The trouble is, this reads like "Just don't be depressed", since this is almost effectively a list of (anti-) symptoms of depression.

> good diet with no junk food, alcohol, drugs and stimulants

How does one get rid of the excitement of the expectation of eating chips or drinking cola etc?

I think this is true, but oof that's a heavy list. For one thing, food, alcohol, drugs, and stimulants, all have addictive properties that are almost certainly comorbid with depression. Dropping those is rough.

Exercise is perhaps one of the easier ones but, personally, I've found it incredible to reflect on how absolutely bad my childhood "gym" classes were. At no point did we actually... go to a gym. That was never normalized for us. We sort of just learned how to do jumping jacks when we were told to, that sort of thing, and it was all structured for us. There was no habit forming, no "how to do this once there's no one around to structure it for you". In my experience, people who go to the gym get "brought in" by someone in their life who can help them build that structure. For someone missing it, well, you're truly on your own in a rather stressful environment.

Sleep hygiene is good but, again, I suspect tricky here.

Regular social interactions, another heavy lift! What do you do to build up a network of people in your life? Social structures don't just magically appear, and once again, they're usually just handed to you for most of your life and once those fall away you're in quite a spot trying to recover or build anew.

I think the environmental stressors may be the roughest, hard to say. Eliminating financial stress is something that can take decades. Noise pollution? That's really quite out of my control.

All of these are great things to work on but I suppose my read of them is "wow, being depressed seems really fucking hard if you have to do these things to get out of it".

I can't remember where I read it, but it always stuck with me: most cases of depression can be solved with a one-time deposit of $20 million in the patient's bank account.

A lot of the time, what is diagnosed as depression is actually a very valid reaction to being in a shitty situation. I myself ended up at a psychiatrist due to being stuck in a shitty job with me being too exhausted and anxious to do anything about it. What eventually 'cured' me wasn't any of the sessions with the shrink but being laid off in a company restructuring with a nice severance package that allowed me to take a couple of months to decompress and look for a job that was a better fit.

You just described causes of depression, like divorce, social isolation and being unemployed. I know there are people that can feel free in a place as horrible as a concentration camp, but most of us have some basic needs that have to be met to feel OK and have some hope.

Some people have actual neurotransmitter imbalances, but many of us just have monkey brains that don't know how to deal with (real, abstract) modern-day stressors that trigger a fight-or-flight response.

This is exactly the kind of list that is both not true (solving depression is not a checklist) and COMPLETELY unhelpful to anyone actually dealing with depression. It's like saying "just make more money" to someone with financial struggles.

AKA "just don't be depressed"

- lower your expectations

If you set your goal too high you will be sad all the time. Choose a goal that you would be happy with but make sure it's a realistic goal!

Every time this comes up the comments are the same. Just don't eat crap, just go to the gym, just make sure you get good sleep. It shows a total lack of understanding of depression. Of course these things work - and if people weren't depressed they might be able to try and do them. But when you have severe depression you literally have zero motivation. None. You suddenly can't sleep. You can barely get yourself out of bed. That's why things like pills are useful because they can help you get to the point where you can take the steps necessary to get your life into a state where it's less conducive to depression.

>> ultimately it becomes your responsibility to try fix them if you want your situation to improve, since nobody else will.

No. This is why doctors and psychologists etc exist. Not everything is fixable by you. Sometimes you need help from other people and blaming the depressed person for being depressed is fucking idiotic.

> How to solve most cases of depression

Tread carefully friend, I agree this is a good list to _prevent_ the most common forms of depression, but some will think you are framing major clinical depression as a personal failing.

Some people slide into a hole of their own making. Others get thrown into the abyss by external factors. Grief, trauma, abuse, crises of repressed identity, poverty and poor prospects. Life can be brutal.

I highly, highly recommend The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (Solomon) for anyone that is interested in a comprehensive view of depression.

> How to solve most cases of depression

What absurdly thoughtless, shallow nonsense. What, specifically, is your background in depression research, that leads you to believe you've completed solved it for everyone? I'll wait. I'm sure it's fucking extensive.

One indicator that you might be falling in to depression is that you no longer have the motivation to maintain those practices.

Exactly. Depression is defined in part as being the inability to effectively do those things.

You have to work on your will to live incrementally.

There are no units of exercise and no units of depression either.

In my opinion the best measure of exercise is perceived effort. So while you're asking for objective answers, I think a lot of this is inherently subjective.

The benchmark you're asking for is also ill-defined. For example: How frequently to be as effective as what type and what frequency of therapy?

"what is one unit of exercise"

Based on my own recent experience I would suggest the "dog".

If you take a "brisk" 20 minute walk every day, you'll meet the recommended weekly amount of aerobic exercise for Americans. (I think people should do more.)

The actual amount you need to exercise, or the intensity, is not very big. The good thing with exercise is also that once you make it a habit to walk, say, 20 minutes a day, then walking 25 minutes a day becomes pretty trivial, and so on.

However much exercise the smug person suggesting it as a depression cure gets.

The problem is that people who are depressed often don't have the energy to change their lifestyle to start exercise, which requires significant effort.

That's why psychiatrists will suggest antidepressants or Electroconvulsive therapy (in extreme cases of depression) because clients are unable to help themselves.

Mens sana in corpore sano

Taking the antidepressant has become the dominant go to approach as it is more commercially profitable for the seller and easier to commit to for the taker.

And while they affect a similar percentage of people, they don't necessarily affect the same individuals. Same for therapy modalities, which often show similar efficacy in studies, but different efficacy for any given person.

So you've got to try different things and figure out what works for you.