- chronic exhaustion
- loss of meaning
- social withdrawal
- hopelessness
- physical symptoms
or some combination of all of these.
So when we say, “I’m depressed,” we’re using a broad label to describe a particular collection of experiences.
And I think this distinction matters.
My answer:
Depression may be better understood not as one single disease with one single cause, but as a collection of different causes and effects that can look remarkably different from one person to another.
Some of those causes may be internal. Others may be external. Often, they interact.
That doesn’t mean depression isn’t real, or that people aren’t suffering from something serious. They absolutely are.
It simply means that I don’t believe there is one universal explanation for why someone becomes depressed, or one universal solution for how they recover.
Depression is real. The suffering is real. But the story behind it can be deeply individual.
3. Is depression caused by brain chemistry?
My answer is:
Both yes and no.
Yes, brain chemistry matters.
Anyone who has experienced the effects of
- alcohol
- chronic stress
- poor sleep
- medication
- exercise
- or even a single night of anxiety
…knows that changes in brain chemistry can dramatically affect how we think, feel, and function.
The real question is whether brain chemistry is the cause of depression or the effect of something deeper.
And I don’t believe it’s as simple as saying depression is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.
The reason is that human beings are interconnected body, mind, and spirit systems, where each part continuously influences the others. Yes, you are made of these three parts; whether you call the subconscious, mysterious part “spirit”, “soul”, “subconscious”, or anything else is irrelevant. It’s there whether you acknowledge it or not.
As a three-part being, everything that happens to you is irrevocably interconnected. Your physical health affects your mood. Your thoughts affect your biology. Your emotions influence your nervous system. Your relationships, environment, sense of purpose, and daily experiences all shape what happens inside your brain.
Brain Chemistry Is Only a Part of The Equation
In other words, brain chemistry doesn’t exist in isolation. It responds to everything else that is happening within us and around us. Now, this doesn’t mean that brain chemistry plays no role in depression. Likely it does.
But from my perspective, focusing exclusively on chemistry is a bit like looking at the warning light on a car’s dashboard and assuming the light itself is the problem. The chemistry may be part of the mechanism through which depression is experienced, but it is not necessarily the root cause.
This is also why I believe healing must be holistic. Because depression affects the whole interconnected body, mind, and spirit system, understanding it requires looking at the whole system rather than any single part.
4. What is depression actually trying to accomplish?
We often treat depression as an enemy to defeat, a malfunction to fix, a symptom to suppress…
…But what if it is also a signal?
Let’s think about physical pain for a moment.
Pain isn’t pleasant, but it serves a purpose. It’s a signal that something needs our attention.
For example, a fever does this. The fever itself isn’t the illness; it is part of the body’s response to an underlying problem. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but it’s there to help us, not harm us.
I believe depression could work in much the same way. It’s a signal that something in our lives has fallen out of alignment.
The source of that misalignment will be different for different people.
It may be chronic stress, loneliness, unresolved grief, a loss of meaning, authenticity, connection, or purpose. Whatever the cause, depression often seems to arise when something important has been ignored, suppressed, or left unaddressed for too long.
So my answer is:
I think depression is trying to get us to pay attention.
In my own life, depression forced me to acknowledge emotions I had buried, needs I had neglected, and changes I knew I needed to make but kept postponing.
That doesn’t mean depression is enjoyable, helpful, or something we should simply accept without seeking relief. The suffering is real. Much like when pain occurs in your body, the best course of action is to try to prevent yourself from hurting your body in the first place.
When there’s pain, the damage has already been done. It’s the same with depression. The best course of action is to try to prevent it from happening in the first place. But if it’s there, then it’s a signal that something needs your attention.
What’s really important here is what we do with this information. Because if depression is a signal, then healing is not a question of how to turn the signal off.
From this perspective, healing becomes a journey of understanding the message. And the most useful question we can ask is, “What is my depression trying to show me?”
5. Why do some people get depressed despite doing everything "right"?
I’ll be honest, this question haunted me for years. I had periods in my life where, on paper, everything looked great.
I was doing what I was supposed to do. Working hard. Being responsible. Setting goals. Building a successful life. Following the advice that society tells us should lead to happiness.
Yet underneath it all, I was anxious, exhausted, and depressed.
How is that even possible?
I think the answer lies in a simple misunderstanding: Doing everything right is not the same as doing what is right for you.
Most of us are taught how to build a successful life long before we learn how to build an authentic one.
We absorb expectations from parents, teachers, friends, employers, culture, and social media.
We learn what success is supposed to look like. We learn what goals are worth pursuing. We learn who we are supposed to become.
And then we spend years trying to become that person. The problem is that our deeper needs, values, and desires don’t usually align with the path we’ve been told to follow.
So we create a life that looks good from the outside while feeling increasingly misaligned on the inside.
From my perspective, this is one of the most common forms of misalignment.
- We pursue goals that don’t truly matter to us
- We ignore our emotions when they tell us something is wrong
- We sacrifice authenticity for approval
- We keep chasing more, believing happiness exists somewhere in the future, just beyond the next achievement.
All the while fighting how we truly feel inside and working against our core values.
