Depression in the Time of Covid
During the COVID pandemic, rates of depression rose for various reasons. A friend of mine was one of the victims, and spiraled into severe depression - couldn't get out of bed until evening, no hope for the future, suicidal thoughts, etc.

I took care of her for a year and a half, and together we managed to cure it, without using prescription drugs, and get her back to a state of healthy happy functioning, creativity, and positive outlook.

I want to share how with the HN community, in case useful to others battling with this. I'd also love to hear of similar experiences and approaches to this problem.

Disclaimer: I am not a health or medical professional. This is based on a sample size of 1. And a crucial component of this treatment was 1-on-1 attention, understanding, encouragement, coaching for over a year until it became self-sustaining, which is not scalable to professional medical care (unless such care explicitly includes the victim's family and teaches them how to do this).

The objective was to create a simple framework for understanding and solving this problem, with just a few simple rules that even someone in the depths of depression and brain shutdown could remember, apply consistently, see results from, and even have fun with. It must be empirical, and emergently tailor itself to the individual, since different treatments can work differently for different people.

I also wanted to deprogram the depression out of the brain, by doing a kind of psychological hard-reset. Doing that required focusing on the root of the problem, that depression impairs your ability to create new neural connections and pathways, thus creating a negative feedback loop exacerbating the depression. Part 1 of solving that problem is removing the obstacles and barriers to a solution emerging. Part 2 is stimulating a solution to emerge via random walk across the entire solution space.

The three rules I came up with for accomplishing that are below. I continued to emphasize and reiterate these entire time, with no divergence or anything else added, to keep them simple, memorable, and easy to focus on.

1. Do not trust your own brain.

When depressed, your brain is presenting you with the worst case outlook on your life, rather than the best case or even average case. Your brain is lying to you, do not trust it. Make this distrust a habit - every morning when you wake up and your brain presents a bleak picture of things, the first thought that enters your mind should be "oh right, my brain is lying to me, things aren't that bad".

2. It's not your fault.

One of the biggest obstacles to recovering from depression, is the victim believing, even subconsciously, that it's their fault and they deserve it for some reason. But depression is a result of chemicals in your brain going haywire, and slowing the rate of neural connections, reducing neural plasticity, etc. There can be many different causes of that, but none of them matter. All that matters is getting out of it, by any means possible. Separate the person from the problem.

3. Try everything.

The third and final rule is to get hyper-experimental. Try literally every new and different thing you can think of that you've never done before - Try a Paleo/Keto/Mediterranean/etc diet. Try running/weight lifting/rock climbing/etc. Try reading SciFi/trashy romance/legal drama/philosophy/etc books. Try nootropics, micro-dosing, university trials. etc.

And you must try everything for at least one month, as that is how long it usually takes to see results (and coincidentally to develop habits).

The objective is to be randomly active, to get the brain back into the habit of forming new neural connections. It does not matter one bit what those neural connections are, only that the brain starts getting accustomed to forming them again.

#1 and #2 are the hard-reset, and #3 is the reboot via random walk.