Hello, Ahueonao. Thanks for writing your post. I'll bet you're going to get LOTS of advice. I'm going to give some. It's based on my own experience with depression. Mine started when I was 25 and I'm now in my early 50s. (I haven't been depressed that whole time.)

Because the symptoms you're describing are so pervasive and because of the sleep disturbance you mention, it really sounds like you need antidepressant medication and something to fix your sleep problems (sometimes that can be an antidepressant - I'm taking 7.5 mg mirtazipine for sleep problems right now, and it's helping tremendously.)

You might think about whether you should find a new therapist. Each therapist uses different methods for treatment, plus they have different personalities, so it's a matter of trying until you find one that can help you.

For a few months, I'd say that the more therapy (individual, group therapy, online therapy) you can do, the better. There's an online "free talk" site with trained listeners that I keep meaning to try that I have heard good things about. It's called 7 cups of tea.

I experienced a long depression that I just started to come out of about three months ago. I started getting better when I started going to therapy and when I was prescribed the med that is helping my sleep get back to normal.

There is a long list of other things that help depression, like eating well and exercising, and taking certain nutritional supplements, but you may not feel able to concentrate on that sort of thing until you start to feel a bit better. If you have access to a holistic physician, I would recommend seeing one.

Oh, I forgot to add - see a regular doctor to get checked for medical conditions that can cause depression like thyroid disease, anemia, low vitamin D3 or B12 levels, etc. if you can. The chance that you have one of those conditions may be low if you're young and healthy, but at the same time, if you do have one of them, your depression probably won't respond to antidepressants.

I hope you'll post again at this forum. I started coming to it last winter. Besides gaining useful information about my mental health conditions, watching so many people struggle with their mental health has helped me somewhat to move from feeling really passive to wanting to try harder to get better.

Good luck!