This is why someone can have a successful career, financial security, loving relationships, and still feel deeply unhappy.
The problem is that they have built a life that is out of alignment with who they truly are.
So when someone asks why people become depressed despite doing everything right,
my answer is this:
Because sometimes the very things we’ve been taught are “right” are pulling us further away from our true selves.
And no amount of external success can compensate for that kind of internal misalignment.
6. Why does depression often return?
One reason I believe depression often returns is that the human mind is not primarily designed for happiness.
The mind is designed for survival, which is obviously very beneficial for us as a species, but it requires a certain negativity bias.
Our minds constantly scan for threats, replay past mistakes, imagine worst-case scenarios, and search for potential dangers. From an evolutionary perspective, this makes perfect sense. The ancestors who paid attention to threats were more likely to survive than those who ignored them.
The problem is that the mind doesn’t always know the difference between protecting us and “imprisoning” us. It tends to repeat familiar patterns, even when those patterns create suffering, because familiar feels safe.
Even if a thought pattern is making us anxious, stressed, or unhappy, the mind often prefers the known discomfort to the uncertainty of change. This is why people can find themselves returning to the same fears, beliefs, habits, relationships, or ways of thinking that contributed to their depression in the first place.
So my answer is:
Because the mind is wired for survival, not happiness.
The mind keeps replaying old programs because it believes those programs are helping us survive. Unfortunately, what helps us survive is not always what helps us thrive.
From this perspective, lasting healing is about becoming aware of these old patterns and gradually replacing them with ones that support the life we actually want to live.
Otherwise, the mind naturally drifts back toward what is familiar, and what is familiar is probably the very thing that made us unhappy in the first place.
7. Can depression be permanently healed?
This is the million-dollar question.
And my answer is…
yes.
Not because depression is something that can simply be switched off, but because people can fundamentally change.
It’s important to note that just as the causes and effects of depression are unique to each one of us, so is the path to healing. There is no one fixed method or medicine to heal everyone. But it is possible to heal; I am living proof of it.
I argue that depression often returns because the mind prefers what is familiar. It replays old thoughts, old fears, old stories, and old patterns because familiarity feels safe.
But familiarity is not fixed. The mind can learn new patterns and adopt new beliefs, no matter how old you are; It can develop a new sense of what is normal.
In other words, we can teach ourselves a new way of being.
This is one reason I believe lasting healing is possible.
Creating a new healthy you
The second reason is even more important.
I don’t think healing is merely about removing depression. I think it is about becoming a different person than the one who experienced it.
That may sound strange, but it mirrors my own experience.
My depression didn’t disappear because I finally figured everything out. The depression disappeared because many of the beliefs, fears, identities, and assumptions that defined my old self gradually fell away.
My values and priorities changed. My understanding of happiness changed. My whole relationship with myself changed.
And as those things changed, my relationship with depression changed too. Eventually, it no longer had a place to exist in the same way it once had.
Healing is a transformation of the self
This is why I believe true healing isn’t about fixing a “broken” person (because we aren’t really broken).
Healing, to me, is more of a transformation of the person who believes they are broken.
Of course, I cannot guarantee that every person can permanently heal from depression, and I would be cautious of anyone who makes such promises.
But based on my own experience, I believe lasting healing becomes possible when we stop asking, “How do I get rid of depression?” and start asking, “Who do I want to be?”
Because when our beliefs, values, habits, and identity change, our experience of life changes with them. The person who emerges on the other side is so different from the person who entered depression that the old patterns no longer have anything to attach themselves to.
That, to me, is what permanent healing looks like.
Conclusion: Change Your Perspective, Change Your Life
Now you may ask: Are these answers correct?
And I want to be honest with you. I don’t know if they are correct or not.
But I don’t think that’s the most important question.
The questions in this article are called “unanswered” for a reason. No one has definitive answers to them.
What matters is not whether my answers are ultimately right or wrong, but whether they help you see depression from a different perspective.
Because the moment your perspective changes, your life has the potential to change with it.
A mountain that once seemed impossible to climb may begin to look more like a foothill. Problems that felt permanent may reveal possibilities you couldn’t see before.
New perspectives create new thoughts. New thoughts, in turn, lead to new words and actions. And over time, those thoughts, words, and actions can become new habits, new beliefs, and ultimately, a new version of yourself.
This is why the first step in my AAA Framework is Awareness.
Before we can change anything, we must first see it differently. We must become aware of the patterns, beliefs, emotions, and assumptions that have been shaping our experience beneath the surface.
A shift in perspective creates new awareness.
And new awareness creates the possibility for change.
Whether you agree with my answers or not, my hope is that they have helped you look at depression through a different lens.
Changing your perspective can help you change your whole life.
Disclaimer
The entire contents of this blog are based upon the opinions of the author. It is intended for informational and educational purposes only. The information in this blog is not intended to replace a one-on-one relationship with a qualified health care professional and is not intended as medical advice. Please consult your health care professional before trying any of the products or methods based on this content. I cannot guarantee that you will be free of stress, anxiety or depression, or that you will be happy. I simply want to share with you what I have discovered during my twenty years of seeking happiness and what has worked for me may not work for you.
