I am really sorry to hear what you're going through ex_vivo.

I was severely depressed for more than a year before starting therapy.

My therapist didn't officially diagnose me with depression (mostly because I get the sense that she thinks it would've done more harm than good) but she did once say when I was going on about my 'deep sadness' that she thought I was depressed.

We discussed it for a bit and she suggested that given my family history and how long I'd always had this persistent sense of deep-rooted sadness / emptiness (basically all my life), she thought it was likely biological by this point.

In response, I told her that I never wanted to get on to meds (bad experience earlier) and so, she suggested something like acupuncture.

I didn't want to do that either and so, then she asked me this question which really baffled me -- what did I want to do with the depression? Did I want it to go away? Or did I want to just manage it?

She went on to explain that people can and do have different responses in how to deal with it as opposed to the straightforward one of doing whatever it takes to get rid of it.

I think for me that forced me to look at how I defined myself and what role my depression played in that -- I guess I said something to the effect that I did not want to do anything to actively make it go away (knowing how my brain works, I was sure it would backfire) but if it did disappear organically, I would be pretty pleased.

I know I was / am in a super privileged position to have been able to say something like that (as in I was functional and things were not totally out of control) and so, I don't know how much it translates outside of my experience.

A few weeks later, I honestly don't know precisely how or why it lifted but it did -- that despite the fact that materially, I ended up having a lot more stressors in the rest of my life which should've actually made me collapse pretty quickly.

So, it's not like it's completely gone but at least for now, the worst of it is gone -- I'm still not totally 'normal' but rather just 'not sad' and things seem much more manageable now.

I think a big part of how therapy helped me was that it forced me to talk about stuff that I'd never talked about -- as I did so, I realized that the depression in my case was largely a deep-rooted sense that I didn't have the right to live the life I wanted to live, have the feelings I had and so on.

This sense of not having a right to my life was so ingrained that I didn't even realize I had it until it came up again and again and again in therapy with my therapist patiently pointing it out in a dozen different ways.

Just showing up every week then to talk to someone who was trained to be empathetic -- I can't honestly say I have a great connection to my T but she's competent -- and helped me reframe my thoughts, I think made the difference in how I felt about myself.

And, so now, I can at times catch myself before I slide back down that dark and scary road.

At the same time though, I can't say I'm completely rid of the fear that it won't occur again but hopefully, I feel like I have a little more strength / resilience in me to tackle it rather than just succumb to it fully.

Not sure if this helps you at all....take care.